“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.
“So my tentative conclusion is that he’s a mixture of the last two categories. A sexually twisted sociopathic personality working out his frustrations by means of a violent power trip.”
‘“All right, Mr. Landers. Thank you. I take it you’ve covered everything I need to know about serial killers.”
“Except for one last point.”
“Which is?”
“They’re damn hard to catch.”
In the final analysis, however, Delgado based his understanding of the killer not on the BSU’s psychological profile, but on a fragment of ancient history that he remembered from one of his college classes-a small, bloody episode that merited barely a footnote in most texts, but which had been printed indelibly on his mind.
In A.D. 408 the grand minister Olympius had ruled the western half of the Roman Empire through the intermediary of the weak-willed and ineffectual emperor, Honorius. A lifetime of manipulation, scheming, and murderous betrayal had lifted Olympius to a position of nearly absolute power. Only one significant threat still faced him, the threat posed by the militant Goths, who wanted to claim the Empire for themselves. The Gothic armies had the manpower and the martial skills to defeat any forces loyal to the emperor. But they were held in check by the knowledge that their wives and families, sixty thousand women and children who had settled in Italian towns, were at the Romans’ mercy.
Olympius had everything he wanted. He controlled the Empire. He ruled the world or what was then known of it. As long as those sixty thousand hostages were his, the Goths could do nothing.
Olympius ordered the hostages killed.
There was no logic to what he did. In murdering those sixty thousand, he ensured his own downfall. He freed the Goths to move against him and avenge their loved ones. He must have known the consequences of the orders he gave; yet he gave them anyway.
Delgado’s teacher, perhaps embellishing the story, reported that as the slaughter was carried out, the bodies heaped high, and the mass graves filled, Olympius capered in his palace, exulting with frenzied glee: “This is greater than the Empire!”
Delgado believed the Gryphon was a man like that.
People assumed that anyone capable of senseless murder must be deranged. The popular stereotype, endorsed to a large extent by psychologists and sociologists and bright young experts like Landers of the BSU, was that of a man driven by irresistible impulses, unable to control his wild urges.
Delgado disagreed. Whatever his inner compulsions, the Gryphon was in final control of his actions. He knew what he was doing, just as he knew how to reach the police if he wanted to confess, or a psychiatrist if he wanted to get help. He planned his crimes with care, taking elaborate pains to avoid leaving evidence that might lead to his arrest. Afterward he showed no sign of remorse or even regret for what he’d done. Quite the contrary. Like Olympius, or like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, he reveled in death, intoxicated by the bloody elixir of the suffering he caused.
There was a word for such a man, a word so simple it had been all but forgotten in this complex modern age. A word Delgado’s grandmother in Guadalajara had known.
Evil.
Delgado nodded. Oh, yes. There was good and evil in the world. Underlying each of these three murders was the will of the man responsible, his private volition, his conscious choice to do violence to the innocent. He had felt the need to kill, and rather than resist that urge, he had given in to it, had acted on it three times and laughed about it later. His compulsions did not drive him; he allowed himself to be driven by them. And for what? An illusory sense of power, a sexual thrill, a few hours of fun. He was a man who took pleasure not in living, but in denying life to others.
Delgado stared moodily at the map on his wall, at the three red dots scattered across L.A.’s Westside. Somewhere in that sweep of lookalike houses and anonymous apartments and gas stations and stores, there was a killer who struck with the brutal impersonality of accident, an Olympius for a meaner and sorrier age. He fashioned his clay sculptures and then he played his game, choosing victims by some means Delgado could not guess, stalking them, killing them, and taking his hideous souvenirs.
Delgado knew everything about that man, except his name.
6
Franklin Rood stepped dripping out of the shower.
He took a shower every afternoon at four-thirty, immediately after getting home from work. He had a strong belief in the importance of personal hygiene. Many of the world’s problems, he felt, could be solved or at least significantly ameliorated if the common herd of people simply learned the value of cleanliness. Instead, just look at them, greasy and unwashed, sweat-stained and foul-smelling, the filth and dreck of the human cesspool. Disgusting.
Briskly he dried himself with a clean white towel, a towel as fresh and new as any that might be found in a hotel bathroom; Rood had no tolerance of dirty laundry, of anything dirty. He was, he supposed, a rather fastidious man. That was a nice word, wasn’t it? Fastidious. He said it out loud, enunciating each syllable clearly, then grinned at the mirror. What a fine smile he had. He looked lovingly at himself, freshly washed, his brown hair tousled and ropy, the skin of his shoulders flushed with the heat of the shower spray.
In the bedroom he put on his glasses, snugging the stems behind his ears, then dressed briskly in blue denim jeans, a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to expose his muscled forearms, and white Reebok running shoes. The Reeboks were excellent for his purposes, permitting rapid movement while ensuring relative silence, and he’d sprayed them liberally with a silicon formula to keep off the worst of the stains.
On his way out of the bedroom, he paused to execute half a dozen pull-ups on the bar screwed into the doorframe. He did them easily, feeling no strain. Every morning and evening he performed a minimum of twenty chins and twenty squats to keep his arms and legs in condition.
