Michael Prescott: Shiver

The dead woman’s hands had both fisted in a cadaveric spasm. If Osborn had been holding the statuette when she died, the clay figure would have been crushed. It was intact. That meant the killer had pried open her dead, rigid fingers to insert the figurine. Peering closely, Delgado detected no tool marks on the skin, no grooves cut by pliers or a screwdriver. Tools had not been needed. The Gryphon had done the job by hand. He was strong, then, with a powerful grip. But Delgado had already known that. It would take a strong man to sever muscle and bone with only a hacksaw. Ordinarily a surgeon’s electric saw would have been needed to do a job of that kind.

The hacksaw, however, was unlikely to have been the murder weapon. Too unwieldy. No, something else had released the spray of blood that measled the walls. Most likely the same weapon that had been used in the other cases. But what?

There was no way to know. Not now.

Delgado stared down at the dark mushroom of blood sprouting between Elizabeth Osborn’s shoulders, crusted brown, soaking into the gaps between the floorboards. It looked eerily like the distorted shadow of the head that was not there. The head that had been sawed off at the base of the neck and taken away.

He sighed, feeling older, much older, than his thirty-six years.

Detective Sebastian Juarez Delgado had spent his entire adult life in the LAPD, and he knew about cops, all cops-plainclothes and uniformed, raw recruits and tarnished brass. He knew how they liked to grouse about their jobs, about the long hours, the bureaucratic paper shuffle, the stretches of enervating boredom interrupted by flashes of electric danger. And he knew, perhaps better than most of them, that such talk was only misdirection, a magician’s sleight of hand.

Overtime, red tape, fatigue, risk-none of that was the bad part of the job, the part that made a young man old. The bad part was facing things like this. Not the physical reality as such, not the lake of blood that had gushed from a severed neck, but the implications to be drawn from the sight. Had Elizabeth Osborn been decapitated in a freeway accident, the condition of her body would have been much the same, but its emotional meaning utterly different.

A man had done this. A member of the human species. A man had hacked through gristle and bone to take the prize he wanted. Had he carried it under his arm, or in a zippered bag, like a bowling ball? Had he whistled cheerfully as he left the house, his night’s work done?

After what seemed like many long minutes, Delgado looked up from the body again and saw that the SID technicians had entered the living room. He nodded to Frommer, the leader of the team; the thin, bespectacled, constantly agitated man had supervised evidence recording and collection on both of the previous cases. He was infuriated by the Gryphon, who so far had refused to leave anything interesting.

“Hello, Eric,” Delgado said, getting to his feet.

“Detective.” Frommer nodded in a distracted way. “Christ, I hate the smell of blood.”

“You should try these.” Delgado tapped his nostrils. “Cotton balls moistened with Aqua Velva. I can’t smell a thing.”

“I experimented with something like that once. Only I used Mennen Skin Bracer. And I’ve tried cigarette filters and swimmers’ nose plugs too. Problem is, when I stick anything up my nose, I feel I can’t breathe. I know it’s irrational-just breathe through your mouth, right? — but I can’t help it. The only thing that works for me is coffee grounds on the stove. Handful of fresh grounds in a saucepan, no water, on a hot burner. In five minutes it masks every other smell in the place.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Frommer stared down at the body. “Jesus, look at her. Just look at her. First thing to do is bag the hands and that goddamned statue. You know, I used to like sculpture.”

Delgado nodded. “So did I.”

Two of the evidence techs in Frommer’s team were busily unpacking their kit bags, removing canister vacuum cleaners, compasses and calipers, four-by-five cameras and video equipment, fiberglass brushes and vials of gray and white fingerprint powder. The cartographer was already plotting the coordinates of the room on graph paper, prior to marking down the exact location of every item of furniture, every ashtray, every bloodstain. The other three would set to work momentarily, snapping photos and bagging evidence. Delgado figured he’d better get out of their way.

Carefully he retraced his steps, backing away from the corpse. On the steps outside, Nason and Gray stood waiting.

“Let’s see the window,” Delgado said tersely.

The two men nodded. Wordlessly they led him down a hallway adjacent to the living room, into a large and well-kept kitchen.

The lights were off, and Delgado left them that way. The wall switch would not be touched until it had been dusted. Wan daylight, filtering through the window curtains, provided some feeble illumination.

Looking around intently, Delgado saw a linoleum floor of indeterminate color, perhaps blue or gray-a built-in electric range-a stainless steel sink piled with last night’s dinner dishes-white steel wall cabinets, charmlessly functional. In one corner a black-paneled side-by-side refrigerator hummed tunelessly to itself; a grocery list was pinned to the door by a magnet in the shape of a saguaro cactus. The saguaro grew almost exclusively in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, and Delgado was willing to bet that Elizabeth Osborn either had recently visited Arizona or had grown up there.

He stepped up to the kitchen window and carefully parted the curtains. The glass had been removed, leaving only a few jagged shards clinging to the frame.

Directly beneath the window there was a dining nook; a three-sided upholstered bench bracketed a small oak-veneer table. A scatter of shining glass fragments dusted the table, the bench, and the floor, but not enough glass to have filled the frame. Delgado turned inquiringly to Nason and Gray.

“Used tape,” Gray said, answering the unspoken question. “Love tap with a blunt instrument. Neatly done.”

Delgado nodded. With strips of tape covering the window, the glass would not have spilled noisily out of the frame even after a soft blow had shattered it.

“Did you find the tape and the glass?” he asked.

“Yeah. He dropped it right outside the window. In a flower bed.”

Delgado nodded. “It’s the first time he’s tried this method.”

“He keeps it interesting,” Nason said.

“Too interesting,”

The Gryphon’s single break-in prior to tonight’s job had been accomplished by picking the lock. He’d sprung a standard latch bolt, apparently by using a loid of some kind-perhaps a credit card or a homemade tool.

Delgado returned his attention to the bench. He saw a few crumbs of dark soil scattered on the tan vinyl upholstery. The killer must have planted his foot on the bench after climbing through the window. Lowering his gaze, Delgado spotted similar specks of dirt on the floor near the table. Perhaps two feet away, there were another few crumbs.

For the first time since entering the house, he smiled.

“I think he’s given us some help this time,” Delgado said softly, speaking more to himself than to the others.

“What do you mean?” Nason asked.

“He tracked dirt into the room. See it? There… and there… and there.”

“Yeah. From the flower bed. But he didn’t leave any footprints as far as I can see.”

“True. But if we measure the distance between tracks, we’ll know the approximate length of his step. From that, we can arrive at an estimate of his height.”

“Shit,” Nason said. “That might work.”

“Retrace your steps carefully,” Delgado ordered.