Shame (24 page)

Too much drink.

The stranger, his father.

The fraternity.

Pledge week.

University of Texas.

Her body left in the bushes near another fraternity house.

Shame.

Shame.

Shame.

Try as he might, the answer wouldn’t come. In frustration, Caleb strained against his bonds, pushing at them until his arms and legs shook with the effort. He wished he were wearing chains. At least he could have rattled those. Tied up, he couldn’t think. A sound escaped him—guttural, angry, like a gorilla’s bark. He sank his teeth into the duct tape and tried to shred the fabric, but when he pulled his mouth away, he could barely see the indentations of where he had bitten. His failure to wreak any damage frustrated him all the more, made him feel weak and helpless. For so long he’d tried to do everything right, to be above reproach. Growing up he’d tried to be perfect, thinking that would keep him from being like his father. His secret formula. But the only thing it had kept him from was being himself. Maybe Lola was right. Maybe he didn’t know who the hell he was.

As his rage diminished, the writing in his mind began to fade, the emblazoned red words cooling, disappearing. He closed his eyes. Only a few words remained.

Fraternity.

Pledge week.

Shame.

His father had always been attracted to university settings. During his reign of terror, he’d kept more lights on in dorms and sororities than anything short of a calculus final....

The connection, or at least part of it, came when he wasn’t expecting it. For a moment, Caleb’s world stopped. Elizabeth Line’s sorority sisters had been murdered. That’s what had been grabbing at him. His father had lured his fourth victim away from a Greek Week party.

The attack on Elizabeth suddenly made sense. She was the Kappa Omega who had gotten away, and the new Shame had wanted to rectify that.

Caleb was certain of it. More than that, he had picture proof.

He jumped up, forgot that his legs were tied, and crashed into the table, knocking everything onto the hardwood floor. Pushing himself to his feet, he hopped to the guest room. Brandy Wein’s pictures were in his coat pocket.

He’d looked at them only that one time in his truck, had never wanted to see them again. Most of the photos were close shots, but there were also two full body shots, one with Brandy posed on a lawn with her legs spread, the other with her in a car, her head propped against the glass as if she were staring at something outside.

That was the picture he wanted. He held it between the fingertips of his tied hands. Visible in the background, illuminated by a spotlight, was a sign that started with the letter
K.
He could just make out the second letter: an
A.
The rest of the lettering was obscured by Brandy’s face. The letters were ornamental and large, archaic-looking. Greek.

Kappa.

Caleb held the picture closer, trying to see better. The photo had been taken at night. Brandy Wein’s lifeless eyes seemed to be offering up a warning to the living. Caleb tried to imagine the mindset of a killer driving around with a corpse in his backseat, a killer who had posed Brandy to stare out at a sorority house, the dead looking out at the quick. The killer had taken her with him to scout out future victims.

Caleb understood his message. And maybe his sickness. The killer had given him a portent of what was to be. And with it a time frame. Elizabeth was the first Kappa Omega he had wanted to kill, but not the last.

The sorority had to be warned without delay.

Caleb hopped back to the living room and saw the mess he had left behind. Food and drink littered the hardwood floor. He reached for Lola’s portable phone. It was sticky, had apparently been bathed in ginger ale and Diet Pepsi. Caleb pressed the Talk
button, heard some odd clicking noises, then smelled burning circuitry.

The phone was dead, victim of the soda bath, the fall, or both.

Caleb dropped it. Maybe there was a second phone in Lola’s bedroom. He hopped over there, scanned the room, saw nothing.

Phone book, Caleb thought. Get the address and phone number of the Kappa Omega sorority house. And then find a way out of his bonds.

He located the white pages on a kitchen shelf. With his bound hands, Caleb had trouble turning the thin pages. Breathing hard and cursing harder, he finally managed to get the page he needed. The sorority was located on Montezuma, a street adjacent to the San Diego State University campus.

Caleb memorized the telephone number and the street address, then looked around desperately for a knife. He flung kitchen drawers open until he found a butcher’s knife. Getting a grip on the knife was difficult; trying to cut the tape was impossible. Some sort of vise was needed. He opened the kitchen window and closed it on the knife to try to secure it. With his chin he pushed down on the windowsill but was unable to supply enough resistance to keep the knife from moving.

He opened a kitchen drawer, positioned the knife’s handle, then closed the drawer on it. The blade pointed skyward, with the sharp side facing away from him. But to get the knife to stay in place Caleb had to lean hard into the drawer, his belly and rib cage pressing into the blade. Awkwardly, laboriously, he pushed and pulled, moving his taped hands in an up-and-down sawing motion against the blade.

Sweat began to pour off him. He tried to work through the pain shooting through his arms, tried to resist the temptation to stop, but the cutting motion kept bringing on cramping. As he fought through a charley horse he was distracted for a moment, long enough for the knife to start slipping from its hold. Caleb overreacted, pushing forward too hard against the drawer.

The blade cut into him just under his sternum. At first, with so many places on his body hurting, he thought he had just scraped himself, but then he saw the redness spreading throughout his shirt and he felt the throbbing pain. Shit. Just what he didn’t need. But he couldn’t slow down. He went back to trying to free himself. His sawing was as ragged as his breath. Blood and sweat dripped on the blade, lubricating it.

He tried to hold the tape taut, tried to offer resistance to the cutting edge of the knife, but the tape was slow to give. Caleb kept at it until there wasn’t any part of his arms and shoulders not in agony. When the last fiber finally separated, Caleb’s arms fell to his sides, and then he dropped to the floor. For a short time he didn’t have motor control over his hands. They flopped up and down like fish out of water. It seemed like minutes before they yielded to his directions. He pulled the tape off his hands and arms, then lifted off his bloodied shirt. He grabbed a dish towel and wiped the blood from his wound. For what looked like a relatively small cut, there seemed to be an awful lot of blood.

Caleb applied pressure to the wound with his left hand, and with his right hand he reached for the knife and began cutting at the tape around his ankles and calves. It took him less than two minutes to free himself. He pushed himself halfway up, then slipped on the blood that had pooled on the floor. He reached out for a counter and righted himself. His bloody handprints were all over the linoleum and the counter.

He tried to stanch the flow of blood before running down the hallway to Lola’s room. In her bathroom medicine cabinet he found gauze pads and bandage strips. He tried to doctor his wound but did a poor job of it. His hands were too slick, and the gauze pads filled with blood too quickly. Impatient, not wanting to waste time, he applied enough tape at least to slow the seepage of blood. He wasn’t used to dressing his own wounds. Anna always tended to his cuts. He thought of her sure hands, his memory taking him back to when they’d first met. She was a
healer, and he had been in need of her healing. How much, she’d never known.

Caleb left his bloody shirt in the sink. He went to Lola’s walk-in closet and flipped through the hangers, desperate to find anything he could wear. The closet was overflowing with outfits, but there was nothing he could use. He continued his search, rummaging through a wardrobe, then a dresser, then a second dresser. In the bottom drawer of the second dresser he found a sweat suit. The top was oversized, would have been stylishly baggy on Lola. As it was, it was a size too small for Caleb. He put it on anyway.

As he ran for the door, Caleb caught a glimpse of the cat clock. Small whiskers on the eleven, large whiskers on the five. Caleb seemed to remember that his father had attacked Elizabeth line’s sorority sisters at a little after midnight.

The cat’s eyes moved from side to side, and its pendulum tail flicked back and forth. It was a clock, Caleb knew, but it was still a black cat.

He ran out of the house.

“S
H, SH, SH,
sh.”

Dana Roberts awoke to the shushing sounds coming from right above her.

She thought she was dreaming, until a hand slapped tape across her mouth and a body fell on her, pinioning her arms. She tried to scream, but the tape swallowed the sounds. The only sounds that filled the room were his.

“Sh, sh, sh, sh.”

Dana tried bucking him off, but he was too heavy. She lifted her head and attempted to butt him, but he slammed her forehead with the flat of his palm, a blow that snapped her head back and left her dazed.

And the whole time she heard “Sh, sh, sh, sh.”

Dana tried to take in her situation and think through her panic. As her thrashing ceased, the intruder’s tone changed, becoming more lulling than demanding.

“Shhhhhhhhhh.”

The sound gradually became softer until there was only silence in the room.

“I won’t harm you,” he said.

Dana exhaled pent-up breath through her nose. She had wanted to hear those words more than any others.

“I need money for a fix,” he said. “I want your jewelry and cash.”

Her head moved forward, a frightened nod, but glad.

“I need your cooperation.”

Another nod.

“Give me your hands.”

In the darkness she could see him holding plastic ties. Dana tensed. He could feel her body tightening up.

“Shhhhhhhhhh.”

He massaged her panic, put it in check again. In his calm voice, he explained, “All I want is your valuables. After this room, I’m going to try a few others and I don’t want you raising an alarm. Give me your hands.”

He eased his weight off of her. From under the covers, Dana felt her arms rising, as if they’d been summoned by a hypnotist.

Plastic loops were slipped around her wrists, and then the ties were tightened.

“And now your feet.”

He reached for the blanket, lifted it. Dana was glad she was wearing her pajamas. She didn’t want him reaching under the covers, so she offered him her ankles.

“Good,” he said, applying the ties.

He got off the bed, moved a few steps away from her. The room was too dark for Dana to make out his features.

“Ah, university life,” he said. “Nothing like it, is there? Young, active minds in search of knowledge. Do you like poetry?”

He didn’t sound like a junkie, Dana thought. She shook her head.

“Pity, that. I was going to quote you some Whitman, a short poem, his ‘Your Felons on Trial in Courts.’ But I’ll respect your wishes. In truth, I don’t much like poetry myself. But I do like universities. John W. Deering had the right idea when he willed his body to the University of Utah. Just before he was shot by a
firing squad, Deering said, ‘At least I’ll get some high-class education.’”

He definitely didn’t sound like a junkie.

“I’ve always been attracted to gallows humor,” he said. “To be insouciant in the face of death is a way of cheating it, don’t you think? When George Appel was being strapped into the electric chair, he looked around at the somber faces of all those who were assembled and said, ‘Well, folks, pretty soon you’re going to see a baked Appel.’”

Dana tried to loosen the tape around her mouth, tried to scream, but the sounds were muted.

“Sh, sh, sh, sh.” More summons for quiet, but behind them she heard his amusement.

Dana kicked off her covers. She could at least hop if nothing else.

“Sh, sh, sh, sh.”

He was insane, Dana was sure, but she still couldn’t be sure he meant her any harm.

As if hearing her doubts, he said, “I told you that I wasn’t going to hurt you.”

His declaration stopped her from doing anything rash. She huddled at the head of her bed, trembling. Dana listened as he rummaged through her belongings. The sounds reassured her. Then he made his way toward her door. Every step away from her brought that much more relief.

He was painstakingly slow about opening the door to the hallway. He stood very still for several moments, looking and listening to make sure that all was clear. Then he turned back to her.

“Don’t try to raise an alarm,” he whispered. “Don’t do anything more than breathe for the next five minutes.”

As he slid out the door, she heard him say ever so softly, “I told you I wouldn’t harm you.”

The door closed behind him.