Shiver

by Michael Prescott

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.