Shame

red words cooling, disappearing. He closed his eyes. Only a few words remained.
    Fraternity.
    Pledge week.
    Shame.
    His father had always been attracted to university settings. During his reign of terror, he’d kept more lights on in dorms and sororities than anything short of a calculus final....
    The connection, or at least part of it, came when he wasn’t expecting it. For a moment, Caleb’s world stopped. Elizabeth Line’s sorority sisters had been murdered. That’s what had been grabbing at him. His father had lured his fourth victim away from a Greek Week party.
    The attack on Elizabeth suddenly made sense. She was the Kappa Omega who had gotten away, and the new Shame had wanted to rectify that.
    Caleb was certain of it. More than that, he had picture proof.
    He jumped up, forgot that his legs were tied, and crashed into the table, knocking everything onto the hardwood floor. Pushing himself to his feet, he hopped to the guest room. Brandy Wein’s pictures were in his coat pocket.
    He’d looked at them only that one time in his truck, had never wanted to see them again. Most of the photos were close shots, but there were also two full body shots, one with Brandy posed on a lawn with her legs spread, the other with her in a car, her head propped against the glass as if she were staring at something outside.
    That was the picture he wanted. He held it between the fingertips of his tied hands. Visible in the background, illuminated by a spotlight, was a sign that started with the letter
K.
He could just make out the second letter: an
A.
The rest of the lettering was obscured by Brandy’s face. The letters were ornamental and large, archaic-looking. Greek.
    Kappa.
    Caleb held the picture closer, trying to see better. The photo had been taken at night. Brandy Wein’s lifeless eyes seemed to be offering up a warning to the living. Caleb tried to imagine the mindset of a killer driving around with a corpse in his backseat, a killer who had posed Brandy to stare out at a sorority house, the dead looking out at the quick. The killer had taken her with him to scout out future victims.
    Caleb understood his message. And maybe his sickness. The killer had given him a portent of what was to be. And with it a time frame. Elizabeth was the first Kappa Omega he had wanted to kill, but not the last.
    The sorority had to be warned without delay.
    Caleb hopped back to the living room and saw the mess he had left behind. Food and drink littered the hardwood floor. He reached for Lola’s portable phone. It was sticky, had apparently been bathed in ginger ale and Diet Pepsi. Caleb pressed the Talkbutton, heard some odd clicking noises, then smelled burning circuitry.
    The phone was dead, victim of the soda bath, the fall, or both.
    Caleb dropped it. Maybe there was a second phone in Lola’s bedroom. He hopped over there, scanned the room, saw nothing.
    Phone book, Caleb thought. Get the address and phone number of the Kappa Omega sorority house. And then find a way out of his bonds.
    He located the white pages on a kitchen shelf. With his bound hands, Caleb had trouble turning the thin pages. Breathing hard and cursing harder, he finally managed to get the page he needed. The sorority was located on Montezuma, a street adjacent to the San Diego State University campus.
    Caleb memorized the telephone number and the street address, then looked around desperately for a knife. He flung kitchen drawers open until he found a butcher’s knife. Getting a grip on the knife was difficult; trying to cut the tape was impossible. Some sort of vise was needed. He opened the kitchen window and closed it on the knife to try to secure it. With his chin he pushed down on the windowsill but was unable to supply enough resistance to keep the knife from moving.
    He opened a kitchen drawer, positioned the knife’s handle, then closed the drawer on it. The blade pointed skyward, with the sharp side facing away from him. But to get the knife to stay in place Caleb had to lean hard into the drawer, his belly and rib cage pressing into the blade. Awkwardly, laboriously, he pushed and pulled, moving his taped hands in an up-and-down sawing motion against the blade.
    Sweat began to pour off him. He tried to work through the pain shooting through his arms, tried to resist the temptation to stop, but the cutting motion kept bringing on cramping. As he fought through a charley horse he was distracted for a moment, long enough for the knife to start