Shiver

by Michael Prescott

  But perhaps he had gone still farther north. Out of the Valley ... and into the desert.

  Delgado remembered the sandstone paperweight in Rood’s apartment. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

  Rood must have picked up that rock in the Mojave.

  Did he spend a lot of time out there? Was that where he kept his trophies?

  He imagined the attraction a man like Rood would feel for the desert—vast stretches of emptiness, of desolation and dust—no strangers’ eyes watching him, no police cars patrolling the streets. A lonely place where he would be free to be himself.

  It seemed right. Felt right.

  The high Mojave was too big to survey by car. Fifty patrol units would not do the job fast enough. But an aerial surveillance was a different matter.

  As he hooked left on Sherman Way and raced toward Van Nuys Airport, Delgado was already speaking into the microphone in his hand, requesting a helicopter.

  32

  Wendy lay on the futon for what seemed like many minutes while the Gryphon paced the trailer, talking to himself in a muttering undertone. She had no idea what he was saying and no desire to find out. She still struggled to free her hands, but the tape binding her wrists was thick and strong, and she couldn’t work it loose.

  Finally he approached her. She waited for him to begin whatever torture he had planned. But he merely stooped and picked up the statuette that had fallen from her pocket.

  “The poor thing is chipped,” he said sadly. “Broke one of its wings. That’s a shame, isn’t it, Wendy? A shame that such a beautiful thing could be damaged.”

  She watched as he carried the figurine to the card table and set it down gently. It lay there, recumbent, a tiny sphinx.

  “Still,” Rood whispered, “it’s lost only a wing. Could be worse. Suppose its head had come off.” His lips parted in a chilly, feral smile. “Wouldn’t that have been a tragedy?”

  He clapped his hands once.

  “Get up.”

  She didn’t move.

  “You heard me,” he said quietly.

  “I’m not going to help you kill me.”

  “Sure you are. You’re going to do exactly as I say.” He tapped the butt of the holstered automatic. “Because if you don’t, I’ll shoot off your kneecaps. Bang. Bang. Then I’ll still be free to do whatever I wish with you. So what will you have gained, besides unnecessary pain?”

  “All right,” she mumbled, defeated. With difficulty she climbed off the futon.

  “Now come here.”

  She walked to the card table. Her unbuttoned blouse hung open, exposing her red raw breasts to his eyes.

  The Gryphon turned one of the folding chairs sideways to face the shrouded cabinet. “Sit.”

  She obeyed.

  “Very good. I’ve been considering how to do this, Wendy, and I’ve decided to put on a show for you. A very special show, one that means a great deal to me. I hope you enjoy it. It’s the last entertainment you’re ever going to have.”

  He tore a strip of cloth from his shirttail, then blindfolded her. She drew a sharp breath when the room disappeared from her view.

  “Is that necessary?” she whispered.

  “Humor me. I have a flair for the dramatic.”

  She heard him move away from the chair. Some stretch of time passed, filled with faint rustling sounds and circling footsteps and his low breathing. After that, silence. Silence and darkness.

  Then from somewhere before her, a woman’s voice, faint and whispery, rising in a trembling monotone like a furtive, frightened prayer.

  “Please don’t kill me. I don’t ... want to die. I’ll do whatever you say ...”

  A second woman began to plead, joining the first.

  “Of course I’m afraid of you. What kind of question is that? My God, who wouldn’t be afraid?”

  A third voice mingled with the others in an unreal chorus.

  “... never done anything to deserve this. It’s not fair, not right, not right at all ...”

  Wendy felt the Gryphon’s hands at the sides of her face. The blindfold was lifted. She gazed straight ahead.

  The white sheet that had draped the cabinet was gone. In its place were four heads displayed in a neat row. Four pale staring faces, each in its own jar. One was Jennifer’s, and one was Elizabeth Osborn’s. The other two were new to her, but she knew them too; she’d seen their pictures in the newspaper after the Gryphon’s first two kills. Julia Stern and ... Rebecca somebody. But those photographs had been of living women, young and vital and intelligent, women who bore only a passing resemblance to these surreal laboratory specimens, these freak-show exhibits with their bulging eyes and swollen tongues.

  Every candle in the room had been extinguished, save two that had been placed on the cabinet. Their dim flickering glow trembled on the waxen features of the women in the jars.

  But it was not the faces that held Wendy paralyzed with disbelieving horror. It was the voices.

  Of the four women, Jennifer alone remained silent, speaking of her terror only with her wide staring eyes. The other three were pleading for mercy, whispering and moaning, their cries emanating—it seemed—directly from their open mouths.

  “... promised you’d let me go if I said those things.” The words were spoken by Julia Stern, the first woman in line, a brunette with sharp, clear features that reflected the fear and indignation in her voice. “You promised ...”

  “Reasons?” asked the redhead beside her, Rebecca somebody-or-other. Girlish freckles were scattered across her nose and cheeks. “Of course I have reasons to live.” Dead Rebecca made a sound that might have been a laugh or a strangled sob. “For God’s sake, I’m only thirty-one ...”

  “And I want to get married again,” Elizabeth Osborn said. “The first time didn’t work out. I want to have a family before it’s too late. What else? I want to travel. The Grand Canyon, the Rockies. There’s so much out there, so much to see ...”

  Speaking. They were speaking. Dead, but alive. Their spirits bottled along with their flesh.

  Then Wendy’s shock cleared, and she understood.

  Behind the first three jars, nearly invisible in the dim wavering light, were pairs of detachable stereo speakers connected by long wires to the three cassette players on the nearest table.

  Tape recordings. That was all the voices were. Recordings of the pleas and confessions the Gryphon extorted from his victims before he pulled the circle of wire taut. Recordings that had been edited to remove the killer’s threats and lying promises, leaving only the voices of the dead.

  “... can’t do this,” Julia breathed. “You just can’t.”

  Rebecca groaned. “I’m asking you ... if you have any mercy ... please ...”

  Elizabeth was sobbing. “I’ll do anything, anything at all ...”

  He must have recorded what I said too, Wendy thought numbly. When he has my head in a jar, he can make it talk. Can make me beg forever, beg and reveal my secret hopes. He’ll sit here in this chair, and he’ll listen to me babble about going to Santa Barbara and falling in love and wanting to live. And he’ll laugh.

  A shudder rippled through her body and left her feeling ill and dizzy.

  The voices grew louder and took on a tinny quality. She looked at the table where the cassette players were displayed. The Gryphon had moved over there. He was adjusting the volume controls and fiddling with the equalizers to boost the treble. Perhaps he fussed constantly with the knobs and levers, customizing each performance, raising the volume ever higher till the trailer rocked. No wonder he’d lined the walls with cork.

  It occurred to her that she was hearing some of the same words for the second time. The tapes must have been spliced into loops. They would play forever, the agonies they preserved never to end.

  “... you’re so powerful,” Elizabeth whispered, “you’re a god, more than a god, more than anything I’ve ever imagined ...”

  “Think of my baby,” Julia moaned.


  “You’re going to kill me anyway,” Rebecca said tonelessly. “I know you are.”

  Suddenly the Gryphon was laughing, a cheerless rasping sound. Wendy saw that he’d turned away from the cassette players and was watching her, thrilling at the horror that must be written on her face, drinking it in like blood.

  “Well, what do you think, Wendy? Aren’t they talented, my four beauties? Don’t they put on a wonderful show?”

  She looked at him, candlelight sparkling on the blank lenses of his glasses, and then at the pickled heads, gibbering and weeping, and suddenly she was shaking all over, shaking and wanting desperately to be anywhere but here, in this trailer in the desert, this den of death.

  Desperately she twisted her wrists, still trying to loosen the tape that bound them. She lurched sideways in her chair, and her struggling hands banged the corner of the card table beside her. The table rattled. It was metal.

  And the corner felt sharp.

  “I do love to watch them, Wendy,” the Gryphon said loudly, almost shouting to be heard over the keening voices. “Sometimes I come here at night and stay till dawn, when the batteries have drained and the tapes are playing at one-quarter speed. The happiest moments I’ve ever known have been spent here, in my special place, with my beautiful friends.”

  Carefully, hoping she would not be seen in the weak fluttery light, Wendy lifted the vinyl tablecloth and folded it back to expose the corner of the table. She touched it. Yes, it was sharp, all right. Sharp enough to cut through the tape binding her hands. If she had time.

  She began to rub her wrists against the corner. Up and down. Up and down.

  “Soon you’ll join my friends, Wendy. You’ll be one of them. I’ve got a jar all ready for you.” The Gryphon went on laughing, laughing, while the dead women whimpered and groaned. “I’ll put you in the place of honor. Just think of it, my dearest. Why, soon you’ll be the star of the show!”

  33

  A Bell Jet Ranger helicopter, painted with the blue and white color scheme of the LAPD, swooped down on Van Nuys Airport less than three minutes after Delgado arrived. He was running toward it even before the skids touched the tarmac. Ducking under the overhead rotor, he climbed into the backseat behind the two Air Support Unit officers—pilot and observer—in the cockpit.

  “Take me north!” he shouted over the engine roar. “To the Mojave!”

  The pilot pulled up on the collective-pitch lever. Engine noise increased as the throttle opened. The airport shrank to a dark irregular stain, then glided away as the pilot’s feet worked the yaw pedals to steer the chopper north.

  “Follow the 405 to the 5,” Delgado ordered. “Give me all the speed you’ve got.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Delgado looked out the side window, staring down at the wide white streak of the San Diego Freeway five hundred feet below. On either side of the freeway, the rooftops of shops and apartment buildings glided by, some darkened briefly by the copter’s oblong shadow. Parking lots, open jewel cases at this height, glittered with shiny treasures that were cars. Lawns and public parks gleamed bright and fuzzy, squares of green velvet.

  The chopper took less than ten minutes to reach city limits, where the Valley ended and the high desert began. Delgado spent the duration of the trip considering where best to look for Franklin Rood. The man might have gone anywhere, of course. Might have traveled fifty miles into the desert. Might still be driving, perhaps headed for Bakersfield or San Francisco—or the Canadian border, for that matter.

  But Delgado didn’t think so. If his assumptions were correct. Rood was going to a place already known to him, the place where he kept his trophies. Some secluded hideaway, close enough to be convenient, most likely on one of the back roads that snaked through the desert like trails traced by a restless finger in the dust.

  He saw such a road running parallel to Route 5 and decided to try it first.

  “Fly over that route,” he said, leaning into the cockpit and pointing. “At a lower altitude.”

  The pilot pulled the lever down, decreasing the pitch angle of the main rotor blades. The pale pink Mojave expanded as the helicopter began its descent.

  Delgado accepted a pair of binoculars from the observer, then scanned the roadside, looking for a white car that resembled a Ford Falcon. He saw one old junker that intrigued him for a moment, but when the copter obligingly dipped still nearer to the ground, he shook his head.

  Several other roads, some of them little better than dirt paths, branched off from the one they were following. At Delgado’s order, the pilot showed him each in detail. The roads hugged the scalloped rims of canyons or meandered into the desert and dead-ended amid the cholla and bitterroot. Delgado saw nothing that looked like the car he sought.

  “Let’s try the Sierra Highway,” he said. It was the next logical place to look.

  There was little to see along the highway itself except a few isolated ranches and what appeared to be large sheds or cheap repair shops with metal roofs. The few vehicles parked here and there were all wrong.

  Again Delgado tried the back roads. Scanning the first one that branched off the highway, he saw a horse ranch, a scatter of picnic tables at a campsite, and a young boy who gazed up at the helicopter, waving his arm in broad sweeps.

  The chopper returned to the Sierra Highway and continued north. A second side road crawled into view like the dry tributary of a dead river. The pilot took it without the need for an order. Delgado peered down. He saw a graveyard of abandoned automobiles, a desolate ranch, and, not far ahead, the silvery shimmer of a trailer.

  Near the trailer was a car. White. Not new.

  Suddenly the back of his neck was warm.

  “Lower,” he said. The word came out so softly as to be nearly inaudible. He had to repeat it to make himself heard.

  The copter descended.

  “Don’t hover. Pass by.” He didn’t want to make too much noise. Just in case.

  The copter swept past the car. It was a Falcon. Delgado was sure of that.

  But was it Franklin Rood’s Falcon? He would have to read the license plate.

  The observer glanced at him. “What now. Detective?”

  “Set us down on the road about fifty yards from the trailer.” Delgado touched the grip of his Beretta, simply to reassure himself that it was there. “I’m taking a closer look.”

  34

  Wendy was sure the tape on her wrists was beginning to split. She needed only another minute or two, that was all, and she would be free. Then maybe somehow she could find a way to fight back. Maybe—

  “I hope you’ve appreciated this wonderful performance, my dear.” The Gryphon had turned away from the display on the cabinet and was smiling at her, smiling like a skull. “But now I think you’ve seen enough.”

  Oh, no, she thought with a chill of fear. Not yet. Please, not yet.

  He crossed the room to the futon. Looking over her shoulder, she saw him kneel and reach into the drawstring bag, which had fallen on the floor during his ugly, pointless attempt at lovemaking.

  From the bag he removed a hacksaw. The blade gleamed in the candlelight.

  “Normally I wait until my victim is dead before taking my trophy.” He circled around the card table with the hacksaw in his hands. “But not this time.”

  She tugged at the tape. It was partly worn through, but still it wouldn’t yield.

  “This time I intend to try a new technique. I’m going to cut your head off while you’re still alive.”

  He was coming toward her. Still smiling. His eyes dead.

  “And I’m going to do it right now.”

  She had to free her hands or she was dead. She had to. Had to.

  With a final desperate tug she ripped the tape apart, then sprang to her feet, facing him from a yard away. He stared at the torn black adhesive clinging to her wrists.

  “You never quit, do you?” he breathed, the words almost swallowed in the confusion of voices from the stereo speakers. “We
ll, it makes no difference. I’ve got you now.”

  He advanced on her. She retreated. She backed into the cabinet. The two candles there, the only ones still lit, guttered fitfully. She grabbed the nearest one and thrust it at his face.

  Blind him, a crazed inner voice was screaming, burn out his damn dead eyes!

  But he was too quick. He dodged the flame, then swatted the candle from her hand. It hit the floor and went out.

  She seized the one remaining candle and held it in front of her. Absurdly she thought of a movie heroine wielding a crucifix to ward off a vampire.

  The Gryphon took another step toward her. He was laughing, enjoying her fear, savoring the pain he was soon to inflict. It was all a game to him, wasn’t it? Torture, murder—a game. He’d used that very word in the alley. The women he killed were the unwilling contestants in that game, and their heads were the prizes he won.

  Their heads ...

  Suddenly she saw a way to hurt him, really hurt him, let him taste at least a hint of the suffering he’d caused.

  With a sweep of her arm she sent the four jars sliding off the cabinet to shatter on the floor.

  His laughter died in a hiccupping gasp. The sharp, biting odor of formaldehyde rose in the air. He stared aghast at the wreckage of his trophies, the pools of clear liquid soaking into the carpet, the four heads rolling amid the litter of glass shards.

  “No,” he whispered in disbelieving horror. The word trailed into a moan, then rose to a wail of pain that reminded her incongruously of a baby’s cry.

  His head jerked up. His eyes locked on hers. She stared at him past the leaping flame of the candle in her hand.

  “You ... you shit,” he hissed. “You filthy, evil little shit!”

  He tossed the hacksaw aside. Scrabbled at his holster. He would point and shoot. Couldn’t miss at this range.

  Unless he couldn’t see.

  With a puff of breath, she extinguished the candle.