Shiver (17 page)

Then she understood. Her head. That was what he meant. He collected heads. The heads he took from his victims. And now he would take hers.

She tried to speak, couldn’t. Her mouth worked, but no sound came. She closed her eyes, trying to shut out the world and flee this nightmare, then opened them immediately, afraid of the dark that had fallen behind her eyelids, the dark that was so much like death.

The steel wire was tightening slowly, slowly. She was going to die here, in this room, tonight—die before she’d lived—and there was nothing she could do.

“You’re mine now. Miss Wendy Alden,” the Gryphon breathed, his voice like dust, like death. “Mine forever.”

10

The Detective Unit office was a large windowless room partitioned into smaller sections by rows of shoulder-high filing cabinets, many of them topped with bound volumes of the Municipal Code and potted plants that did not require sunlight. Metal desks butted up against one another, sharing their clutter; swivel chairs that rolled on steel casters were scattered here and there like driftwood.

Delgado sat in one chair, turning slowly in his seat, back and forth, back and forth, while two of the task-force detectives. Donna Wildman and Tom Gardner, tossed ideas at him. It was a brainstorming session, the kind of thing cops did when they had run out of strategies. Phones rang in other parts of the room, and people hurried in and out of doors, trailing plumes of cigarette smoke and the odor of sweat.

“So how about working the statues harder?” Wildman said. She was eating a granola bar, and she spoke through a mouthful of molasses and nuts.

“Harder, how?” Delgado countered. “Torres and Blaise have visited every gallery and art school on the Westside.”

“But only looking for somebody who’s a sculptor. What about approaching it from another angle? Wait a minute. The lab report is here someplace.” She dug through a mound of papers on her desk, found a manila folder, scanned its contents. “It says the statues were made of a specific brand of modeling clay. Why don’t we go to art-supplies stores and track down everybody who bought a box of that stuff?”

“I was told it’s a common brand, sold everywhere.”

“If he used a particular kind of sculpting tool to put in the details, we could look for purchases of that.”

“The experts say it was probably a pencil.”

“Maybe we should run in everyone who’s bought a pencil,” Tom Gardner cracked.

Wildman glared at him.

“Okay,” he added, “we’ll limit it to number-two pencils only.”

“Come on, you two,” Delgado said. “Give me some better ideas. Amaze me.”

“I say we post unmarked cars at all crime scenes, twenty-four hours a day,” Gardner said. “Just watching. He may show up again.”

“Why would he?” Wildman asked, sounding irritated at Gardner because he’d shot down her idea.

“These guys do that. Like Ted Bundy. He would go over to a crime scene and fantasize about the murder, relive it, get off on it.” He fingered the tape dispenser on his desk, removing bits of tape and sticking them on his blotter. “I think he brought little souvenirs with him, like the victim’s ballpoint pen, say, or a grocery list— something he’d taken that was never missed. He’d sit there in his car and fondle this thing and think about how good it had felt to kill that girl.”

“We’ve already got beat cars cruising past those buildings every fifteen minutes,” Delgado said.

“Suppose he’s there for only five minutes, and they miss him.”

“What are we going to do?” Wildman asked. “Arrest everybody who parks on the street?”

“Only the ones who look suspicious.”

“Whatever that means.”

Delgado cut off Gardner’s reply. “I don’t think we can spare the manpower right now. But I’ll keep it in mind.”

“I say we push the limits of the physical evidence,” Wildman said. “Physical evidence is what always trips up these guys. For instance, those carpet fibers. I think we were too quick to brush them off.”

“The fibers will convict him,” Gardner said, “not catch him.”

“Maybe they’ll do both. I say we start checking likely places where this guy works. Operate on the assumption that he’s an art aficionado. Look at the galleries, art stores, and other operations like that, and see what kind of carpeting they’ve got. If we find a fiber match, we start checking out the employees—” Her desk phone rang; she grabbed it. “Wildman.”

Delgado was watching her, and he saw her face change as she slowly put down the uneaten portion of her granola bar. She looked at him.

“Another one, Seb.”

He drew a sharp breath. “Damn. God
damn
.”

“Female Caucasian, decapitated, in a one-bedroom apartment at nine-seven-four-one Palm Vista Avenue. That’s a couple of blocks south of Pico, near Beverly Boulevard.”

“Farther east than the others,” Gardner said.

“I’ll go on ahead,” Delgado told them. He was already rising from his chair, shrugging on his coat. “You two call the rest of the task force, get them out of bed or wherever the hell they are, then hustle everybody over there as fast as possible.”

He did not wait to hear their replies.

The address was twenty minutes from the West L.A. station. As he drove, Delgado felt anger rising in him, the cold familiar anger at the taking of an innocent life. He knew he shouldn’t let himself feel that way; he should remain calm and professionally detached. But he couldn’t help it. He had always become personally involved in the cases he worked. His need to see justice served was a whip cracking over his head, lashing his back, driving him to put in fourteen-hour days and seven-day weeks, never to rest, never to be satisfied.

Yet objectively he knew that there was more to his motivation than moral passion alone. There was his stubborn, angry need to prove himself, to solve every case, to be the best.

He remembered how close Paulson had come to removing him from the investigation this afternoon. At the time Delgado had been sure that his insistence on retaining command of the task force was based purely on a professional commitment to getting the job done. Now he wondered. To what extent had he been moved by motives less noble—pride, grandiosity, an unwarranted self-confidence, and, underlying it, the secret terror of failure and public humiliation?

Stupid greaser couldn’t cut it after all, said an ugly voice in his mind. Always said he was a loser, the spic bastard.

He knew that voice. He had heard it many times—in high school, in college, at the police academy in Elysian Park, in the station-house locker room. It was the voice of unthinking, irrational hostility, focused on him for no reason other than his dark complexion and sharp accent, markers of his place of origin that had made him an outcast in a country not his own.

In Mexico things had been different. There he had been popular, at least as popular as a boy given to remoteness and intellectual abstraction could be. Even so, he had not been happy growing up in Guadalajara. He remembered being bored most of the time, bored with his elders and his peers, impatient to discover a more interesting part of the world. Mexico had been long behind him when he learned to his surprise that Americans found Guadalajara exotic and fascinating, “the Pearl of the West.”

There was little romance in the slum neighborhood where he was raised. There were vendors selling
pulque
on hot summer afternoons, children playing the hopscotch game
bebeleche
, flyblown dogs napping in swatches of shadow. Parchment-creased grandmothers sat on stone steps telling stories of Pedro de Ordinales, the wily shepherd who could outwit God and Satan, and La Llorona, the Wailing Woman, who would come in the night to steal away any child who misbehaved. The streets were narrow, the buildings dark, and so were the minds of the people who lived in that part of town, acting out roles scripted by traditions they neither understood nor challenged.

Young Sebastián had been told he should be proud of those traditions and of his heritage. He was a
mito mita
, half-and-half, his mother descended from the Yaqui Indians, his father from the Conquistadors. A locked box in the parlor was purported to contain a sheaf of yellowed papers that recorded his father’s genealogy, tracing his ancestry to a Spanish captain named Delaguerre who had explored the coast of Mexico in the sixteenth century. But the box had never been opened in Sebastián’s presence, and even as a boy he had doubted there was anything inside. From the beginning, skepticism was natural to him; perhaps he was fated to become a cop.

He was ten years old when his parents took him to live in the United States, aided by an uncle who had become a naturalized citizen, and a prosperous one. In Tucson or Houston or any of a dozen other places, Sebastián might have lived among Mexican immigrants like himself, blending with them; but his uncle’s home was in Indiana, where a boy with a funny way of talking and a strange cast to his skin could not help drawing furtive, suspicious looks.

Grade school was hard; high school was harder. Sebastián became good at fighting; and not just with his fists. The real fight was the fight for respect; and he was smart enough to know that he would win it only if he honed his mind. He studied hungrily, earned top grades, and delivered the valedictory address at his high-school graduation. Two of his classmates, denied a diploma and sentenced to summer school, tried to beat him up after the graduation ceremony. Delgado broke both their noses.

His academic achievement opened the doors of every college in the country to him. He chose UCLA, because Los Angeles was warm and the Indiana winters had been too cold. Even in L.A., three hours from the Mexican border in a city named by Spanish settlers, he discovered prejudice. But it was manageable. Everything was manageable as long as he worked harder than anyone around him.

He was finishing college, uncertain of his future, when the LAPD recruited him. The department needed more minority cops to patrol the barrios, where WASP rookies automatically became targets.

Again racism plagued him. He heard a lot of wetback jokes in his days as a uniformed cop, jokes that bit like small dogs and left scars. But he knew the solution. To fight back with hard work, as he had done in school. To outperform those who looked down on him. To log more hours, take more Academy classes, spend more time on the shooting range or in the gym, read more books and write more reports. To work nights and weekends, sacrifice his social life, forgo any existence at all outside his work. That was the way to win.

His ambitiousness had served his career well. He’d risen swiftly, making detective at twenty-six, then spending two years in Narcotics and four years in Robbery before his transfer to Homicide. At thirty-four he’d earned the rank of Detective II; if he solved this case he might well become a D-III, one of the youngest ever made in the LAPD.

But the price he paid was high, too high, and the worst of it was losing Karen. She offered her love to him, and what did he do with that gift? Wadded it up and tossed it away—because he could not escape his work.

Now he had been handed the most important assignment of his career, the toughest challenge, the case that would make him or break him—and he was failing. Failing.

And another woman was dead.

Delgado guided the Caprice up to the crime-scene ribbon, then switched off his engine. He sat unmoving in the car for a long moment, looking at the apartment building before him. Squad cars and uniformed cops were everywhere; police-band crosstalk crackled and sputtered nervously from car radios and portable handsets. The media had yet to arrive, but a restless, murmuring crowd of onlookers loitered at a barely respectable distance, held back by patrolmen with unfriendly stares. Some fool with a flash camera was clicking off snapshots, perhaps in the hope of selling them to the
Times
for a small payment of blood money, or perhaps as personal mementos, to be preserved under acetate in his photo album between last year’s trip to Yosemite and next year’s vacation at Walt Disney World.

Suppressing his disgust, Delgado left the car and crossed the yellow ribbon. He flashed his badge at every uniform he passed, not stopping for conversation with any of them. He was in no mood for talk.

The apartment wasn’t hard to find. The door was ajar, the lights on. Half a dozen cops milled around outside; their muttered conversation died away as they saw Delgado approach. Wordlessly they parted to let him through. He reached the doorway and looked in.

Just inside the door, a young woman’s naked, decapitated body, limbs in disarray, lay sprawled on a white pile carpet soaked with glistening blood.

There was no clay statuette in her hand.

Delgado blinked. No, that couldn’t be. The Gryphon never failed to leave his calling card.

A chill shivered through him as he considered the possibility that this killing had been the work of a copycat, some lunatic inspired by the news coverage to imitate the Gryphon, but failing to get one key detail right.

He didn’t want to believe it. One maniac was enough to deal with.

With a sigh, he banished that line of speculation. For the moment he would proceed on the assumption that the Gryphon was responsible for this latest crime. Most likely, the killer had simply altered his usual pattern for some reason known only to him.