Please, God, please make him let me go…
“I want to live,” she said, her voice thick. “I do. Really. So much. I never knew before-how much. And if you… kill me, I won’t get the chance to live, to change. If I can change. I don’t know if I can. Maybe I can’t. Maybe nobody can. Maybe we’re all victims, me and you, everyone. Maybe it’s too late… for all of us. But I’m not sure. I have to find out. Please let me find out. I’m not making sense, am I? I know I’m not. I wish, I wish, I wish I knew what to say…”
“Hush now. You’ve done fine, Miss Alden. The Gryphon is well-pleased.”
She hitched in a breath. What did he mean by that? Would he let her go? He’d promised he would, if she satisfied him. She waited, tears standing in her eyes, feeling a desperate hope.
“You’re very innocent,” he breathed in a voice soft as velvet, “aren’t you, my dear? I like that. You’re not at all like the others in this polluted city. You’re so wonderfully untouched, uncorrupted. Your purity makes me ashamed of having lied to you.”
Her heart twisted. “Lied?”
“I do apologize.”
“What… did you… lie about?” But she knew. She knew already.
“Letting you go. Sparing your life. There never was any chance I would do that.”
Her last hope crumbled, crushed under heavy despair. She moaned. Her mind was a bruise slowly turning black-and-blue.
“You’re far too fine a specimen,” he whispered. “You’ll be such a wonderful addition to my collection.”
Specimen? she thought numbly. Collection?
Then she understood. Her head. That was what he meant. He collected heads. The heads he took from his victims. And now he would take hers.
She tried to speak, couldn’t. Her mouth worked, but no sound came. She closed her eyes, trying to shut out the world and flee this nightmare, then opened them immediately, afraid of the dark that had fallen behind her eyelids, the dark that was so much like death.
The steel wire was tightening slowly, slowly. She was going to die here, in this room, tonight-die before she’d lived-and there was nothing she could do.
“You’re mine now. Miss Wendy Alden,” the Gryphon breathed, his voice like dust, like death. “Mine forever.”
10
The Detective Unit office was a large windowless room partitioned into smaller sections by rows of shoulder-high filing cabinets, many of them topped with bound volumes of the Municipal Code and potted plants that did not require sunlight. Metal desks butted up against one another, sharing their clutter; swivel chairs that rolled on steel casters were scattered here and there like driftwood.
Delgado sat in one chair, turning slowly in his seat, back and forth, back and forth, while two of the task- force detectives. Donna Wildman and Tom Gardner, tossed ideas at him. It was a brainstorming session, the kind of thing cops did when they had run out of strategies. Phones rang in other parts of the room, and people hurried in and out of doors, trailing plumes of cigarette smoke and the odor of sweat.
“So how about working the statues harder?” Wildman said. She was eating a granola bar, and she spoke through a mouthful of molasses and nuts.
“Harder, how?” Delgado countered. “Torres and Blaise have visited every gallery and art school on the Westside.”
“But only looking for somebody who’s a sculptor. What about approaching it from another angle? Wait a minute. The lab report is here someplace.” She dug through a mound of papers on her desk, found a manila folder, scanned its contents. “It says the statues were made of a specific brand of modeling clay. Why don’t we go to art- supplies stores and track down everybody who bought a box of that stuff?”
“I was told it’s a common brand, sold everywhere.”
“If he used a particular kind of sculpting tool to put in the details, we could look for purchases of that.”
“The experts say it was probably a pencil.”
“Maybe we should run in everyone who’s bought a pencil,” Tom Gardner cracked.
Wildman glared at him.
“Okay,” he added, “we’ll limit it to number-two pencils only.”
“Come on, you two,” Delgado said. “Give me some better ideas. Amaze me.”
“I say we post unmarked cars at all crime scenes, twenty-four hours a day,” Gardner said. “Just watching. He may show up again.”
“Why would he?” Wildman asked, sounding irritated at Gardner because he’d shot down her idea.
“These guys do that. Like Ted Bundy. He would go over to a crime scene and fantasize about the murder, relive it, get off on it.” He fingered the tape dispenser on his desk, removing bits of tape and sticking them on his blotter. “I think he brought little souvenirs with him, like the victim’s ballpoint pen, say, or a grocery list- something he’d taken that was never missed. He’d sit there in his car and fondle this thing and think about how good it had felt to kill that girl.”
“We’ve already got beat cars cruising past those buildings every fifteen minutes,” Delgado said.
“Suppose he’s there for only five minutes, and they miss him.”
“What are we going to do?” Wildman asked. “Arrest everybody who parks on the street?”
“Only the ones who look suspicious.”
“Whatever that means.”
Delgado cut off Gardner’s reply. “I don’t think we can spare the manpower right now. But I’ll keep it in mind.”
“I say we push the limits of the physical evidence,” Wildman said. “Physical evidence is what always trips up these guys. For instance, those carpet fibers. I think we were too quick to brush them off.”
“The fibers will convict him,” Gardner said, “not catch him.”
“Maybe they’ll do both. I say we start checking likely places where this guy works. Operate on the assumption that he’s an art aficionado. Look at the galleries, art stores, and other operations like that, and see what kind of carpeting they’ve got. If we find a fiber match, we start checking out the employees-” Her desk phone rang; she grabbed it. “Wildman.”
Delgado was watching her, and he saw her face change as she slowly put down the uneaten portion of her granola bar. She looked at him.
“Another one, Seb.”
He drew a sharp breath. “Damn. God damn.”
“Female Caucasian, decapitated, in a one-bedroom apartment at nine-seven-four-one Palm Vista Avenue. That’s a couple of blocks south of Pico, near Beverly Boulevard.”
“Farther east than the others,” Gardner said.
“I’ll go on ahead,” Delgado told them. He was already rising from his chair, shrugging on his coat. “You two call the rest of the task force, get them out of bed or wherever the hell they are, then hustle everybody over there as fast as possible.”
He did not wait to hear their replies.
The address was twenty minutes from the West L.A. station. As he drove, Delgado felt anger rising in him, the cold familiar anger at the taking of an innocent life. He knew he shouldn’t let himself feel that way; he should remain calm and professionally detached. But he couldn’t help it. He had always become personally involved in the cases he worked. His need to see justice served was a whip cracking over his head, lashing his back, driving him to put in fourteen-hour days and seven-day weeks, never to rest, never to be satisfied.
Yet objectively he knew that there was more to his motivation than moral passion alone. There was his stubborn, angry need to prove himself, to solve every case, to be the best.
He remembered how close Paulson had come to removing him from the investigation this afternoon. At the time Delgado had been sure that his insistence on retaining command of the task force was based purely on a
