Shiver

12

The police station on Butler Avenue was a bedlam of ringing telephones, clacking typewriters, and screams. The screams were in Spanish, and they came from a man in handcuffs as he was led away toward a lockup area. His head whipsawed crazily; streamers of spit sprayed from his mouth. Wendy stared at him in paralyzed fascination.

Patrol Officer Sanchez touched her arm. She jumped.

“This way, Miss Alden.”

She followed obediently. Sanchez showed her into a small, windowless office smelling of stale coffee. One of the two fluorescent panels was out, leaving the room half in shadow.

‘“Would you like something to drink?” Sanchez asked, then smiled. “I mean coffee, tea, juice. I can’t offer you the hard stuff.”

“Just water would be fine.”

He returned with a glass of water and handed it to her.

“Thanks,” she said, sipping it gratefully.

“The detective will be with you in just a minute.” Sanchez left, shutting the door.

Wendy sat in a straightback chair. She shivered, feeling wet and cold. Her pajamas and robe, tacky with sweat, clung to her skin in damp patches.

Her bare toes poked through a hole in the one slipper she was still wearing. She wrapped herself more tightly in the blanket she’d been given, then sneezed.

Wendy, she told herself, are you ever a mess.

But at least she wasn’t dead.

The garrote had been tightening around her neck when she remembered the knife. The knife she’d used to carve and core the apple. The knife she’d stowed in a pocket of her robe before leaving the kitchen. In her panic she’d forgotten it. Forgotten the only weapon she had.

Her right hand dived into her pocket and closed over the handle. With all her strength she thrust her arm backward and drove the blade into the killer’s body.

He made a sound that was more than a croak, not quite a shout. The garrote fell from his hands. She flung open the door and fled.

The gallery streaked under her feet like a sheet of ice. She bounded down the staircase, taking the steps two at a time, an act of sheer recklessness she’d never attempted before in her life, not even as a child. When she reached ground level she shot a terrified glance over her shoulder, certain the Gryphon would be following her, wielding the bloody knife in one fist and the garrote in the other. No one was there.

Maybe she’d killed him. Maybe he was lying dead on the floor. Oh, God, she hoped so.

But she knew he wasn’t dead. Just knew it. A man like that wouldn’t die so easily. If he could die at all.

She looked around frantically, trying to decide what to do, where to go. Her car. She had to get in her car and speed to the nearest police station, wherever that was. No, wait. She didn’t have her car keys, did she? They were in her purse, and her purse was in her apartment, where he was.

All right then. Run. Go on, Wendy, run!

She stumbled blindly along Palm Vista Avenue, not looking back, then reached Beverly Boulevard and headed north, sprinting uphill, gasping. Apartment buildings blurred past, buildings crowded with people she didn’t know. She could pound on some stranger’s door and yell for help. But she was afraid to stop. Afraid the Gryphon might be right behind her, gaining on her, ready to bring her down. She was sure she could hear his racing footsteps, his panting breath.

She ran faster. Somewhere along the way she lost one of her slippers, like Cinderella after the ball. She didn’t notice.

At the corner of Beverly and Pico she found a Mobil station, an oasis of light amid the shadowed streets. The smell of auto exhaust and gasoline bit her nostrils as she staggered across the floodlit asphalt, past the two service islands, into the snack shop. She caromed off a wire carousel, spilling candy bars on the tile floor. The clerk looked up from the magazine he was reading and started to say something, and then Wendy was screaming, screaming in terror and release, screaming about the Gryphon. She was still screaming when the clerk dialed 911.

Several endless minutes passed before a police car arrived, domelights flashing. By that time Wendy was calm, yes, remarkably calm, except for the sudden unpredictable tremors that racked her body and set her teeth chattering for no reason at all.

Somehow she mustered the clarity of mind to condense what had happened into a few simple declarative sentences, not unlike the ones she was always writing in those stupid little booklets of hers. The two patrolmen, plainly skeptical, radioed a report of a possible sighting of the Gryphon at 9741 Palm Vista. Another squad car, en route to the scene, volunteered to take a look.

“Tell them to be careful,” Wendy said. “Very, very careful.”

“They will be, ma’am,” one of the cops said in a soothing voice, the voice of a man doing his best to comfort a small trembling animal.

His partner was studying Wendy’s neck. “Guess you’ll need to see a doctor about that, huh?”

About what? she wondered blankly.

Raising a hand to her throat, she felt warm liquid. For the first time she realized she was bleeding. The garrote had gouged a hairline wound in her neck. She swayed, light-headed, overcome by the sudden visceral awareness of how near death had been, how narrowly she’d escaped.

The two cops steadied her. Kindly they gave her a blanket from the trunk of the patrol car. She draped herself in it and rubbed her legs together to keep warm as she rode in the backseat on the way to the hospital.

The car had just pulled into the parking garage at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center when the radio crackled with a Code 187. The unit at 9741 Palm Vista was calling in a homicide that matched the M.O. of the Gryphon.

Homicide, Wendy thought blankly. But he was after me. And I got away. So… who?

From the report, she gathered that the Gryphon himself had fled the scene. She hadn’t expected to hear otherwise. It would take more than the thrust of a knife to stop that man.

Between bursts of radio crosstalk, the two cops turned in their seats to introduce themselves; their names, they said eagerly, were Sanchez and Porter. Condescension had vanished from their voices, replaced by admiration, even awe. Clearly they now realized Wendy was not the nutcase they’d made her out to be. She was someone who’d taken on the city’s most notorious killer and survived.

They asked how she’d gotten away. She told them about the knife. “I stabbed him. Somewhere around the waist, I think.”

Porter got on the radio to relay the information. “Every hospital in town will be looking for him now,” he said briskly. “If the asshole tries to get medical attention, he’s screwed, blued, and tattooed. Uh, sorry, ma’am. Pardon my French.”

Wendy sat with Sanchez in the crowded waiting room while Porter phoned the station house for further instructions. She was still shivering, not with cold,

“You know. Miss Alden,” Sanchez said quietly, “I’ve had some bad experiences in this job. You want to know how I handle them? I close my eyes, and I imagine I’m in my favorite place in the world. It has to be a peaceful place. A place where nothing bad ever happens. You have a place like that?”

“I… I think so.” She was thinking of a park in Beverly Hills where she liked to spend her summer afternoons, a green place of trees and laughing children.

“Can you go there now? In your mind, I mean?”

She smiled. “I can try.”

Eyes shut, she visualized the park. She felt the velvet grass and smelled the flower-scented air.

“You there?” Sanchez asked.

“I guess I am.”

“Feeling a little better?”

“A little.” She studied herself and found that the shivering had stopped. “Yes, definitely. You ought to be a shrink.”

“The pay’s not good enough. Policework is where the real money is.”

She grinned at that, and then she just sat there, in the park. Not long afterward a nurse summoned her.

“Porter and I will still be here when they get done looking you over,” Sanchez assured her. “We wouldn’t leave without you. Miss Alden. Believe me.”

She doubted that the average crime victim received such personalized service from the LAPD. It was funny, wasn’t it? The Gryphon had attained a twisted kind of celebrity status in this city; as his intended victim, Wendy had become a celebrity of sorts as well. She wondered if her picture would be in the papers, if she would be interviewed on the news. Maybe there would be a TV movie about her. Who would be cast in the lead? Somebody blonde and much better looking than she was. Meg Ryan, maybe.

The nurse led her into a ward lined with examination tables separated by pleated privacy curtains. Wendy reclined on a table, resting her head on a pillow, and asked for a mirror.

“This isn’t a beauty parlor,” the nurse said testily. “You don’t have to fix your hair for the doctor.”

Wendy fingered her throat. “I just want to see what… what he did to me.”

The nurse softened. “Of course you do. It’s not too bad, honey. Believe me, I’d trade my looks for yours any day.”

She hurried off and returned with a hand mirror. Nervously Wendy raised it to her face. The eyes that gazed back at her were not the eyes she’d seen in her bathroom mirror this morning, the eyes of a woman who’d always looked younger than her years. The fragile innocence they’d always reflected was still there, but overlying it she saw anger and determination and something more-a hard, glassy quality midway between ice and steel.

She tilted the mirror to examine her throat, neatly bisected by a thin red line still oozing droplets of blood. For some reason she was reminded of Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein, her head sewn onto her body, the stitches plainly visible. The comparison disturbed her. Wendy Alden, the living dead.

Her hands were shaking as she put the mirror aside.

A doctor looked her over, pronounced the wound superficial, and treated it with antiseptic before applying medicated adhesive strips. “No need to worry,” he said briskly. “It won’t leave much of a scar.”

Wendy knew better. There would be a scar. A bad one. A scar, not on her body, but on her soul.

When she returned to the waiting room, Sanchez and Porter revealed said they had orders to deliver her to the West L.A. station, where she would meet with a Detective Delgado. The name seemed vaguely familiar. She couldn’t quite place it. She was too tired to try.

As the squad car cruised west on Santa Monica Boulevard, Wendy sat with her head thrown back against the seat, listening to the beat of her heart in her ears. It was a sound she hadn’t expected to hear ever again.

“Aw, shit,” Porter said as the car turned south onto Butler Avenue.

She blinked alert. Looking past the two cops, she saw a row of TV news vans and a milling crowd of reporters.

“Knew our luck couldn’t hold out forever,” Sanchez said. “We got a break just getting out of Cedars without those pricks hassling us.”

“But”-Wendy swallowed-“how could they have heard about me so soon?”

“They monitor the radio chatter,” Porter replied. “Of course, they probably don’t know your name or any of the details. That’s why I used the landline-the telephone, I mean-at Cedars. A little more privacy that way.”

She looked down despondently at her robe and pajamas. “Am I going to have to be on TV like this?”

Sanchez shook his head. “Uh-uh. Don’t you worry, ma’am. Situation’s under control.”

Halfway down the block, he spun the wheel, guiding the cruiser into the station-house parking lot. Slant-parked patrol cars and unmarked sedans glided past, leeched of color by the glareless sodium-vapor lights.

“Cop cars are pulling in and out of this place all night long,” Porter said. “One more won’t make any difference. Anyway, those camera jockeys can’t come in here. Restricted area.”

At the rear of the windowless two-story building, safely out of sight of the street, Sanchez parked. He and Porter escorted Wendy inside via a back door.

Now here she was, in the detective’s office. She looked around slowly, trying to make the room real. A noteboard littered with incomprehensible diagrams was mounted behind a neat, uncluttered desk. A pair of battered file cabinets stood near an unmade cot in a corner; apparently Delgado slept here sometimes. On one wall hung a map of Los Angeles, studded with three red pins in West L.A. area. With a small shock Wendy realized that each pin must mark the location of one of the murders.

There could have been a pin for me, she thought numbly. A marker for my life. What else would have marked it? Anything? Anything at all?

The door creaked open. Into the office stepped a tall, whipcord-thin man in a brown suit. He nodded at her, bowing slightly, a gesture suggesting an air of formality alien to L.A.

“Miss Alden, my name is Delgado. Detective Sebastian Delgado.”

“Pleased to meet you,” she answered automatically.

“Not half as pleased as I am to meet you.”

She studied him as he shrugged off his coat and tossed it on a coat rack in the corner. He was in his mid-thirties, she guessed, though at first glance his face made him look older-a long, narrow, angular face, vaguely patrician, lined with worry and saddened by heavy-lidded gray eyes under finely traced brows. His skin was dark; his hair, swept back from his forehead, was a deep lustrous black.

She’d seen that face before. Suddenly she knew why his name had been familiar.

“You’ve been on TV,” she said, then instantly regretted it. What a stupid thing to say.

But Delgado didn’t seem to think so. Turning to face her, he smiled, a surprisingly warm smile made of small white teeth. Quite an attractive smile, really.

“I’m afraid I’ll never have my own series, though,” he answered. The trace of a Spanish accent tinged his words; she liked it.

He kept looking at her, and she realized he was studying her, sizing her up. His eyes were alert, perceptive, intelligent. They were his best feature, she decided. Well, that and his smile.

She shifted nervously in her chair.

“I’ve never met a detective before,” she told him, for no particular reason except that she felt the need to say something, anything, right now.

“Well, I’ve never met anyone who survived an encounter with the Gryphon.”

“I came pretty close to not surviving.”

“Close doesn’t count. You made it. You’re alive.”

“I guess I am. It seems hard to believe. In fact, I’m not sure I do believe it yet. Any of it. It’s like… like a dream.”

He grunted. “I wish it were. For your sake and mine and… everybody’s. How’s your throat?”

She touched the bandage self-consciously. “It hurts a little. But it’s not serious. The garrote”- she drew a quick breath-“didn’t cut very deep.”

“Garrote?” He sat on the edge of his desk, leaning forward, and flipped open a memo pad. “Is that the weapon he used?”

“Uh-huh. Why? Does he usually do it some other way?”

“We’ve never known what the weapon was. I’d assumed it was a knife for, uh, for various reasons. But there was no way to tell.”

“Oh. Of course.” No heads, she remembered. Her stomach rolled.

“Can you tell me anything more about the garrote?” Delgado asked.

“I didn’t really get a look at it, but… but he described it to me. See, the garrote was around my neck, and he was standing behind me and whispering in my ear. He said it was a foot and a half of steel wire.” A shiver radiated through her as she remembered his low voice, his hot breath, the garrote’s chilling touch. “And he said-let’s see-he said it was homemade, and it had wooden dowels at both ends, for handles, and he could tighten the wire by twisting the handles.”

Delgado nodded slowly, scribbling in his notepad. “Homemade. That makes our job more difficult. If he’d bought it on the street, we might be able to… well, never mind.”

Wendy sighed. “I take it you don’t have any idea who this man is. No clues, no leads…?”

“Clues and leads, yes, a few. But if you’re asking me if we have a specific individual in mind, or even a list of individuals, the answer is no.”

“Must be tough to track down a killer with no motive.”

“Tough?” Delgado chuckled without humor. “Yes, you could say that. But perhaps you can make it a little easier. Did your assailant give any indication of why he’d chosen you?”

“No.”

“Did he suggest in any way that you might have met him previously?”

“You mean at a party or something?”

“Perhaps. Or in some business connection.”

“No. No, he didn’t say anything like that.” She closed her eyes briefly. “I’m sure I’ve never met him. I couldn’t have.”

“You didn’t recognize his voice?”

“No.”

“Don’t answer too quickly. Think for a moment. Are you sure his voice didn’t remind you, even slightly, of someone with whom you might have come in contact, either in person or over the telephone? Perhaps an anonymous phone caller… or the mailman… or a neighbor you barely know.”

She shook her head. “It didn’t remind me of anyone. But he was whispering. I guess everybody’s voice sounds pretty much the same in a whisper.”

“Did any of his statements reveal personal knowledge of you?”

“Well, he knew my name.”

“How did he refer to you?”

“Miss Wendy Alden. Or just Miss Alden. He always said it that way, very polite.” She clucked her tongue against her teeth. “Doesn’t that sound crazy, calling him polite? But you know what I mean.”

“Yes.” His gaze was suddenly faraway. “Yes, I know exactly what you mean.”

Delgado stared into space a moment longer; she wondered what he was thinking of. Then with sudden energy he stood up.

“All right,” he said briskly. “What I’d like to do is go over this from the beginning. I want to know everything in detail, as much detail as you can remember, starting with…”

“Wait.” She swallowed. “There’s something I have to know first.” She took a breath, then asked the question that haunted her. “Who was killed in my apartment building tonight?”

Delgado looked down at his desk, his lips pursed, and made no reply.

“I know somebody was,” she went on urgently. Despite the water Sanchez had brought, her mouth was suddenly dry. “I heard about it in the police car, on the radio. Homicide, they said. A homicide at my address.”

“Miss Alden,” Delgado said slowly, “you’ve already been through a lot tonight. Wouldn’t it be better if…?”

“No, it wouldn’t be better. I need to know.” She would not be put off. Yesterday she would have meekly dropped the subject, but not now. She had faced the Gryphon. She could face this. “Who got killed instead of me? Tell me. Please.”

Delgado met her gaze. “As best we can determine, her name was Jennifer Kutzlow.”

Wendy stared at him, trying to take in what he’d said. A rush of blood thrummed in her ears with a conch-shell roar.

Jennifer.

Jennifer, who was always playing her record albums at a million decibels. Jennifer, who’d smiled at her just this morning, making small talk about the weather, before hurrying off to the airport. But Jennifer couldn’t be dead in her apartment; she was in Seattle, wasn’t she? Wasn’t she? She couldn’t have gotten back this soon. And, anyway, if she’d been home tonight, she would have been making a racket, like always.

Unless she was dead already… Unless he’d killed her first…

Did he kill Jennifer because he thought she was me? Wendy thought in trembling horror. Is that it? Did he think she was me?

“Miss Alden?” The voice was Delgado’s, and it came from some great distance. “Are you all right?” She couldn’t answer. “Miss Alden?”

“Don’t call me that,” she heard herself say. “That’s what he called me. Just say Wendy. That’s my name. Wendy.”

A hand was touching her arm. “Are you all right, Wendy?”

She looked at the hand. His hand. She realized he was leaning over her. Concern showed in his gray eyes.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I… I’m fine.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said gently. “Was she a friend of yours?”

“No. Not really. Not at all, in fact. To tell you the truth, I thought she was kind of a bitch…” She hitched in a breath. “Oh, God, I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

“You’re doing just fine.”

She lowered her head. Her eyes were burning. “I hate this. I hate this so much.”

“I know it’s hard,” Delgado said softly. “But at least you got away. You made it. You’ve got to hold on to that. You’re alive.”

She looked at him. A new thought entered her mind.

“For how long?” she asked quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s still out there. He wants to kill me. He’ll try again.”

“Not necessarily. You gave him a lot more trouble than he bargained for. After tonight he may not want to tangle with you a second time.”

“Or he may want to get me back. Even the score.”

Delgado nodded, not with his head but with his eyes, dropping the heavy lids in a way that signaled assent. “I won’t argue the point. Anything is possible. We won’t know for certain what he’s thinking till we find him.”

“How will you do that? You don’t know who he is. You don’t know anything about him.”

“Sooner or later he’ll make a mistake.”

“And in the meantime?”

“I’ll assign uniformed officers to watch you around the clock on triple shifts. You’ll be constantly protected. You won’t have to face this thing alone.”

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. But she knew Delgado was wrong.

Of course she would face it alone.

She was always alone.