Michael Prescott: Shiver

Walking backward, the three men returned to the kitchen doorway.

“No one enters this room again until SID has photographed and measured those tracks,” Delgado said. “Tell Frommer to make it his first priority once the living room is taken care of.”

“Right.” Gray hurried off to convey the orders.

Delgado was still smiling. “He can make mistakes, it seems. Small ones. But those are the ones that will do him in.”

From outside the house rose a loud male voice shouting questions at the beat cops positioned around the cordon. A reporter, Delgado assumed. Soon dozens of them would swarm over this neighborhood like flies crusting a garbage pail. This afternoon every local newscast would lead with the story, and the city’s panic, already high, would be ratcheted up another notch. Gun stores and home-security outfits would report a new wave of record sales. Not since the Night Stalker case had one killer generated a wave of paranoia of such frightening intensity. People acted as if the phenomenon of serial murder were new to L.A. It was not.

The Gryphon, as Delgado and every other cop in the LAPD knew only too well, was far from the only repeat killer loose in Los Angeles on this chill March morning. No one in the department cared to speculate on how many unsolved homicides were the work of men who killed capriciously, not for gain but for the satisfaction of an anti-life impulse so primal it could scarcely be understood by a normal mind. L.A. had dozens of them, and they were rarely caught.

The Gryphon had garnered more publicity than any of the others, in part because of the sensational aspects of the case, but in greater part because his first two victims, like his third, had been not prostitutes or runaways, not the faceless shadow figures who slept in alleys and turned tricks for a hit of crack, but “decent people,” in the cops’ own parlance. Julia Stern had been a young housewife; Rebecca Morris had been an upwardly mobile junior executive. So far the Gryphon had worked exclusively in L.A.’s Westside, a patchwork of middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, where attractive young women were not supposed to die random, senseless deaths.

But then, nobody was supposed to die a death like that. Life, any life, was not meant to end that way.

Delgado sighed, his brief smile fading.

A moment later Gray returned with the news that Frommer was eager to get a look at the tracked dirt. “He’ll probably put it through microscopic analysis,” Gray remarked.

Delgado was barely listening. “Let’s check out the rest of the house.”

A narrow hallway led past a bathroom, a utility closet, and a guest room that Elizabeth Osborn had turned into a messy, but comfortable, study. At the far end of the hall was the bedroom. The table lamp on the nightstand was unlit. A piano concerto played from a clock radio; apparently the alarm had been set to awaken the woman with soft music. The bed was unmade, the quilted spread flung back hastily. The walls were bare save for an Arizona Highways calendar; the photo showed a grove of golden paloverde trees against a wall of striated purple.

Definitely a relocated Arizonan, Delgado concluded.

A stack of mail had been left on the bureau. Delgado looked it over and saw a Century Cable bill, a mailing from the Sierra Club, a Great Western Bank statement, and a catalog from Crane’s Department Store. The catalog’s cover featured a smiling woman in a straw hat and the cheerful announcement: “Summer’s On the Way!” It was a summer Elizabeth Osborn would never see.

“Seb?” The voice was Gray’s. “You okay?”

“Just… thinking.”

“It gets to you,” Nason said sympathetically. “You start seeing them in your sleep.”

“And hearing them,” Delgado said. “Their voices.”

Nason blinked. “I forgot about that. You kept that out of the papers, didn’t you?”

“So far.”

“Good.”

The tapes, like many other details of the case, had been withheld from the press, partly to protect the victims’ privacy and partly to provide a means of debunking the endless phony confessions that came in over the task-force hotline. If necessary, such information also could be used to distinguish a copycat killer from the original. As yet, thank God, there had been no imitators. In time there would be. In time…

“So how do you figure it?” Nason asked abruptly. “You think maybe he woke her up, hustled her out of bed, cooled her in the other room?”

“No. That’s not his M.O. He doesn’t move them around like pieces on a chessboard.”

“Then what’s the story?”

“Something like this.” Eyes closed, Delgado watched the scene unroll in his mind. “The Gryphon breaks in while Osborn is asleep. He makes some noise that awakens her. She’s not certain if she heard anything or not, so she slips out of bed and looks into the living room to see if anyone is there. The Gryphon strikes from behind. He kills her. Strips the body, tosses her nightgown aside. Rapes the corpse. Takes the head. And leaves the lights on and the door open, as always, when he departs.”

Nason grunted. “Sounds reasonable.”

“Reasonable?” Delgado shook his head wearily. “Oh, no. There is nothing reasonable about it.” He moved toward the doorway, his shoulders sagging. “Let’s get out of here. That goddamn music is giving me a headache.”

The three men returned to the foyer, making a detour around the living room, where Frommer was aiming a video camcorder at the body as he narrated a running commentary on the crime scene. Outside, several news vans were parked around the cordon; cameras were being mounted on tripods; snarled snakes of microphone cable slithered everywhere.

The coroner’s assistant, Ralston, was waiting for Delgado near the front door. He had handled the Gryphon case from the beginning, and he looked very tired of it now.

“Not much I can tell you yet, Seb,” Ralston said in answer to Delgado’s unvoiced question. “So far Frommer has hardly let me touch the deceased. He’s rather protective of his crime scene, as you know.”

“You’ll get your chance. Have you taken the temperature readings?” That part of the pathologist’s examination had to be done as soon as possible.

Ralston nodded. “Rectum and liver. Body temp is ninety-two point three. That puts the time of death at roughly midnight.”

Delgado scribbled in his notepad. “The body wasn’t moved.” It was not a question.

“Uh-uh. Definitely not. That arterial spray makes it pretty obvious she died right here. Standing up, I’d say. The evidence techs will have to chart the trajectories of the spatters in order to fix her exact location.”

“Anything else I ought to know?”

“Nothing you didn’t notice for yourself. There are no apparent abrasions, contusions, incisions, or ligature marks on the limbs or trunk, not even any defense cuts. The damage must have been inflicted exclusively on the head and neck.”

“Just like the others. Did you smell sulfur?”

“No. I don’t think it was a gunshot. We’ve never found any traces of powder on the previous victims.”

“And there’s no sound of a shot on the tapes. More like… cutting or strangling… a combination of the two.” Delgado shook his head.

“Knife or a straight razor,” Ralston suggested. “With a sideways jerk of a sharp blade”-he demonstrated with a slash of his hand across his own throat-“he could tear out the carotid arteries. Plenty of blood then.”

“Yes,” Delgado said, looking at the living-room walls. “Plenty of blood.” He sighed. “Okay. Thanks, Rally. See you at the autopsy.”

He rejoined Nason and Gray, standing a few yards away.

“We were just saying the interval’s shorter this time,” Gray remarked.