Shiver

by Michael Prescott

  “Of course.”

  “And I’m afraid I did lose my temper. I shouldn’t have called you ... that word. Such an ugly word. I didn’t mean it. I was upset, that’s all. But I think you knew that. Didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He reached out and ruffled her hair. She bit back the urge to scream.

  “Friends again?” he asked.

  She tried to answer, nearly choked, finally got the word out,

  “Friends,” she said. Somehow she managed a smile.

  “I’m glad.” Then the sadness returned to his face. “Even so, I’m afraid I just can’t trust you, Wendy. I can never tell when you might pull another one of your silly stunts.” He shrugged heavily. “It looks like you’ve given me no choice but to do something I’d very much hoped to avoid.”

  “What’s that?” she whispered.

  He ran his hand through her hair again, his fingers crawling over her scalp like beetles.

  “I’m going to make sure you give me no further trouble, Wendy. No trouble at all.”

  He removed a roll of heavy black electrician’s tape from the drawstring bag.

  “Put your hands behind your back, please.”

  She obeyed. A strip of tape was wound snugly around her wrists, binding them.

  “That’s awfully tight.” She tried to keep her voice level, not to betray her mounting panic. “I think it’s cutting off my circulation.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s what you get for being such a bad girl. I don’t take kindly to people using guns on me, Wendy. I don’t take kindly to it at all.” He pressed his mouth to her ear. “Better be glad I’m in love with you. Otherwise you could be in real trouble.”

  She made no reply.

  “Now how about if I fix you that lunch I promised?” He thrust his fist in front of her face and worked his thumb like a mouth. “Sorright?”

  She nodded weakly. “Sorright.” The word came out like a cough.

  Whistling, he busied himself with the preparations for their meal. Wendy sat in the chair and tugged uselessly at the tape, knowing there was no hope of working her hands free.

  She’d been given one last chance, and she’d blown it.

  No way out now. No escape.

  29

  Delgado drove fast, Lionel Robertson at his side. Hugging their tail was a second motor-pool sedan carrying Donna Wildman and Tom Gardner. Four black-and-whites loaded with eight patrol cops took up the rear.

  The trip would be short; Rood’s address was less than half a mile from the station.

  “Right in our backyard,” Delgado muttered as he steered the Caprice onto Nebraska Boulevard, heading west. “Right under our damn noses.”

  Robertson glanced at him. “You say something, Seb?”

  “Never mind. Look, when we get there, I want you to cover the rear exit, if there is one. I’m going in through the front door with Wildman and Gardner.”

  “Right.”

  “Warrantless entry should be no problem, given the exigent circumstances. I thought about securing a Ramey warrant anyway—it would have taken ten minutes—but that’s ten minutes more than I care to waste.”

  “Believe me, Seb, we’re not going to have to kick this guy loose. You got him. You fucking nailed him.”

  “It’s all circumstantial so far. We’ve established a link between Rood and the four victims, but we’ve got no hard evidence.”

  “Just wait,” Robertson said confidently.

  They arrived at Rood’s address. A group of teenage boys bouncing a basketball watched with mingled curiosity and suspicion as the eight uniformed cops and four plainclothes officers converged on the apartment complex. The U-shaped one-story building, its wood-shingle walls painted an unappealing shade of green, bracketed a courtyard of weed-tufted cement. In one of the units, a dog barked loudly and monotonously in a deep throaty voice.

  According to Khouri, Rood lived in Apartment 2. It was not a corner unit. The occupant could escape only via the front or the rear.

  Delgado sent Robertson and two patrol officers around to the back. A minute later his radio handset squawked with Robertson’s transmission: “Glass sliding door opens onto a patio with a high brick wall. He could probably climb it.”

  “Stay there. I’ll alert you just before we go in.”

  Delgado ordered the remaining six uniforms to fan out silently and position themselves on either side of Rood’s front door. Then he drew his Beretta 9mm. Gardner and Wildman did the same.

  “I hope you two have been logging some hours on the shooting range,” he said, his mouth dry,

  “That’s why they call me Dead-Shot Donna,” Wildman cracked. Nobody laughed.

  Delgado keyed the transmit button on his radio. “Lionel. We’re doing it.”

  “That’s a roger.”

  He nodded to Gardner and Wildman. “Let’s go.”

  Then he was moving up the front steps to the door, throwing open the screen door, raising his foot to deliver a powerful kick to the lock—a second kick—the door popped open, and he was inside, Wildman and Gardner following, the three of them breathing in the smell of air freshener and disinfectant.

  The apartment was dark, the windows curtained, but there was enough ambient light for Delgado to see that the living room was unoccupied.

  They checked out the kitchen. Empty. Bathroom. Empty. Bedroom. Empty.

  “Looks like nobody’s home,” Wildman whispered in a shaky voice.

  Gardner swore.

  Delgado was on the handset again. “Lionel, any activity out back?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Okay. The Gryphon has flown. Come around to the front.”

  He switched to the duplex setting and made a connection on Tac-4 with the West L.A. watch commander. Before leaving the station, he’d requested a Department of Motor Vehicles computer search to learn Rood’s vehicle registration. The watch commander relayed the information, which Delgado jotted down. He was telescoping the handset’s antenna when Robertson stepped into the living room.

  “Lionel,” Delgado said briskly, “I want you to take two officers and search the vicinity for a white sixty-three Ford Falcon.” He recited the license number. “If it’s around, you ought to find it within a radius of two blocks. There’s no shortage of parking spaces in this neighborhood.”

  “Got you, Seb.” Robertson hurried out.

  Delgado looked at Wildman and Gardner. “The three of us are going to toss this place. Quickly but thoroughly.”

  By unspoken agreement they checked out the kitchen first. Delgado tensed his body before opening the refrigerator door. He remembered Jeffrey Dahmer in Milwaukee, the things he had kept in the fridge among the leftovers and the jugs of milk.

  But Franklin Rood was a different story, apparently. Delgado saw nothing unusual in either the refrigerator or the freezer compartment.

  He told Gardner to explore the rest of the kitchen and sent Wildman to look at the bedroom. Then he set to work in the living room.

  There was no dust anywhere, no dirt, no clutter. The place was immaculate, almost obsessively so.

  Clay figurines were displayed around the room. Small, tidy sculptures of mythological subjects: centaurs, dragons, mermaids, unicorns, satyrs, the multiheaded Hydra, the cydops Polyphemus, the Minotaur, the Roc, the Kraken. A clay menagerie.

  No gryphons, though. Rood had found another use for them.

  Near the TV was a stack of videotapes. Delgado loaded one into the machine and watched it for a few moments. A news report on the Gryphon. He saw himself delivering yesterday’s statement to the press, and suddenly a picture came to him of Rood watching this tape, freezing the image, studying the face of his nemesis with hungry, hateful eyes. Delgado shut off the tape as a chill passed over him like a ghost’s caress.

  Nothing else in the living room was of interest. He entered the bedroom, passing under a chin-up bar screwed into the door frame, and found Wildman poring over a stack of bills and receipts.
/>   “Found these in a desk drawer,” she said. “Thought I could find some reference to another address, a second home. No luck.”

  On Rood’s desk lay a chunk of red sandstone, presumably used as a paperweight. Delgado was reminded of the geode of agate on his own desk at work. The comparison disturbed him. He wanted nothing in common with the Gryphon.

  He picked up the rock, wondering where Rood had gotten it. In the Mojave, most likely. Huge projections of sandstone could be seen out there, breaking the skin of the earth like the jagged spines of buried dinosaurs. Small pieces were constantly being chipped off by time or tools.

  Wildman was searching the desk’s bottom drawer. Delgado heard a sharp intake of breath. “Hey, Seb, look at this.”

  She pulled out a thick scrapbook and opened it. The book was crowded with newspaper and magazine clippings about the Gryphon’s murder spree. But not the Gryphon alone; the earliest articles concerned miscellaneous murders and disappearances in Idaho, and later, in the L.A. area.

  “Kathy Lutton,” Delgado read aloud as Wildman flipped pages stiff with glue. “Georgia Grant. Lynn Peters. Stacy Brannon. Erin Thompson. Kelly Widmark. Carla Aguilar.”

  “He did all of them,” Wildman muttered. “God damn.”

  The task force had suspected that the Gryphon had been responsible for some of those killings. Some, but not all.

  “He’s been a busy man,” Delgado said softly.

  His fists clenched briefly, then relaxed. No time for anger now. Later.

  Beneath the scrapbook was a pile of papers, Wildman sifted through them. Photo spreads torn from magazines catering to those who enjoyed violent, sadistic pornography. Crude sketches of bound women subjected to elaborate tortures. A collage of photo cutouts—the heads of fashion models and actresses, neatly scissored at the base of the neck, glued to a sheet of black construction paper.

  “Jesus Christ,” she whispered, her shoulders hunching in an unconscious reaction.

  Delgado let his gaze drift from the ugly images. Scanning the shelves of a bookcase, he saw titles on sculpture, criminology, and medieval torture. Among the books were copies of Bulfinch’s Mythology, The Golden Bough, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The Gryphon had been a character in Alice, hadn’t he? Perhaps that was where Rood had gotten the idea.

  The door of the bedroom closet had been yanked open during the initial search. Inside the closet Delgado found the mixing board Rood must have used to prepare the edited versions of the tapes. Stored with it was a collection of pop-music cassettes. Nothing else.

  He left the bedroom and looked in the bathroom down the hall. The wastebasket under the sink contained evidence that Rood had bandaged his knife wound last night. That information was of no help to anyone now.

  Finally Delgado found himself back in the living room with Gardner and Wildman.

  “What have we learned?” he asked.

  “That he’s got another place,” Wildman said immediately.

  Gardner was skeptical. “How do we know that?”

  “For one thing, the carpet doesn’t match the fibers found at the crime scenes. Rood must have picked up those fibers someplace else. Someplace where he spends a lot of time.”

  “At work,” Gardner said with a shrug.

  Wildman shook her head. “No way. An upscale department store like Crane’s wouldn’t use cheap short-nap carpeting. It’s more like something you’d find in a low-rent office—maybe someplace he’s renting.”

  “And there’s another thing,” Delgado added before Gardner could reply. “Rood doesn’t keep his trophies here. Since he’s unlikely to throw them away, he must hide them at another location. A location that offers privacy—isolation or concealment.”

  “That could be anywhere,” Gardner said.

  Delgado sighed. “I’m afraid so.”

  A rap on the open door. Robertson was back. “No luck, Seb. Car’s nowhere in sight.”

  That was no surprise. Delgado hadn’t expected the Ford to be around. Presumably Rood had stored it in the alley near Sepulveda while using the stolen Dodge. Then he’d switched to the Falcon and driven Wendy to his hiding place.

  He took a moment to gather his thoughts, then clapped his hands.

  “All right, listen up. Donna, you’re going to Crane’s right now. Interview Mr. Khouri and all the employees who knew or worked with Franklin Rood. See if any of them ever heard Rood talk about a weekend getaway spot or a second home—anything that might give us some clue to where he’s gone.”

  “I got you, Seb.”

  “Tom, go to that alley where the Dodge was found. Take two officers with you. Canvass the neighborhood, find out if anyone remembers seeing the Ford Falcon leave the area sometime after nine a.m. If we know what direction he was headed in, we may be able to narrow down the search.”

  Gardner nodded. “I’ll check the locations near the freeway on-ramps too. Maybe somebody saw him get on.”

  “Do that. Lionel, it looks like you’re off art-store duty for good. Now you’re doing service-station duty. Make the rounds of the neighborhood gas stations and auto-repair shops. Ask the attendants and mechanics if they remember ever seeing the Ford. If any of them do, find out if the car has any identifiable features not found in the standard model—customized chrome or grillwork, dents, rust spots, special tires.”

  “Maybe the sucker’s got steer horns on the hood and Old Glory flapping from the radio antenna,” Robertson said. “I sure hope so.”

  “So do I.”

  Delgado left two uniforms to watch the apartment in case Rood returned, then walked back to his car, rubbing his head. Tired. He was so tired.

  He tried to be an optimist. The ‘63 Falcon was a distinctive automobile, far easier to spot than one of the lookalike models produced by contemporary car manufacturers. The APB could yield results. Sure it could.

  But he knew there was no substance to his hopes. L.A. was a city of cars, millions of them, crowding every street and freeway. The chances of finding any one vehicle, no matter how unusual, were remote.

  In his fourteen years on the force, he had faced frustration many times; it went with the job. But he could not recall ever feeling this abjectly helpless.

  Despite his best efforts, the Gryphon continued to elude him; and if Wendy was still alive, whatever time she might have left was rapidly slipping away.

  30

  In a corner of the trailer, the Gryphon was pouring Pepsi-Cola into two Styrofoam cups. He was still whistling cheerily. Wendy recognized the tune. It was that old Eagles song, the one that had been such a big hit for Linda Ronstadt. “Desperado.”

  Abruptly the whistling stopped. A moment later the Styrofoam cups were set down on the checkered tablecloth, followed by a handful of paper napkins and two picnic plates with sandwiches on them. Wendy tried not to look past the plates at the two jars, their contents lit by the candles’ flickering glow.

  The Gryphon settled into one of the folding chairs, facing her from across the table. Candlelight shimmered on his glasses. His eyes behind the lenses, flat and dead, reminded her oddly of the eyes of the two women in the jars.

  “Lunch is served,” he announced with a melodramatic flourish.

  She gazed down at her sandwich. Two slices of white bread with some kind of brown goop overspilling the edges. Peanut butter, she realized. No jelly. Her eyes flicked to the cup of Pepsi. It had gone flat.

  “Gee, this looks good,” she said with whatever conviction she could muster. Then she had an idea. Casually she added, “But, you know, I need my hands free in order to eat.”

  He merely smiled indulgently, the smile of a sage parent who has seen through a small child’s pitifully obvious ploy.

  “No, you don’t, Wendy. I’ll feed you myself.” He picked up her sandwich and raised it to her mouth. “Open wide.”

  “Really, I don’t think I—”

  He wedged the sandwich between her jaws, silencing her. Reluctantly she took a bite. The peanut butter tast
ed like glue; the untoasted bread, slightly stale, had the texture and consistency of a sheaf of newsprint. The gluey, flavorless mixture turned to papier-mâché as she chewed.

  “How about something to wash it down with?” he asked.

  Without waiting for a reply, he lifted a cup and pressed it to her lips. Warm Pepsi flowed into her mouth. She tried to swallow, but the wet pulp of bread and peanut butter got in the way. She coughed, spitting soda on the floor.

  “Can’t,” she gasped. “Can’t do it.”

  He shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid you’ll have to. That’s what you get for being such a naughtykins. Now, come on, eat some more of your sandwich.”

  She looked at the jars again. The pale dead faces. The bloodless flesh.

  “I guess I don’t have much of an appetite right now,” she said softly.

  The Gryphon brushed aside the comment with an irritated wave of his hand. “Not long ago you told me you were starved. Anyway, I went to all the trouble of fixing you a nice lunch, and you wouldn’t want me to think of you as ungrateful. Would you?”

  “No.” She sighed. “No, of course not.”

  “All right, then. So let’s stop being stubborn and eat our nice lunch. Here, I’ll show you the way.” He lifted her sandwich. “This is the train.” With his other hand he gently pried her lips apart. “And this is the tunnel.” Slowly he guided the sandwich toward her mouth. “Choo-choo. Choo-choo.”

  Somehow she managed to consume the rest of the sandwich. When she was done, the Gryphon set to work on his own lunch. He ate quickly and sloppily, smacking his lips, gulping when he swallowed, draining his cup of Pepsi in a series of slurps and gasps. Bread crumbs and droplets of soda spotted the blue uniform. He didn’t notice.

  “You know,” he said suddenly, speaking through a last mouthful of Wonder Bread, “this is nice, Wendy. It’s a genuine pleasure sharing a meal with a beautiful woman. I could get used to it.”

  I couldn’t, she thought. She said nothing.

  “You’ve still got a little soda left. Want it?”

  She didn’t dare refuse. “Sure.”