by Alan Russell
“‘So who’s the real father of your child? It can’t be Gray Parker, because his blood type is B positive.’
“The press conference exploded with questions, some for me and some for Leslie Van Doren. I told the reporters that Gray Parker had suspected the child wasn’t his and had asked me to investigate. I also said he would gladly submit to a DNA test to prove beyond any doubt he wasn’t the father.
“As for Van Doren, she very loudly declared, ‘Either Gray is the father or it was Immaculate Conception.’
“In subsequent days, reporters proved conclusively it wasn’t the latter. According to several published accounts, Van Doren had done as much hooking as she had cocktailing.
“As for Parker’s suspicion that the child wasn’t his, he never told me much more than, ‘I tried to not 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
FERAL 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 bald, that he could have his hair after the Utah marksmen shot him dead. Volunteer marksmen. Who said citizens shirked their civic responsibilities? There had been no shortage of volunteers for that job. But the shooters had never known if there was a bullet or a blank in their chambers. None of them could have the certain satisfaction of the kill.
Though death by firing squad seemed like an easy way for a state to kill, it wasn’t a popular form of capital punishment, Utah being one of the last states to practice that art. But then the Beehive State had long exhibited a different kind of sensibility about executing its criminals. In 1857 it had even hanged a horse.
Warren Drake, a member of the Mormon militia, had been convicted of committing bestiality with a mare. He and his horse were sentenced to be executed, but Drake ended up being excommunicated from the Mormon Church and exiled from the territory.
The horse wasn’t so fortunate.
How typical, thought Feral, to punish the innocent. That’s what had happened to him.
He had never known his mother, but his hired detective had submitted an extremely edifying report. And he was well acquainted with what Queenie had written about her. Neither Queenie nor the detective had offered a very complimentary picture of Mother. If he had been Shame’s son, things might have been very different, but when Mother’s little lie became public knowledge, his fate was sealed. Mother had loved Shame and not him. She had shown her true colors by washing her hands of him, by saying good riddance to her little bastard.
It was too bad Mother had died before he was old enough to reintroduce himself to her. But there were others deserving of his justice. At the top of the list was Queenie, who had exulted in exposing Mother, who had taunted her in person and castigated her in print. It was Queenie who had graphically described Mother’s willingness to rut in the filth. Queenie’s message was that Mother was worse than a fallen woman; she was a slattern who had paid to be fucked and humiliated and deserved no better treatment than she received.
Of course she’d had a partner in crime: Gray Parker. Shame and Queenie had conspired to make a laughingstock out of Mother. Shame had been too good to deposit his seed into dear Mother. He was willing to poke but not plant, was happy to humiliate and debase and degrade Mother but not willing to give her his precious seed. Like Onan, he’d preferred to spill it on the floor.
“I coulda been a contender,” whispered Feral.
He could have, should have, been the son of Shame. For a few short days he had been the other Gray Jr. And then he’d been nothing, nothing at all.
His hired detective had concluded it was highly unlikely that Feral would ever know who his real father was. He had been fifteen before his adoptive parents had told him he wasn’t their biological child. Deep down he hadn’t really been surprised, for it was hard for him to imagine that those two fossils could have been his parents, but he still felt angry and betrayed. He had been deceived, lied to for years.
Reason enough, and then some, for him to act as he had when he came of age. He had been Mater and Pater’s sole heir. Their deaths had been so tragic, but they’d left behind a considerable amount of money, as well as a small manufacturing company. Not that Feral dirtied his hands at work. That’s what good managers were for. But it pleased him that he was still the boss.
“How to succeed in business without really trying,” Feral whispered.
He put his right shoe up on a railing and took his time tying it. Feral never bothered looking at the shoelace. His attention was on the block of rooms overlooking the pool.
There were three maid carts in sight but no maids. They had to be cleaning the rooms. A door opened, and a man emerged. His briefcase gave him away as a businessman. The man looked at his watch and apparently didn’t like what he saw.
It had been a long shot thinking he could just run into Queenie. She was probably holed up in her room. Feral wondered how he could flush her out. She’d be suspicious of any call. Once burned, twice learned. But maybe he didn’t even need to talk with her. He could use his cell phone to call the hotel and ask for Vera Macauley’s room. If she wasn’t in he might be able to pinpoint where her room was by the ringing of her telephone.
But if she was in he might make her even more wary than she already was. No, he didn’t want to take that chance.
Another door opened, and two kids came running out. For a moment Feral didn’t recognize them. But then he saw Anna Parker. She was wearing a hat and dark glasses, but to Feral that only made her stand out all the more.
“After you get the sodas, come right back,” she yelled.
The children weren’t listening to her. They acted as if they had been cooped up for days. And getting a little taste of freedom, Feral thought, was like letting the genie out of the bottle. Getting it, and the children, back in would be difficult.
Feral finished tying his shoe. He made a point of not looking at Anna or her children. Mama Bear was clearly on alert, and Feral wanted to appear to be just another anonymous guest.
He walked toward the parking lot, intent on his thoughts. Queenie must have used one of her aliases to get the room. Feral thought it unlikely that Queenie was staying with the Parker family. While working, she was always the lone wolf. He was betting she was at another hotel.
Feral weighed the possibilities. This could all work out well—very well.
32
ELIZABETH WAS ALMOST done sifting through her Parker boxes. She’d winnowed the past, had decided what needed to be studied and what could be put away forever. Intent on her organizing, she had resisted the temptation to do too much looking back, but seeing the framed calligraphy made her pause. It had been Gray’s parting gift to her.
The lettering was ornate and beautiful. He had learned calligraphy while in prison, had seemed to get immense satisfaction out of transforming his crabbed handwriting into a thing of beauty.
His gift had surprised her. He had used parchment paper and had obviously taken great pains over the work. The dark ink and the gold filigree had faded very little over the years. He had given her a work of art, but she had hidden it away. Elaborately inscribed were three passages from Whitman’s “The Sleepers”:
The blind sleep, and the deaf and dumb sleep,
The prisoner sleeps well in the prison...the runaway son sleeps,
The murderer that is to be hung next day...
how does he sleep?
The earth recedes from me into the night,
I saw that it was beautiful...and I see that what is not the earth is beautiful.
I too pass from the night;
I stay awhile away O night, but I return to you again and love you;
Why should I be afraid to trust myself to you?
I am not afraid...I have been well brought forward by you.
It had given her more pleasure to study the flourishes than the words. Gray had picked Whitman’s poetry to express his mortality, his regrets, his hopes, his gratitude. And perhaps his love. Maybe he’d been unable to say those things himself and had needed proxy words, or perhaps the inked poem was his last and greatest manipulation. They had never quite trusted each other—how could they?—but each had offered the other important pieces of themselves.
“I have been well brought forward by you.” And so he had been, she thought. The self-proclaimed “exact opposite of a tree,” stunted, twisted, and blighted as he was, had somehow flowered at the end. Most would say she was deluding herself to think that. They would point to his calligraphy and the poem and say they were but Shame’s way of controlling her even in death.
The vibration of her phone made her shiver. It almost seemed as if Gray were calling her.
And maybe he was, or the closest thing to him. The display showed Lola’s phone number. But it wasn’t Lola calling this time. It was Caleb.
“How are you?” she asked.
“I don’t think I’ve slept. Maybe a little. My mind’s been sort of funny—the fever, you know.” His voice sounded weak and distant. “I’ve been listening to the book.”
“Oh.” Lola had told Elizabeth how intent Caleb had been on listening to the tape, how even his illness and delirium hadn’t kept him from it.
“I think given the subject matter you did a good job.”
It sounded as if it hurt him to admit that. “Thank you.”
She heard him draw in a deep breath. “I learned a lot, but not enough to shout ‘eureka.’ I’m not exactly sure what I should do next.”
“I think you should turn yourself in.”
“A normal person could do that. I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“My father. The law wants to bring us both in. Did you see all those articles in the newspaper today? My favorite was the Associated Press article with the headline ‘Bad Seed.’ Did you read it?”
“No.”
“You should. It talked about different fathers and sons that had been executed for their crimes, and made it sound like murder was a game the whole family—no, generations of the same family—could play. It gave a rundown of some bloodlines that had produced killer after killer. There was even a side story on Gerald Gallego. Gerald’s apparently a chip off the old block. His father was executed by the state of Mississippi, and now Gerald is on Death Row in Nevada. One geneticist all but said, ‘The apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree.’ He was using me as his reference.”
“Newspapers are in the business of selling papers.”
“Are you saying you don’t have your own doubts about me?”
A momentary pause. “I believe in you.”
“Should I pretend I didn’t hear you hesitate?”
“It’s just that I have a few questions.”
“Ask them.”
“Now’s not the appropriate—”
“Ask them.”
“A little over a month ago, your appearance changed drastically. You cut your hair and lost your beard right before the first murder. With your clean-cut look, you became the picture of your father.”
“I wasn’t trying to look like my father. If anything, I was trying to look like Dr. Jennings. I knew Anna was having an affair with him, and I thought if I looked more like him she’d notice me more. That, and I was tired of hiding my face.”
“There’s also the matter of the polygraph. You failed it.”
“Yes.”
“When you were asked whether you had murdered anyone, the galvanic response was very significant.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. I was nervous, I know that. I was sweating terribly.”
He sounded nervous now, thought Elizabeth. She wondered whether he was again sweating.
“And how did you know to go to the sorority?”
Caleb explained, or tried to. His voice started cracking when telling her about the Brandy Wein photos, and that made him angry.
“If I have to convince you,” he said, “what chance do I have of making the police
believe me?”
“Even they’ll have to concede that you couldn’t have been in two places at one time,” said Elizabeth. “It would have been impossible for you to simultaneously attack me and call me, just as you couldn’t have been lighting the fire and setting off the alarm at the same time you were supposedly inside the sorority.”
He considered her argument for several moments, long enough for Elizabeth to think he’d hung up, but his sigh told her that he was still there.
“I’m tired,” he said. “And I’m still sort of fuzzy. What I’d like to do is talk to Anna about all of this.”
“I’ll arrange that.”
“Why don’t you just tell me where she is and I’ll call her?”
“Because I don’t know if the Sheriff’s Department is monitoring her phone. If they are, they’ll be breaking down your front door a few minutes from now, and nothing looks worse than being led off in handcuffs. If you’re going to be taken in, I would much rather you surrendered to them.”
“Is it possible that you still don’t trust me?”
“Your family is staying at the Amity Inn in the Golden Triangle. Your wife is registered under the name of Vera Macauley. Are you satisfied, or do I have to prove I believe in you in some other way?”
“I’m sorry. Not enough sleep, I guess.”
“That’s two of us,” she said. “Look, after we finish talking I’m going to visit your family. I’ll have Anna call you from some safe phone within the hour. Okay?”
“Thank you.”
“In the meantime, try to rest. You’ve been through a lot.”
“So have you. Is your neck...are you...?”
“I’m fine.”
“I feel like I’m the plague.” Caleb stopped to cough. It sounds as if he has the plague, thought Elizabeth. “People around me keep dying.”
“You’re not alone in this. And you’re not responsible. I don’t think you’re the only target. I’m beginning to believe all of this was done as much for my sake as for yours.”