Michael Prescott: Shiver

Those bad nights would pass, as would the nagging sense that she was living her life with blinders on, imposing a kind of tunnel vision on herself, moving through the blur of her days without risking a glance at anything she hadn’t seen before. But the fear, the constant tension twisting her gut, would remain.

How long could she continue this way? How many more years would she waste, hiding from the world, eating dinner alone and talking to herself and watching too much TV? Would she still live as she did now when she was forty? When she was sixty? Was this the shape the rest of her life would take?

“No,” Wendy whispered, chilled by the thought. “No, I won’t let it be like that.”

She sat up straight at the wheel. A wild notion seized her. She would not go to work today. She would stop at a pay phone, call in sick, then drive up the coast to Santa Barbara-she’d always meant to go there, and it was only two hours away-and spend the day wandering the city, exploring out-of-the-way shops, buying presents for herself. Perfume, maybe. Or a necklace. A beautiful gold necklace. She’d wanted one for so long, and Jeffrey never gave her jewelry. He never gave her anything at all.

Well, she’d find a necklace she liked and buy it for herself. Perhaps she would even stay overnight in a hotel, make it a real adventure. And she’d never tell anyone, not Jeffrey, not her friends at work, not her parents. Nobody would ever know. It would be her secret. Her special day.

She would do it. She was entitled to go a little crazy once in a while, wasn’t she? Sure, she was.

Wendy smiled, pleased with the idea. She kept thinking about it, adding detail and nuance, imagining every shop she would visit in Santa Barbara and all the charming knickknacks she would buy. She was still mulling it over and smiling when she pulled into the parking garage of the Century City office building where she worked, took a ticket, found a space, and parked.

On her way to the elevator, she checked her watch.

Eight-fifty-five.

She was on time. Of course.

The morning had not gone well.

Delgado should have known he was in for a bad day when at six A.M. he was awakened from a troubled sleep on his office cot by shouts and running footsteps in the hall. It seemed that a juvenile offender on his way to the holding cells at the rear of the station had somehow appropriated a can of tear gas from the arresting officer’s utility belt. A dozen cops had the kid surrounded, but he kept yelling that if they tried to take him down, he’d Mace them.

Delgado decided to put some of his conflict-resolution training to work. He ordered the other officers to back off, then approached the kid and began speaking softly, reasonably, in the calming voice of gentle authority. He tried not to think about the Beretta 9mm service pistol snugged in the pancake holster under his jacket. There was a chance that the kid could blind him with a shot of Mace, then grab the gun away from him while he was incapacitated.

Their conversation lasted seven minutes, a span of time that, to Delgado, seemed much longer. Finally the kid handed over the tear-gas canister, and the uniforms converged on him in an angry rush. Delgado waited till the kid had been locked up, then returned the Mace to the officer who’d lost it. “Try keeping an eye on this,” he told the man dryly.

Not long afterward, a disappointing piece of news reached him. Albert Garrett was not the Gryphon. Of course Delgado had known that Garrett was a long shot. Even if a man was charged with beating his wife into unconsciousness, and even if that same man happened to work in an art store, where he’d displayed a knack for modeling clay curios, he was not necessarily the city’s most notorious serial killer. But when a blood test identified Garrett as AB positive, a match with the Gryphon, Delgado had permitted himself cautious optimism.

A seven A.M. telephone call had extinguished his hopes. Garrett had been positively alibied for the night of the Osborn murder; moreover, it appeared that his whereabouts on the day of Julia Stern’s murder had also been accounted for.

The rest of the morning had been taken up with phone calls and hurried conferences that wasted a great deal of time and seemed to accomplish nothing. Delgado wondered why so much of policework was like that. Bureaucracy was part of the reason. Cops were only bureaucrats with guns anyway. A depressing thought; but then, it had been a depressing day.

He sat at his desk, a pile of notes spread on his stained and dog-eared blotter, steam rising from a Styrofoam coffee cup. Behind him was a laminated noteboard that had become an abstract artwork of half-erased flow charts and scribbled phone numbers. Outside the closed door of his office, the station echoed with the clamor of ringing telephones, bursts of static from police radios, and boisterous voices, mostly male and often profane.

He glanced at his watch, confirming that the time was eleven A.M., then swiveled slowly in his chair to survey the seven men and one woman assembled before him. A few were seated in metal chairs they’d brought in from the squad room; most stood leaning against file cabinets or walls. None looked happy.

He was seeing the key members of the special task force hunting the Gryphon. All of them were veteran Homicide detectives. Individually or in pairs they supervised teams of less-experienced detectives and uniformed cops.

There was one man in the room who was not part of the task force. The division commander, Captain Bill Paulson, sat in a corner sipping herbal tea from a seemingly bottomless mug.

“All right, everybody.” Delgado’s calm, authoritative voice instantly silenced the low babble of conversation. “Let’s go over what we have.”

He summarized the situation they were faced with. Nearly two weeks had passed since Elizabeth Osborn’s murder, and with the elimination of Albert Garrett as a suspect, the task force appeared to be no closer to finding the killer.

The only recent development, one that was not unexpected, had been the delivery on Friday of the third tape. Over the weekend Delgado had listened to it many times; he now had a new voice to haunt his sleep.

Frustration was building. Delgado did his best to boost morale. “The case could break wide open at any time,” he reminded them. “So let’s hear what you have. Eddie?”

Eddie Torres frowned. “The spotters at the funeral saw a few unfamiliar faces, but we’ve checked out those guys, and they’re clean. The photos SID snapped of the gawkers at the Osborn crime scene haven’t yielded diddly. We’ve compared them to the crowd shots from the first two murders, and we can’t make any matches. Two black-and-whites are running regular patrols of Osborn’s neighborhood, and they’ve caught a few thrill seekers nosing around, but nobody interesting.”

“And the hardware stores?”

“No luck on the hacksaw or blades.” Torres sighed. “Basically, Seb, we’re batting zero.”

“Maybe not for long,” Delgado said, trying to sound reassuring. “Donna, Harry, how about you?”

“Still at it, Seb,” Donna Wildman answered. “Going through Osborn’s Rolodex. She had a lot of friends and even more business associates.”

“We’ve finished interviewing her neighbors,” Harry Jacobs added. “They barely knew her, as usual in the big city. And we’ve found her datebook, so we’re calling up her old boyfriends and, I think, scaring the shit out of them.”

“That can’t be helped.”

“As for linking her with the other victims-so far, nothing.”

“Her ex-husband?”

“Alibied,” Wildman said. “Yeah, that occurred to us too. Guy cools the first two just to make the third one look random. But it turns out that only happens on TV.”