Shame

break. Elizabeth’s father had died ten years earlier, but the ritual of letting the engine run was her way of keeping kinship with him. While her car idled, she watched Caleb drive his gardening truck out of the parking lot.
Mister Tree,
his truck said.
    No, she thought.
Mystery.
    Elizabeth was just putting her car into gear when Detectives Holt and Alvarez ran out to the lot. Their heads swiveled around in desperate search of something. Elizabeth drove over to them.
    “You seen him?” Holt shouted. “You seen Parker?”
    “He left a few minutes ago,” she said.
    “What was he driving?” Alvarez asked.
    For some reason, she balked on the truth. “I—I didn’t really notice.”
    “That fuck,” Holt said. “That fuck.”
    “What happened?”
    “A body was just discovered at the Presidio in Old Town,” said Alvarez. “She’s got Shame’s handwriting on her—literally.”

11

    C ALEB PASSED BY the Interstate 5-805 merge. It was late enough that he didn’t have to fight the usual bottleneck.
    He wouldn’t have minded traffic tonight, though. It would have delayed his having to confess to Anna. The night before he’d tried to figure out how to tell her all that had occurred and had ended up sitting in his driveway half the night. He still didn’t know how he’d break the news to her.
    As the traffic lanes converged, Caleb looked to his right and left. In the darkness, he kept seeing a white envelope on the passenger seat. It wasn’t empty, judging by a rectangular bulge. One of the kids must have dropped it there, he thought, but he didn’t remember seeing it on the drive over to the Sheriff’s Department. He had been so nervous, though, it was something he could have easily overlooked.
    No, he thought. I would have noticed it.
    His throat started to tighten. The envelope was out of place, just as the open door at the Sanderses’ house had been. He reached for it, found it unsealed, and thumbed it open. There were some pictures inside. He turned on the map light, pulled the photos from the envelope, and took a look at them.
    The pictures fell out of his hands. He grasped the steering wheel as if it was a life preserver, and he was in danger of drowning.
    Another victim. Naked.
SHAME
scrawled across her privates. Seeing the photos was almost worse than when he’d been confronted with the body of Teresa Sanders. The pictures made him feel as naked as the victim, stripping away his illusions. Someone had targeted him. But as Caleb’s breathing steadied, his defense mechanisms started kicking in. Maybe the photos were old, or staged. Maybe the Sheriff’s Office had planted them in his truck to put more psychological pressure on him.
    He didn’t want to look at the pictures again, but he reached for them anyway. He had to see. There was enough light to make out the woman’s face. She looked familiar.
    Everyone looks familiar, he tried to tell himself. More denial. But it didn’t work.
    “No,” he said, but he remembered anyway.
    The night before he had awakened from a grim memory to that sweet face. She was the smiling clerk from the doughnut shop. The girl—she was too young to be called a woman—had gently announced to him that it was closing time. He had been reliving his last meeting with his father. As far as he was concerned, her interruption had been only too timely, a rope thrown to a drowning man.
    Caleb didn’t know her name, knew only that he was the cause of her death.
    He paced the Solana Beach platform, waiting for the last train of the evening to downtown San Diego.
    Caleb’s truck was parked on a residential street a mile from the station, far enough away, he hoped, for the police not to immediately assume his intentions. Not that Caleb knew his intentions beyond boarding the train and trying to get a little time to figure out who was setting him up. He hoped the authorities would assume he’d traveled north, to Los Angeles.
    No one else was at the station. Caleb consulted the posted train schedule yet again. The
Coaster
was making its last southernrun at 10:23—five minutes from now, if it was on schedule. Time enough to address the question he’d put off: Did I kill them?
    He found himself shaking. Caleb wanted to believe he wasn’t capable of murder, but he knew that wasn’t true.
    The whistle of the approaching train grabbed his attention. It also awakened him to the possibilities of another form of escape.
    Just put the bad penny on the tracks.
    The platform