Shame

recite the words to Queenie herself. She was smart enough that she might even appreciate them. His former girlfriend had never liked his recounting couplets or ditties. She had thought him a pedant. That was one of her excuses for breaking up with him. Of course she hadn’t used the word
pedant
, not with her limited vocabulary. What she had said was, “You always talk about weird stuff, and creepy stuff.” He had accepted her rejection in a very understanding manner, but that had been easy for him to do. For rejecting him, Feral had known, she had to die.
    No woman was ever going to reject him again.
    Feral remembered a line from W. C. Fields: “’Twas a woman who drove me to drink, and I never even had the decency to thank her.” Feral felt much the same way. He had his girlfriend to thank for all the murders, but he hadn’t even had the decency to thank her. Instead, he had murdered her. And then he had emulated the Cave Man killings a second time. He’d killed again to allay potential suspicion. The second victim had been his insurance policy. Feral had known the Cave Man’s troglodyte luck would soon run out. But Feral thought it possible that after his capture the Cave Man might take credit for his murders, andif not, the murders could always be attributed to one of those pesky copycats.
    Funny how in such cases no one said imitation was the sincerest form of flattery.
    As it had turned out, the Cave Man
had
initially claimed the kills as his own but later recanted. The police were looking into his change of heart, and so was Queenie. Feral had been thrilled when he first heard she was coming to Denver to write a book on the Cave Man murders. Her timing had been impeccable. She had saved him from having to seek her out. And how ironic it was that she asked him for an interview. How positively delicious. She had no idea of their ties to one another. To her, he was just another grief-stricken loved one of a victim.
    Kismet had brought them together. When they had talked at his place of business, Feral had been tempted to drop hints of what he knew about her and make some allusions to their mutual past, but of course he hadn’t. He probably knew more about Queenie than anyone, for the detective who had researched his own history had also delved into hers.
    The PI’s snooping hadn’t stopped there. The dick had proved quite adept at surreptitiously tracking down half a dozen other individuals. All had a common denominator: each and every one of them had been sired by some notorious serial murderer. Feral had explained to the PI that he was writing a book called
Cain’s Children.
Not that the detective had really cared about anything except getting paid. But the detective’s competence was offset by his attitude. He had presumed an annoying familiarity with Feral.
    Feral still remembered the way the man had walked into his office and acted as if he owned it. The detective had finished all his background work and took pleasure in tossing his report down onto Feral’s desk. “Demon spawn,” he announced, showing him a cocky grin. “Everything you wanted to know about the children of serial murderers but were afraid to ask.”
    His report, though, was professional. The man had no couth, but he was thorough. How unfortunate that the detective had recently been killed by a hit-and-run driver. But as it was best expressed in Ecclesiasticus, “He that toucheth pitch shall be denied therewith.” The detective had apparently touched too much pitch. And hadn’t he said it?
    Demon spawn.

30

    T HE MORE E LIZABETH tried to discount Lola’s words, the more they came back to haunt her.
    The killer had manipulated her. He had known her weaknesses. And he had targeted her.
    Other nagging doubts surfaced. Her sorority sisters had been Parker’s ninth and tenth victims. So why had the copycat attacked her out of sequence? He’d tried to make her his fourth San Diego victim. And if he wasn’t a copycat...
    Maybe she was the target and had been all along. By doing her job well, Elizabeth knew, she had made her fair share of enemies, but there had been no overt death threats recently, unless you could count Ken’s poetry on talk radio.
    Poetry. The connection with her past made Elizabeth wonder if Ken might have been an invention, yet another ploy by the killer, another false trail for the police to follow in the event of her death.
    Caleb was right, she decided. The answers were in the past. She was the one