Shiver

by Michael Prescott

  “I say we push the limits of the physical evidence,” Wildman said. “Physical evidence is what always trips up these guys. For instance, those carpet fibers. I think we were too quick to brush them off.”

  “The fibers will convict him,” Gardner said, “not catch him.”

  “Maybe they’ll do both. I say we start checking likely places where this guy works. Operate on the assumption that he’s an art aficionado. Look at the galleries, art stores, and other operations like that, and see what kind of carpeting they’ve got. If we find a fiber match, we start checking out the employees—” Her desk phone rang; she grabbed it. “Wildman.”

  Delgado was watching her, and he saw her face change as she slowly put down the uneaten portion of her granola bar. She looked at him.

  “Another one, Seb.”

  He drew a sharp breath. “Damn. God damn.”

  “Female Caucasian, decapitated, in a one-bedroom apartment at nine-seven-four-one Palm Vista Avenue. That’s a couple of blocks south of Pico, near Beverly Boulevard.”

  “Farther east than the others,” Gardner said.

  “I’ll go on ahead,” Delgado told them. He was already rising from his chair, shrugging on his coat. “You two call the rest of the task force, get them out of bed or wherever the hell they are, then hustle everybody over there as fast as possible.”

  He did not wait to hear their replies.

  The address was twenty minutes from the West L.A. station. As he drove, Delgado felt anger rising in him, the cold familiar anger at the taking of an innocent life. He knew he shouldn’t let himself feel that way; he should remain calm and professionally detached. But he couldn’t help it. He had always become personally involved in the cases he worked. His need to see justice served was a whip cracking over his head, lashing his back, driving him to put in fourteen-hour days and seven-day weeks, never to rest, never to be satisfied.

  Yet objectively he knew that there was more to his motivation than moral passion alone. There was his stubborn, angry need to prove himself, to solve every case, to be the best.

  He remembered how close Paulson had come to removing him from the investigation this afternoon. At the time Delgado had been sure that his insistence on retaining command of the task force was based purely on a professional commitment to getting the job done. Now he wondered. To what extent had he been moved by motives less noble—pride, grandiosity, an unwarranted self-confidence, and, underlying it, the secret terror of failure and public humiliation?

  Stupid greaser couldn’t cut it after all, said an ugly voice in his mind. Always said he was a loser, the spic bastard.

  He knew that voice. He had heard it many times—in high school, in college, at the police academy in Elysian Park, in the station-house locker room. It was the voice of unthinking, irrational hostility, focused on him for no reason other than his dark complexion and sharp accent, markers of his place of origin that had made him an outcast in a country not his own.

  In Mexico things had been different. There he had been popular, at least as popular as a boy given to remoteness and intellectual abstraction could be. Even so, he had not been happy growing up in Guadalajara. He remembered being bored most of the time, bored with his elders and his peers, impatient to discover a more interesting part of the world. Mexico had been long behind him when he learned to his surprise that Americans found Guadalajara exotic and fascinating, “the Pearl of the West.”

  There was little romance in the slum neighborhood where he was raised. There were vendors selling pulque on hot summer afternoons, children playing the hopscotch game bebeleche, flyblown dogs napping in swatches of shadow. Parchment-creased grandmothers sat on stone steps telling stories of Pedro de Ordinales, the wily shepherd who could outwit God and Satan, and La Llorona, the Wailing Woman, who would come in the night to steal away any child who misbehaved. The streets were narrow, the buildings dark, and so were the minds of the people who lived in that part of town, acting out roles scripted by traditions they neither understood nor challenged.

  Young Sebastián had been told he should be proud of those traditions and of his heritage. He was a mito mita, half-and-half, his mother descended from the Yaqui Indians, his father from the Conquistadors. A locked box in the parlor was purported to contain a sheaf of yellowed papers that recorded his father’s genealogy, tracing his ancestry to a Spanish captain named Delaguerre who had explored the coast of Mexico in the sixteenth century. But the box had never been opened in Sebastián’s presence, and even as a boy he had doubted there was anything inside. From the beginning, skepticism was natural to him; perhaps he was fated to become a cop.

  He was ten years old when his parents took him to live in the United States, aided by an uncle who had become a naturalized citizen, and a prosperous one. In Tucson or Houston or any of a dozen other places, Sebastián might have lived among Mexican immigrants like himself, blending with them; but his uncle’s home was in Indiana, where a boy with a funny way of talking and a strange cast to his skin could not help drawing furtive, suspicious looks.

  Grade school was hard; high school was harder. Sebastián became good at fighting; and not just with his fists. The real fight was the fight for respect; and he was smart enough to know that he would win it only if he honed his mind. He studied hungrily, earned top grades, and delivered the valedictory address at his high-school graduation. Two of his classmates, denied a diploma and sentenced to summer school, tried to beat him up after the graduation ceremony. Delgado broke both their noses.

  His academic achievement opened the doors of every college in the country to him. He chose UCLA, because Los Angeles was warm and the Indiana winters had been too cold. Even in L.A., three hours from the Mexican border in a city named by Spanish settlers, he discovered prejudice. But it was manageable. Everything was manageable as long as he worked harder than anyone around him.

  He was finishing college, uncertain of his future, when the LAPD recruited him. The department needed more minority cops to patrol the barrios, where WASP rookies automatically became targets.

  Again racism plagued him. He heard a lot of wetback jokes in his days as a uniformed cop, jokes that bit like small dogs and left scars. But he knew the solution. To fight back with hard work, as he had done in school. To outperform those who looked down on him. To log more hours, take more Academy classes, spend more time on the shooting range or in the gym, read more books and write more reports. To work nights and weekends, sacrifice his social life, forgo any existence at all outside his work. That was the way to win.

  His ambitiousness had served his career well. He’d risen swiftly, making detective at twenty-six, then spending two years in Narcotics and four years in Robbery before his transfer to Homicide. At thirty-four he’d earned the rank of Detective II; if he solved this case he might well become a D-III, one of the youngest ever made in the LAPD.

  But the price he paid was high, too high, and the worst of it was losing Karen. She offered her love to him, and what did he do with that gift? Wadded it up and tossed it away—because he could not escape his work.

  Now he had been handed the most important assignment of his career, the toughest challenge, the case that would make him or break him—and he was failing. Failing.

  And another woman was dead.

  Delgado guided the Caprice up to the crime-scene ribbon, then switched off his engine. He sat unmoving in the car for a long moment, looking at the apartment building before him. Squad cars and uniformed cops were everywhere; police-band crosstalk crackled and sputtered nervously from car radios and portable handsets. The media had yet to arrive, but a restless, murmuring crowd of onlookers loitered at a barely respectable distance, held back by patrolmen with unfriendly stares. Some fool with a flash camera was clicking off snapshots, perhaps in the hope of selling them to the Times for a small payment of blood money, or perhaps as personal mementos, to be preserved under acetate in his photo album between last year’s trip to Yosemite and next year’s vacation at Walt D
isney World.

  Suppressing his disgust, Delgado left the car and crossed the yellow ribbon. He flashed his badge at every uniform he passed, not stopping for conversation with any of them. He was in no mood for talk.

  The apartment wasn’t hard to find. The door was ajar, the lights on. Half a dozen cops milled around outside; their muttered conversation died away as they saw Delgado approach. Wordlessly they parted to let him through. He reached the doorway and looked in.

  Just inside the door, a young woman’s naked, decapitated body, limbs in disarray, lay sprawled on a white pile carpet soaked with glistening blood.

  There was no clay statuette in her hand.

  Delgado blinked. No, that couldn’t be. The Gryphon never failed to leave his calling card.

  A chill shivered through him as he considered the possibility that this killing had been the work of a copycat, some lunatic inspired by the news coverage to imitate the Gryphon, but failing to get one key detail right.

  He didn’t want to believe it. One maniac was enough to deal with.

  With a sigh, he banished that line of speculation. For the moment he would proceed on the assumption that the Gryphon was responsible for this latest crime. Most likely, the killer had simply altered his usual pattern for some reason known only to him.

  Carefully, Delgado stepped through the doorway into the apartment and looked around. It was a modest mid-rent place, neatly kept and unimaginatively furnished. His circling gaze took in a sofa, a coffee table, a potted plant. Corner windows framed a leafy fig tree. A chest-high counter divided the living room from the kitchenette, brightly lit by overhead fluorescents.

  In a corner lay a heap of torn, bloody rags. The victim’s clothes, obviously, which the Gryphon had ripped off her body and cast aside. Delgado couldn’t tell what kind of outfit it had been without handling the clothes, and he wouldn’t do that, of course. There was always a chance the Gryphon had neglected his gloves this time and left a nice bloody fingerprint for Frommer and his SID team.

  He knelt by the body. The woman was a young

  Caucasian, probably in her twenties, perhaps five feet tall. She was slender, as all the Gryphon’s victims had been, with shapely legs and small pert breasts. No doubt she had been attractive. They always were.

  Delgado wondered what her name was, what her life had been like, what dreams she’d nurtured. He would learn the answer to such questions soon enough, he supposed. Her name would be determined at the morgue; her lifestyle would be reported by friends, neighbors, and relatives; and as for her dreams ... A tape would come in the mail, a recording of her last words, and when he listened to her whispery plaintive voice, Delgado would know what she’d wanted out of life, and what she would never get.

  How many more voices would he have to hear?

  He got up slowly, feeling tired, very tired. He backed away from the corpse, careful to disturb nothing around it, and returned to the doorway, where the uniformed cops were watching him intently, as if trying to read his thoughts in his eyes.

  “Who were the first officers to arrive at the scene?” Delgado asked, fatigue thickening his voice.

  Two men stepped forward. “We were, Detective,” one of them said.

  Delgado recognized the pair. The cop who’d spoken was named Branden. He wore wire-rim glasses and longish hair that tested the limits of departmental regulations, giving him the appearance of a disaffected intellectual of the existentialist stripe, the sort who could go on at tedious length about Plato’s cave or Dostoevski’s underground man. There were a lot of them in L.A., and a few had even found their way onto the police force, for motives impossible to guess.

  Branden’s partner, Van Ness, was a farmboy, or should have been; he had the kind of build the word “strapping” had been coined to describe: thick neck, broad shoulders, huge meaty fists like hams. Excitement shone in his eyes. Clearly he was getting a kick out of being involved in a case with this much heat on it.

  Flipping open his memo pad, Delgado fixed his gaze on Branden, whom he judged the more intelligent of the two. “Let me have your report.”

  “We were cruising this neighborhood,” Branden said, “when a call came over the radio. Some civilian nine-elevened a report about the Gryphon. Apparently he was seen at this address—”

  “Seen?” Delgado interrupted, his heartbeat speeding up. Nobody had ever seen the Gryphon before. A description would be invaluable. If an artist could work up an IdentiKit sketch ...

  Branden shrugged. “That was how I understood it, sir. But the details were fuzzy as hell. Frankly, we didn’t think there was anything to it anyway; people have been calling in false alarms for weeks.”

  “The whole Westside is scared shitless,” Van Ness added. “Jumping at shadows. We figured somebody saw a drunk taking a leak in the bushes, and got spooked.”

  “All right.” Delgado tried to hold impatience and frustration at bay. He would find out about the alleged sighting later, from somebody better informed than either of these two. For the moment he would dig out whatever information they had. “You arrived at the scene at what time?”

  “Ten-thirty-four,” Branden answered.

  “Go on.”

  “We checked out the grounds of the building first, then the apartments. That was when we saw the stiff. Couldn’t miss her. The door was wide open, and the lights were on.”

  “He always leaves the place lit up like that,” Van Ness said. “Like a frigging laundry-mat.” That was how he put it: laundry-mat.

  Delgado ignored him. “You found the body. What then?”

  “Van Ness called in the homicide. In about two minutes, we had more backup than I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  “Everybody wants to be in on this one,” Van Ness said, smiling.

  “Everybody except the victims,” Delgado replied coolly. He returned his attention to Branden. That 911 report still teased his curiosity. “Do you have any idea who tipped us off? Could it have been somebody in the building?”

  Branden shook his head. “We asked all the neighbors. Nobody here saw anything.”

  “Did they tell you who rents this apartment?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s a woman, and the description they gave us matches the deceased. I mean, as far as you can tell.”

  “Did she live alone?”

  “According to them, yes. And there’s only one name on the mailbox.”

  “Which is?”

  “Kutzlow, sir. Jennifer Kutzlow.”

  “They say she was a stewardess,” Van Ness added.

  11

  This was bad. Very bad.

  Franklin Rood sat in his car, breathing hard, fighting pain and weakness. His shirt was untucked, his belly exposed to the pale yellow glow of a streetlight. Blood oozed from a jagged vertical gash in his side. Not a great deal of blood, but enough to have trickled down his pants and pooled on the driver’s seat, soiling the tan upholstery. He hoped he could remove the stain.

  He’d driven at least a mile from the apartment building on Palm Vista Avenue before parking on a quiet side street to inspect the wound. He couldn’t tell how serious it was, though it sure hurt like the dickens.

  He sighed, a low wheezing sound that startled him, the kind of sound an invalid would make. He had to admit that the last round of the game had not gone exactly as planned.

  Shortly past eight o’clock Rood had arrived in Miss Wendy Alden’s neighborhood and parked in a curbside space. Before leaving the car, he clipped the cassette recorder to his belt. He played the blank tape for a few seconds to get past the leader, then pulled on his gloves and checked the pocket of his coat to confirm that the garrote was inside.

  He smiled. Ready to go.

  Holding the bag by its strap, he got out of the car and walked toward the apartment building where Miss Alden lived. It was a simple two-story frame structure, put up back in the late Fifties or early Sixties, in those simpler times when nobody felt the need for a security gate or an intercom system or any protection
at all. The doors opened directly onto the street—or, in the case of the apartments on the second floor, onto a gallery that could be reached easily enough via the outside staircase.

  How wonderfully convenient.

  As the building drew near. Rood became aware of raucous rock music blaring from a ground-floor window. He wondered if Miss Alden were throwing a party. He hoped not. If she were, he’d have to wait for her guests to leave.

  A few yards from the building Rood stopped, removed the night-vision binoculars from his bag, and squinted through the eyepieces. The world was suffused in a green fog; the brass numbers affixed to the apartment doors shone brightly in the enhanced luminescence of the streetlights. He rotated the focusing knob, bringing the numbers into crisp resolution, then located the door marked 204. Miss Alden’s apartment.

  She lived in an upstairs corner unit directly above the noisy apartment. The curtains in the side window were drawn, the place dark and silent. She must be out.

  Rood replaced the binoculars in his bag and considered his options. He could wait in his car till he saw the lights go on in the apartment. Eventually the window would darken again when she retired for the night. An hour or so after that, he could silently break in and surprise her in bed. She would awaken from a dream into a nightmare.

  Yes, he could do it that way. But there was another, more interesting, slightly riskier possibility. He could pick the lock on her door, conceal himself in the apartment, and wait for her to come home. There was danger in an ambush; suppose she returned with her boyfriend or with a group of friends. But then again, suppose she didn’t. He could watch her from his hiding place, then pounce for the kill. What fun.

  He decided to chance it.

  Briskly he walked up to the staircase. He’d just put his foot on the lowest step when the door to the ground-floor apartment swung open in a blast of frenzied guitar chords and a young woman emerged with a bulging sack of garbage in her arms. She stopped short, her eyes fixed on Rood from a yard away.

  “Oh,” she said very simply, as her eyes tracked from his face to his gloved hands, mottled in dried blood.