Shiver (8 page)

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 Sebastián 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.

4

From nine to twelve Wendy worked steadily, rarely looking up from her word processor. She typed briskly and accurately, using two fingers; in time with the tapping of the keys, columns of radium-green characters marched across the display screen, forming sentences, paragraphs, chapters. But not the great American novel or anything—just another booklet for Iver & Barnes Consultants, Inc.

Iver & Barnes was an actuarial firm specializing in pension plans for medium-size corporate clients. The people in the communications department, Wendy among them, had the task of explaining the complex plans to the clients’ employees. The most common approach was a pamphlet ten or twelve pages long, written in simple declarative sentences and illustrated with goofy little cartoons. Once you got the hang of it, the actual writing was ridiculously easy, almost mindless; long ago Wendy had learned that each new job involved merely rearranging the same basic phrases in slightly different patterns.

The department functioned as a halfway house for aspiring writers. They arrived fresh out of college, worked for a year or two, and moved on. All of the people who’d been there when Wendy arrived five years ago were long gone. Many had gone into publishing; a few of the braver ones had saved up money, then embarked on a freelance writing career.

But she remained, grinding out paragraphs and pages, going nowhere.

At noon she broke for lunch. She pushed the keyboard away from her and rose from her chair, yawning hugely, then damned Jennifer and her stereo system for the hundredth time. God, was she ever tired. Maybe food would revive her.

She walked the length of the department, passing rows of particleboard cubicles identical to her own. Her lunch was stashed in the compact refrigerator under the water cooler. Kneeling, she opened the fridge and found the brown bag marked with her name.

She was turning to go when she saw two of the newer writers, Kirsten Vaccaro and Monica Logan, approaching. They were deep in whispered conversation. As they came closer, Wendy caught a reference to the Gryphon.

Oh, no. She didn’t want to hear this. But before she could walk away, Monica spotted her.

“Hey, Wendy, you live on the Westside, right?”

Glumly she nodded. “Half a mile from here.”

“So are you scared out of your wits or what?”

“I ... I guess so.”

“Sure glad I’m out in the Valley. You know, I’ll bet when they get this guy, he turns out to be one of those released mental patients.”

Kirsten frowned. “What makes you say that?”

“Because he’s obviously crazy. I mean, totally insane.”

Kirsten was thoughtful. “I don’t know. He’s got to be at least somewhat rational to avoid getting caught.”

“Rational? Him? No way. He’s foaming at the mouth.”

Having lingered long enough, Wendy felt she could permit herself to leave. She had taken her first tentative step away from the water cooler, the paper bag clutched in her fist, when Kirsten turned to her.

“What do you think, Wendy?”

She froze.

“Me?” she asked stupidly.

“Yeah. Is the Gryphon a certified psycho or not?”

She faced the two women, who were watching her expectantly. Hot panic swelled inside her. Nobody ever asked for her opinion. She had no idea what to say. Her mind had gone blank.

“Well, I …” She groped desperately for words. “I think ... I think he probably can’t help doing what he does. Because none of us can really help it, right? Whatever we do. It all goes back to our childhood.”

Monica pursed her lips. “You’re saying the Gryphon is a victim of his childhood?”

Was she saying that? She supposed she was. It sounded kind of ridiculous, didn’t it? Or maybe not. She wasn’t sure. Monica and Kirsten were still looking at her, still waiting.

“He might be,” Wendy said cautiously, searching for a way to squirm free of the snare of words. “I mean, you could look at it like that. But it’s just an idea, that’s all. I guess I’m not really sure one way or the other....”

Her voice trailed off into embarrassed silence.

“Well,” Kirsten said dryly, “I don’t feel sorry for him, no matter how lousy his childhood might have been.” She turned back to Monica. “And I don’t think he’s crazy either. I think he’s just bad news, and when they catch the guy, they ought to string him up by his balls.”

“Ouch,” Monica said. “Nasty.”

“That’s me. The Torquemada of the typewriter,”

The two women laughed. Discussion continued. Wendy slipped away unnoticed. She was trembling.

She returned to her cubicle and sank into her swivel chair. She stared at the computer screen. A paragraph of text stared back at her, the cursor winking maliciously like an evil eye.

Slowly she opened the brown bag and removed a chicken-salad sandwich sealed in Saran Wrap, a can of Diet Sprite, two paper napkins, and a banana. While she ate, she scrolled through the work she’d done this morning, not seeing it, not seeing anything except her own humiliation.

She asked herself why she’d always been so deathly afraid of taking a stand, any kind of stand. Why she froze up like a deer in a splash of headlights the minute anybody asked her anything more controversial than the time of day.

She sighed. The answer, she supposed, was obvious enough; it was contained, in fact, in what she’d said at the water cooler, even though her presentation had been so inept that the logic of the idea had been impossible to follow.

Childhood was the key, the key to everything. The origins of any adult’s secret terrors and painful inadequacies could be traced back to those few precious years when a young life was molded and shaped like clay on a potter’s wheel.

That serial killer must have had a horrible childhood; people like him always did.

But not just people like him.

Wendy could point to no physical mistreatment that had scarred her as a child. No whippings, no molestations, no incarcerations in locked closets. But there were other forms of abuse.

For her entire adult life, she’d found it painfully difficult to think about her childhood or even to remember it. Those years were masked by a fog of amnesia. She hated that fog. Pieces of herself lay concealed behind it, hidden from her—stolen from her—erased from memory as if they’d never existed. But when she tried to poke holes in the fog bank, when she tried to see the truths veiled by smoke and darkness, her mind usually would make a sharp detour, and all of a sudden she would find herself thinking about what to make for dinner or what to wear at work. Oh, the mind was a wonderful thing, all right, and what it was most wonderful at was protecting itself. It put up walls and smokescreens and No Trespassing signs to keep you away from dangerous, forbidden, hurtful memories.