He was ten years old when his parents took him to live in the United States, aided by an uncle who had become a naturalized citizen, and a prosperous one. In Tucson or Houston or any of a dozen other places, Sebastian might have lived among Mexican immigrants like himself, blending with them; but his uncle’s home was in Indiana, where a boy with a funny way of talking and a strange cast to his skin could not help drawing furtive, suspicious looks.
Grade school was hard; high school was harder. Sebastian became good at fighting; and not just with his fists. The real fight was the fight for respect; and he was smart enough to know that he would win it only if he honed his mind. He studied hungrily, earned top grades, and delivered the valedictory address at his high-school graduation. Two of his classmates, denied a diploma and sentenced to summer school, tried to beat him up after the graduation ceremony. Delgado broke both their noses.
His academic achievement opened the doors of every college in the country to him. He chose UCLA, because Los Angeles was warm and the Indiana winters had been too cold. Even in L.A., three hours from the Mexican border in a city named by Spanish settlers, he discovered prejudice. But it was manageable. Everything was manageable as long as he worked harder than anyone around him.
He was finishing college, uncertain of his future, when the LAPD recruited him. The department needed more minority cops to patrol the barrios, where WASP rookies automatically became targets.
Again racism plagued him. He heard a lot of wetback jokes in his days as a uniformed cop, jokes that bit like small dogs and left scars. But he knew the solution. To fight back with hard work, as he had done in school. To outperform those who looked down on him. To log more hours, take more Academy classes, spend more time on the shooting range or in the gym, read more books and write more reports. To work nights and weekends, sacrifice his social life, forgo any existence at all outside his work. That was the way to win.
His ambitiousness had served his career well. He’d risen swiftly, making detective at twenty-six, then spending two years in Narcotics and four years in Robbery before his transfer to Homicide. At thirty-four he’d earned the rank of Detective II; if he solved this case he might well become a D-III, one of the youngest ever made in the LAPD.
But the price he paid was high, too high, and the worst of it was losing Karen. She offered her love to him, and what did he do with that gift? Wadded it up and tossed it away-because he could not escape his work.
Now he had been handed the most important assignment of his career, the toughest challenge, the case that would make him or break him-and he was failing. Failing.
And another woman was dead.
Delgado guided the Caprice up to the crime-scene ribbon, then switched off his engine. He sat unmoving in the car for a long moment, looking at the apartment building before him. Squad cars and uniformed cops were everywhere; police-band crosstalk crackled and sputtered nervously from car radios and portable handsets. The media had yet to arrive, but a restless, murmuring crowd of onlookers loitered at a barely respectable distance, held back by patrolmen with unfriendly stares. Some fool with a flash camera was clicking off snapshots, perhaps in the hope of selling them to the Times for a small payment of blood money, or perhaps as personal mementos, to be preserved under acetate in his photo album between last year’s trip to Yosemite and next year’s vacation at Walt Disney World.
Suppressing his disgust, Delgado left the car and crossed the yellow ribbon. He flashed his badge at every uniform he passed, not stopping for conversation with any of them. He was in no mood for talk.
The apartment wasn’t hard to find. The door was ajar, the lights on. Half a dozen cops milled around outside; their muttered conversation died away as they saw Delgado approach. Wordlessly they parted to let him through. He reached the doorway and looked in.
Just inside the door, a young woman’s naked, decapitated body, limbs in disarray, lay sprawled on a white pile carpet soaked with glistening blood.
There was no clay statuette in her hand.
Delgado blinked. No, that couldn’t be. The Gryphon never failed to leave his calling card.
A chill shivered through him as he considered the possibility that this killing had been the work of a copycat, some lunatic inspired by the news coverage to imitate the Gryphon, but failing to get one key detail right.
He didn’t want to believe it. One maniac was enough to deal with.
With a sigh, he banished that line of speculation. For the moment he would proceed on the assumption that the Gryphon was responsible for this latest crime. Most likely, the killer had simply altered his usual pattern for some reason known only to him.
Carefully, Delgado stepped through the doorway into the apartment and looked around. It was a modest mid-rent place, neatly kept and unimaginatively furnished. His circling gaze took in a sofa, a coffee table, a potted plant. Corner windows framed a leafy fig tree. A chest-high counter divided the living room from the kitchenette, brightly lit by overhead fluorescents.
In a corner lay a heap of torn, bloody rags. The victim’s clothes, obviously, which the Gryphon had ripped off her body and cast aside. Delgado couldn’t tell what kind of outfit it had been without handling the clothes, and he wouldn’t do that, of course. There was always a chance the Gryphon had neglected his gloves this time and left a nice bloody fingerprint for Frommer and his SID team.
He knelt by the body. The woman was a young
Caucasian, probably in her twenties, perhaps five feet tall. She was slender, as all the Gryphon’s victims had been, with shapely legs and small pert breasts. No doubt she had been attractive. They always were.
Delgado wondered what her name was, what her life had been like, what dreams she’d nurtured. He would learn the answer to such questions soon enough, he supposed. Her name would be determined at the morgue; her lifestyle would be reported by friends, neighbors, and relatives; and as for her dreams… A tape would come in the mail, a recording of her last words, and when he listened to her whispery plaintive voice, Delgado would know what she’d wanted out of life, and what she would never get.
How many more voices would he have to hear?
He got up slowly, feeling tired, very tired. He backed away from the corpse, careful to disturb nothing around it, and returned to the doorway, where the uniformed cops were watching him intently, as if trying to read his thoughts in his eyes.
“Who were the first officers to arrive at the scene?” Delgado asked, fatigue thickening his voice.
Two men stepped forward. “We were, Detective,” one of them said.
Delgado recognized the pair. The cop who’d spoken was named Branden. He wore wire-rim glasses and longish hair that tested the limits of departmental regulations, giving him the appearance of a disaffected intellectual of the existentialist stripe, the sort who could go on at tedious length about Plato’s cave or Dostoevski’s underground man. There were a lot of them in L.A., and a few had even found their way onto the police force, for motives impossible to guess.
Branden’s partner, Van Ness, was a farmboy, or should have been; he had the kind of build the word “strapping” had been coined to describe: thick neck, broad shoulders, huge meaty fists like hams. Excitement shone in his eyes. Clearly he was getting a kick out of being involved in a case with this much heat on it.
Flipping open his memo pad, Delgado fixed his gaze on Branden, whom he judged the more intelligent of the two. “Let me have your report.”
“We were cruising this neighborhood,” Branden said, “when a call came over the radio. Some civilian nine-elevened a report about the Gryphon. Apparently he was seen at this address-”