“You’re mine now. Miss Wendy Alden,” the Gryphon breathed, his voice like dust, like death. “Mine forever.”
10
The Detective Unit office was a large windowless room partitioned into smaller sections by rows of shoulder-high filing cabinets, many of them topped with bound volumes of the Municipal Code and potted plants that did not require sunlight. Metal desks butted up against one another, sharing their clutter; swivel chairs that rolled on steel casters were scattered here and there like driftwood.
Delgado sat in one chair, turning slowly in his seat, back and forth, back and forth, while two of the task-force detectives. Donna Wildman and Tom Gardner, tossed ideas at him. It was a brainstorming session, the kind of thing cops did when they had run out of strategies. Phones rang in other parts of the room, and people hurried in and out of doors, trailing plumes of cigarette smoke and the odor of sweat.
“So how about working the statues harder?” Wildman said. She was eating a granola bar, and she spoke through a mouthful of molasses and nuts.
“Harder, how?” Delgado countered. “Torres and Blaise have visited every gallery and art school on the Westside.”
“But only looking for somebody who’s a sculptor. What about approaching it from another angle? Wait a minute. The lab report is here someplace.” She dug through a mound of papers on her desk, found a manila folder, scanned its contents. “It says the statues were made of a specific brand of modeling clay. Why don’t we go to art-supplies stores and track down everybody who bought a box of that stuff?”
“I was told it’s a common brand, sold everywhere.”
“If he used a particular kind of sculpting tool to put in the details, we could look for purchases of that.”
“The experts say it was probably a pencil.”
“Maybe we should run in everyone who’s bought a pencil,” Tom Gardner cracked.
Wildman glared at him.
“Okay,” he added, “we’ll limit it to number-two pencils only.”
“Come on, you two,” Delgado said. “Give me some better ideas. Amaze me.”
“I say we post unmarked cars at all crime scenes, twenty-four hours a day,” Gardner said. “Just watching. He may show up again.”
“Why would he?” Wildman asked, sounding irritated at Gardner because he’d shot down her idea.
“These guys do that. Like Ted Bundy. He would go over to a crime scene and fantasize about the murder, relive it, get off on it.” He fingered the tape dispenser on his desk, removing bits of tape and sticking them on his blotter. “I think he brought little souvenirs with him, like the victim’s ballpoint pen, say, or a grocery list- something he’d taken that was never missed. He’d sit there in his car and fondle this thing and think about how good it had felt to kill that girl.”
“We’ve already got beat cars cruising past those buildings every fifteen minutes,” Delgado said.
“Suppose he’s there for only five minutes, and they miss him.”
“What are we going to do?” Wildman asked. “Arrest everybody who parks on the street?”
“Only the ones who look suspicious.”
“Whatever that means.”
Delgado cut off Gardner’s reply. “I don’t think we can spare the manpower right now. But I’ll keep it in mind.”
“I say we push the limits of the physical evidence,” Wildman said. “Physical evidence is what always trips up these guys. For instance, those carpet fibers. I think we were too quick to brush them off.”
“The fibers will convict him,” Gardner said, “not catch him.”
“Maybe they’ll do both. I say we start checking likely places where this guy works. Operate on the assumption that he’s an art aficionado. Look at the galleries, art stores, and other operations like that, and see what kind of carpeting they’ve got. If we find a fiber match, we start checking out the employees-” Her desk phone rang; she grabbed it. “Wildman.”
Delgado was watching her, and he saw her face change as she slowly put down the uneaten portion of her granola bar. She looked at him.
“Another one, Seb.”
He drew a sharp breath. “Damn. God damn.”
“Female Caucasian, decapitated, in a one-bedroom apartment at nine-seven-four-one Palm Vista Avenue. That’s a couple of blocks south of Pico, near Beverly Boulevard.”
“Farther east than the others,” Gardner said.
“I’ll go on ahead,” Delgado told them. He was already rising from his chair, shrugging on his coat. “You two call the rest of the task force, get them out of bed or wherever the hell they are, then hustle everybody over there as fast as possible.”
He did not wait to hear their replies.
The address was twenty minutes from the West L.A. station. As he drove, Delgado felt anger rising in him, the cold familiar anger at the taking of an innocent life. He knew he shouldn’t let himself feel that way; he should remain calm and professionally detached. But he couldn’t help it. He had always become personally involved in the cases he worked. His need to see justice served was a whip cracking over his head, lashing his back, driving him to put in fourteen-hour days and seven-day weeks, never to rest, never to be satisfied.
Yet objectively he knew that there was more to his motivation than moral passion alone. There was his stubborn, angry need to prove himself, to solve every case, to be the best.
He remembered how close Paulson had come to removing him from the investigation this afternoon. At the time Delgado had been sure that his insistence on retaining command of the task force was based purely on a 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.