Shame

convinced that all the deaths were necessary.
    “Apparently, even his own.”
    Caleb reached over and stopped the narrative. He didn’t acknowledge Lola’s being in the room, just started mumbling to himself. At first Lola couldn’t make out his words, only noticed that his voice was higher-pitched than usual. And then she started making sense out of what he was saying. Caleb was repeating some of the phrases he had just heard.
    “‘No longer was he this nebulous figure,’” he said. “‘MO never changed. No tool doing the killing. All deaths were necessary.’”
    Caleb shook his head. “‘All deaths were necessary,’” he said once again.
    The voice sounded like a woman’s, Lola thought.
    “‘All deaths were necessary,’” he said for a third time, “‘apparently even his own.’”
    Not just any woman, Lola realized, but Elizabeth Line. “‘Apparently even his own.’”
    Caleb’s mimicking ability was so uncanny that Lola felt uneasy. It was as if someone else were inside him. She was glad when he started listening to the recording again.
    It was in New Orleans that Parker had first experimented with a victim. Jenny Lucas was found with the usual Shame MO, but he didn’t leave her body with only his signature. Her breasts were found ravaged with tooth marks, her right nipple almost completely severed. There were also bite marks all around Jenny’s labia.
    Parker didn’t use lipstick to do the lettering on Jenny. Lab results confirmed what the police on the scene had guessed: that Parker had applied his signature with Louisiana hot sauce. Hot sauce was also found inside her vagina.
    Caleb turned off the recording. He appeared agitated at what he’d heard. He kept smoothing his hair. His cheeks were flushed red, but the rest of his face was drawn and pale.
    Lola went over to check his fever. She took away the washcloth. Steam all but rose from it. She put the back of her hand on his forehead.
    “Oh, God,” she said. “You’re so hot.”
    “Louisiana hot sauce,” he said but in Elizabeth’s voice.
    Lola wished a priest were at her side. She thought Caleb was possessed and in need of an exorcism. It was all she could do not to run screaming from the room.
    “Some Louisiana hot sauce,” he said, “that’s what I need.”
    This time he didn’t speak in Elizabeth’s voice. But it wasn’t Caleb’s either. Lola felt chilled. She was sure it was Gray Parker voicing the request.

29

    “C AN’T ESCAPE ME ,” Feral said. “You know that, don’t you?”
    Feral thought of Robert O. Pierce and how he had tried to escape his appointed destiny with death. On the night Pierce was due to be executed, he managed to get a piece of glass and cut his own throat. The wound had been too deep for the prison doctor to treat him successfully, but instead of taking Pierce to the hospital, the guards had carried him to the gas chamber. And there he had lived just long enough to die by gas.
    It still bothered Feral that he’d had his hands around Queenie’s neck and she had gotten away. But like Pierce, she was about to go from the frying pan into the fire.
    Feral started up his car and pulled away from the curb. He was taking his time scouting the exterior of the Amity Inn. He had already driven around the parking lot but hadn’t seen Queenie’s car. She probably had a new rental. Queenie had been suspicious enough to begin with, and after yesterday’s tête-à-tête, she would be even more so.
    Didn’t matter, he thought. She and Robert O. Pierce could compare notes in hell.
    Feral parked in the white zone in the front of the lodge. The Amity Inn wasn’t the kind of establishment that had bellmenwaiting at the curb. It was designed for the long-term business traveler. Perfect for Queenie’s anonymity and his own as well. At a hotel there would have been more employees and guests milling about, more potential witnesses.
    From where he was sitting, Feral could see the lobby. He was tempted just to walk in and ask the clerk which room Vera Macauley was in, but he didn’t want to expose himself. The staff might be on alert to anyone asking for her, and even if they weren’t, most clerks were trained not to give out a guest’s room number. It was a suspicious world. Shame on it.
    No, Queenie was going to make this as hard as possible. Feral whispered from an Andrew Marvell poem: “‘Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime.’”
    He would have liked to