Shame

give her my seed.’
    “Though I asked him several times, he never elaborated on why he had practiced this birth control. Perhaps Parker was distrustful of Van Doren’s self-aggrandizing and knew that she would use a baby in just such a way. Or it might have been that he didn’t want another child of his born into the world. By his own account, he hadn’t been a very good father, and with his imminent death it was clear he wouldn’t be able to improve upon that track record.”
    Elizabeth sat in the middle of her hotel room, overwhelmed by the emptied boxes. She’d have to put the Do Not Disturb tag on the door. There was no way the maid would be able to clean the room.
    She wondered if she had some Walter Mitty complex about being a superdetective. That wasn’t what crime writers did. They didn’t solve crimes, just documented the circumstances surrounding them. So what the hell was she doing?
    Maybe I’m trying to be like that actress who played me in that movie-of-the-week version of
Shame,
she thought. She had been embarrassed at how they had portrayed her as a busy little sleuth. No, Elizabeth decided, I’m not playing that actress. I haven’t had my breasts augmented yet.
    Elizabeth picked up a stack of pictures of Gray Parker. As a child he hadn’t yet learned to hide his feelings. In almost all the pictures he was frowning, not afraid to show how unhappy he was. But his mother had taught him to put on a cheery face in public and that anything else was unacceptable. As Parker matured he learned he could get by more easily by pretending to be who he wasn’t. In almost every picture she had of Parker the man, he was flashing a broad smile.
    Elizabeth continued to sort through the pile. She found one of her old speeches. It had been typed and whited out and had several pasted inserts that were now threatening to come apart.Public speaking hadn’t been as easy for her back then. As a crutch, she had always typed out a prepared speech. Now she was more confident. Her notes were usually written on an index card.
    She read the last page of her old speech.
    “Parker was, and always will be, an enigma. The easy thing to do would be to paint him as rotten to the core, but he confounds such a broad brush. His behavior was sometimes good, even noble, and that’s bothersome. It is disturbing to see a so-called cold-hearted killer demonstrate a capacity for caring. From both a personal and a societal standpoint, it’s easier to think of a serial killer as a total monster than as someone with any vestiges of humanity. It complicates matters, it jars the psyche, to see images of a murderer not in keeping with the headlines or the mind’s eye.
    “I think the most terrible thing of all to accept is that for the most part Gray Parker was only too human. He is someone we can’t easily dismiss, and if we look carefully in our own mirrors, there are times when his reflection stares back.”
    At the bottom of the page were the names. Elizabeth felt she knew these women better than anyone else. It had been her tradition always to read the names of Parker’s seventeen victims at the end of her talk. Elizabeth thought that by remembering their names she honored their memories.
    It had been a long time since she had finished her speech with that memorial. To herself, she read the names aloud.

31

    F ERAL KNEW THE transformation would come soon. He loved watching old horror films, especially those with transformations, like Lon Chaney turning into the Wolfman. That’s how his legal name was. It amused him that all he had to do was switch a few letters, and he became what he was: wild. A savage and untamed beast.
    He started on his second walk around the inn. He had already checked the temperature of the spa, dipped his finger into the pool, made stops at the sundry machines, lingered over his selections of a candy bar and then a soda, and stopped several times to smell the flowers. But he still hadn’t seen any sign of Queenie.
    He considered how else he might learn which room she was in. Later, he could visit the night clerk and do a Gary Gilmore on him, get the information while making the clerk’s death look like a robbery, but that would mean waiting until after midnight. And it would entail additional risk. Gilmore was said to have had a death wish. Feral most certainly didn’t.
    What Feral liked most about Gilmore was his sense of humor, something he never lost. Gilmore had told one of his lawyers, who was