Shame

was sure, prideful. She sensed that in the way he had posed her.
    Elizabeth suddenly gasped, but not for air. Sometimes she looked at pictures, or visited crime scenes, and felt the evil as ifit was still there. But this was different. This time wasn’t like the others. She wasn’t looking at the evil; it was as if it was looking at her.
    Staring right at her.
    Elizabeth put the pictures back into the folder. She’d seen more than enough. And tomorrow she’d probably get the chance to study Teresa Sanders’s pictures. And there would be others, of that she was certain.
    Elizabeth looked at her watch. A little after six. What it was on the eternity scale she couldn’t be sure.
    The FBI might describe her scrutiny as a primitive form of profiling. The Feeb’s Investigative Support Unit shrinks were famous for checking off boxes and taking in data. She just felt. The bureau had learned its profiling trade from conducting hundreds of interviews with serial killers and rapists. Elizabeth hadn’t interviewed nearly as many killers but believed she had the dubious distinction of having learned from the best. Gray Parker had taught her how to look at evil.
    Elizabeth stood up and stretched. “I guess I’m finished for the day.”
    “Wish I could say the same.” Louise leaned back in her chair. The women had said remarkably little to one another for having shared an office for so many hours.
    “Pull up a chair,” said Louise. “Take mine if you want, especially if you’re a good typist.”
    Elizabeth made a cross of her index fingers as if warding off a vampire, and both of them laughed. “So what are you working on?”
    “A Lieutenant Borman project. Boreman. The man does live up to his name.”
    Louise gestured disparagingly at the paperwork. Elizabeth reached for the nearest pile and came away with a stack of bills and invoices.
    “The lieutenant wants me to make a list of service people that might have been at the Sanderses’ during the last two months.It’s not going to be easy. Their house was entertainment central. They always had florists, caterers, wait staff, and party rental people going in and out. And talk about upkeep. They had a regular army working there, what with gardeners, painters, pool service, and contractors.”
    People with uniforms, Elizabeth thought. Mrs. Sanders might have easily opened her door to someone with a uniform.
    “Thought we might have had something earlier,” Louise said. “One of the Sanderses’ neighbors, Ruby Davidson, thought she saw a gardener’s truck parked in their driveway yesterday morning. Problem is, Ruby’s eighty-two years old, and she’s the first to tell you that she doesn’t remember like she used to. Turns out the landscaping service didn’t come yesterday, but the
day before yesterday.
And the last tree service was two months ago.”
    Elizabeth made sympathetic clucking noises while continuing to flip through the bills. Louise was right; it did seem as if an army had been employed by the Sanderses. And it would take an army of detectives ultimately to interview everyone. In the pile she had grabbed were bills for tack and feed, cable, tree service, security...
    The thought suddenly came to her: What if Ruby Davidson wasn’t wrong? What if a vehicle had been parked in the driveway that looked like a gardener’s truck? That might even explain the 911 call. Someone could have seen something but been too panicked to become involved.
    Elizabeth reached for the landscaping invoices. Mister Tree had removed two eucalyptus trees on March 16. Teresa Sanders had paid by check, and a receipt had been given to her. Elizabeth examined that receipt. If the signature hadn’t been so textbook neat, she wouldn’t have noticed the name.
    Caleb Parker.
    The name jumped out at her. Before she had always thought that expression a sorry cliché, but that’s how it felt, a namestanding out amid everything around it. Impossible, she thought. She was jumping to conclusions. Parker was a common surname.
    But she knew Gray Parker had fathered a son. The boy had been named after him. Elizabeth had seen him only a few times. She remembered the boy’s pinched, sad face. And she remembered something else. To differentiate between the two Grays, the mother had sometimes called her boy by his middle name.
    She’d called him Cal, or Callie. And sometimes, especially when she was upset, or she wanted to get his attention, she’d called him Caleb.

7

    E LIZABETH