Shame

feel better.”
    “I think only one of us has lost our head in this conversation.”
    “Talk is cheap. Bitch like you thinks you’re so smart, spouting off words. I’ve got a few words for you.”
    “I thought you had a poem.”
    “I do.”
    “I’m listening.”
    Ken didn’t say anything for several seconds. Elizabeth didn’t offer him an out, just waited in silence. Then he started reciting:
    “I hear your heart beating,
    Awaiting our meeting,
    I wonder at your greeting,
    When my knife meets your flesh.
    Will you scream out in pain,
    Will your tears run like rain,
    Will your blood gush from a vein,
    When my knife meets your flesh.”
    He wanted her to react; Elizabeth knew that with certainty. He wanted her to be afraid, to plead with him that he shouldn’t be thinking those thoughts. He hoped she would scream, or shout that he was a sick bastard, or hang up in fear.
    Instead, she asked, “You know what, Kenny?”
    Suspiciously: “What?”
    “I think you should take your knife to the poem before you direct it my way. We’re talking major-league awful.”
    “Fuck you.”
    “But you know what I like best about that poem, Kenny?”
    He hesitated before asking, but he had to know: “What?”
    “That it’s over.”
    Sounds of raw anger came over the phone, inarticulate, guttural hatred, and then another sound—a dial tone.

3

    T HE PHONE TRACE proved successful but only to the extent that they learned where the call had been made.
    “Pay phone in Anaheim, California,” the engineer announced. “Near Disneyland, I’m told.”
    “Must have been Mickey Mouse calling,” Elizabeth said.
    They continued with the show, making no on-air references to the call. There was no reason to encourage other kooks. At the show’s conclusion, Elizabeth declined Kipper’s offer to escort her personally up to her hotel room “just to make sure everything is okay.” Everything would be okay once she got her bubble bath.
    As the bath was running, Elizabeth called her service for messages. The deputy’s call finally caught up with her at 2:32 a.m. She found it much more upsetting than Ken’s call.
    “Shit,” she said, punching in her code to replay the message and listening to the deputy sheriff’s information a second time. “Shit,” she said again, then called the airport to get the first flight out to San Diego.
    She never did get her bubble bath.
    The jet shook yet again. More turbulence. The pilot came on over the intercom.
    “Sorry about those bumps, folks, but we’re going to be experiencing some Rocky Mountain love taps for a while yet. Please remain seated with your seat belts fastened.”
    Elizabeth thought that the turbulence suited her frame of mind. She remembered how Gray Parker—Shame—had turned her life upside down. Parker had been the impetus for Elizabeth’s becoming the Queen of True Crime (a label her publisher insisted upon putting on every one of her books—all twelve of them).
    Shame
had been her first book. Even with all her books since, Elizabeth’s name was still linked with Parker’s nickname, so much so that she was convinced there was some unwritten rule that emcees and announcers and interviewers were obligated to link their names in the same breath.
    The jet dipped again. Stomachs lurched, and anxious voices called out. The man sitting next to her reached for his air-sickness bag. But Elizabeth didn’t feel the topsy-turvy motion in her stomach so much as in her head. Thinking about Gray Parker did that to her. With the new developments there was this sense of things past, even if that wasn’t appropriate. Any mirror could tell her that. She had been twenty when he came into her life, and now she was forty-five. Besides, this wasn’t Parker. He was dead. This was just a copycat murderer.
    Elizabeth had first heard from the officer the week before when he’d called to tell her about the young woman’s body that had been left in the desert, her back to an ocotillo, the word
SHAME
written on her naked flesh. At the time, she had hoped it wasn’t the beginning of a pattern, had thought it possible that someone had just written the word to mislead the authorities, to divert attention.
    So much for her wishful thinking.
    The timing was bad, she told herself. She was halfway through another book. She didn’t like the idea of stopping and starting, of literary coitus interruptus. But that wasn’t really it. She had closed a lot of personal doors on the original