There was a word for such a man, a word so simple it had been all but forgotten in this complex modern age. A word Delgado’s grandmother in Guadalajara had known.
Evil.
Delgado nodded. Oh, yes. There was good and evil in the world. Underlying each of these three murders was the will of the man responsible, his private volition, his conscious choice to do violence to the innocent. He had felt the need to kill, and rather than resist that urge, he had given in to it, had acted on it three times and laughed about it later. His compulsions did not drive him; he allowed himself to be driven by them. And for what? An illusory sense of power, a sexual thrill, a few hours of fun. He was a man who took pleasure not in living, but in denying life to others.
Delgado stared moodily at the map on his wall, at the three red dots scattered across L.A.’s Westside. Somewhere in that sweep of lookalike houses and anonymous apartments and gas stations and stores, there was a killer who struck with the brutal impersonality of accident, an Olympius for a meaner and sorrier age. He fashioned his clay sculptures and then he played his game, choosing victims by some means Delgado could not guess, stalking them, killing them, and taking his hideous souvenirs.
Delgado knew everything about that man, except his name.
6
Franklin Rood stepped dripping out of the shower.
He took a shower every afternoon at four-thirty, immediately after getting home from work. He had a strong belief in the importance of personal hygiene. Many of the world’s problems, he felt, could be solved or at least significantly ameliorated if the common herd of people simply learned the value of cleanliness. Instead, just look at them, greasy and unwashed, sweat-stained and foul-smelling, the filth and dreck of the human cesspool. Disgusting.
Briskly he dried himself with a clean white towel, a towel as fresh and new as any that might be found in a hotel bathroom; Rood had no tolerance of dirty laundry, of anything dirty. He was, he supposed, a rather fastidious man. That was a nice word, wasn’t it? Fastidious. He said it out loud, enunciating each syllable clearly, then grinned at the mirror. What a fine smile he had. He looked lovingly at himself, freshly washed, his brown hair tousled and ropy, the skin of his shoulders flushed with the heat of the shower spray.
In the bedroom he put on his glasses, snugging the stems behind his ears, then dressed briskly in blue denim jeans, a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to expose his muscled forearms, and white Reebok running shoes. The Reeboks were excellent for his purposes, permitting rapid movement while ensuring relative silence, and he’d sprayed them liberally with a silicon formula to keep off the worst of the stains.
On his way out of the bedroom, he paused to execute half a dozen pull-ups on the bar screwed into the doorframe. He did them easily, feeling no strain. Every morning and evening he performed a minimum of twenty chins and twenty squats to keep his arms and legs in condition.
He walked through the living room into the kitchen, and stopped before the refrigerator. Arctic air gusted against his face as he opened the door to the freezer compartment and peered inside. The freezer was crowded with unidentifiable leftovers in aluminum-foil wrapping. At first he couldn’t find the Swanson Hungry Man chicken pot pie he wanted. He rummaged in the freezer, looking past plastic trays of ice cubes and cans of orange juice. Then, with a delighted smile, he saw the corner of the box sticking out from behind the frozen blue mass of Miss Elizabeth Osborn’s head.
Rood slid the chicken pot pie out of the package, punched a few holes in the pie crust with a fork, and placed his dinner in the oven.
Checking his wristwatch, he saw that the time was now one minute to five. There were local newscasts at five. Couldn’t miss them. He hurried back to the living room, turned on the TV, loaded a blank videotape into the VCR, and settled into his armchair with the wireless remote in his hand. He pressed the button marked Record. The VCR started with a whir just as “Eyewitness News” began.
The female news anchor was afraid of him. Rood could see the fear furrowing her forehead, tugging at the corners of her mouth, moistening her lips. Every woman in the city was afraid. Well, they ought to be.
The top story was a fire in Topanga Canyon, fanned by the dry desert winds. Rood was disappointed. Fires were common. Fires had no business taking priority over the Gryphon.
He waited impatiently for the real news, the only news that counted. Finally it came on-the daily update on the city’s waking nightmare.
He quickly gathered that there were no new developments in the case. Ignoring the reporter’s meaningless commentary, he focused on the snippets of file footage, mostly pertaining to Miss Osborn’s murder.
Her bungalow, looking seedier in daylight than it had at night. The crowd of spectators, like vultures, disgusting. The camera peering past the yellow crime-scene ribbon, panting for a voyeuristic glimpse through the doorway. A metal gurney, and on it a black plastic body bag. The doors of a coroner’s wagon slamming shut.
Then an unexpected treat: Detective Sebastian Delgado standing outside the police station, delivering a statement to the press.
Rood leaned forward, studying the man’s face, a face he’d seen in other newscasts and in newspaper photos, but one he found endlessly fascinating. The black hair swept back from the high forehead. The sharp nose, hawklike. The angry mouth bracketed by chiseled grooves.
“Catch me. Detective,” Rood whispered. “Catch me before I kill again.”
The newscast continued, but it was not about the Gryphon anymore. Rood flipped through the other channels and caught a few seconds of other, similar reports. Then there was nothing. Ah, well. He could get more air time whenever he liked.
There would be newspaper stories too, of course. He’d brought home today’s edition of the L.A. Times, the Evening Outlook, the Daily News and, although he could not read Spanish, La Opinion. More clippings for his scrapbook.
He rewound the tape and played the “Eyewitness News” story again. As he watched, he leaned back in the chair, lacing his fingers behind his head, smiling. The game was such fun.
For most of his thirty-two years Rood had found little that brought him pleasure or pain. His life had been a blank, his days drudgery, his nights dreamless. He had been a zombie shuffling through the motions of living, dead inside.
His first kill, five years ago, had changed all that. Freed from the strait jacket of normal existence, hunting his prey, Rood felt alive-wonderfully, intoxicatingly, dizzyingly alive-more alive than any other man had ever been. He was a god, vertiginously elevated above ordinary humanity, towering over the teeming mob as an average man would tower over a nest of squirming maggots. He was in total control of every aspect of reality, free to do as he pleased, utterly unconstrained. Nothing could compare to the exhilaration of taking a woman’s life, then using her body while the flesh was still warm, the blood still wet. It was a thrill as dark and heady as black wine.
A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts.
He froze. Suddenly he was afraid. Nobody ever visited him. In his two years in L.A., he’d never once had company. The very idea seemed unreal. In a distant, rather abstract way he was aware that people did such things; they learned one another’s addresses and dropped in now and then to say hello. But the ritual was as alien to him as the social habits of bees in a hive.
He had no idea what to do. Perhaps if he made no sound, whoever was out there would go away.
There was another knock, then a faint, muffled voice. A woman’s voice.
“Franklin? It’s me. Melanie. From next door.”
Rood swallowed. Oh, God. What was she doing here?
He’d exchanged pleasantries with Miss Melanie Goshen on a few occasions while entering or leaving his apartment. She was a tall, pale blonde who spoke quietly, rarely meeting his eyes. Very shy and innocent. Or so she seemed. But Rood knew that her innocence was an act. On more than one night, she’d had a man over at her place. Rood had heard the noises of their lovemaking through his bedroom wall.