Briefly he comforted himself with the thought that, even if the Gryphon escaped from the car before it exploded, he could not have outrun the brushfire that followed. But the wind had been gusting westward; if the Gryphon headed east, away from the flames, he could have descended to Thornwood Place, then hurried through the network of intersecting streets till he hooked up with Nichols Canyon Road a mile to the south. From there it would not have been difficult for him to find his car, parked on some dark side street, and drive off, unnoticed in the confusion.
Yes, Delgado decided as he planted one shoe on the spur of granite and stood looking at the wreckage three yards away. The Gryphon could have done that. But had he?
Slowly he approached the car. Without looking back, he knew that the other detectives had halted at the edge of the rock, watching him tensely.
The car ticked and hissed and creaked, sounds of the jungle or the swamp. Every window had exploded in the intense heat, and the spray of glass fragments littering the ground had melted, fusing with the rock to form lumpy starbursts, transparent as ice. Picking his way among the slippery mounds, Delgado reached the driver’s side of the car, taking care not to touch the smoldering metal, and peered in through the twisted window frames.
The front and back seats were craters of ash. Plastic stalactites dripped from the dashboard. Cinders drifted lazily in the air like dust motes.
There was nothing in the car. Nothing. No human remains.
Delgado turned and shook his head once. “Gone.”
“The scumbag might be dead anyway,” Tom Gardner said with desperate optimism. “Even if he jumped clear, he could have been torched. The whole mountain went up like a bucket of super premium.”
Delgado shrugged. He wasn’t hopeful. “Let’s fan out and see.”
They obeyed. Delgado remained at the car, circling it slowly, looking for clues he did not find. He wondered if this man could ever be killed.
“Seb!”
The cry was Donna Wildman’s. She stood near the black remnant of a scrub oak thirty feet away, her outstretched arm arrowed at something in the brush.
Delgado clambered off the rock and ran to her. Looking down, he saw a body lying facedown on the ground, burned so badly that most of its skin had crisped like bacon and peeled off. The body was nude, the clothes apparently incinerated along with the flesh.
“Son of a bitch.” That was Eddie Torres. Delgado glanced up and saw the other detectives ringing the scene. “We got Tweetie Bird, after all.”
But Delgado didn’t think so. An ugly suspicion was taking shape in his mind.
“Turn him over,” he ordered, his voice ominously low.
Tallyman and Robertson donned plastic gloves and gently rolled the corpse onto its back. The front of the body was crusted with dark soil.
“Scrape him clean.”
The two men wiped away the filth, exposing the corpse’s face, preserved from the fire by the dirt. One sightless eye gazed up at them; the other was a bloody hole.
“Oh, Christ,” Blaise whispered. “It’s Sanchez.”
Delgado nodded, unsurprised.
Harry Jacobs scratched his jaw. “Was he thrown here by the force of the blast, you think?”
“No.” Delgado knelt by the body. “He was dragged.”
With the flat of his hand, he wiped a long strip of grime from Sanchez’s chest. The same dirt that had protected his face from incineration should have protected the front portions of his clothes, as well. But his uniform was gone. Only a soiled undershirt remained.
“Dragged… and stripped.”
Then Delgado’s radio was in his hand, his finger pressing the call button.
“Eight William Twenty. I need to have Eight Lincoln Ninety meet me on a Tac frequency.”
He waited, heart pounding, while the female dispatcher selected an available frequency and contacted 8L90, the watch commander at the Butler Avenue station.
“Eight Lincoln Ninety”-the dispatcher’s voice crackled over the handset’s speaker-“meet Eight William Twenty on Tac six.”
Delgado switched the handset to Tac 6 and keyed the mike. “Eight William Twenty to Eight L Ninety.”
“Eight L Ninety, go,” said the gravelly voice of Lieutenant Nat Kurtz.
“Nat?” Delgado fought to keep his own voice level. “I have some news here that won’t wait.”
“Hey, so do we, Seb. We’ve got what you might call a situation. The unit dispatched to Cedars just called in. The civilian they were sent to pick up is gone. Hospital staff reports she left with another officer less than five minutes ago. The guy was in uniform, but he’s nobody we know. And here’s the worst part. One of the security guards got a look at the mystery cop’s nameplate.”
Delgado closed his eyes. He barely heard the watch commander’s next words. He didn’t need to hear them.
“The name on the tag was Sanchez.”
23
Wendy was gazing past the cop in the driver’s seat, watching the modest high rises that lined Santa Monica Boulevard sweep by, when suddenly it came to her, wordless and unsettling-an eerie sense of deja vu.
Blinking, she shifted her focus from the view framed in the windshield to the cop directly before her. She could see nothing of him but the top of his hatless head rising over the headrest. A few wisps of curly brown hair.
She stiffened.
The armchair in her living room. A glimpse of a stranger’s head as he ducked down.
The same brown hair she saw now.
No. Crazy. Impossible.
She was turning paranoid, that was all. Probably half the male population in America had brown hair, for God’s sake.
Calm down, Wendy. He’s a police officer. He has to be.
But what if he weren’t?
It occurred to her that a police car, even an unmarked car, ought to be equipped with a special radio, as well as a microphone clipped under the dash and other paraphernalia she remembered from Sanchez and Porter’s cruiser last night. As surreptitiously as possible she peered between the two front seats. She saw no microphone, no squawkbox, only what looked like a perfectly ordinary AM/FM radio and… and a cassette player.
No police car would have a tape deck in it. She was certain of that. Almost certain. But suppose this car had been confiscated in a drug bust or something. Then it would have come with all sorts of options already installed. Okay, that made sense-maybe-but it still didn’t explain the absence of a police radio. Unless the radios in unmarked cars were concealed in some way. That might be the answer.
But she wasn’t convinced.
She glanced around at the interior of the car, looking for a way out. Just in case, she told herself, just in case.
There was no way out. She was trapped. Had the Dodge been a four-door model, she could have thrown open a rear door and jumped clear if necessary. But the car was a coupe, and from the backseat she couldn’t reach the door handles.
She remembered lying on the floor and thinking of a coffin. Her coffin.
Oh, come on, she told herself shakily. Take it easy, will you?
But she couldn’t take it easy. She kept staring at the brown curls above the headrest, while she thought of Officer Sanchez, whose body, according to Delgado, hadn’t been found.
Had she checked the nameplate on this man’s uniform? She knew she hadn’t.
The car reached Sepulveda Boulevard. Abruptly the cop-if he was a cop-spun the steering wheel hard to the left, veering south.
But the police station wasn’t south. It was west. Due west.
Wendy was trembling now. Trembling all over.
She cleared her throat and tried to act casual and unconcerned. “Hey, aren’t we, uh, heading the wrong way?”
“Well, yes, I guess you could say so,” he answered laconically as auto-body shops and health spas ticked past. “Thing is, I believe we’ve got one of those TV news vans on our tail. So I’m taking a little detour to shake him loose.”