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she wasn’t sure. She had visited where the women had lived and died, had in fact done that for all of Parker’s victims. His trail of death had taken her from New Mexico to Florida. In many ways, Parker had been her guide. Before leaving on her trips she had asked him questions, and he had answered them matter-of-factly. She always tried to come away from her pilgrimages with three sets of impressions: her own, the victim’s, and Parker’s.
    “I hope your murderer isn’t as naturally elusive as Gray Parker,” she said. “There was one detective who called him ‘the man of a thousand faces.’ He was wrong: Parker didn’t disguise himself; he knew how to be invisible. Most of the time he passed himself off as a college student. That gave him license to keep odd hours. It also gave him a certain anonymity, with people seeing him as a student more than as an individual.”
    She didn’t want to overload her audience with too many details, and yet there were so many things she wanted to say.
    “What distinguished Parker’s first three homicides from those that followed is that there was significantly more posing involved. By this I don’t only mean his signature—his postmortem ritualized writing of
Shame
on their flesh—but his purposely situating the victims in specific spots.
    “The first placement was in White Sands. Parker was a regular visitor there and knew the area well. He was fixated on how ephemeral life was and how White Sands showcased that. ‘Until the next dune buries them,’ was a favorite expression of his, words he had lifted from one of the White Sands exhibits. In a convoluted leap of logic, Gray decided he was that next dune and that his calling was to take life. The very act of placing Alicia Gleason’s body inside the monument revealed the extent of his compulsion. The road into White Sands is closed at night, and to get her body to the preselected spot, he had to carry her for two miles.
    “Parker was similarly obsessed with the posing of his second victim, situating her at the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site. He was fascinated by the rock drawings. I suspect he saw them as tablets with messages as clear as the Ten Commandments. His fascination with Indian drawings wasn’t anything new; whenever he was at his wife’s home in Eden, Texas, he always visited the neighboring community of Paint Rock to look at its renowned Indian pictograph site. It’s a pretty spot, a half-mile bluff that overlooks the Conchos River, a place where a number of Indian tribes have left artifacts for over a thousand years. Some have even offered up their stories in relatively modern times. In 1865 Apache warriors kidnapped a fourteen-year-old girl named Alice Todd. They were fleeing pursuit but took the time to paint symbols of what they’d done on the rocks. They drew two crossed lances, which is the warpath symbol, and next to that they painted two long-haired scalps, which depicted the killings of Alice’s mother and a black slave girl. A third drawing showed a girl posed horizontally, a typical depiction of a captive. What ultimately happened to Alice is not known. Her body was never discovered, and she was never seen by the white community again. The last evidence of her existence is that drawing.”
    Elizabeth paused in her telling. They didn’t need to hear about Parker’s fascination with Alice Todd. It would be more helpful to them to hear about Kathy Franklin. Elizabeth had extensively toured the Three Rivers Petroglyph Site, had spent two full days walking up and down the ridge and studying the area where the Franklin girl’s body had been posed. Anthropologists had documented more than twenty-one thousand rock carvings at Three Rivers, drawings more than a thousand years old. Many of the petroglyphs told stories; the bighorn sheep pierced with three arrows; the representations of mountain lions, bears, and game birds; the staring faces and masks; the mysterious crosses, circles, and