“After last night, I can face anything.”
He nodded, unsmiling now. “I know you can.”
20
Delgado drove east on Hollywood Boulevard, then turned north onto Nichols Canyon Road, returning to Jeffrey Pellman’s house.
As he drove, he replayed the conversation with Wendy in his mind. He’d lied to her about one thing. He hadn’t stopped off at Cedars-Sinai because he was in the neighborhood. He’d gone out of his way to see her. He suspected she knew it too.
Ran him off the road, Delgado thought with a slow shake of his head.
Of course he’d already assumed that she’d gone on the attack in the car chase. Having spent the past few hours reconstructing the events of the previous night, he believed he knew what had transpired at nearly every turn.
Ralston, the coroner’s assistant, had been preparing to perform an autopsy on Jermifer Kutzlow, and Delgado and Tom Gardner had been waiting restlessly in the chilly, echoing morgue, when the phone rang. Lieutenant Crasser, the West L.A. night-watch commander, was on the line with news that Jeffrey Pellman’s nearest neighbor had reported hearing a woman’s cries for help.
Delgado left Gardner to oversee the autopsy and preserve the chain of evidence that would be necessary for the eventual prosecution of the case. By the time he jumped behind the wheel of his Caprice, the radio was crackling with word of a car crash on Mulholland Drive, the details still unclear.
He drove directly to the scene of the accident, bypassing Pellman’s house, and arrived there only minutes after Wendy was taken away in an ambulance. He had no idea of her condition. The Camaro she’d been driving—Jeffrey’s car, according to the documents in the glove compartment—was in bad shape. What kind of shape was Wendy in? Was she bleeding, hemorrhaging, going into cardiac arrest, entering a coma? Was she dying even as he stood there in the windy darkness above the blazing brushfire? Perhaps she was dead already, pronounced DOA in the emergency room.
He was scared. Distantly he was astonished at how very damn scared he was.
With trembling effort he pushed fear out of his mind and focused on the job at hand. As he took notes on the scene of the accident, four engine companies from Hollywood and other nearby communities roared in, responding to the alarm. Pumping engines. Range Rovers, brush breakers, pump water tenders, and the big fire trucks known as quads and quints lined the road; lines of lightweight flexible hose, two and a half inches thick, were quickly stretched across the macadam.
The fiery mountainside was bracketed by Mulholland Drive to the south and, to the north, a smaller road of lower elevation called Thornwood Place. Between the two roads was a steep slope choked with chaparral. In the dry weather the chaparral, with its high oil content, had caught easily.
The engine crews’ strategy quickly became clear. Using Mulholland and Thornwood as firebreaks, they targeted the leeward fringes of the fire, spraying streams of water at the upslope flames and driving them back. Brush strike forces were formed, teams of smokechasers masked in bandannas and wearing yellow Nomex fireshirts; working with grub hoes, hatchets, shovels, and McLeod fire rakes, they cleared the brush in advance of the fire, digging firelines eight feet wide, then set backfires to consume excess fuel. From time to time Delgado saw the smokechasers staggering out of the chaparral, sweat-soaked and gasping, the fire having consumed much of the oxygen in the air. After sucking on air packs and guzzling bottled water, they would tramp back into the hell of whirling embers and superheated air to continue raking and shoveling. Delgado was glad he would not be joining them.
Having completed his examination of the scene on Mulholland, he left the fire crews to their hot and hazardous work, and drove to Jeffrey Pellman’s house. He found it swarming with uniforms. The first TV vans and print reporters were already there, as were the key members of the task force, disheveled and jittery, running on adrenaline and black coffee. Tom Gardner was among them, having just arrived after witnessing the autopsy.
“Give me the details,” Delgado said tersely.
“Porter is dead,” Donna Wildman answered as she led him inside the house. “Throat slashed. Sanchez is missing. We’re assuming his body was in the patrol car when it crashed. And here’s another one.”
She gestured toward the living-room couch, draped with a white sheet.
“Jeffrey Pellman?” Delgado asked.
“Yes. The neighbor who called in the report has already been over to I.D. him.”
“Same wound as Porter’s?”
Wildman nodded. “Cut throat. Nasty.”
As Delgado moved through the house, reconstructing the events that had taken place there, he became aware of an ugly tension around him, the tension that always developed in any crowd of police officers when one of their own had been killed. Or in this case, two of their own; nobody had any serious expectation of finding Sanchez alive.
The Gryphon had added a pair of cops to his roster of corpses; and the men and women who had worked alongside Sanchez and Porter, who had sat beside them at the night-watch roll call, who had swapped stories with them in the locker room, were upset and angry and seething to obtain the rough justice of vengeance. Delgado caught whispered remarks concerning what they would do to the Gryphon if he was somehow still alive.
Of course, Delgado had known the two officers as well. Other than Wendy and her boyfriend, he must have been the last person to speak with them. In a sense he had sent them to their deaths. The thought cut him like glass. Despite himself, he felt stirrings of the same wild anger that simmered around him, the animalistic fury that, unchecked, would drive a lynch mob. With effort he suppressed those feelings, slamming the lid on any thoughts of the two patrolmen. He had to stay in focus. There was a job to do.
“Something happened in the darkroom,” Eddie Torres was saying. “We think she locked herself in, and he broke down the door.”
Delgado peered into the half-bath, past the door leaning on shattered hinges, and saw that the black paper sealing the window had been stripped off, the window raised.
“She tried to escape, but the security bars stopped her,” he said.
“Goddamn firetrap,” Ted Blaise muttered.
“There’s a latch,” Harry Jacobs said, “but she must have been too panicky to find it.”
Wildman grunted. “Can’t say I blame her. Suspect was chasing me down an alley once, and I could barely remember how to pop the strap on my holster.”
“I’ll bet you did remember, though,” Torres said.
“Yeah, and shot the bastard in the knee. He’ll never play soccer again.”
“What’s that on the floor?” Delgado asked.
Rob Tallyman followed his gaze. “Frommer says it’s acid.”
“She tried to splash him, turn him into the Phantom of the Opera, I guess,” Jacobs said.
Blaise frowned. “He wouldn’t have been any scarier that way than he was already.”
“You can see somebody took a swipe at somebody else with that photographic enlarger.” Wildman was pointing at a dented chunk of metal on the floor. “My guess is she brained him with it.”
Delgado got down on hands and knees. He peered under the sink, then pulled on a glove and carefully retrieved a knife. “Take a look at this.”
“Kitchen knife, it looks like,” Tallyman said.
Delgado studied the serrated blade. “This could be what he used to kill Porter and Pellman, and quite possibly Sanchez as well. It may even be the same knife Wendy wounded him with, the one from her kitchen drawer.” He bagged and labeled it.
Spots of blood mottled the floor of the hallway. “The lab’s doing tests on them right now,” Lionel Robertson said. “Ten-to-one odds they match the Gryphon’s blood type.”
“Or Wendy’s,” Delgado said quietly.
The blood trail, cordoned off by evidence tape, led them back into the living room and out the front door. In the driveway, the beam of Tallyman’s flashlight picked out a pile of shattered safety glass.
“The Camaro had a broken window on the driver’s side,” Delgado said.
“Then it all fits together.” Wildman sounded pleased. “She ran for the car and got in. He caught up with her and broke the window, but she got away.”
“Pulled out fast, bounced over the curb,” Gardner said. “See the tread marks in the lawn?”
“After that, the Gryphon ran across the road to the black-and-white,” Delgado said. “He had already taken care of Sanchez and Porter before entering the house. He jumped behind the wheel, pushing Sanchez’s body into the passenger seat if necessary, and took off in pursuit.”
“Most of the locals heard the car chase,” Tallyman said. “High-speed pursuit. The Gryphon was using the siren and maybe even the loudspeaker; somebody heard what sounded like an amplified voice.”
“And gunshots,” Blaise put in. “He was firing at her.”
“Probably using Sanchez’s gun,” Delgado said. “The Camaro’s windshield was blown out, and a nine-millimeter Parabellum round was embedded in the headrest of the passenger seat.”
Gardner rubbed his chin. “If the bullet entered through the windshield, he must have been in front of her. That doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe they were careening back and forth, jockeying for position.” Wildman shrugged. “Who knows?”
Delgado had another idea. He thought Wendy had deliberately maneuvered behind the Gryphon and rammed him, forcing him off the road. But he kept that opinion to himself.
“Then the guy loses control of his car,” Robertson was saying, “and takes the big plunge. Ka-bam! The car goes up like a drum of gasoline and rockets him straight to hell.”
“Think that’s it, Seb?” Wildman asked.
“Yes,” Delgado answered slowly. “That, or something very much like it.”
“Guess what, folks?” Eddie Torres wore a huge grin. “I think gryphons just became extinct.”
“I’ve got just one question,” Tallyman said. “Why did he take the patrol car, and not his own?”
“Because obviously his car was parked somewhere else,” Gardner replied. “On a side street, I’d guess.”
“If so, then it will still be there,” Delgado said. “And that means you talented people are going to find it.”
Wildman groaned. “We’ll have to check out all the cars parked on the street within a two-mile radius. Wake up everybody in the neighborhood to determine the ownership of every vehicle in sight.”
“I’m afraid so.”
“A lot of people who managed to sleep through the rest of the excitement are going to be awfully upset at being dragged out of bed,” Torres said.
Delgado smiled faintly. “Well, isn’t that just too damn bad?”
Shortly before dawn, Delgado finally received word of Wendy’s condition. He was told she’d suffered a mild case of shock but had come out of it unharmed. She had no broken bones, no internal bleeding, no serious cuts or contusions. All she needed was rest. He experienced a wave of relief so intense it was physically draining.
He arranged for a female beat cop to deliver a set of Wendy’s clothes to her hospital room, then ordered the staff at Cedars-Sinai to restrict access to that wing of the medical center. He was no longer concerned about the Gryphon, but he wanted no one from the media sneaking into Wendy’s room to wangle a secret interview or snap a photo of her in bed.
At daybreak the blaze on the mountain was declared to be “confined and controlled,” though not yet extinguished. The task force would not be permitted to examine the wreckage for at least another hour. Delgado took the opportunity to drive to Cedars-Sinai and look in on Wendy. She was pale and thin, her hands bandaged, her eyes too large for her face. He thought she was lovely.
He wanted to hold her in his arms, but he contented himself with merely taking her hand lightly in his. For now, that was enough. For now.
Smiling slightly, pleased to find himself in a world where the Gryphon was dead and Wendy Alden was alive, Delgado arrived at the 2100 block of Nichols Canyon Road. He threaded his Caprice through a corridor of parallel-parked TV vans and came to a stop at the cordon sealing off Jeffrey Pellman’s house.
Inside, he found Frommer and the SID team still methodically bagging and tagging. Frommer seemed more irritated than usual, perhaps because he’d worked three crime scenes in the last twenty-four hours, but more likely because none of the physical evidence he’d collected had played the slightest role in the Gryphon’s demise.
From the kitchen Delgado heard the familiar voices of the task-force detectives. If they were back, then they must have completed their rounds, which meant they had located the car. From the license number, the Gryphon’s identity could easily be traced. At his home, the heads of his victims would be found. The last pieces of the puzzle would snap into place.
Delgado entered the kitchen and saw the eleven investigators scattered around the large sunlit room. He sensed their moody restlessness at once, even before Donna Wildman spoke.
“Bad news, Seb.”
His gut tightened.
“What is it?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“We checked out every car, truck, van, motor scooter, and tricycle within two miles of this location, and all the owners are accounted for.”