Michael Prescott - Shiver

“I hope you enjoyed that performance. Detective Delgado. I found it exquisite. Mrs. Julia Stern conveyed real emotion, don’t you think?

“Oh, but forgive me; how terribly inconsiderate. I haven’t introduced myself. Call me the Gryphon. I suppose the objet d’art I left with Mrs. Stern is sufficient to make the reference clear.

“You may wonder what I’m up to. Well, I’ll tell you. I’m playing a game. A wonderful game I invented. The object of the game is to take living women and turn them into dead ones.

“Have you ever killed anybody. Detective? In the line of duty, I mean. If so, you may understand what I’ve learned from the game I play, the transcendent truth I’ve discovered.

“Other men, lesser men, measure power in terms of money or political influence or sexual conquests. But I have seen what true power is, and it is not found in checkbooks, voting booths, or bedrooms. No, true power is the power of life and death. Now, consider Mrs. Julia Stern. She wasn’t important, merely one anonymous soul among millions, never to be missed. But when I ended her life, I ended a universe. Yes, a whole universe. The private cosmos that had been Mrs. Stern’s world. The earth, sun, and stars, human history, culture, and art… all of it had existed, for her, only in her own mind. Now Mrs. Stern is dead, and, for her, those things exist no more.

“That is the secret I have learned. To wield power, ultimate power-the power to erase existence, void reality, blot out stars and galaxies with one stroke-it is not necessary to bring on Armageddon. It is necessary only to take a life.

“The God of the Old Testament is said to have created the world in six days. But I can wipe out a world in less than a minute, and I can do it whenever I please. Who, then, is the more powerful? Who is the greater god? The creator of one world-or the destroyer of many?

“Well, enough of this philosophizing. We’re practical men. Detective; you have your work to do, and I have mine. Let’s both get on with it. I know I will. You’ll be seeing more art objects, many more. I hope you’ll take the time to admire their beauty. Art adds so much to our enjoyment of life, doesn’t it? Art and myth and ritual-see how neatly I’ve blended all three. Or perhaps you don’t share my taste in aesthetic matters? Then try to stop me. Do your best.

“Catch me before I kill again.”

The tape faded out.

Delgado switched off the tape recorder, then tugged off the headphones, grateful to escape them. Quickly he returned the cassette and the headphones to the drawer, slamming it shut.

He’d learned nothing new. But he hadn’t expected to. He already knew what little the tapes could tell him.

After the second murder, Delgado had asked the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia, to prepare a psychological profile of the man who called himself the Gryphon. As part of its Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or VICAP, the BSU had amassed files on every modern serial killer, and its experts used the known tendencies of those who had been caught to extrapolate the probable behavior and personal characteristics of the ones still at large.

The BSU analyst, a glib, chatty man named Landers who gave the impression that he enjoyed his work too much, had called Delgado to go over the profile with him. The evidence was necessarily sketchy, the results largely guesswork. Still, it was better than nothing.

“Most serial killers,” Landers told Delgado breezily over the buzz of the long-distance connection, “are adult males in their twenties, thirties, or forties. Typically the younger ones strike quickly, while the older ones draw out the murder, often making their victims beg. On this basis I’m tentatively placing the Gryphon in the upper age bracket. Thirty to forty is my working hypothesis.”

Delgado listened, taking notes, saying nothing.

“The tape indicates that he’s intelligent, fairly well educated. Good verbal skills. Pronounces difficult words without strain-even objet d’art, for Christ’s sake. The name he’s picked for himself suggests a knowledge of mythology, the classics, maybe ancient or medieval history. Let’s see, what else? It’s hard to say for sure, but I think I noted signs of effeminacy in his choice of words. Also a strange sense of humor-well, I guess you’d expect it to be strange, wouldn’t you? Puckish. That’s the word I’m looking for. You know what I mean. Detective?”

“Yes.”

“Now, this is a guy who broke into Julia Stern’s apartment during the day, when he knew she was home. You have to ask why he would do that. Why not ring the doorbell, pretend to be a salesman or a new neighbor? Two possibilities occur to me. One is that he lacks even elementary social skills; he’s withdrawn, a loner-what we call a ‘disorganized asocial’ personality type. For a man like that, breaking in might seem easier than talking his way inside. The other possibility is that he’s actually deformed, disfigured in some way. It’s a long shot, but it could explain the decapitation of the victims. Maybe he projects his self-loathing onto these women and takes their heads as a punishment of himself.

“Of course, there are other possible reasons why he decapitates the bodies. He may use the heads as totems, as sexual objects, or as objects of further violence. There was one guy who hacked off his mother’s head and used it as a dartboard. Or-I hope you’ve got a strong stomach, Detective-he may consume the heads, or parts of them, in order to gain his victims’ life force; conceivably he eats their brains to gain knowledge or their eyes to gain vision.”

“Or perhaps,” Delgado said slowly, “there is a simpler explanation.”

“Such as?”

“I was ten years old, Mr. Landers, when my family moved to the United States from Mexico. That was in 1965. On our way north we stopped to visit Disneyland. I kept the ticket stub for years afterward. I probably still have it somewhere. Every time I looked at it, I remembered the excitement of that day, the escape I’d found from everyday life. For the Gryphon, his victims’ heads may serve the same purpose.”

Landers chuckled. “You ought to be in my line. You can think like them. That’s the whole secret, right there.”

It was a secret Delgado had never wanted to learn.

“Is there anything else you can tell me?” he asked heavily.

“Only the classification,” Landers said. “We classify lust murderers-our term for serial killers-according to their presumed motives. There are four categories we recognize. The first is the so-called visionary killer, the guy who hears voices or sees visions that compel him to kill. Personally I’m skeptical about this category; most of the visionaries turn out to be faking it. But it’s irrelevant anyway, because your man doesn’t mention any voices in his head.

“Then there’s the mission-oriented killer. He feels it’s his sacred calling to eradicate a specific group of people. You get a nurse who pulls the plug on terminal patients, or a Jack-the-Ripper type who kills prostitutes. Well, the Gryphon doesn’t say there was anything about these women that caused him to single them out, so we can ignore this category too, at least for now.

“Third, the hedonistic killer. He murders for sexual gratification and usually performs sex acts with the victim or the victim’s body. Obviously, the Gryphon fits this profile-up to a point. But he doesn’t mutilate the women’s genitals, buttocks, or breasts, as we would expect a classic hedonistic type to do.

“Finally, the power-oriented killer. This is the guy who kills because he likes control, likes to dominate his victims. I think it goes without saying that your man, the Gryphon, is definitely into power and control in a major way. He says he’s greater than God, after all, and he makes his victims pay homage to him before he kills them.