Shame

been the only one doing the using and manipulating. A Johnson needs his Boswell.
    Elizabeth had known that liking him wasn’t right. It was stupid and irresponsible and wrong. It betrayed the memory of her friends and double-crossed all those intimacies afforded her by the families of the victims. She had always had nothing but scorn for those women who had married prisoners. “Outmates,” she called them, women who’d become outcasts by marrying inmates. Fools. She saw them lined up on visiting days, even got to know their stories and their grand illusions. In many cases they’d thrown away everything for misguided love: money, family, self-respect.
    Idiots.
    But was she raging at them or herself? Maybe she’d never really been very different from them. Maybe she was an
outmate.
    Let it out, Elizabeth told herself. Tell your anger.
    “Damn you, Gray Parker,” she whispered. “You died with secrets. You held out this carrot in front of my nose and you led me in circles, and I don’t know whether I knew you any better in the end than I did in the beginning.”
    Her voice grew incrementally louder. “Damn you, Gray Parker, for bringing your namesake into this world, and for all but willing that boy to follow in your footsteps.”
    More, she thought. There was so much more. “Damn you, Gray Parker, for causing pain and misery and heartbreak whereveryou went. You could have been anything, but you chose to be worse than evil.
    “Damn you, Gray Parker, for murdering innocent women and murdering innocence and ultimately murdering yourself. If you were in such a hurry to die, why didn’t you just kill yourself?”
    A quick, deep breath, but she wasn’t done, not even close. “Damn you, Gray Parker, for doing everything you could to win me over. I suppose I was one last game for you. One last person to hurt.
    “Damn you, Gray Parker, for always being so nice and thoughtful to me, for showing me only your best, most considerate side and leaving me to wonder if all the kindnesses you offered me were only manipulation.”
    Her voice became shriller. “Damn you, Gray Parker, for your last words. Leave it to you to cloud my mind even at the end. You had no right to tell me that you loved me, no right at all.”
    He’d made his offer of love in the face of death. They’d been his parting words to her. He had known that the next time she saw him he’d be strapped into the electric chair.
    Elizabeth found herself shaking uncontrollably. Unwanted tears fell. There were so many things twisted up in the Gray Parker story, so many elements that should never have merged in the same breath: murder and love; gentleness and brutality; intelligence and sickness.
    “Damn you, Gray Parker,” she said, her last curse the most vehement, “for even suggesting that I could fall in love with you. I wasn’t willing to love you then, and I’m not willing to love you now.”
    Elizabeth took a few deep breaths and wiped away her tears. Then she started digging through the boxes again, on the hunt for answers past and present.

19

    T HE WOMAN WAS out taking an early-morning walk by herself. A power walk. Her strides were purposeful and measured, her body and mind intent on getting the proper workout. She carried hand weights and pumped her arms back and forth. Every so often she consulted her watch to make sure her heart and pulse rates were at their desired levels. She never stopped to smell the flowers—indeed, took little notice of anything but her regimen.
    That made it easy for the predator to move in on her unnoticed.
    Caleb matched her pace, but his legs were longer. Almost imperceptibly, he closed the distance between them. The woman wore her brown hair short, and that accentuated her long neck. He focused on that. She wore form-fitting workout clothes that hugged her shapely figure like a second skin.
    He narrowed the gap from twenty yards to fifteen to ten. There was no need for him to muffle his footsteps. Like him, the woman was wearing earbuds that tuned out the world. But she wasn’t listening to the same recording he was. If she had been, he was sure, the woman would have been more aware of her surroundings. In Caleb’s ears, a voice buzzed, and in his mind’s eye he watched another woman being stalked. He was a witness to his father’s moving in for the kill....
    Gasping for breath, Caleb pulled up. Ahead of him, the woman kept walking. He yanked out the earbuds, then turned around. He felt dirty, felt as