Michael Prescott: Shiver

Delgado had no doubt that the news conference originally had been scheduled for the purpose of announcing his replacement.

“You don’t need to take any questions,” Paulson was saying. “Just make a statement. Keep it vague: The investigation is ongoing and the task force is currently exploring several promising leads, no further details to be released at this time for fear of jeopardizing the case, et cetera.”

Delgado nodded. “Anything else. Captain?”

Paulson paused in the doorway.

“Just catch him, for Christ’s sake,” he said coldly. “I want that feathered motherfucker grounded-permanently.”

A moment later the door banged shut, and Delgado was left alone in the room.

He returned to his desk and sighed. A little longer, the captain had said. What span of time was implied by those words? Another couple of weeks? Perhaps not even that much, if the Gryphon kept busy. Could he solve the case, make an arrest, in a matter of days? Not unless one of the leads unexpectedly panned out, or the killer started making mistakes, big ones. Well, he could only proceed with the various strategies he’d been following, and hope.

He leaned back in his desk chair and looked around slowly at the narrow windowless room, a room daylight could never reach. One of the overhead fluorescent panels had gone out; the other hummed and buzzed, singing insect songs. In the dreary half-light, the metal file cabinets and institutional-green walls seemed more depressing than usual.

His gaze, tracking restlessly, settled on the nodule of agate he kept on his desk. The egg-shaped stone had been split neatly in half by some accident of nature to expose a mirror-smooth oval of cryptocrystalline quartz banded in concentric circles of green, gold, and neon blue.

Delgado had found the stone in the Mexican desert when he was eight years old, and had invested many hours in its sanding and polishing. He’d been fascinated by the colors, the patterns, and the mystery of the forces that had formed them. If such beauty could be hidden inside a dusty chunk of rock, he’d sometimes asked himself as he stared into the agate’s depths, then what other, greater wonders might the world conceal?

He smiled. Picking up the nodule, he ran his thumb and forefinger lazily, sensuously, over the flat, glassy surface. Handling the stone relaxed him, helped him to think. He kept on rubbing slowly as he reviewed the facts known about the Gryphon.

There was no point in going over it all again, no reason to expect a sudden brainstorm, the mental click of a new understanding or a new approach. But he would do it anyway.

All right. Start at the beginning.

Saturday, December 1. Shortly after nine A.M., Robert Stern drove to a municipal golf course to play eighteen holes with some friends, leaving his wife alone in their apartment. Julia Stern, twenty-four years old and seven months pregnant, took a shower at nine-thirty, according to a neighbor who heard the whistling of water through the pipes. At the same time, the Gryphon easily defeated the simple latch bolt on the apartment’s front door. When Julia, wrapped in a towel, emerged from the bathroom, the killer was waiting. In midafternoon Robert Stern returned to find the front door ajar, the lights on. His wife’s decapitated body lay on the carpet near the bathroom doorway, a clay gryphon in her hand.

Delgado winced, recalling his own first look at the corpse. The hump of the belly. The ragged trunk of the neck.

At the time, no one could have been certain that the killer would strike again. Even after the tape arrived in the mail and Delgado heard the Gryphon’s mocking challenge, he’d found it possible to believe that the murder had been an isolated occurrence. As days passed, then weeks, some of the psychological consultants on the case began to speculate that the Gryphon had committed suicide and rid the city of his presence.

But that was before Friday, February 8. At six-fifteen that evening Rebecca Morris, thirty-one, arrived home from work while her roommate was fixing dinner. Rebecca was in a hurry. Less than a month earlier, she had been promoted to vice president of a computer software firm; that night she was scheduled to attend a reception thrown by the firm’s biggest client. Quickly she changed into a formal ice-blue gown that stressed her statuesque figure and set off her fiery hair and emerald eyes. Her roommate later reported that Rebecca had never looked so enthused, so healthy, so alive. At six-forty-five Rebecca, running late, rushed to the one-car garage stall at the side of the building where her Mazda RX-7 was parked; she lifted the garage door by hand and entered. Apparently she was unlocking the car when the Gryphon slipped into the garage through the open doorway and attacked from behind. At seven-thirty Rebecca’s boss called the apartment to ask where the hell she was. Her roommate, concerned, went down to the garage to see if the Mazda was gone. She discovered a woman’s naked, headless corpse stretched across the two front seats, one hand clutching a clay gryphon. At the morgue she could make a positive I.D. only from the ring on Rebecca’s finger, a ring Rebecca had bought for herself in celebration of her promotion and her exciting new life.

After the second murder, there could be no doubt that the Gryphon meant to go on killing till he was stopped. The task force had been formed, with Delgado in charge; the miscellany of unrelated cases he’d been investigating had been handed over to other detectives, most of whom groused about the additional caseload for days. The second tape had arrived within a week, the FBI had been contacted, and Delgado had begun working twenty-hour days and sleeping on the cot in the corner.

And then the week before last, on Wednesday, March 6, Elizabeth Osborn had lost her life.

Delgado shook his head slowly.

If the women had died in street muggings or bungled burglaries, their deaths might not have seemed so difficult to accept. There was a kind of logic to events like that, a motive and purpose that could be, if not defended, at least divined. Here there was no logic, no motive, no purpose. There was only the terrifying randomness of a restless evil that claimed lives as arbitrarily as an airborne virus or a cloud of poison gas.

All three victims had been young middle-class women; but other than that, no common denominator appeared to link them-not occupation, not background, not religious affiliation, not business associates or friends or doctors. Although all three had been attractive, their physical features had varied as well: Julia Stern, dark-haired and pale-skinned; Rebecca Morris, redheaded and freckle-faced; Elizabeth Osborn, blond and salon-tanned.

As far as Delgado could tell, the three women had had nothing in common except the fact that they were young and vital and alive. Presumably that had been enough.

He turned to a map of the city tacked to the far wall. Three red push pins marked the locations of the murders and suggested the parameters of the Gryphon’s field of operation. It was an area of roughly six square miles, extending west to Bundy Avenue, where Julia Stern had lived; east to Rebecca Morris’s apartment on Beverly Glen Boulevard; south to Elizabeth Osborn’s neighborhood near National Boulevard. Everyone on the task force assumed that the killer lived somewhere on the Westside and was operating reasonably close to home. He was not a drifter; he was settled, using a house or apartment as his base of operations. And he was mobile; he must own or have access to a vehicle.

The three victims had been Caucasian, a fact that virtually guaranteed that the Gryphon was white also; serial killers rarely crossed racial lines. Julia Stern’s murder had taken place on a Saturday morning; Rebecca Morris had been killed at about six-forty-five in the evening; Elizabeth Osborn had died in the middle of the night. Those time periods suggested the possibility that the Gryphon held down a daily nine-to-five job, which would restrict his activities to nights and weekends.