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.
