Shiver

3

The morning had not gone well.

Delgado should have known he was in for a bad day when at six A.M. he was awakened from a troubled sleep on his office cot by shouts and running footsteps in the hall. It seemed that a juvenile offender on his way to the holding cells at the rear of the station had somehow appropriated a can of tear gas from the arresting officer’s utility belt. A dozen cops had the kid surrounded, but he kept yelling that if they tried to take him down, he’d Mace them.

Delgado decided to put some of his conflict-resolution training to work. He ordered the other officers to back off, then approached the kid and began speaking softly, reasonably, in the calming voice of gentle authority. He tried not to think about the Beretta 9mm service pistol snugged in the pancake holster under his jacket. There was a chance that the kid could blind him with a shot of Mace, then grab the gun away from him while he was incapacitated.

Their conversation lasted seven minutes, a span of time that, to Delgado, seemed much longer. Finally the kid handed over the tear-gas canister, and the uniforms converged on him in an angry rush. Delgado waited till the kid had been locked up, then returned the Mace to the officer who’d lost it. “Try keeping an eye on this,” he told the man dryly.

Not long afterward, a disappointing piece of news reached him. Albert Garrett was not the Gryphon. Of course Delgado had known that Garrett was a long shot. Even if a man was charged with beating his wife into unconsciousness, and even if that same man happened to work in an art store, where he’d displayed a knack for modeling clay curios, he was not necessarily the city’s most notorious serial killer. But when a blood test identified Garrett as AB positive, a match with the Gryphon, Delgado had permitted himself cautious optimism.

A seven A.M. telephone call had extinguished his hopes. Garrett had been positively alibied for the night of the Osborn murder; moreover, it appeared that his whereabouts on the day of Julia Stern’s murder had also been accounted for.

The rest of the morning had been taken up with phone calls and hurried conferences that wasted a great deal of time and seemed to accomplish nothing. Delgado wondered why so much of policework was like that. Bureaucracy was part of the reason. Cops were only bureaucrats with guns anyway. A depressing thought; but then, it had been a depressing day.

He sat at his desk, a pile of notes spread on his stained and dog-eared blotter, steam rising from a Styrofoam coffee cup. Behind him was a laminated noteboard that had become an abstract artwork of half-erased flow charts and scribbled phone numbers. Outside the closed door of his office, the station echoed with the clamor of ringing telephones, bursts of static from police radios, and boisterous voices, mostly male and often profane.

He glanced at his watch, confirming that the time was eleven A.M., then swiveled slowly in his chair to survey the seven men and one woman assembled before him. A few were seated in metal chairs they’d brought in from the squad room; most stood leaning against file cabinets or walls. None looked happy.

He was seeing the key members of the special task force hunting the Gryphon. All of them were veteran Homicide detectives. Individually or in pairs they supervised teams of less-experienced detectives and uniformed cops.

There was one man in the room who was not part of the task force. The division commander, Captain Bill Paulson, sat in a corner sipping herbal tea from a seemingly bottomless mug.

“All right, everybody.” Delgado’s calm, authoritative voice instantly silenced the low babble of conversation. “Let’s go over what we have.”

He summarized the situation they were faced with. Nearly two weeks had passed since Elizabeth Osborn’s murder, and with the elimination of Albert Garrett as a suspect, the task force appeared to be no closer to finding the killer.

The only recent development, one that was not unexpected, had been the delivery on Friday of the third tape. Over the weekend Delgado had listened to it many times; he now had a new voice to haunt his sleep.

Frustration was building. Delgado did his best to boost morale. “The case could break wide open at any time,” he reminded them. “So let’s hear what you have. Eddie?”

Eddie Torres frowned. “The spotters at the funeral saw a few unfamiliar faces, but we’ve checked out those guys, and they’re clean. The photos SID snapped of the gawkers at the Osborn crime scene haven’t yielded diddly. We’ve compared them to the crowd shots from the first two murders, and we can’t make any matches. Two black-and-whites are running regular patrols of Osborn’s neighborhood, and they’ve caught a few thrill seekers nosing around, but nobody interesting.”

“And the hardware stores?”

“No luck on the hacksaw or blades.” Torres sighed. “Basically, Seb, we’re batting zero.”

“Maybe not for long,” Delgado said, trying to sound reassuring. “Donna, Harry, how about you?”

“Still at it, Seb,” Donna Wildman answered. “Going through Osborn’s Rolodex. She had a lot of friends and even more business associates.”

“We’ve finished interviewing her neighbors,” Harry Jacobs added. “They barely knew her, as usual in the big city. And we’ve found her datebook, so we’re calling up her old boyfriends and, I think, scaring the shit out of them.”

“That can’t be helped.”

“As for linking her with the other victims-so far, nothing.”

“Her ex-husband?”

“Alibied,” Wildman said. “Yeah, that occurred to us too. Guy cools the first two just to make the third one look random. But it turns out that only happens on TV.”

“What else are you pursuing?”

Wildman shrugged. “What aren’t we? Her medical records, family history, recent vacations. The works.”

“Okay. Tommy?”

Tom Gardner, the task force’s liaison with Forensics, looked up from the Bic pen he was rolling restlessly between his palms.

“We’ve printed all of Osborn’s friends and neighbors,” he said, “anyone who might have been in that house. There was a lot of glass, and SID found plenty of latents. We’re working on eliminating prints now. Donna and Harry got me a list of the people in the Rolodex and the datebook, and we’re printing them too. It’s a hell of a job, and the evidence techs say this bastard wears gloves anyway.”

Delgado ignored his last comment. It was true that smooth glove prints had been found at the crime scenes, but there was always a chance that the killer had removed his gloves before or after one of the murders and left traceable latents. Gardner knew this, of course; he was just blowing off steam.

“I’m looking for more than that from you,” Delgado told him. “I need an analysis of the crime scene-any changes in the pattern, evidence of progression or deviation, anything at all that might spark a better understanding of how this man’s mind works and what he might do next.”

“I hear you,” Gardner said.

“Rob?”

Rob Tallyman shifted his weight, and his chair creaked. “The cranks are really crawling out from under their rocks on this one. Ten seconds after KFWB broke the Osborn story, the hotline phones were ringing off the hook, and they haven’t stopped since. Needless to say, the confessions are all bullshit, and so far none of the leads has panned out.”

“Have you got enough uniforms to fill in the tip sheets?”

“I could use another couple guys.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Ted, Lionel, you’re still working the art angle?”

“Working it to death, Seb,” Ted Blaise said sourly. “We’ve been in so many art galleries and boutiques the last couple months, people are starting to think we’re a little swishy.”

Robertson straightened his huge shoulders in mock annoyance. “Speak for yourself, sucker.”

Mild laughter greeted that remark.

“Me, I like this detail,” Robertson added. “Paintings and statues are a lot prettier to look at than your typical homeboy.”

“They’re the only thing about this case that looks good,” Delgado said grimly.

At noon the meeting adjourned. Delgado talked briefly with a couple of the detectives as the others filed out. Then they too departed, and only Bill Paulson remained, still sipping his tea.

Delgado sat on the corner of his desk and waited, watching the captain. Paulson was a big, thick-necked, large-mustached man, gray and paunchy, but still formidable, like an aged but untamed grizzly. Delgado knew he would speak when he was ready and not before. Deliberation was his style in speech, in movement, in planning an arrest or composing a memo. Everything about him was slow except his mind.

“So let’s hear it, Seb,” Paulson said finally. “How’s it really coming? No pep talks, please.”

“We’re following up every possible lead,” Delgado replied. “My people are running themselves ragged. But a case like this…” He spread his hands. “It’s not normal policework. You know that. Captain.”

Paulson nodded. Normal policework was ninety percent snitches and squeals. Or it involved solving a crime with an obvious motive or a clear-cut personal connection. The Gryphon killed randomly. No apparent motive, no personal acquaintance with his victim, no likelihood of being involved in a criminal network.

“We have minimal physical evidence,” Delgado said, “which we’re exploiting for all it’s worth. We have the BSU profile, the charts and extrapolative materials they sent us, which make interesting reading but have been of limited practical use. We have no eyewitnesses, no IdentiKit sketch, no vehicle description or license number. We’re doing what we can.”

He heard defensiveness in his voice and regretted it. Six weeks of uninterrupted work on the case had worn him down.

“Okay,” the captain said. He walked slowly toward the desk, his footsteps heavy, loose change jingling in his pockets. “I’ll be straight with you, Seb. Our friends at Parker Center are under a lot of pressure. You know the score. Angry letters from concerned citizens. Nasty editorials in some of the smaller papers-not the Times yet, but the Outlook, the Daily News, and that Spanish rag, La Opinion. And the TV creeps are putting a little more bite in their stories. I was hoping this man Garrett might be our guy. Apparently he isn’t. Which means we’re still no closer to catching the bastard-and we’re running out of time.”

He met Delgado’s eyes. “What it comes down to is this. The big boys are looking for a scapegoat. You’re it. They want you eighty-sixed. Want me to put another man in charge.”

Paulson’s words hung in the room, gathering weight. Delgado knew he hadn’t spoken lightly. If he said it was time for a new man to take over the task force, he meant it.

Still, there might be a way to change the captain’s mind. Delgado had to try. Losing the command would be a heavy blow to his career, the career that had cost him his relationship with Karen and, along with it, any hope of a life outside his job. But even that was not his main concern now. His main concern was the work of the task force itself. If someone else were brought in for political reasons, time would be lost, work needlessly duplicated, exhausted avenues of investigation reopened for no good reason. And while that happened, the Gryphon would go on killing, the intervals between murders frighteningly short.

Slowly he stood up, facing Paulson from a yard away. He spoke quietly, choosing each word with care.

“You’re telling me what they want. The brass and the politicians. But how about you. Bill?” It was a risk, using Paulson’s first name, but Delgado felt the need for informality between them. “This is your district. All three murders have been committed in your territory. You’re the one in charge. What do you want?”

Paulson grunted. “I want you to catch the son of a shit.”

“So do I.”

“I know you do. But so far you’ve gotten nowhere. Maybe another man could come up with a new approach, an angle you haven’t thought of.”

“Maybe. Or maybe by the time he’s brought up to speed, the body count will stand at four. Or five. Or higher.”

“It won’t take that long to get caught up.”

“It won’t take that long to get more bodies either.”

Paulson returned his stare steadily, then sighed, conceding the point. “No, I guess it won’t. How long till the next one turns up?”

“You’re asking me to guess?”

“Yes.”

“It could happen anytime. But I think it will be soon. Perhaps even within twenty-four hours.”

“Shit.”

“He’s riding high. He thinks he can’t be stopped.”

“So tell me, Seb: Is he wrong? Can you stop him?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I know him.”

Delgado waited. There was nothing more he could say.

After a long moment, Paulson nodded. “All right. I’ll hold them off a little longer.” He frowned. “But not forever. You’ll have to show some progress soon. Understood?”

It was a reprieve. Not much of one, but a stay of execution nonetheless. Delgado kept his face expressionless. He could not show how much this meant to him.

“Understood,” he answered evenly.

“Okay, then.” Paulson was all business now. “You’re holding a news conference at two o’clock. That’s early enough to make the afternoon news shows.”

Delgado had no doubt that the news conference originally had been scheduled for the purpose of announcing his replacement.

“You don’t need to take any questions,” Paulson was saying. “Just make a statement. Keep it vague: The investigation is ongoing and the task force is currently exploring several promising leads, no further details to be released at this time for fear of jeopardizing the case, et cetera.”

Delgado nodded. “Anything else. Captain?”

Paulson paused in the doorway.

“Just catch him, for Christ’s sake,” he said coldly. “I want that feathered motherfucker grounded-permanently.”

A moment later the door banged shut, and Delgado was left alone in the room.

He returned to his desk and sighed. A little longer, the captain had said. What span of time was implied by those words? Another couple of weeks? Perhaps not even that much, if the Gryphon kept busy. Could he solve the case, make an arrest, in a matter of days? Not unless one of the leads unexpectedly panned out, or the killer started making mistakes, big ones. Well, he could only proceed with the various strategies he’d been following, and hope.

He leaned back in his desk chair and looked around slowly at the narrow windowless room, a room daylight could never reach. One of the overhead fluorescent panels had gone out; the other hummed and buzzed, singing insect songs. In the dreary half-light, the metal file cabinets and institutional-green walls seemed more depressing than usual.

His gaze, tracking restlessly, settled on the nodule of agate he kept on his desk. The egg-shaped stone had been split neatly in half by some accident of nature to expose a mirror-smooth oval of cryptocrystalline quartz banded in concentric circles of green, gold, and neon blue.

Delgado had found the stone in the Mexican desert when he was eight years old, and had invested many hours in its sanding and polishing. He’d been fascinated by the colors, the patterns, and the mystery of the forces that had formed them. If such beauty could be hidden inside a dusty chunk of rock, he’d sometimes asked himself as he stared into the agate’s depths, then what other, greater wonders might the world conceal?

He smiled. Picking up the nodule, he ran his thumb and forefinger lazily, sensuously, over the flat, glassy surface. Handling the stone relaxed him, helped him to think. He kept on rubbing slowly as he reviewed the facts known about the Gryphon.

There was no point in going over it all again, no reason to expect a sudden brainstorm, the mental click of a new understanding or a new approach. But he would do it anyway.

All right. Start at the beginning.

Saturday, December 1. Shortly after nine A.M., Robert Stern drove to a municipal golf course to play eighteen holes with some friends, leaving his wife alone in their apartment. Julia Stern, twenty-four years old and seven months pregnant, took a shower at nine-thirty, according to a neighbor who heard the whistling of water through the pipes. At the same time, the Gryphon easily defeated the simple latch bolt on the apartment’s front door. When Julia, wrapped in a towel, emerged from the bathroom, the killer was waiting. In midafternoon Robert Stern returned to find the front door ajar, the lights on. His wife’s decapitated body lay on the carpet near the bathroom doorway, a clay gryphon in her hand.

Delgado winced, recalling his own first look at the corpse. The hump of the belly. The ragged trunk of the neck.

At the time, no one could have been certain that the killer would strike again. Even after the tape arrived in the mail and Delgado heard the Gryphon’s mocking challenge, he’d found it possible to believe that the murder had been an isolated occurrence. As days passed, then weeks, some of the psychological consultants on the case began to speculate that the Gryphon had committed suicide and rid the city of his presence.

But that was before Friday, February 8. At six-fifteen that evening Rebecca Morris, thirty-one, arrived home from work while her roommate was fixing dinner. Rebecca was in a hurry. Less than a month earlier, she had been promoted to vice president of a computer software firm; that night she was scheduled to attend a reception thrown by the firm’s biggest client. Quickly she changed into a formal ice-blue gown that stressed her statuesque figure and set off her fiery hair and emerald eyes. Her roommate later reported that Rebecca had never looked so enthused, so healthy, so alive. At six-forty-five Rebecca, running late, rushed to the one-car garage stall at the side of the building where her Mazda RX-7 was parked; she lifted the garage door by hand and entered. Apparently she was unlocking the car when the Gryphon slipped into the garage through the open doorway and attacked from behind. At seven-thirty Rebecca’s boss called the apartment to ask where the hell she was. Her roommate, concerned, went down to the garage to see if the Mazda was gone. She discovered a woman’s naked, headless corpse stretched across the two front seats, one hand clutching a clay gryphon. At the morgue she could make a positive I.D. only from the ring on Rebecca’s finger, a ring Rebecca had bought for herself in celebration of her promotion and her exciting new life.

After the second murder, there could be no doubt that the Gryphon meant to go on killing till he was stopped. The task force had been formed, with Delgado in charge; the miscellany of unrelated cases he’d been investigating had been handed over to other detectives, most of whom groused about the additional caseload for days. The second tape had arrived within a week, the FBI had been contacted, and Delgado had begun working twenty-hour days and sleeping on the cot in the corner.

And then the week before last, on Wednesday, March 6, Elizabeth Osborn had lost her life.

Delgado shook his head slowly.

If the women had died in street muggings or bungled burglaries, their deaths might not have seemed so difficult to accept. There was a kind of logic to events like that, a motive and purpose that could be, if not defended, at least divined. Here there was no logic, no motive, no purpose. There was only the terrifying randomness of a restless evil that claimed lives as arbitrarily as an airborne virus or a cloud of poison gas.

All three victims had been young middle-class women; but other than that, no common denominator appeared to link them-not occupation, not background, not religious affiliation, not business associates or friends or doctors. Although all three had been attractive, their physical features had varied as well: Julia Stern, dark-haired and pale-skinned; Rebecca Morris, redheaded and freckle-faced; Elizabeth Osborn, blond and salon-tanned.

As far as Delgado could tell, the three women had had nothing in common except the fact that they were young and vital and alive. Presumably that had been enough.

He turned to a map of the city tacked to the far wall. Three red push pins marked the locations of the murders and suggested the parameters of the Gryphon’s field of operation. It was an area of roughly six square miles, extending west to Bundy Avenue, where Julia Stern had lived; east to Rebecca Morris’s apartment on Beverly Glen Boulevard; south to Elizabeth Osborn’s neighborhood near National Boulevard. Everyone on the task force assumed that the killer lived somewhere on the Westside and was operating reasonably close to home. He was not a drifter; he was settled, using a house or apartment as his base of operations. And he was mobile; he must own or have access to a vehicle.

The three victims had been Caucasian, a fact that virtually guaranteed that the Gryphon was white also; serial killers rarely crossed racial lines. Julia Stern’s murder had taken place on a Saturday morning; Rebecca Morris had been killed at about six-forty-five in the evening; Elizabeth Osborn had died in the middle of the night. Those time periods suggested the possibility that the Gryphon held down a daily nine-to-five job, which would restrict his activities to nights and weekends.

It seemed clear that the Gryphon watched each house or apartment building for at least a short while before acting. He must have seen Robert Stern depart with his golf clubs, just as he’d seen Rebecca Morris open the garage door and hurry inside. Presumably he’d observed Elizabeth Osborn’s house as well, lingering nearby until the lights were out and she was asleep. Only once he had determined that his victim was alone and vulnerable would he strike.

By all odds, somebody in one of the neighborhoods should have noticed a strange man, an unfamiliar vehicle-something, anything, out of the ordinary-during the period when the killer watched and waited. But the Gryphon’s luck had been excellent-the luck of the devil, Delgado thought. Nobody had seen a thing.

The murder weapon remained unknown. The victims’ heads were severed at the base of the neck, so if a knife or razor had been used to slash their throats, as Delgado suspected, there was no way to confirm it now.

The tool used to decapitate the bodies was a hacksaw. Thanks to the lab, Delgado even knew the specific brand. Microscopic analysis of the torn flesh had revealed minute particles of tungsten carbide, which had been matched to those found in a commercially available hacksaw blade. The blade, twelve inches long, was made of high-carbon steel to which tungsten carbide was metallurgically bonded to form a highly effective cutting edge. It could cut easily through cast iron, hardened steel, reinforced cement, and, of course, bone.

Delgado had ordered Eddie Torres and the officers working under him to trace every purchase of that hacksaw and its replacement blades that had been made in the Westside during the past six months. The number of customers was large, the records poor, the job nearly impossible.

At each of the crime scenes, evidence technicians had picked up short-nap rayon carpet fibers, industrial gray; the cheap material, ubiquitous in low-rent offices and homes, was impossible to trace. The Gryphon had left no fingerprints, but the techs had found a few dark brown head hairs. And they had found semen in the dead women’s vaginal vaults as well as, in one instance, the anus. Postmortem examinations indicated that penetration and ejaculation had occurred after the victims were dead. Like eighty percent of the male population, the Gryphon was a secretor, meaning that analysis of an antigen secreted with his bodily fluids could determine his blood type. His blood was AB positive.

Then, of course, there were the clay statues. Delgado had given Blaise and Robertson the assignment of making inquiries at art galleries and gift shops, looking for any local artist who could conceivably fit the Gryphon’s profile. They were still on the detail; so far no useful leads had developed.

Delgado had given himself a crash course in mythology to better understand the symbolism of the gryphon. The peculiar hybrid of eagle and lion, he had learned, had haunted the minds of human beings for four thousand years. Its point of origin was the Levant; from there it had been conveyed to Asia and eventually to Greece. The Athenian playwright Aeschylus had his Prometheus warn of the hounds of Zeus, the sharp-beaked gryphons; the animal, thought to be the guardian of treasure hoards, was ever-vigilant, cruelly predatory, capable of a swift, deadly attack in which its ruthless talons would slash its victim to bits.

It was a symbol of blood and death, of patient observation and sudden violence, of the lion’s cunning and the eagle’s swiftness. Regal and vicious, mythic and monstrous, a creature to be both feared and revered.

Now the city of Los Angeles was experiencing the same primitive terror Aeschylus’s audience had known: terror of the sharp-beaked, bloody-clawed Gryphon, the beast that struck without warning and killed without remorse.

Delgado shook his head. Having learned all that, perhaps he understood the killer’s psychology slightly better, but he was no closer to catching the man.

The other major phase of the investigation focused on earlier unsolved homicides that might roughly fit the Gryphon’s pattern. In a city as large and as violent as L.A., there was no shortage of brutal attacks on women; but two cases struck Delgado as particularly intriguing. Last June a Culver City woman had disappeared while on a shopping errand, then had turned up dead in a trash dumpster several days later, her neck deeply gashed and nearly severed by what might have been a hacksaw. Six months earlier, in December, a teenage Santa Monica girl was found dead in an alley behind the video rental store where she’d worked; her right hand had been lopped off and stuffed in her mouth. In each case the victim had been sexually abused after death, and the killer’s blood type had been established as AB positive.

The task force was also looking into out-of-state crimes that might be connected with the Gryphon’s activities. So far a murder in Idaho two years ago seemed the likeliest connection. The body of a female hitchhiker had been discarded in a roadside ditch; the girl’s tongue had been cut out, her fingers methodically removed. Again, the body had been used as a sexual object by a man typed as AB positive. The Idaho authorities had formed a small task force of their own and were digging through their files to find similar crimes. A number of possibilities had cropped up-a call girl, Lynn Peters, raped and strangled in Nampa three years ago; a high-school teacher, Georgia Grant, stabbed to death on a hiking trail in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in the summer of 1987; a Twin Falls waitress, Kathy Lutton, bludgeoned to death in a parking lot at Christmastime in 1986-but none could be definitely linked to the current investigation.

Well, that was hardly surprising. Nothing definite had developed anywhere. And while Delgado’s task force pored over arrest records and filled in tip sheets and canvassed neighborhoods and made inquiries at art galleries and gift shops, that man was out there, the brown-haired man who eluded them, mocked them. Even now he might be at work. At any moment the phone might bring word of another corpse.

Slowly Delgado replaced the chunk of agate. His gaze traveled to the tape recorder on his desk. He looked at it for a long moment.

Then, while he watched as if from a distance, his hand opened the top drawer of his desk. Inside lay a pair of foam-cushioned miniature headphones and three audiocassettes. The cassettes were copies; the originals were locked in storage, as evidence.

The tapes had come by first-class mail, addressed to Detective Sebastian Delgado, care of this divisional station; the words had been printed in large block letters with a felt-tip pen. There had been no return address, of course, and the two postmarks had been different. The existence of the tapes had never been made public, and so far the Gryphon had chosen not to contact any of the local news services. Only one fact pertaining to the tapes had leaked out, and that was the name selected by the killer to identify himself.

Delgado stared at the tapes. He didn’t want to hear them. He’d played them many times, too many, and it was pointless, an exercise in self- torture, to play them again.

But he would anyway.

His hands shook only a little as he removed the headphones from the drawer and slipped them on.