A moment passed while the two men studied each other. Then slowly Rood smiled.
“The Gryphon claimed another victim, Detective,” he whispered. “The loveliest one of all.”
Delgado stiffened.
“Go in and see.” It was the same taunting voice he’d heard on the tapes, the voice that had defied him to catch the Gryphon. “Go on.”
Delgado raised his service pistol and tried to remind himself of all the reasons why he couldn’t pull the trigger.
Then the Air Support Unit officers ran up, their weapons drawn.
“Cover him,” Delgado snapped.
He turned and rushed up the stairs.
The voices he’d heard faintly from outside greeted him as he entered the trailer. He recognized them now. The voices of Julia Stern and Rebecca Morris and Elizabeth Osborn, which had spoken to him so many times, first on tape, then in the depths of dreams.
The interior of the trailer was a long narrow space, dimly illuminated by the sun through the doorway. There was no other light. Delgado scanned the room and saw four round objects on the floor perhaps twenty feet from where he stood. Sudden fear clutched his stomach as he realized what they were.
Heads.
But Rood couldn’t have taken Wendy’s head, not if he’d shot her just moments ago. Unless he hadn’t been shooting at her. The shots might have signified something else entirely.
There was only one way to know.
Tensely Delgado moved closer. He identified the heads one by one. Julia Stern, Rebecca Morris, Elizabeth Osborn. The fourth was turned facedown, her hair blondish in the uncertain light.
With the toe of his shoe he turned the head over, then relaxed slightly. The face was one he didn’t recognize. Jennifer Kutzlow’s face, perhaps.
“Wendy?” he called.
No answer.
He crept past the cabinet, avoiding the heads haloed in chemical puddles. On a small folding table, he saw three cassette players, their red diodes glowing to indicate that the power was on. He switched them off, and the voices fell silent. All but one, whimpering softly.
That voice was not on tape.
“Wendy?” he said again, hope and apprehension mingled in the word.
The sound was coming from the rear of the trailer, far from the sun. He moved through the deepening gloom, squinting. Then he saw her.
She was huddled behind a bookcase. She must have pulled it away from the wall to make a hiding place. Curled up in a tight fetal ball, her arms locked around her knees, she was shivering and crying. She didn’t seem to know he was there.
“Wendy, it’s all right now. We’ve got him.”
She gave no reply.
He knelt by her and looked her over. He saw no blood, no sign that she’d been knifed or shot. If Rood had fired at her, he’d missed.
“Wendy. Talk to me.”
Blinking, she looked up at him through a skein of hair. He saw that her blouse was open and her breasts had been badly bruised.
“Hello, Detective,” she said with a note of surprise.
“Call me Sebastian.”
“Yes. Yes, I’ll do that.”
She became aware of the tears streaking her face and wiped them away self-consciously.
“I was strong,” she told him, as if in explanation or apology. “Really. Right up to the end. But I guess I… I just don’t like the dark.”
Delgado smiled. “Well, you’re out of the dark now. Out of it for good.”
36
“Franklin. Hey, Franklin. You ever fuck your mama?”
“Yeah, she suck you off, weirdo?”
“Bet you fucked her like you fucked them dead girls.”
“Your mama ain’t here to help you now, asshole.”
“Nobody’s here to help you, Griff.”
“You’re gonna have yourself a serious accident.”
“Gonna die. Franklin. Baby-killer gonna die.”
“Baby-killer gonna die!”
“Baby-killer gonna die!”
Scum. Rabble. Filth.
Rood sat on the cot in his cell, staring straight ahead, trying not to hear the voices of the caged animals around him, the chattering monkeys in this human zoo. He’d always despised the gutter garbage of humanity, the street trash, and now he was penned up with them, surrounded by their foul smells and coarse jokes and ugly, evil threats.
At first he couldn’t understand why he’d been chosen as the focus of their collective hatred. Then gradually he’d come to realize that there was a kind of social hierarchy among prisoners. Rapists were very low on the scale, but lower still were murderers of women. And lowest of all, at the very bottom, were killers of pregnant women.
Mrs. Julia Stern had been pregnant.
“Franklin… oh, Franklin…”
The big black convict in the adjacent cell always called him by his first name, pronouncing it in a girlish falsetto that contrasted sharply with the deep baritone of his normal speaking voice. It had taken Rood several days to realize that by saying the word in this way, the man was insinuating that Rood was a homosexual.
“You got yourself a real pretty set of choppers there, Franklin. But I figure to do a little dental work on you.”
“Es dentista!” screeched one of the Hispanics farther down the row, laughing wildly.
“Gonna knock out all your damn teeth,” the man went on, his voice slowing, deepening, as thick and dark as river mud. “So you ain’t got nothing but gums. See?”
“Ningunos dientes!”
“And you know why, Franklin? I say, you know why, motherfucker?” He paused for dramatic effect. “ ’Cause I like my pussy… smooth.”
Rood gripped the edge of his bunk with both hands and tried not to be here. Not to know how close those animals were to him, and how powerless he felt, and how dirty this place was, how disgustingly unclean.
He had never really believed he would be imprisoned. Oh, he’d known that it was a possibility, but the thought had always seemed unreal and faintly absurd. And even if he had believed it, he never could have imagined that jail would be so much like… like school. Yet here he was, reliving the horrible nightmare of his childhood. Once again he was weak and helpless, abused by bullies and thugs, laughed at and insulted and scorned, his manhood questioned, his safety threatened. It was like being back in the locker room. His life had come full circle, a snake swallowing itself, and he’d returned to his beginnings, having accomplished nothing. Nothing.
Don’t think like that, he told himself. You’re the Gryphon. You’ve got power. You’ve traveled a great distance, and you have much farther yet to go.
Brave words. Brave, empty words.
Rood stared morosely at the bars of his private cell, the same bars he’d been studying for eleven days, ever since his incarceration on B row, the section of the Los Angeles County Jail reserved for the most dangerous or notorious offenders.
At first he found it terribly unjust that he would be held prisoner. It was a violation of his Constitutional rights, he’d been sure. After all, there had been no trial yet, not even a preliminary hearing-only an arraignment where he’d been summarily denied bail. He’d had no chance to defend himself, to tell his side of the story. It was all so outrageously unfair.
For several days he mused ruefully that it had been bad luck to call himself the Gryphon. That beast appeared in Alice in Wonderland; and now he seemed to have fallen down a rabbit hole himself, into some topsy-turvy world where the legal system functioned in accordance with the Queen of Hearts’ nonsensical pronouncement: “Sentence first-verdict afterwards.”
Gradually he came to understand that his anger and indignation were wasted. It didn’t matter when the preliminary hearing and trial were held. They would be only formalities in this case. The verdict was a certainty. There was no way out for him this time.
That was when he dismissed the court-appointed attorney. No lawyer could blow a smokescreen dense enough to cover the evidence in his trailer or the testimony of the bitch.