professional commitment to getting the job done. Now he wondered. To what extent had he been moved by motives less noble-pride, grandiosity, an unwarranted self-confidence, and, underlying it, the secret terror of failure and public humiliation?
Stupid greaser couldn’t cut it after all, said an ugly voice in his mind. Always said he was a loser, the spic bastard.
He knew that voice. He had heard it many times-in high school, in college, at the police academy in Elysian Park, in the station-house locker room. It was the voice of unthinking, irrational hostility, focused on him for no reason other than his dark complexion and sharp accent, markers of his place of origin that had made him an outcast in a country not his own.
In Mexico things had been different. There he had been popular, at least as popular as a boy given to remoteness and intellectual abstraction could be. Even so, he had not been happy growing up in Guadalajara. He remembered being bored most of the time, bored with his elders and his peers, impatient to discover a more interesting part of the world. Mexico had been long behind him when he learned to his surprise that Americans found Guadalajara exotic and fascinating, “the Pearl of the West.”
There was little romance in the slum neighborhood where he was raised. There were vendors selling pulque on hot summer afternoons, children playing the hopscotch game bebeleche, flyblown dogs napping in swatches of shadow. Parchment-creased grandmothers sat on stone steps telling stories of Pedro de Ordinales, the wily shepherd who could outwit God and Satan, and La Llorona, the Wailing Woman, who would come in the night to steal away any child who misbehaved. The streets were narrow, the buildings dark, and so were the minds of the people who lived in that part of town, acting out roles scripted by traditions they neither understood nor challenged.
Young Sebastian had been told he should be proud of those traditions and of his heritage. He was a mito mita, half-and-half, his mother descended from the Yaqui Indians, his father from the Conquistadors. A locked box in the parlor was purported to contain a sheaf of yellowed papers that recorded his father’s genealogy, tracing his ancestry to a Spanish captain named Delaguerre who had explored the coast of Mexico in the sixteenth century. But the box had never been opened in Sebastian’s presence, and even as a boy he had doubted there was anything inside. From the beginning, skepticism was natural to him; perhaps he was fated to become a cop.
He was ten years old when his parents took him to live in the United States, aided by an uncle who had become a naturalized citizen, and a prosperous one. In Tucson or Houston or any of a dozen other places, Sebastian might have lived among Mexican immigrants like himself, blending with them; but his uncle’s home was in Indiana, where a boy with a funny way of talking and a strange cast to his skin could not help drawing furtive, suspicious looks.
Grade school was hard; high school was harder. Sebastian became good at fighting; and not just with his fists. The real fight was the fight for respect; and he was smart enough to know that he would win it only if he honed his mind. He studied hungrily, earned top grades, and delivered the valedictory address at his high-school graduation. Two of his classmates, denied a diploma and sentenced to summer school, tried to beat him up after the graduation ceremony. Delgado broke both their noses.
His academic achievement opened the doors of every college in the country to him. He chose UCLA, because Los Angeles was warm and the Indiana winters had been too cold. Even in L.A., three hours from the Mexican border in a city named by Spanish settlers, he discovered prejudice. But it was manageable. Everything was manageable as long as he worked harder than anyone around him.
He was finishing college, uncertain of his future, when the LAPD recruited him. The department needed more minority cops to patrol the barrios, where WASP rookies automatically became targets.
Again racism plagued him. He heard a lot of wetback jokes in his days as a uniformed cop, jokes that bit like small dogs and left scars. But he knew the solution. To fight back with hard work, as he had done in school. To outperform those who looked down on him. To log more hours, take more Academy classes, spend more time on the shooting range or in the gym, read more books and write more reports. To work nights and weekends, sacrifice his social life, forgo any existence at all outside his work. That was the way to win.
His ambitiousness had served his career well. He’d risen swiftly, making detective at twenty-six, then spending two years in Narcotics and four years in Robbery before his transfer to Homicide. At thirty-four he’d earned the rank of Detective II; if he solved this case he might well become a D-III, one of the youngest ever made in the LAPD.
But the price he paid was high, too high, and the worst of it was losing Karen. She offered her love to him, and what did he do with that gift? Wadded it up and tossed it away-because he could not escape his work.
Now he had been handed the most important assignment of his career, the toughest challenge, the case that would make him or break him-and he was failing. Failing.
And another woman was dead.
Delgado guided the Caprice up to the crime-scene ribbon, then switched off his engine. He sat unmoving in the car for a long moment, looking at the apartment building before him. Squad cars and uniformed cops were everywhere; police-band crosstalk crackled and sputtered nervously from car radios and portable handsets. The media had yet to arrive, but a restless, murmuring crowd of onlookers loitered at a barely respectable distance, held back by patrolmen with unfriendly stares. Some fool with a flash camera was clicking off snapshots, perhaps in the hope of selling them to the Times for a small payment of blood money, or perhaps as personal mementos, to be preserved under acetate in his photo album between last year’s trip to Yosemite and next year’s vacation at Walt Disney World.
Suppressing his disgust, Delgado left the car and crossed the yellow ribbon. He flashed his badge at every uniform he passed, not stopping for conversation with any of them. He was in no mood for talk.
The apartment wasn’t hard to find. The door was ajar, the lights on. Half a dozen cops milled around outside; their muttered conversation died away as they saw Delgado approach. Wordlessly they parted to let him through. He reached the doorway and looked in.
Just inside the door, a young woman’s naked, decapitated body, limbs in disarray, lay sprawled on a white pile carpet soaked with glistening blood.
There was no clay statuette in her hand.
Delgado blinked. No, that couldn’t be. The Gryphon never failed to leave his calling card.
A chill shivered through him as he considered the possibility that this killing had been the work of a copycat, some lunatic inspired by the news coverage to imitate the Gryphon, but failing to get one key detail right.
He didn’t want to believe it. One maniac was enough to deal with.
With a sigh, he banished that line of speculation. For the moment he would proceed on the assumption that the Gryphon was responsible for this latest crime. Most likely, the killer had simply altered his usual pattern for some reason known only to him.
Carefully, Delgado stepped through the doorway into the apartment and looked around. It was a modest mid-rent place, neatly kept and unimaginatively furnished. His circling gaze took in a sofa, a coffee table, a potted plant. Corner windows framed a leafy fig tree. A chest-high counter divided the living room from the kitchenette, brightly lit by overhead fluorescents.
In a corner lay a heap of torn, bloody rags. The victim’s clothes, obviously, which the Gryphon had ripped off her body and cast aside. Delgado couldn’t tell what kind of outfit it had been without handling the clothes, and he wouldn’t do that, of course. There was always a chance the Gryphon had neglected his gloves this time and left a nice bloody fingerprint for Frommer and his SID team.
He knelt by the body. The woman was a young
Caucasian, probably in her twenties, perhaps five feet tall. She was slender, as all the Gryphon’s victims had been, with shapely legs and small pert breasts. No doubt she had been attractive. They always were.
Delgado wondered what her name was, what her life had been like, what dreams she’d nurtured. He would learn the answer to such questions soon enough, he supposed. Her name would be determined at the morgue; her lifestyle would be reported by friends, neighbors, and relatives; and as for her dreams… A tape would come in the mail, a recording of her last words, and when he listened to her whispery plaintive voice, Delgado would know what she’d wanted out of life, and what she would never get.
How many more voices would he have to hear?
He got up slowly, feeling tired, very tired. He backed away from the corpse, careful to disturb nothing around it, and returned to the doorway, where the uniformed cops were watching him intently, as if trying to read his
