Shiver

1

Sebastian Delgado put down the psychological profile from the Behavioral Science Unit and massaged his burning eyes with his fingertips. He’d read the paper at least a hundred times, and it had told him nothing. He wondered if the experts knew any more about this case than he did, or if any rational person could be considered an expert in such matters.

He checked his watch. Five-thirty A.M. His gaze drifted to the cot in the corner of his office, where he’d been stealing rare, restless cat naps for the past four weeks, ever since the investigation had shifted into high gear. The cot was inviting, but he was too tired for sleep, and he didn’t want to dream again.

Abruptly he stood up, scraping his chair away from his desk. He needed air. As much air as he could find in the windowless labyrinth of the Butler Avenue station.

He left his office and wandered the hallways. Drunken shouts rose like the wails of alley cats from the lock-up area in the rear of the building. Phones rang and went unanswered.

He entered the Detective Unit squad room, the walls covered with collages of mug shots and departmental memoranda, and crossed to the basin in the corner. He splashed cold water on his face, then dried himself with a paper towel from a dispenser.

On the way back to his office, he saw Detective Tony Sachetti standing outside the closed door of an interrogation room, pouring himself a cup of coffee and muttering irritably.

“Something wrong, Tony?”

Sachetti looked up, startled. His heavy eyebrows lifted in mild surprise. “Don’t you ever go home?”

“Not recently. What have you got?”

The smaller man released a grandiloquent sigh. “Real piece-of-shit case. The thing of it is, it should be open and shut, but it’s not. Something’s screwy.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Haven’t you got enough to worry about?”

Delgado chuckled. “More than enough. Let’s hear it anyway.”

“Guy named Ruiz is coming out of a bar in Mar Vista, near Palms and Centinela, about four hours ago, at one-fifteen. His car is parked on the street. He’s fumbling with the keys when somebody decides it’s payday. Either Ruiz puts up resistance or the robber gets nervous; one way or the other, Ruiz winds up being knifed in the neck. Just then, a black-and-white swings by. Suspect takes off on foot and ducks into an alley. Another unit cuts him off at the opposite end. He’s collared. Paramedics declare Ruiz dead at the scene, so it’s a homicide, and we’ve got our man. Nice and neat, huh?”

“Sounds like it.”

“Except for one problem. The knife. He didn’t leave it in the body, so he must’ve still been carrying it when he started running. But when he got nabbed, he didn’t have it on him. Only place he could have ditched it was the alley. But I’ve got ten guys pawing through garbage and looking under parked cars, and they can’t find diddly. That knife has done some kind of disappearing act.”

“Can’t you make him anyway?”

“We can make him, yeah. But without the murder weapon, I don’t know if the D.A. will file.”

Delgado frowned. “Let me talk to him. What’s his name?”

“Leon Crowell.”

Delgado pushed open the door and entered the interrogation room. A young black man, his head shaved bald, sat in a straight-backed chair, his left wrist handcuffed to a steel ring bolted to the wall. He wore a leather jacket emblazoned with the silver and black logo of the Los Angeles Raiders, an outfit favored by youthful offenders in L.A. Delgado had never been sure whether it was the team’s rebel image or simply the bold color scheme that attracted the interest of streetwise criminals; but he’d caught himself thinking, at times, that the city’s crime rate might not be rising quite so fast if the Raiders had stayed in Oakland.

“Hello, Leon,” he said, making no effort to sound friendly.

Leon pursed his lips like a pouting child. “I got nothing to say.”

“My friend here”-Delgado indicated Sachetti-“seems to think you killed a man tonight. Want to tell me why he’s wrong?”

A shrug. “Man, I don’t know nothing about that. I was just out for a walk, you know?”

“At one-fifteen in the morning?”

“I get sort of restless sometimes.”

“Why were you running?”

“I like to run, is all. Exercise.”

He scratched his nose with his right hand. Delgado studied that hand. A ring of dirt, a perfect circle an inch and a half in diameter, was printed faintly on the palm.

“It’s a public street, man,” Leon was saying. “Public property. I can run on it if I want to. Says so in the Constitution.”

Delgado smiled. “You’re a smart fellow, aren’t you, Leon?”

“Smart enough.”

“I’ll bet. But I’m smart too. Do you want to see how smart I am?”

“I don’t want to see nothing.”

Delgado turned to Sachetti. “You said there are cars in that alley?”

“Yeah. It’s right behind the bar, and some of the staff park there. But we searched the cars, Seb. Nothing underneath, and nothing inside.”

“No,” Delgado said. “Leon’s too smart for that. Leon, show Detective Sachetti your hand. Your right hand.”

“Say what?”

“Do it.”

Slowly, suspiciously, Leon raised his hand. Delgado twisted his wrist, angling the dirty palm at the overhead fluorescents.

“Hey, man,” Leon whined, “let go of me.”

Delgado ignored him. “See that, Tony?”

Sachetti leaned closed. “I see it. Now tell me what it means.”

“It means Mr. Crowell is a quick thinker. He sprinted into that alley, and he knew he had no more than two or three seconds to dispose of the knife.”

“There never was no knife,” Leon said, his voice reedy with the first piping note of desperation.

“So he ran to the nearest available hiding place,” Delgado continued. “One of those cars. He crouched down and shoved the knife into the exhaust pipe. When he did so, his palm made contact with the end of the pipe, which left the circle of dirt marked there.”

“I’ll be damned,” Sachetti muttered.

Delgado released Leon’s hand. “Tell your people to check the exhaust pipes, Tony. One of them will contain a surprise. A surprise with Mr. Crowell’s fingerprints on it, not to mention Mr. Ruiz’s blood.”

Leon shifted in his seat and knocked his sneakers together. “Shit.”

“I’ll tell you something, Seb,” Sachetti said with a smile. “That fucking birdman you’re looking for doesn’t stand a chance.”

Delgado sighed. “I hope you’re right.”

As he returned to his office, Delgado found himself envying Tony Sachetti. The man was out there working the streets, hauling in punks like Leon Crowell, accomplishing something. Yes, that must be nice.

He remembered the quiet excitement he’d felt when he’d been assigned to lead the task force a month ago, after the second victim was found. He hadn’t even minded seeing the rest of his caseload transferred to other officers. He was intoxicated with the luxury of devoting twenty-four hours a day to a single case, supervising seventy-five detectives, uniformed cops, and plainclothes officers all working with equal single-mindedness.

It was the kind of massive, resource-intensive investigation that could be launched only when a case was sizzling with media heat, heat that had made it the top priority of the political heavy-hitters downtown.

But after four weeks spent killing himself with work and worry, his excitement had faded, replaced by frustration. He was no closer to a solution than he’d been at the beginning.

Out-thinking Leon Crowell was easy. But the man Delgado was hunting, the man who held the city in the cold clutch of fear, was no small-time street punk. That man would not make the easy, obvious mistakes.

Delgado closed the door of his office and sat at his desk. He picked up the BSU profile and, for no particular reason, began reading it again. He was still on the first page when the telephone rang.

Slowly he lowered the report, looking at the phone, while a chill fluttered briefly in his gut.

He knew. Even before he lifted the handset from the cradle, he knew.

Four minutes later he was guiding his unmarked Chevrolet Caprice south on Sawtelle Boulevard, then east on Pico. He drove fast, whipping around slower traffic, grateful that the streets were still largely empty; rush hour would not begin till seven.

From the crosstalk crackling over the radio, Delgado gathered that Detectives Nason and Gray were already on the scene. Apparently they’d been heading home after a nightlong stakeout when the 187 came in; although not part of the task force, they’d volunteered to secure the crime scene and supervise the uniforms until Delgado arrived.

At six-fifteen he turned onto a narrow residential street lined with thick-boled date palms and leafless elms. Yellow evidence tape had been strung between trees and hydrants to cordon off half the block. Delgado was pleased to see that Nason and Gray had protected a wide area; it was possible, however unlikely, that tire tracks or a discarded object might be found in the street.

The TV crews and print reporters had yet to arrive. A few neighbors in tossed-on street clothes or robes and nightgowns stood well back from the ribbon, their staring faces flashing red, blue, red, blue in the stroboscopic light of patrol-car beacons. The dawn sky, cloud-wrapped, was the color of bone. The air was thick and clinging, like fog.

Delgado parked alongside the cordon, got out of the car, and approached the nearest of the uniformed cops guarding the scene. He flipped his badge at the man, more out of habit than necessity; most of the beat cops knew his face.

“Good morning. Detective.”

“I wish it were.”

He stepped over a sagging stretch of ribbon, his long legs clearing it easily, and walked swiftly down the street, trailing plumes of breath.

The house was a stucco bungalow indistinguishable from the others lining this street, one sad little box among hundreds of thousands of boxes checkerboarding Los Angeles. Its ordinariness was redeemed only by a garden in the front yard, splashed with waves of silver-blue juniper, spiky yuccas, and snow-flurry dwarf asters.

On the street outside, Nason and Gray were waiting. Delgado shook hands with each in turn.

Frank Nason was a large loutish man, as tall as Delgado and twice as wide, with a battered nose squashed sideways across his face. He made a sharp contrast with Chet Gray, small, soft-spoken, sad-faced. Together they gave the impression of an ex-prizefighter in the company of an unusually somber funeral director. Despite their differences, the two cops had been partners a long time, and, like an old married couple, they had grown to resemble each other, not physically, but in their mannerisms, thought processes, and patterns of speech. Delgado had seen the same phenomenon many times, and it always secretly amused him.

“You got here in a hurry,” Gray said.

“I broke some laws.”

“Good thing, too. Gonna be a circus. Channel Four is on their way over, so you know pretty soon all the other TV assholes will be doing stand-ups, getting video of the body bag on the stretcher.”

“If it bleeds, it leads,” Nason said, quoting the alleged motto of all local news teams.

Delgado surveyed the area. He saw perhaps a dozen uniforms; nobody else. The only sounds were low, uneasy conversation and the intermittent crackle of the beat cops’ radio handsets.

“Under the circumstances,” he said, “I would have expected a greater display of political firepower. Where are our friends from City Hall?” He spoke slowly, his diction impeccable as always, his words edged with the trace of an accent from the Guadalajara barrio of his childhood.

“Those pretty boys are still curling their hair to look nice for the cameras,” Nason replied with a snort. “They’ll be here when the tape rolls, not before. The mayor’s office is sending somebody, ditto the D.A. And you can bet the chief will want to pose for his picture.”

Delgado shrugged, having already lost interest in the subject. “What was his means of entry?”

Nason picked at something green in his teeth, working his thumbnail like a dental tool. “Kitchen window. Want to take a look?”

“Later. First give me the rest of what you know.”

“This place is owned by Elizabeth Osborn,” Gray said. He spelled the last name. “Real-estate agent. Thirty-four. Divorced. She goes jogging every morning with a friend of hers from down the street.”

Gray paused, and Nason picked up the story smoothly. Delgado thought of the ’88 Lakers, of Magic passing the ball to Kareem.

“Friend’s name is Lucille Carlton,” Nason said. “So today, at five-thirty, Carlton jogs over here as usual. Sees the door is open. Lights are on. She takes a peek, has herself a coronary, and scrams.”

“She runs back to her house,” Gray said, “and nine-elevens it.”

“Where is she now?”

“At the station, I think. Unless maybe they took her to the hospital. She’s in bad shape. In shock, almost.”

“I take it Ms. Carlton believes the deceased is Elizabeth Osborn.”

“She thinks so.” Nason finally succeeded in dislodging the green thing in his teeth. He flicked it away and watched its arc. “Almost sure. But…”

“But she can’t make a positive ID,” Delgado finished for him.

“Can you blame her?”

“No. I can’t.” Delgado sighed. “Who was the First Officer?” The first officer present at the scene, he meant.

“Stanton. Over there.”

“I’ll get his report. In the meantime, I want a modified grid search of the crime-scene perimeter. The gawkers and loiterers-we need their pictures taken. Surreptitiously, of course. Have the SID shutterbug do it. And send a couple of uniforms to record the plates of every car parked within a radius of three blocks. My people will track down the owners and conduct interviews later.”

“You think the scumbag would hang around?” Nason asked doubtfully.

“With this one,” Delgado said softly, “anything is possible.”

Stanton was standing near a palm tree, one hand holding fast to the rough diamond-textured trunk. The patrolman was young, maybe twenty-two, still starchy with Academy training. He looked green in both senses of the word. His eyes kept wandering toward the house, then away. His lips wore a wet sheen.

Delgado identified himself, flipped open his memo pad, and requested the First Officer’s report. Stanton provided essentially the same information Delgado had obtained from Nason and Gray, though in greater detail. Referring to his own notes, he recounted the exact time when he’d been dispatched to the crime scene, the time of his arrival, the time when he called in his report of a 187-PC. PC was the California Penal Code, Section 187 of which covered the crime of homicide. Once the dispatcher had been alerted, Stanton had waited outside the house till Nason and Gray arrived,

Delgado wrote it all down in his neat, elegant script. “Did you touch anything?” he asked finally.

“The door, sir. It was open already, but I pushed on it, just a little, to look in.”

“Nothing else?”

“No, sir.”

“Not the body?”

“No, sir. I know it’s standard procedure to check for a heartbeat. But in this case, it didn’t seem necessary. Sir.”

Delgado allowed himself a smile. “No,” he said mildly. “Not necessary at all.” He snapped his memo pad shut. “Thank you, Stanton. Excellent work.”

The patrolman tried to smile, but his mouth wouldn’t work. His lips seemed wetter than before.

Delgado left him. Then, because he could delay no longer, he walked up the slate path toward the front door of Elizabeth Osborn’s house. From his pocket he removed a small vial containing cotton balls soaked in shaving lotion. He tamped one ball into each nostril.

The door was open, the lights inside still burning. No surprises there. In both previous cases, the killer had left the lights on and the door ajar, inviting the unwary to step inside and inspect his handiwork. One of those who had accepted the invitation was now undergoing psychological therapy; the other was making arrangements to move out of state.

Three brick steps lifted Delgado to the doorway. A tiled foyer carried him into a clean upscale living room. The room was empty, the house vacated until the arrival of the forensics unit.

Breathing through his mouth, Delgado approached the middle of the room, where a woman’s naked body was sprawled supine on the richly stained, mirror-lustrous oak floor in a tangle of limbs. Near it lay a torn and crumpled nightgown.

A yard from the corpse, Delgado stopped. He studied the body. At the corner of his sight wavered a displaced strand of hair, bobbing over his temple. Unconsciously he smoothed it back, blending it with the jet-black skullcap of hair pasted to his scalp. He let his hand slide over the curve of his head to the nape of his neck, where he felt the hard bony knobs of spinal vertebrae. He massaged them slowly.

With a small start he became aware of what he was doing. Irritated, he thrust both hands into his jacket pockets, then briskly closed the distance between himself and death. He squatted, leaning over the corpse. His stomach twisted.

No doubt a youngster like Stanton thought the veteran cops took this kind of thing with equanimity. They did not. Nobody could. Nor did Delgado want to. A man who could look at this horror and feel nothing was a man capable of murder himself.

He steadied himself, then set to work on an examination of the body. Strictly visual. Hands off.

The victim, he estimated, had stood five-four. She was trim, her muscles well-toned. Age? Thirty-four would be a reasonable guess.

Elizabeth Osborn. Had to be.

He looked at her bare feet, the white beds of her toenails. Settled blood bruised the knobs of her ankles. Her naked legs were twisted and splayed. Vaginal swabs, Delgado knew, would reveal traces of semen. This man had his fun with the women he killed.

Slowly his gaze traveled up Elizabeth Osborn’s groin, her belly, her chest. Her skin was darkly livid, mottled in purple. All visible signs of hypostasis indicated that the body had not been moved. Osborn either had fallen or had been dropped on this spot.

With his index finger Delgado touched the skin between her collarbones; it was cool, but not yet stone-cold. Her left forearm had fallen across one of her breasts, as if in a futile gesture of modesty. A Band-Aid encircled her thumb. Perhaps she had cut herself with a kitchen knife. The small detail seemed poignant, the Band-Aid incongruous on this body.

The woman’s right arm lay outstretched on the floor. In that hand, pressed between her fingers, was a small clay statuette.

Delgado had hoped never to see one of those statues again.

Drawing a quick shallow breath, he looked away from the corpse. Suddenly he was tired. He rubbed his eyes, then pressed his fingertips to his high unlined forehead, feeling the hard bone beneath the yielding flesh. He let his hand drop to his cheekbones, high and saturnine, then to his narrow angular chin. He thought of the bony architecture of his face-the zygomatic arch, the maxilla and mandible, the eye sockets and occipitals-terms he’d often used in his analysis of bullet tracks and knife punctures and shattering hammer blows, but which he’d rarely imagined applying to himself. If the skull was the symbol of leering death, he thought randomly, then mortality could be glimpsed in any mirror.

With effort he shook loose of those thoughts. He focused his attention on Elizabeth Osborn’s home, trying to get a feel for the woman’s lifestyle and financial circumstances. Though the house was modest enough-only a single story, perhaps twelve hundred square feet, and hardly new-Delgado knew it had been expensive; in this part of town, even a stucco box like this one would run three hundred thousand dollars and up. Mortgage payments of two grand a month, easily. Either Osborn had been doing well in her real-estate sales or she’d been heavily in debt, living on her credit cards and charge accounts; these days the latter was more likely.

Delgado’s gaze ticked restlessly across the living room. A white oval throw rug, creamy as a puddle of spilled milk, lay on the hardwood floor under a glass cocktail table with chrome-plated legs. Other glass tables were scattered around in an artful illusion of disorder. Glass surfaces, Delgado knew, were unusually receptive to latent prints. There would be plenty of tented arches and radial loops to occupy the Scientific Investigation Division. But whatever prints the evidence technicians found would belong to Elizabeth Osborn, whose fingers would be printed for comparison, or to her boyfriend, if she’d had one, or to a cleaning woman. Somebody. Anybody.

Not the Gryphon.

Pages of a newspaper, probably the L.A. Times, were scattered on a futon flanked by chrome torcheres. Against one wall stood an entertainment center with mirrored doors, holding a twenty-six-inch Magnavox and a Pioneer stereo system. A reproduction of an emakimono, a Japanese watercolor on a horizontal scroll, hung over the fireplace.

The painting and the white walls were spotted with blood. Long slanted splashes like bugs on a windshield.

The stains could have been made when the saw was used, but Delgado didn’t think so. The height and trajectory of the marks looked wrong. No, Osborn had still been upright, struggling wildly, releasing an arterial spray like a hellish lawn sprinkler. A dying person could spasm and convulse as frantically as an epileptic in a grand mal seizure.

Death was everywhere in this room. Delgado could not escape from it. Sighing, he returned his attention to the statue.

It was a small brown figure, unpainted, four inches long, modeled by hand out of self-hardening clay. The work was unsophisticated but far from inept; there had been speculation that the Gryphon might be an art instructor or a professional sculptor, but it was equally likely that he was a talented amateur.

The sculpture he had made was a representation of his namesake, the raptorial bird-beast of Arabian and Greek mythology, a gargoyle-like monster featuring the head and wings of an eagle joined incongruously with the body of a lion. The clay gryphon was posed rearing upright, forelimbs extended, wings folded, beak jutting dangerously forward. It was a pose often given to the heraldic gryphons on medieval shields.

The dead woman’s hands had both fisted in a cadaveric spasm. If Osborn had been holding the statuette when she died, the clay figure would have been crushed. It was intact. That meant the killer had pried open her dead, rigid fingers to insert the figurine. Peering closely, Delgado detected no tool marks on the skin, no grooves cut by pliers or a screwdriver. Tools had not been needed. The Gryphon had done the job by hand. He was strong, then, with a powerful grip. But Delgado had already known that. It would take a strong man to sever muscle and bone with only a hacksaw. Ordinarily a surgeon’s electric saw would have been needed to do a job of that kind.

The hacksaw, however, was unlikely to have been the murder weapon. Too unwieldy. No, something else had released the spray of blood that measled the walls. Most likely the same weapon that had been used in the other cases. But what?

There was no way to know. Not now.

Delgado stared down at the dark mushroom of blood sprouting between Elizabeth Osborn’s shoulders, crusted brown, soaking into the gaps between the floorboards. It looked eerily like the distorted shadow of the head that was not there. The head that had been sawed off at the base of the neck and taken away.

He sighed, feeling older, much older, than his thirty-six years.

Detective Sebastian Juarez Delgado had spent his entire adult life in the LAPD, and he knew about cops, all cops-plainclothes and uniformed, raw recruits and tarnished brass. He knew how they liked to grouse about their jobs, about the long hours, the bureaucratic paper shuffle, the stretches of enervating boredom interrupted by flashes of electric danger. And he knew, perhaps better than most of them, that such talk was only misdirection, a magician’s sleight of hand.

Overtime, red tape, fatigue, risk-none of that was the bad part of the job, the part that made a young man old. The bad part was facing things like this. Not the physical reality as such, not the lake of blood that had gushed from a severed neck, but the implications to be drawn from the sight. Had Elizabeth Osborn been decapitated in a freeway accident, the condition of her body would have been much the same, but its emotional meaning utterly different.

A man had done this. A member of the human species. A man had hacked through gristle and bone to take the prize he wanted. Had he carried it under his arm, or in a zippered bag, like a bowling ball? Had he whistled cheerfully as he left the house, his night’s work done?

After what seemed like many long minutes, Delgado looked up from the body again and saw that the SID technicians had entered the living room. He nodded to Frommer, the leader of the team; the thin, bespectacled, constantly agitated man had supervised evidence recording and collection on both of the previous cases. He was infuriated by the Gryphon, who so far had refused to leave anything interesting.

“Hello, Eric,” Delgado said, getting to his feet.

“Detective.” Frommer nodded in a distracted way. “Christ, I hate the smell of blood.”

“You should try these.” Delgado tapped his nostrils. “Cotton balls moistened with Aqua Velva. I can’t smell a thing.”

“I experimented with something like that once. Only I used Mennen Skin Bracer. And I’ve tried cigarette filters and swimmers’ nose plugs too. Problem is, when I stick anything up my nose, I feel I can’t breathe. I know it’s irrational-just breathe through your mouth, right? — but I can’t help it. The only thing that works for me is coffee grounds on the stove. Handful of fresh grounds in a saucepan, no water, on a hot burner. In five minutes it masks every other smell in the place.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Frommer stared down at the body. “Jesus, look at her. Just look at her. First thing to do is bag the hands and that goddamned statue. You know, I used to like sculpture.”

Delgado nodded. “So did I.”

Two of the evidence techs in Frommer’s team were busily unpacking their kit bags, removing canister vacuum cleaners, compasses and calipers, four-by-five cameras and video equipment, fiberglass brushes and vials of gray and white fingerprint powder. The cartographer was already plotting the coordinates of the room on graph paper, prior to marking down the exact location of every item of furniture, every ashtray, every bloodstain. The other three would set to work momentarily, snapping photos and bagging evidence. Delgado figured he’d better get out of their way.

Carefully he retraced his steps, backing away from the corpse. On the steps outside, Nason and Gray stood waiting.

“Let’s see the window,” Delgado said tersely.

The two men nodded. Wordlessly they led him down a hallway adjacent to the living room, into a large and well-kept kitchen.

The lights were off, and Delgado left them that way. The wall switch would not be touched until it had been dusted. Wan daylight, filtering through the window curtains, provided some feeble illumination.

Looking around intently, Delgado saw a linoleum floor of indeterminate color, perhaps blue or gray-a built-in electric range-a stainless steel sink piled with last night’s dinner dishes-white steel wall cabinets, charmlessly functional. In one corner a black-paneled side-by-side refrigerator hummed tunelessly to itself; a grocery list was pinned to the door by a magnet in the shape of a saguaro cactus. The saguaro grew almost exclusively in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, and Delgado was willing to bet that Elizabeth Osborn either had recently visited Arizona or had grown up there.

He stepped up to the kitchen window and carefully parted the curtains. The glass had been removed, leaving only a few jagged shards clinging to the frame.

Directly beneath the window there was a dining nook; a three-sided upholstered bench bracketed a small oak-veneer table. A scatter of shining glass fragments dusted the table, the bench, and the floor, but not enough glass to have filled the frame. Delgado turned inquiringly to Nason and Gray.

“Used tape,” Gray said, answering the unspoken question. “Love tap with a blunt instrument. Neatly done.”

Delgado nodded. With strips of tape covering the window, the glass would not have spilled noisily out of the frame even after a soft blow had shattered it.

“Did you find the tape and the glass?” he asked.

“Yeah. He dropped it right outside the window. In a flower bed.”

Delgado nodded. “It’s the first time he’s tried this method.”

“He keeps it interesting,” Nason said.

“Too interesting,”

The Gryphon’s single break-in prior to tonight’s job had been accomplished by picking the lock. He’d sprung a standard latch bolt, apparently by using a loid of some kind-perhaps a credit card or a homemade tool.

Delgado returned his attention to the bench. He saw a few crumbs of dark soil scattered on the tan vinyl upholstery. The killer must have planted his foot on the bench after climbing through the window. Lowering his gaze, Delgado spotted similar specks of dirt on the floor near the table. Perhaps two feet away, there were another few crumbs.

For the first time since entering the house, he smiled.

“I think he’s given us some help this time,” Delgado said softly, speaking more to himself than to the others.

“What do you mean?” Nason asked.

“He tracked dirt into the room. See it? There… and there… and there.”

“Yeah. From the flower bed. But he didn’t leave any footprints as far as I can see.”

“True. But if we measure the distance between tracks, we’ll know the approximate length of his step. From that, we can arrive at an estimate of his height.”

“Shit,” Nason said. “That might work.”

“Retrace your steps carefully,” Delgado ordered.

Walking backward, the three men returned to the kitchen doorway.

“No one enters this room again until SID has photographed and measured those tracks,” Delgado said. “Tell Frommer to make it his first priority once the living room is taken care of.”

“Right.” Gray hurried off to convey the orders.

Delgado was still smiling. “He can make mistakes, it seems. Small ones. But those are the ones that will do him in.”

From outside the house rose a loud male voice shouting questions at the beat cops positioned around the cordon. A reporter, Delgado assumed. Soon dozens of them would swarm over this neighborhood like flies crusting a garbage pail. This afternoon every local newscast would lead with the story, and the city’s panic, already high, would be ratcheted up another notch. Gun stores and home-security outfits would report a new wave of record sales. Not since the Night Stalker case had one killer generated a wave of paranoia of such frightening intensity. People acted as if the phenomenon of serial murder were new to L.A. It was not.

The Gryphon, as Delgado and every other cop in the LAPD knew only too well, was far from the only repeat killer loose in Los Angeles on this chill March morning. No one in the department cared to speculate on how many unsolved homicides were the work of men who killed capriciously, not for gain but for the satisfaction of an anti-life impulse so primal it could scarcely be understood by a normal mind. L.A. had dozens of them, and they were rarely caught.

The Gryphon had garnered more publicity than any of the others, in part because of the sensational aspects of the case, but in greater part because his first two victims, like his third, had been not prostitutes or runaways, not the faceless shadow figures who slept in alleys and turned tricks for a hit of crack, but “decent people,” in the cops’ own parlance. Julia Stern had been a young housewife; Rebecca Morris had been an upwardly mobile junior executive. So far the Gryphon had worked exclusively in L.A.’s Westside, a patchwork of middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, where attractive young women were not supposed to die random, senseless deaths.

But then, nobody was supposed to die a death like that. Life, any life, was not meant to end that way.

Delgado sighed, his brief smile fading.

A moment later Gray returned with the news that Frommer was eager to get a look at the tracked dirt. “He’ll probably put it through microscopic analysis,” Gray remarked.

Delgado was barely listening. “Let’s check out the rest of the house.”

A narrow hallway led past a bathroom, a utility closet, and a guest room that Elizabeth Osborn had turned into a messy, but comfortable, study. At the far end of the hall was the bedroom. The table lamp on the nightstand was unlit. A piano concerto played from a clock radio; apparently the alarm had been set to awaken the woman with soft music. The bed was unmade, the quilted spread flung back hastily. The walls were bare save for an Arizona Highways calendar; the photo showed a grove of golden paloverde trees against a wall of striated purple.

Definitely a relocated Arizonan, Delgado concluded.

A stack of mail had been left on the bureau. Delgado looked it over and saw a Century Cable bill, a mailing from the Sierra Club, a Great Western Bank statement, and a catalog from Crane’s Department Store. The catalog’s cover featured a smiling woman in a straw hat and the cheerful announcement: “Summer’s On the Way!” It was a summer Elizabeth Osborn would never see.

“Seb?” The voice was Gray’s. “You okay?”

“Just… thinking.”

“It gets to you,” Nason said sympathetically. “You start seeing them in your sleep.”

“And hearing them,” Delgado said. “Their voices.”

Nason blinked. “I forgot about that. You kept that out of the papers, didn’t you?”

“So far.”

“Good.”

The tapes, like many other details of the case, had been withheld from the press, partly to protect the victims’ privacy and partly to provide a means of debunking the endless phony confessions that came in over the task-force hotline. If necessary, such information also could be used to distinguish a copycat killer from the original. As yet, thank God, there had been no imitators. In time there would be. In time…

“So how do you figure it?” Nason asked abruptly. “You think maybe he woke her up, hustled her out of bed, cooled her in the other room?”

“No. That’s not his M.O. He doesn’t move them around like pieces on a chessboard.”

“Then what’s the story?”

“Something like this.” Eyes closed, Delgado watched the scene unroll in his mind. “The Gryphon breaks in while Osborn is asleep. He makes some noise that awakens her. She’s not certain if she heard anything or not, so she slips out of bed and looks into the living room to see if anyone is there. The Gryphon strikes from behind. He kills her. Strips the body, tosses her nightgown aside. Rapes the corpse. Takes the head. And leaves the lights on and the door open, as always, when he departs.”

Nason grunted. “Sounds reasonable.”

“Reasonable?” Delgado shook his head wearily. “Oh, no. There is nothing reasonable about it.” He moved toward the doorway, his shoulders sagging. “Let’s get out of here. That goddamn music is giving me a headache.”

The three men returned to the foyer, making a detour around the living room, where Frommer was aiming a video camcorder at the body as he narrated a running commentary on the crime scene. Outside, several news vans were parked around the cordon; cameras were being mounted on tripods; snarled snakes of microphone cable slithered everywhere.

The coroner’s assistant, Ralston, was waiting for Delgado near the front door. He had handled the Gryphon case from the beginning, and he looked very tired of it now.

“Not much I can tell you yet, Seb,” Ralston said in answer to Delgado’s unvoiced question. “So far Frommer has hardly let me touch the deceased. He’s rather protective of his crime scene, as you know.”

“You’ll get your chance. Have you taken the temperature readings?” That part of the pathologist’s examination had to be done as soon as possible.

Ralston nodded. “Rectum and liver. Body temp is ninety-two point three. That puts the time of death at roughly midnight.”

Delgado scribbled in his notepad. “The body wasn’t moved.” It was not a question.

“Uh-uh. Definitely not. That arterial spray makes it pretty obvious she died right here. Standing up, I’d say. The evidence techs will have to chart the trajectories of the spatters in order to fix her exact location.”

“Anything else I ought to know?”

“Nothing you didn’t notice for yourself. There are no apparent abrasions, contusions, incisions, or ligature marks on the limbs or trunk, not even any defense cuts. The damage must have been inflicted exclusively on the head and neck.”

“Just like the others. Did you smell sulfur?”

“No. I don’t think it was a gunshot. We’ve never found any traces of powder on the previous victims.”

“And there’s no sound of a shot on the tapes. More like… cutting or strangling… a combination of the two.” Delgado shook his head.

“Knife or a straight razor,” Ralston suggested. “With a sideways jerk of a sharp blade”-he demonstrated with a slash of his hand across his own throat-“he could tear out the carotid arteries. Plenty of blood then.”

“Yes,” Delgado said, looking at the living-room walls. “Plenty of blood.” He sighed. “Okay. Thanks, Rally. See you at the autopsy.”

He rejoined Nason and Gray, standing a few yards away.

“We were just saying the interval’s shorter this time,” Gray remarked.

Delgado had been thinking of that too. He nodded. “Julia Stern was killed on December first. After that, the Gryphon was dormant for more than two months. Rebecca Morris died on February eighth. Now this one, on March sixth.”

“He’s going faster,” Nason said. “The high doesn’t last as long as it did.”

Gray nodded. “He’s lost it, all right. Out of control.”

“Perhaps.” Delgado was thoughtful. “Or he may simply be gaining confidence.”

“Is that what you think?” Gray asked.

“Yes. This is a man consumed by grandiosity. He sees himself as more than human-as a god. He believes he is without weaknesses or blind spots. He teases us, certain he cannot be stopped. You know, of course, how he ended both tapes.”

“ ‘Catch me before I kill again,’ ” Nason quoted. “Like that guy in Chicago in the Forties. What the hell was his name?”

“William Heirens.”

“Yeah. Didn’t Heirens write something similar at one of his crime scenes?”

“In lipstick. On a wall.”

“So what’s the significance, do you think?”

“The psychiatrists call it a cry for help. A desperate plea to be apprehended, treated, rescued from the irresistible compulsions that drive him.”

Nason had caught the skepticism lacing Delgado’s voice. “But you don’t agree?”

“No. I don’t.” Delgado looked at him. “Those words are not a plea. They are a taunt. A mocking challenge. He is not asking to be caught. He is defying the very possibility of capture.”

“I guess you could look at it either way,” Nason said. “How can you be sure?”

Delgado’s voice was iron. “Because I know him.”

A beat of silence pulsed among them. Gray broke it.

“Well, whether he’s losing it or just getting cocky, he’s heading for a fall. He’s got to make a mistake soon.”

“Got to,” Nason echoed.

“Oh, yes,” Delgado said quietly. “He will. Every man has a weakness, and this man has his. Some flaw in his character-hubris, perhaps, or something else, something we have not yet seen-will trip him up and bring him down. But…”

He looked away, not to let them see his face.

“But even so, his fall will not come soon enough.”

He stared at the body on the living-room floor, not seeing it, seeing only the future he could not prevent.

If the next interval was shorter still, as Delgado believed it would be, then soon, much too soon, another clay gryphon would roost in a dead woman’s hand.