by Alan Russell
ALSO BY ALAN RUSSELL
Multiple Wounds
No Sign of Murder
The Forest Prime Evil
The Hotel Detective
The Fat Innkeeper
Exposure
Political Suicide
Burning Man
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2006 Alan Russell
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
PO Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781612186108
ISBN-10: 1612186106
To good friends:
Penny Travis, whose big heart and good soul have always been there for me;
Terry and Norman Glenn, with whom I have had the pleasure of sharing wonderful food and even more wonderful food for thought; and
Wadestein, who on a weekly basis lectures me on his theories of plausible deniability.
Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without, and know we cannot live within.
—James Baldwin,
The Fire Next Time
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
November 3, 1985
TO THE CASUAL observer, the 225 square miles of New Mexico’s White Sands National Monument are a wasteland. Few places on earth are as dry as the Tularosa Basin. It is that very dryness that allows the gypsum to dominate the landscape. In a wetter climate the gypsum would dissolve, but in the Tularosa Basin the crystal granules come together to form nature’s ever-changing monuments.
From a moving car, White Sands appears to be almost devoid of life. Trees are small and sparse, mostly Rio Grande cottonwoods, and plants have a difficult time scrabbling out a foothold in the shifting dunes. And those few plants that do raise their heads in the sheltered low areas between the dunes are often buried as the ephemeral dunes give way.
The dunes have swallowed more than plants. Hernando de Luna was a follower of Francisco Coronado, engaged in his expedition to find the Seven Cities of Cíbola and Gran Quivira. Struck down by the Apaches in 1540, de Luna fell among the shifting white sands.
Manuela de Luna was a newlywed in the first blush of love who could not accept the news of her husband’s death. The lovely bride left her home in Mexico City in search of her beloved conquistador. It is said she was also lost among the white sands, and over the centuries many have claimed to have seen a beautiful Spanish woman walking among the dunes, the long train of her white wedding dress trailing behind her. The native people call this the Legend of Pavla Blanca and believe she looks for her husband still. Manuela appears, they say, just after sunset, gliding along the whipping eddies of sand.
Almost as ghostlike as Manuela are the predators that stalk in the White Sands, their passage usually detected only in the powdery gypsum—the serpentine markings of the three species of rattlesnake, as well as footpads of fox and coyote. These ghosts also leave behind remains of the vanquished: cast-off fur, bones, and scat easily seen atop the spectral white dunes.
Park Ranger Nolan Campbell spotted the body of Alicia Gleason while driving on rounds. At first he doubted what he saw.
“Sometimes you see things out here,” Campbell said, “and you rub your eyes, and they usually disappear, but she didn’t. She wasn’t Pavla Blanca, or any mirage.”
Alicia hadn’t just been dropped in the desert, but had been put on display. Two miles from the entrance to the park, her naked body had been propped at the base of a fifty-foot sand dune. She was naked, her legs spread, a message written on her flesh. Everyone wondered at the word: SHAME. The just-concluded decade of the sixties was supposed to be a time for people to lose their shame. There was no place for shame in the Age of Aquarius. That was an emotion that belonged to the Puritans and Cotton Mather.
But everyone who saw Alicia’s naked and dead body felt shame. They also felt fear. A terrible predator, hitherto unknown, had announced his presence.
When Alicia was discovered in the morning, the gypsum hadn’t settled on her, but around her. After her body was removed, a picture was taken of the outline it had left. Nature had silhouetted her body better than any coroner’s chalk. One detective was moved to tears, saying it looked as if a snow angel had been left behind.
—Excerpt from the book Shame
by Elizabeth Line
1
May 4, 2012
THE FRONT DOOR was slightly ajar, opened just a little more than a crack. Caleb Parker raised his finger to the doorbell yet another time. He had already walked around the manicured pathway to the back, had checked for Mrs. Sanders at the swimming pool, the tennis courts, the gardens, and the stables. Out in the corral he had found three horses, the same three he remembered from his visit two months earlier. It didn’t look as if Mrs. Sanders was out riding.
If it hadn’t been for the open front door, he would have been sure she wasn’t home.
It was a beautiful house, even by Rancho Santa Fe standards. There was no moat protecting the palatial estate, but there were signs all around the property warning of alarm systems and armed response. A rose showing its thorns, Caleb thought. A fortune had been spent on security.
Which again made him wonder why the front door wasn’t shut tight.
Earlier that morning Caleb had talked with Mr. Sanders on the phone. Sanders had persuaded him to make the time to come right over to cut down an acacia tree. It was playing havoc with his wife’s allergies, Sanders had told him. “My wife will be waiting for you with bated—if not wheezing—breath,” Sanders had promised.
Caleb pushed the doorbell again. He could hear the chimes sounding throughout the house. A minute passed, but still there was no sound of footsteps, nothing to indicate that anyone was home.
Except for the opened front door.
Caleb reached out with his right hand, rapped with his knuckles, causing the door to open several inches, enough for Caleb to get a look inside.
“Hello,” he called. “Anyone home?”
Caleb wondered if he might have set off one of those silent alarms, wondered if at that very moment guards were being dispatched to the house. But he wasn’t afraid of burglar alarms so much as the alarms going off in his mind. Caleb sensed that something was very wrong. He could feel it. Standing at the threshold, he was afraid to go forward and afraid to retreat. Scents from inside reached out to him, the beguiling aroma of freshly cut flowers and potpourri, but he still didn’t feel reassured.
“Hello,” he shouted again, willing his voice to be loud and strong.
Again, nothing.
Caleb couldn’t bring himself to just push open t
he door; that wouldn’t be quite right. Once again he knocked. The front door was oversized and made of heavy wood, but it was well-balanced. The door swung completely open, allowing him to see in. Windows and skylights made the interior light and cheery. He contemplated the tiled hallway. It led forward, first to the living room, and beyond that to the stairwell.
“Anybody here?”
Even to Caleb’s ears, his voice sounded strained. Almost desperate. Turn around, he tried to tell himself, and walk away.
But he couldn’t. Caleb took a deep breath. No one would be able to fault him for going a little ways forward, maybe as far as the stairwell, where he could shout upstairs. The circumstances all but dictated that. It was possible Mrs. Sanders had succumbed to her allergies. But he still found himself balking at the doorway, his foot hovering over the entryway as if he were girding himself to jump into cold water.
The foot dropped. He was inside. He took a second step forward, then a third. Caleb saw the white, plush carpeting in the living room, a color that bespoke no children, or the ability to afford very frequent carpet cleaning, or both.
Then he saw the bare leg.
“Hello,” Caleb said, the word coming out as not much more than a whisper.
The leg didn’t move.
Caleb stepped into the living room and found Mrs. Sanders. She was naked, her back propped up against a love seat. Her legs were spread apart. On the inside of her upper right thigh the red letters S and H had been written. An arch wound its way along the outskirts of her golden pubic patch, with a letter barely visible through the hair. An A. The M and the E were scripted on the inside of her left thigh.
SHAME.
Caleb wanted to be shocked. He wanted to feel outraged. But he couldn’t. It was almost as if he had expected just such an encounter.
I tried to believe I could escape, he thought, but it’s always been there, always been a part of me.
Caleb turned and ran.
As fast as Caleb was driving, the terror was still catching up to him. He sneaked another glance in his rearview mirror. Nothing pursuing him, at least not yet. The mirror showed only his white face and his scared eyes. He didn’t find his reflection in any way reassuring. He’s dead, Caleb told himself. He’s been dead for more than twenty years.
Caleb took a deep breath. Maybe I should go back, he thought, and call the police. But facing up to the situation frightened him. It went against a lifetime of habits. His urge to deny everything was strong, too strong. Given a choice, he didn’t want to be connected in any way with Mrs. Sanders, but as fervently as Caleb wanted to believe that his stumbling upon her was an accident, the word—the curse—belied that.
Someone knew his secret. Caleb had been found out. He had always dreaded the thought of this moment, but the death of Mrs. Sanders made it even more horrific than he had ever imagined, and he had always imagined the worst.
Thinking about her made him feel sick, and also guilty. He hadn’t even made sure she was dead. He’d been too afraid, too panicked, to check. He had to do something.
Neither of the pay phones at the supermarket was being used. Caleb punched 911.
“Emergency nine-one-one,” the dispatcher answered.
Disguising his voice, making it atonal and low, Caleb said, “Go to thirty-four seventy-two Via Monterrey in Rancho Santa Fe. There’s a woman there who has been seriously injured.”
“Thirty-four seventy-two Via Monterrey in Rancho Santa Fe,” the dispatcher repeated. “Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And can you tell me the severity and type of injury?”
“Get there quickly,” Caleb said.
“What’s your name, sir?”
Caleb hung up.
That afternoon a call had been made from a different pay phone. A woman answered but didn’t offer any other greeting than, “Answering service.”
The caller knew his voice wasn’t known to the operator, but he disguised it anyway: “I’d like to leave a message for Elizabeth Line.”
“I’ll connect with her voice mail.”
Elizabeth Line had told him that in an emergency he could have her service page her, but the man didn’t want to talk to her directly. It was easier just leaving a message.
I feel like a fucking spy, he thought. Making this kind of cloak-and-dagger call wasn’t for him. He was a cop, a San Diego County deputy sheriff who’d never even had the ambition to hide his badge in his wallet.
A computer-generated voice interrupted his thoughts: “Leave your message now.”
The artificial voice didn’t sound very different from the operator who had answered. The deputy sheriff knew Elizabeth Line needed to protect herself. It came with her turf. But he wondered if her friends got tired of this routine.
“There’s been another one,” he said. “It happened this morning in Rancho Santa Fe. That’s where a whole lot of rich people live. It’s in the north of San Diego County. The victim’s name is Teresa Sanders. Same MO as the other one. This one’s a bit older, she’s thirty-two, but I’m told she was pretty and could have passed for twenty.”
The officer looked all around. There was no one within hearing distance, and no one who appeared to be looking his way.
“They’re putting a big clamp down on the investigation. I was lucky to hear as much as I did. Prepare to be stonewalled. Prepare to be counterquestioned. I guess I don’t need to be telling you that. It’s not like you don’t know the routine. If you need to talk to me, call from a pay phone and leave a message on my machine. Identify yourself as Aunt Millie and leave a safe number where I can get back to you.”
The deputy sheriff scanned the area a second time and decided he could say a few more hurried words.
“I heard he used her lipstick to write the word, but that’s probably third- or fourth-hand information. A male made a nine-one-one call and said a woman had been seriously injured. The call came from a pay phone in Encinitas, about six miles from where she was murdered. There are a lot of theories going along with that call. Did a Good Samaritan see something but was too scared to get involved, or was Shame playing some kind of game? That’s what they’re already calling him: Shame.”
He lowered his voice to a whisper. “’Course that’s not supposed to get out to the public on threat of severe reprisal. It’s not only the secrecy thing—people are worried about a panic around here.”
If this Line woman hadn’t helped out his brother Larry, he’d never have dropped a dime. Larry was also a cop, and Line had saved his brother’s ass a few years back, had validated his police work in print when the entire city of Seattle was ready to ride him out of town. The family owed her. This was her marker.
“Bet you never thought you’d be writing about Shame again,” he said. “He’s all yours, lady. Shame on you.”
2
THE NEWS BREAK allowed Elizabeth Line a five-minute respite from the phone calls. She left her headphones on and listened to the newscast, a junkie indulging in her habit.
The door to the broadcasting booth opened, and the talk jock waved to her. He went by the name of Kip, or as he seemed to prefer, The Kipper. As he donned his headset he winked at Elizabeth, did a sound check with the engineer, then signaled to her that they were about to go on air. His signal came by hand instead of eye, and for that Elizabeth was grateful. The Kipper moved slightly forward to his microphone. He was round and his puffy face had an almost neon-pink hue, but he was porcine without the squeal. The Kipper had a mellifluous and powerful voice and had the power to make the inane sound important.
“You’ve got the right-right station,” he said, “because this is the Knight-Nights show coming to you live from our nation’s capital in Washington, DC.”
No more late-night book promotions on radio, vowed Elizabeth.
“This is The Kipper,” he said, “and we’ll be continuing for the next hour with our special guest, true-crime author Elizabeth Line.
“For those of you who were with us duri
ng the last hour, you know we’ve been talking murder, folks. Elizabeth’s latest is A Magnolia Hanging.
“We’ve got Dave from Springfield, Missouri, on the line, and I do mean line as in our guest Elizabeth Line. How ya doing, Dave?”
“Doing fine, Kip. But after listening in tonight, I went around and made sure all my doors and windows were locked, and I just now put a loaded gun under my pillow. I can’t say you’ve got a very reassuring guest.”
As if, Elizabeth refrained from saying, Dave and the loaded gun under his pillow were cause for comfort.
“She does have some mean stories, doesn’t she, Dave? But you’d never know it to look at Elizabeth. You’d think she was some model, not some milk carton chronicler.”
Elizabeth supposed that was a compliment. “Thank you, Kip,” she said.
“Well,” Dave said, “I wanted to ask her a few questions about Shame.”
What a surprise, Elizabeth thought. In her first hour on the show, most of the questions had been about Gray Parker. They always were.
“I’m listening, Dave,” Elizabeth said.
Usually she was able to get out of coming to the studio. She preferred being a call-in guest, doing the so-called phoners. Radio booths made her feel claustrophobic. But her publicist thought it was good PR to make occasional personal appearances, especially on shows with a national audience. In a weak moment she had agreed to do the spot.
“Yeah,” Dave said. “I’ve heard that after Shame died they cut him up and sold his body parts. Supposedly some college got his brain to study. But I also heard some woman paid twenty-five thousand dollars for his, um, Johnson. I was told it’s floating around in this ten-gallon bottle. Word is that it’s, uh, about as big as Einstein’s brain, you know, real oversized, and that it’s available for private showings.”
“You mean privates showing,” Kipper said.
The two men laughed.
“Well, how about it, Ms. Line?” Kip asked. “We got a killer’s genitalia on the loose?”
