Michael Prescott - Shiver

She twisted the top of the cylinder counterclockwise, and the beam winked out, and then three shots exploded, blue muzzle flashes cutting the darkness, and she was screaming.

Delgado jumped out of the helicopter even before it set down on the road. He sprinted toward the Falcon. A yard away he stopped, read the license plate, and almost smiled.

Rood’s car.

Drawing his Beretta, he approached the trailer. He wanted to make sure the door visible from this angle was the only exit before he went in. The two Air Support Unit officers would have to cover him. Like all flight officers, they were armed, and they would have been required to log time on street patrol.

As Delgado drew nearer, he became aware of faint, muffled sounds from inside the trailer. Voices? Perhaps.

A sudden loud pop, like a firecracker. Another. Another.

Gunshots.

A woman’s scream, abruptly cut off.

Wendy’s scream. He knew it. Rood was killing her. Killing her right now.

Then he was racing for the trailer door, his jacket flapping around him, shoes kicking up desert dust.

Rood knew exactly what had happened. Wendy had found his Tekna Micro-Lite in the canvas bag and turned it on without realizing what it was. That was why her face had appeared briefly in the gloom, a white circle lit by the beam. Then the light had vanished, and he’d aimed and fired three times in the direction of the blue image fast fading on his retinas.

He was fairly sure he’d hit her. He’d heard her sudden cry, a cry of either pain or fear. She was silent now. Dead, perhaps, or unconscious. Or, just possibly, unhurt and hiding.

He needed to see. Needed light. But how? He’d already checked his pockets and discovered that his cigarette lighter was missing. He must have put it down absent-mindedly on one of the tables. He couldn’t find it now.

The door, then. Of course.

He would open the door and let in the sun.

Swiftly Rood moved toward the door, feeling his way. He hoped Wendy wasn’t dead. He hoped he’d only wounded her. He wanted to take more time with the killing, wanted her to suffer, wanted to watch her eyes grow huge as he pressed the hacksaw’s blade to her throat and began to stroke. That would be fun, such fun. Then, when she was dead, he would take her headless body and make it his. Yes, and take her head too. His manhood, swollen and empurpled, would slide into her screaming mouth and find release.

Let her try to rob him of his power then. Rood chuckled. Just let her try.

His questing hand slapped the door. He groped for the lever that controlled the dead bolt, found it, and retracted the bolt with a click. He turned the knob. The door swung open and daylight flooded in like water cascading through a burst dam, and a man was there.

He stood in the doorway, his tall figure outlined in an aureole of sun. Rood took a step back, staring at his face, at the jet-black hair swept back from his high forehead, at the sharp, hawklike nose, at the angry mouth bracketed by chiseled grooves.

He knew that face. He’d studied it in newspaper photos and on television newscasts. He’d memorized every detail.

“You,” Rood said, his voice hushed.

Detective Sebastian Delgado nodded once. “Me.”

Delgado had been poised to shoot off the locks securing the trailer door when suddenly the door opened from inside and he found himself facing a man in a police officer’s uniform-a man with a gun held loosely in his hand, pointing down-a man who was, of course, Franklin Rood.

Shock held Rood paralyzed. He muttered one word, signifying recognition, and Delgado answered, confirming it, and then before Rood could react, before he had time to raise the gun hanging uselessly at his side, Delgado struck.

He lashed out with his pistol and whickered it across Rood’s face, breaking off one stem of his glasses, then seized Rood’s gun hand and twisted hard. Rood’s fingers splayed, and the Beretta dropped from his grasp. Delgado spun him around, put him in a choke hold, and hauled him out of the trailer onto the landing of the iron staircase. Rood drove his elbow into Delgado’s abdomen. Delgado took the blow without flinching, then shoved Rood headfirst down the stairs. He hit the ground on his side and tried to rise, but already Delgado was on top of him, slamming his face into the dirt again and again, then yanking Rood’s hands roughly behind his back and pinning them there.

He fished a pair of handcuffs from his jacket pocket, snapped them on, and rolled Rood onto his back, hands manacled behind him. Rood gazed up at him, breathing hard. His eyes, half-concealed behind the glasses askew on his face, were small and gray and lifeless. They caught the sunlight, glittering colorlessly like flecks of pond scum.

A moment passed while the two men studied each other. Then slowly Rood smiled.

“The Gryphon claimed another victim, Detective,” he whispered. “The loveliest one of all.”

Delgado stiffened.

“Go in and see.” It was the same taunting voice he’d heard on the tapes, the voice that had defied him to catch the Gryphon. “Go on.”

Delgado raised his service pistol and tried to remind himself of all the reasons why he couldn’t pull the trigger.

Then the Air Support Unit officers ran up, their weapons drawn.

“Cover him,” Delgado snapped.

He turned and rushed up the stairs.

The voices he’d heard faintly from outside greeted him as he entered the trailer. He recognized them now. The voices of Julia Stern and Rebecca Morris and Elizabeth Osborn, which had spoken to him so many times, first on tape, then in the depths of dreams.

The interior of the trailer was a long narrow space, dimly illuminated by the sun through the doorway. There was no other light. Delgado scanned the room and saw four round objects on the floor perhaps twenty feet from where he stood. Sudden fear clutched his stomach as he realized what they were.

Heads.

But Rood couldn’t have taken Wendy’s head, not if he’d shot her just moments ago. Unless he hadn’t been shooting at her. The shots might have signified something else entirely.

There was only one way to know.

Tensely Delgado moved closer. He identified the heads one by one. Julia Stern, Rebecca Morris, Elizabeth Osborn. The fourth was turned facedown, her hair blondish in the uncertain light.

With the toe of his shoe he turned the head over, then relaxed slightly. The face was one he didn’t recognize. Jennifer Kutzlow’s face, perhaps.

“Wendy?” he called.

No answer.

He crept past the cabinet, avoiding the heads haloed in chemical puddles. On a small folding table, he saw three cassette players, their red diodes glowing to indicate that the power was on. He switched them off, and the voices fell silent. All but one, whimpering softly.

That voice was not on tape.

“Wendy?” he said again, hope and apprehension mingled in the word.

The sound was coming from the rear of the trailer, far from the sun. He moved through the deepening gloom, squinting. Then he saw her.

She was huddled behind a bookcase. She must have pulled it away from the wall to make a hiding place. Curled up in a tight fetal ball, her arms locked around her knees, she was shivering and crying. She didn’t seem to know he was there.

“Wendy, it’s all right now. We’ve got him.”

She gave no reply.

He knelt by her and looked her over. He saw no blood, no sign that she’d been knifed or shot. If Rood had fired at her, he’d missed.

“Wendy. Talk to me.”

Blinking, she looked up at him through a skein of hair. He saw that her blouse was open and her breasts had been badly bruised.

“Hello, Detective,” she said with a note of surprise.