Shiver (35 page)

Rood was fond of the desert. He liked its ugly desolation and arid inhospitality to man, the stony friendlessness of its monuments, the bite of the dusty air. But today he took little interest in the scenery around him. He had something far more interesting to occupy his attention.

Leaning back in his seat, he studied the young woman behind the steering wheel as she drove. He really did prefer her hair loose as it was now, not coiled in that dreadful chignon. He loved the innocence of her face, the smooth skin, the china-blue eyes. She was a porcelain doll. His doll. His to play with and fondle and hold. A life-size toy, all for him.

That was what love was. Wasn’t it?

He was wonderfully happy. Everything had gone flawlessly so far. His good fortune seemed all the more amazing when he considered how close he’d come to the ultimate disaster last night. He’d very nearly lost the game for good. He could have been killed in the crash, yet incredibly he escaped without injury. He even showed the presence of mind to drag Officer Sanchez’s body away from the car before the fuel tank blew. Then it was a simple matter to remove the man’s shirt, pants, shoes, and gun belt. Once back in his apartment, he scrubbed off the dirt and blood stains.

His initial plan was to impersonate a police officer in order to get into Miss Wendy Alden’s room at Cedars-Sinai—where, according to the radio and TV reports, she was hospitalized in good condition—and kill her. But strangely he found he’d lost the desire to take her life. It seemed a shame to waste a player of such natural talent and unusual skill. No longer could he deny Miss Alden her due. She was unquestionably an extra-special opponent, a true challenge, almost his equal in certain respects. There were not many women who could have fought him off again and again. She might very well be the only one capable of such an achievement. In all the world, the only one ...

Rood had shut his eyes in rapt contemplation of a sublime truth.

Out of all the hundreds, thousands, millions of women he might have come across, she had been the one he’d chosen. It could not have been coincidence.

She was meant for him. Not as a victim. As a lover. Of course.

“Wendy,” he had said softly as he stood alone in his living room, his eyes still closed. “Wendy.” Speaking of her that way, not as Miss Alden but simply as Wendy, warmed him with a pleasant, almost intoxicating sense of intimacy. “Wendy. Wendy. Wendy.”

Now she was his at last. He could hardly wait till he had her inside his special place, where they could begin to really get to know each other. He would keep her there indefinitely. During the day he would have to go to work, of course—he couldn’t call in sick every morning, as he’d done today—but at night he could drop by and see her, and on every weekend too. He would feed her, comb and brush her hair, bring her gifts. She would hate him at first, but he would bring her around. Nothing was impossible. Not for him. Not for Franklin Rood.

Until she learned to love him, she would have to be kept under restraint whenever he was away. Well, that would be easy enough to arrange. In the beginning he would bind and gag her. Later he might invest in a cage. Yes, a good-size steel cage, the kind used for big dogs. The idea tickled him with dark pleasure. Before leaving for work, he would put her in the cage, like a doggie,
his
doggie, and wouldn’t she be thrilled when her master came home in the evening and let her out to play? Unfortunately, while he was gone, she might scream for help. The easiest solution to that problem would be to cut out her tongue. So what if she couldn’t talk? He would do the talking for both of them, and she would listen in humble silence. That was the way things ought to be.

Of course. Rood acknowledged realistically, even a love affair as exalted as theirs couldn’t last forever. Sooner or later he would tire of Wendy’s charms. When he did, he would have to get rid of her. But he preferred not to think about that just yet.

After all, he truly did love her, and the prospect of having to ... well, it was depressing. Though he had to admit she would make a fine addition to his collection once the time came.

He was still contemplating the many bright facets of their future together when he realized that the junction with the Sierra Highway was coming up.

“Take the next right,” he ordered.

Wordlessly, Wendy obeyed. The car hummed across a bridge over an arroyo, white as bone, then rattled down the four-lane highway. Years ago, before the freeways were built, the Sierra Highway had been one of the main arteries serving the high Mojave. Now the cracked and rutted blacktop was all but empty of traffic.

“Turn right again. Here.”

She hooked onto a narrow side road. An automobile graveyard passed by, rows of starred windshields and chrome grillwork glittering in the sun. An abandoned ranch appeared and vanished. Up ahead a windowless storage trailer, parked on the roadside on a parcel of dirt, slid into view.

“Pull over.”

Wendy steered the Falcon off the road. She parked near the trailer. Clouds of pink dust boiled around the car.

“Shut off the engine. Give me the keys.”

She did so. “Is this it?” she asked throatily, staring straight ahead.

“Uh-huh. When I moved to L.A., I purchased this half-acre and this trailer. I wanted a hideaway, you see. A retreat. A place all for myself. You’re the first guest I’ve ever invited.” He opened his door. “Now we’re both going to get out of the car. There’s no use trying to run away this time. You’ve got nowhere to go. Okay?”

Without troubling to wait for her reply. Rood climbed out, then circled around the Ford to the driver’s side, where Wendy stood waiting. The cool dry wind pasted her hair to her face in disorderly strands.

Tenderly he brushed the blond hairs from her forehead. He felt her shudder at his touch. Well, he would teach her not to shudder. He would teach her many things.

“Take a good look around, Wendy,” he whispered. “Do you see any houses? Any shops? People? Anything at all?”

He watched her as she turned her head in a wide, slow arc. There was nothing to see in any direction. Nothing but the untraveled back road and the dirt and the distant shimmer of heat and sun.

“No,” she said quietly in a voice like death. “I don’t see anything.”

“I just wanted you to be fully aware of how alone we are out here. It’s just you and me now. So you’d better do what I say.” He took her arm. “Come on.”

He led her to the rear of the car and unlocked the trunk. Inside were the three items he’d brought with him when he left his apartment earlier this morning.

“Take out those bags.” He pointed to them. “One in each hand. And don’t drop them, or I’ll be awfully upset.”

She lifted the two plastic shopping bags. They sagged, heavy with secrets.

Holding the gun on her with one hand, Rood reached into the trunk and removed the third item, his drawstring bag. Awkwardly he shouldered the bag, then slammed the trunk lid. Then he stuck the gun in Wendy’s back and marched her toward his special place.

The trailer was forty feet long and eight feet wide, supported by four tandem wheels and five pairs of metal support legs. Yellow and red reflectors studded walls of hot-dipped galvanized steel. A portable iron stairway—three rusty steps and a landing—was positioned at the rear, in front of the only door.

Rood guided Wendy up the steps, then fished the keys from his pocket. The door was secured by a pin-tumbler lock fitted with an antipick latch and a steel T-guard, backed up by a Segal vertical dead bolt. Together the locks would frustrate nearly any thief. The trailer was isolated and frequently unoccupied, and Rood didn’t care to imagine what might happen if someone uninvited were to see what was inside.

He unlocked the door and pushed it open, exposing the cavelike darkness within.

“Well, this is it, Wendy. Your new home.”

She hesitated on the threshold, her small body trembling.

“Go on, now,” he whispered. “Go on.”

Smiling, he gave her a gentle push into the dark.

27

When he was through at Cedars-Sinai, Delgado returned to the Butler Avenue station, having nowhere else to go. He shut the door of his office, sank into the chair behind his desk, and tried to think.

But the only thought that came to him was of Wendy, naked, headless, her hand clutching a clay figurine.

He turned to the map on the wall. His gaze flinched from the red pushpins marking the Gryphon’s other victims. He glanced down at the papers on his desk and saw Ralston’s preliminary report on the Kutzlow autopsy. He didn’t want to look at that either. Averting his eyes, he noticed the tape recorder that had played the Gryphon’s audiocassettes. When would the next tape arrive in the mail, the one mocking him with a new voice—Wendy’s voice?

He had to stop this. Stop it right now. And think, dammit. Think.

But there was nothing to think about. He’d gone over the case a hundred times. A thousand times. He had no leads. No hope.

He called the Crime Lab, got Frommer on the line. “Anything?” he asked, his voice sharp.

“No.” Frommer sounded weary. “At least, nothing so far. The search of the mountainside has yielded no results. Well, we expected that. The fire would have erased any clues the Gryphon might have left.”

“What about the Pellman house?”

“No significant physical evidence was obtained, except for blood spots on the floor—they’re AB positive, the Gryphon’s blood type—and the knife you found. It’s Wendy Alden’s. We matched it to a set of knives in her kitchen drawer. He was trying to kill her with it, apparently—poetic justice.”

“Prints?”

“We dusted the knife with copper powder and got two partials on the handle, but they’re so badly smeared as to be useless.”

“How about the Dodge?”

“We dusted that too. The interior is littered with prints, but most of them presumably belong to the owner and his family. It’ll take days, at least, to print everybody who might have been inside that car, and even then we may never get them all. A fingerprint can last for years, you know. There was a case where a woman’s print on a glass remained intact for three decades—”

“Later.” Delgado was in no mood for forensic folk tales at the moment. “So what you’re telling me is there’s no hope of a computer scan on any of those prints? A blind run, I mean, on all knowns in the database?”

“Impossible until we narrow it down, eliminate the prints we can identify. As I say, that’ll take—”

“Days, at least. I heard you. All right, Eric. Keep at it.”

He cradled the phone, then looked around him slowly. His hand closed over the nodule of agate on his desk. He picked it up and ran his fingers over the smooth core. There was a time when the mysterious colors and eldritch patterns caught in that chunk of stone seemed to hint at all the beautiful secrets guarded by the world. Now they signified nothing. The world held no secrets other than the ugly, evil kind he was paid to ferret out. And now even those secrets were eluding him.

He felt a surge of hatred for the agate, or for the innocent optimism it represented. With a quick reflexive motion of his arm, he hurled the stone across the room. It banged off a filing cabinet and skittered under a chair, the chair in which Wendy had sat last night—he could see her even now, wrapped in a blanket, curled up and watching him with her blue perceptive eyes.

Dead now. Or soon. Her blue gaze focused on nothing.

His eyes tracked to the tape recorder again.

He had to do something. No matter how pointless, how painful.

The desk drawer slid open under his hand. He put on the headphones. Loaded one of the Gryphon’s cassettes into the machine. Then listened for the hundredth time to Julia Stern’s pleading voice.

“... can’t identify you. We’ve got a lot of nice things here. You can have any of it. There’s silverware in the kitchen. A color TV, a stereo. In the closet I’ve got some birthday presents for my husband: a camera, a watch, a new coat. Oh, God ... Please, take anything you want and just go and you’ll never get caught. I swear ...”

No, he would never get caught. Julia had been right about that much, at least.

“Please don’t kill me. I don’t ... want to die. I’ll do whatever you say. I know you’re much more powerful than ... than I am. You’re so strong... .”

Why are you doing this, Seb? he asked himself as the tape played on. What purpose does it serve, other than self-torture?

“I’m only twenty-four. I’ve got a husband, and we love each other; we really do. We got married two years ago this April, and we promised it would be forever, and it will be ...”

No, it wouldn’t, Julia. Nothing was forever. Nothing good. Only evil lasted. Only death was permanent.

“... got a baby coming. A boy. We’re going to name him Robert. That’s my husband’s name. ...”

But there would be no baby. There would be no wedding anniversary to celebrate in April. There would be no birthday party for Julia’s husband either, and the presents she’d bought for him would bring no joy, only a deeper grief.

Delgado blinked.

Birthday presents.

He rewound the tape.

“... silverware in the kitchen. A color TV, a stereo. In the closet I’ve got some birthday presents for my husband: a camera, a watch, a new coat ...”