Shiver

by Michael Prescott

  He’d learned nothing new. But he hadn’t expected to. He already knew what little the tapes could tell him.

  After the second murder, Delgado had asked the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia, to prepare a psychological profile of the man who called himself the Gryphon. As part of its Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or VICAP, the BSU had amassed files on every modern serial killer, and its experts used the known tendencies of those who had been caught to extrapolate the probable behavior and personal characteristics of the ones still at large.

  The BSU analyst, a glib, chatty man named Landers who gave the impression that he enjoyed his work too much, had called Delgado to go over the profile with him. The evidence was necessarily sketchy, the results largely guesswork. Still, it was better than nothing.

  “Most serial killers,” Landers told Delgado breezily over the buzz of the long-distance connection, “are adult males in their twenties, thirties, or forties. Typically the younger ones strike quickly, while the older ones draw out the murder, often making their victims beg. On this basis I’m tentatively placing the Gryphon in the upper age bracket. Thirty to forty is my working hypothesis.”

  Delgado listened, taking notes, saying nothing.

  “The tape indicates that he’s intelligent, fairly well educated. Good verbal skills. Pronounces difficult words without strain—even objet d’art, for Christ’s sake. The name he’s picked for himself suggests a knowledge of mythology, the classics, maybe ancient or medieval history. Let’s see, what else? It’s hard to say for sure, but I think I noted signs of effeminacy in his choice of words. Also a strange sense of humor—well, I guess you’d expect it to be strange, wouldn’t you? Puckish. That’s the word I’m looking for. You know what I mean. Detective?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, this is a guy who broke into Julia Stern’s apartment during the day, when he knew she was home. You have to ask why he would do that. Why not ring the doorbell, pretend to be a salesman or a new neighbor? Two possibilities occur to me. One is that he lacks even elementary social skills; he’s withdrawn, a loner—what we call a ‘disorganized asocial’ personality type. For a man like that, breaking in might seem easier than talking his way inside. The other possibility is that he’s actually deformed, disfigured in some way. It’s a long shot, but it could explain the decapitation of the victims. Maybe he projects his self-loathing onto these women and takes their heads as a punishment of himself.

  “Of course, there are other possible reasons why he decapitates the bodies. He may use the heads as totems, as sexual objects, or as objects of further violence. There was one guy who hacked off his mother’s head and used it as a dartboard. Or—I hope you’ve got a strong stomach, Detective—he may consume the heads, or parts of them, in order to gain his victims’ life force; conceivably he eats their brains to gain knowledge or their eyes to gain vision.”

  “Or perhaps,” Delgado said slowly, “there is a simpler explanation.”

  “Such as?”

  “I was ten years old, Mr. Landers, when my family moved to the United States from Mexico. That was in 1965. On our way north we stopped to visit Disneyland. I kept the ticket stub for years afterward. I probably still have it somewhere. Every time I looked at it, I remembered the excitement of that day, the escape I’d found from everyday life. For the Gryphon, his victims’ heads may serve the same purpose.”

  Landers chuckled. “You ought to be in my line. You can think like them. That’s the whole secret, right there.”

  It was a secret Delgado had never wanted to learn.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me?” he asked heavily.

  “Only the classification,” Landers said. “We classify lust murderers—our term for serial killers—according to their presumed motives. There are four categories we recognize. The first is the so-called visionary killer, the guy who hears voices or sees visions that compel him to kill. Personally I’m skeptical about this category; most of the visionaries turn out to be faking it. But it’s irrelevant anyway, because your man doesn’t mention any voices in his head.

  “Then there’s the mission-oriented killer. He feels it’s his sacred calling to eradicate a specific group of people. You get a nurse who pulls the plug on terminal patients, or a Jack-the-Ripper type who kills prostitutes. Well, the Gryphon doesn’t say there was anything about these women that caused him to single them out, so we can ignore this category too, at least for now.

  “Third, the hedonistic killer. He murders for sexual gratification and usually performs sex acts with the victim or the victim’s body. Obviously, the Gryphon fits this profile—up to a point. But he doesn’t mutilate the women’s genitals, buttocks, or breasts, as we would expect a classic hedonistic type to do.

  “Finally, the power-oriented killer. This is the guy who kills because he likes control, likes to dominate his victims. I think it goes without saying that your man, the Gryphon, is definitely into power and control in a major way. He says he’s greater than God, after all, and he makes his victims pay homage to him before he kills them.

  “So my tentative conclusion is that he’s a mixture of the last two categories. A sexually twisted sociopathic personality working out his frustrations by means of a violent power trip.”

  ‘“All right, Mr. Landers. Thank you. I take it you’ve covered everything I need to know about serial killers.”

  “Except for one last point.”

  “Which is?”

  “They’re damn hard to catch.”

  In the final analysis, however, Delgado based his understanding of the killer not on the BSU’s psychological profile, but on a fragment of ancient history that he remembered from one of his college classes—a small, bloody episode that merited barely a footnote in most texts, but which had been printed indelibly on his mind.

  In A.D. 408 the grand minister Olympius had ruled the western half of the Roman Empire through the intermediary of the weak-willed and ineffectual emperor, Honorius. A lifetime of manipulation, scheming, and murderous betrayal had lifted Olympius to a position of nearly absolute power. Only one significant threat still faced him, the threat posed by the militant Goths, who wanted to claim the Empire for themselves. The Gothic armies had the manpower and the martial skills to defeat any forces loyal to the emperor. But they were held in check by the knowledge that their wives and families, sixty thousand women and children who had settled in Italian towns, were at the Romans’ mercy.

  Olympius had everything he wanted. He controlled the Empire. He ruled the world or what was then known of it. As long as those sixty thousand hostages were his, the Goths could do nothing.

  Olympius ordered the hostages killed.

  There was no logic to what he did. In murdering those sixty thousand, he ensured his own downfall. He freed the Goths to move against him and avenge their loved ones. He must have known the consequences of the orders he gave; yet he gave them anyway.

  Delgado’s teacher, perhaps embellishing the story, reported that as the slaughter was carried out, the bodies heaped high, and the mass graves filled, Olympius capered in his palace, exulting with frenzied glee: “This is greater than the Empire!”

  Delgado believed the Gryphon was a man like that.

  People assumed that anyone capable of senseless murder must be deranged. The popular stereotype, endorsed to a large extent by psychologists and sociologists and bright young experts like Landers of the BSU, was that of a man driven by irresistible impulses, unable to control his wild urges.

  Delgado disagreed. Whatever his inner compulsions, the Gryphon was in final control of his actions. He knew what he was doing, just as he knew how to reach the police if he wanted to confess, or a psychiatrist if he wanted to get help. He planned his crimes with care, taking elaborate pains to avoid leaving evidence that might lead to his arrest. Afterward he showed no sign of remorse or even regret for what he’d done. Quite the contrary. Like Olympius, or like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, he reveled in
death, intoxicated by the bloody elixir of the suffering he caused.

  There was a word for such a man, a word so simple it had been all but forgotten in this complex modern age. A word Delgado’s grandmother in Guadalajara had known.

  Evil.

  Delgado nodded. Oh, yes. There was good and evil in the world. Underlying each of these three murders was the will of the man responsible, his private volition, his conscious choice to do violence to the innocent. He had felt the need to kill, and rather than resist that urge, he had given in to it, had acted on it three times and laughed about it later. His compulsions did not drive him; he allowed himself to be driven by them. And for what? An illusory sense of power, a sexual thrill, a few hours of fun. He was a man who took pleasure not in living, but in denying life to others.

  Delgado stared moodily at the map on his wall, at the three red dots scattered across L.A.’s Westside. Somewhere in that sweep of lookalike houses and anonymous apartments and gas stations and stores, there was a killer who struck with the brutal impersonality of accident, an Olympius for a meaner and sorrier age. He fashioned his clay sculptures and then he played his game, choosing victims by some means Delgado could not guess, stalking them, killing them, and taking his hideous souvenirs.

  Delgado knew everything about that man, except his name.

  6

  Franklin Rood stepped dripping out of the shower.

  He took a shower every afternoon at four-thirty, immediately after getting home from work. He had a strong belief in the importance of personal hygiene. Many of the world’s problems, he felt, could be solved or at least significantly ameliorated if the common herd of people simply learned the value of cleanliness. Instead, just look at them, greasy and unwashed, sweat-stained and foul-smelling, the filth and dreck of the human cesspool. Disgusting.

  Briskly he dried himself with a clean white towel, a towel as fresh and new as any that might be found in a hotel bathroom; Rood had no tolerance of dirty laundry, of anything dirty. He was, he supposed, a rather fastidious man. That was a nice word, wasn’t it? Fastidious. He said it out loud, enunciating each syllable clearly, then grinned at the mirror. What a fine smile he had. He looked lovingly at himself, freshly washed, his brown hair tousled and ropy, the skin of his shoulders flushed with the heat of the shower spray.

  In the bedroom he put on his glasses, snugging the stems behind his ears, then dressed briskly in blue denim jeans, a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to expose his muscled forearms, and white Reebok running shoes. The Reeboks were excellent for his purposes, permitting rapid movement while ensuring relative silence, and he’d sprayed them liberally with a silicon formula to keep off the worst of the stains.

  On his way out of the bedroom, he paused to execute half a dozen pull-ups on the bar screwed into the doorframe. He did them easily, feeling no strain. Every morning and evening he performed a minimum of twenty chins and twenty squats to keep his arms and legs in condition.

  He walked through the living room into the kitchen, and stopped before the refrigerator. Arctic air gusted against his face as he opened the door to the freezer compartment and peered inside. The freezer was crowded with unidentifiable leftovers in aluminum-foil wrapping. At first he couldn’t find the Swanson Hungry Man chicken pot pie he wanted. He rummaged in the freezer, looking past plastic trays of ice cubes and cans of orange juice. Then, with a delighted smile, he saw the corner of the box sticking out from behind the frozen blue mass of Miss Elizabeth Osborn’s head.

  Rood slid the chicken pot pie out of the package, punched a few holes in the pie crust with a fork, and placed his dinner in the oven.

  Checking his wristwatch, he saw that the time was now one minute to five. There were local newscasts at five. Couldn’t miss them. He hurried back to the living room, turned on the TV, loaded a blank videotape into the VCR, and settled into his armchair with the wireless remote in his hand. He pressed the button marked Record. The VCR started with a whir just as “Eyewitness News” began.

  The female news anchor was afraid of him. Rood could see the fear furrowing her forehead, tugging at the corners of her mouth, moistening her lips. Every woman in the city was afraid. Well, they ought to be.

  The top story was a fire in Topanga Canyon, fanned by the dry desert winds. Rood was disappointed. Fires were common. Fires had no business taking priority over the Gryphon.

  He waited impatiently for the real news, the only news that counted. Finally it came on—the daily update on the city’s waking nightmare.

  He quickly gathered that there were no new developments in the case. Ignoring the reporter’s meaningless commentary, he focused on the snippets of file footage, mostly pertaining to Miss Osborn’s murder.

  Her bungalow, looking seedier in daylight than it had at night. The crowd of spectators, like vultures, disgusting. The camera peering past the yellow crime-scene ribbon, panting for a voyeuristic glimpse through the doorway. A metal gurney, and on it a black plastic body bag. The doors of a coroner’s wagon slamming shut.

  Then an unexpected treat: Detective Sebastián Delgado standing outside the police station, delivering a statement to the press.

  Rood leaned forward, studying the man’s face, a face he’d seen in other newscasts and in newspaper photos, but one he found endlessly fascinating. The black hair swept back from the high forehead. The sharp nose, hawklike. The angry mouth bracketed by chiseled grooves.

  “Catch me. Detective,” Rood whispered. “Catch me before I kill again.”

  The newscast continued, but it was not about the Gryphon anymore. Rood flipped through the other channels and caught a few seconds of other, similar reports. Then there was nothing. Ah, well. He could get more air time whenever he liked.

  There would be newspaper stories too, of course. He’d brought home today’s edition of the L.A. Times, the Evening Outlook, the Daily News and, although he could not read Spanish, La Opinion. More clippings for his scrapbook.

  He rewound the tape and played the “Eyewitness News” story again. As he watched, he leaned back in the chair, lacing his fingers behind his head, smiling. The game was such fun.

  For most of his thirty-two years Rood had found little that brought him pleasure or pain. His life had been a blank, his days drudgery, his nights dreamless. He had been a zombie shuffling through the motions of living, dead inside.

  His first kill, five years ago, had changed all that. Freed from the strait jacket of normal existence, hunting his prey, Rood felt alive—wonderfully, intoxicatingly, dizzyingly alive—more alive than any other man had ever been. He was a god, vertiginously elevated above ordinary humanity, towering over the teeming mob as an average man would tower over a nest of squirming maggots. He was in total control of every aspect of reality, free to do as he pleased, utterly unconstrained. Nothing could compare to the exhilaration of taking a woman’s life, then using her body while the flesh was still warm, the blood still wet. It was a thrill as dark and heady as black wine.

  A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts.

  He froze. Suddenly he was afraid. Nobody ever visited him. In his two years in L.A., he’d never once had company. The very idea seemed unreal. In a distant, rather abstract way he was aware that people did such things; they learned one another’s addresses and dropped in now and then to say hello. But the ritual was as alien to him as the social habits of bees in a hive.

  He had no idea what to do. Perhaps if he made no sound, whoever was out there would go away.

  There was another knock, then a faint, muffled voice. A woman’s voice.

  “Franklin? It’s me. Melanie. From next door.”

  Rood swallowed. Oh, God. What was she doing here?

  He’d exchanged pleasantries with Miss Melanie Goshen on a few occasions while entering or leaving his apartment. She was a tall, pale blonde who spoke quietly, rarely meeting his eyes. Very shy and innocent. Or so she seemed. But Rood knew that her innocence was an act. On more than one night, she’d had a man over at h
er place. Rood had heard the noises of their lovemaking through his bedroom wall.

  “Franklin?”

  He didn’t want to answer, didn’t want to talk with her at all, but he felt he had to. Vaguely he thought it might seem suspicious if he didn’t. Lately he’d grown extremely conscious of avoiding any activity that might raise suspicions of any kind.

  He tried to imagine what a person would say when company called. After a moment’s thought, the correct response came to him.

  “I’m coming,” he said loudly, his voice pitched an octave higher than normal, his vocal cords stretched taut by nervous tension.

  He rose from his chair and switched off the TV, then hurried to the door and opened it. Miss Goshen was standing on his front steps, lit by the porch light, the empty courtyard behind her. Her sleeveless blouse was much too tight. Indecently tight.

  Fear squirmed in his gut. He felt droplets of sweat squeezing out all over his body.

  “Hello,” he said, straining for calm.

  “Hi.” She smiled, and her cheeks dimpled sweetly. “Sorry to bother you, but I’m making dinner, and the recipe calls for olive oil. Which I thought I had, but it turned out that all I’ve got is peanut oil. Which won’t do at all.”

  “You ... want to borrow some?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to say. Yes. If you’ve got any, that is.”

  “I’m ... I’m sure I do.” Don’t look at her breasts. Don’t think about the noises from her bedroom, the groans of pleasure, the creaking mattress springs. “Just a moment.”

  He meant to have her wait in the doorway, but as he headed for the kitchen, he realized she was following him.

  “Thanks so much,” she said. “I appreciate this.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  The oils were kept in a cabinet over the sink. He saw the jar of extra-virgin olive oil immediately. He reached for it, fighting the panic that sent ripples of light-headedness radiating through him.

  “You’ve got something in the oven.” Her voice startled him, and he nearly dropped the jar.