“You will,” he said with finality. “Tonight.”
She licked her lips. Her heart thumped in her ears. Sweat trickled down the insides of her arms, pasting the blouse to her skin. She hated to ask the next question, for fear of what the answer surely would be; but she had to ask it, because she had to know, just had to.
“What ... what’s going to happen tonight?”
He didn’t answer. Instead he snapped his fingers with a sudden thought.
“Oh, gosh. I knew there was something I forgot to do. We’re running low on gas, aren’t we?”
Her gaze flicked to the fuel gauge, where the arrow was brushing the red zone.
“Almost empty,” she reported.
“Darn. We’ll have to fill up, then.”
Fill up. At a gas station. With people around. Lots of people. He wouldn’t shoot her there. Not in front of everybody. Would he? Maybe he would. But if she took him by surprise ... if he didn’t react quite fast enough ...
All she had to do was throw open the car door and run, get inside the office or the service bay, and then—
“I know what you’re thinking, Wendy.”
A wave of light-headedness passed over her. She felt as if his fingers had been prying inside her brain. “I’m not thinking anything.”
“Oh, yes, you are.” He sounded amused. “It’s written all over your face. Little Red Riding Hood thinks she’s found the golden opportunity to get away from the Big Bad Wolf.” The gun pressed deeper into her side. “But you’re wrong, Wendy. Very wrong. Fatally wrong. I warned you about what would happen if you tried anything. I made myself explicitly clear. Didn’t I?
Didn’t I?
”
“Don’t kill me,” she breathed, the words coming out so spontaneously she was astonished to hear them.
“Don’t make me,” he answered coolly. “Lock your door.”
She depressed the lock.
“Good. Now if you have any thoughts of making a break for it when we stop for gas, consider this. You’re wearing a safety belt. Your door is locked. It’ll take time to unbuckle that belt and unlock that door. A full second, at least. How long do you think it will take me to put a bullet in you?”
She didn’t answer.
“How long?”
“Okay,” she whispered. “I understand.”
“You yell for help, you honk the horn, you do anything out of the ordinary—and you’re dead.”
“I understand,” she said again, more sharply.
The Ford coasted down the mountain into Studio City. A few blocks ahead, the bright orange ball of a Union 76 sign hung against the sky like a setting sun.
“Pull in there,” he ordered.
She guided the Ford onto the asphalt and pulled up alongside a full-service island, then shut off the motor, silencing Rosanne Cash, who was singing about a runaway train. Wendy knew about trains like that. She was on one right now.
“What now?” she breathed.
“When the attendant asks, you say you want a full tank.” He was buttoning up his brown coat to conceal the policeman’s uniform underneath. “And remember what I told you.” The gun snaked behind her, the metal cylinder of the five-inch barrel hard against her lower back.
She cranked down the window, waited for an attendant to arrive, and asked him to fill the tank.
“Check the oil?” he asked briskly. “Tire pressure?”
A painfully false smile distorted her face. “No, thanks.”
The attendant hooked up the gas-pump nozzle, then squeegeed the windshield with broad vigorous strokes. As he was scraping off the soapy water, Wendy turned toward the passenger seat.
“I don’t have any money with me, you know,” she whispered.
“That’s all right.”
“What are we going to do? Drive away without paying?”
“Wendy.” He looked genuinely distressed. “That would be immoral. Of course we won’t do anything like that.” With one hand he fumbled in his coat pocket and gave her a well-worn wallet. “There ought to be enough in there to cover it.”
The attendant rang up the total. Wendy handed him a couple of bills through the open window.
“Thanks,” he said as he dug in his pocket for change. “Nice set of wheels.”
He was looking right at her. She looked back. Their eyes met. In that instant she considered trying to signal him somehow, with a facial expression or a whispered word or ... or something.
Courage failed her. She could imagine the shuddering blast of the gunshot as it tore through her spine.
“We like it,” she said with another faltering smile.
“Yeah, they really built ’em back then. What is it, a sixty-two?”
“Sixty-three,” the Gryphon said helpfully from the passenger seat.
The attendant nodded. “Nice condition.”
“Well,” the Gryphon said politely, “I’ve always believed that if you take care of your car, it’ll take care of you.”
“Hey, you know it.” The attendant handed Wendy her change. “Have a nice one.”
Wendy started the engine and steered the car out of the service station, rolling up the window. The deadly pressure on her back eased.
“Congratulations,” the killer told her. “You’re a very smart girl.”
She took a breath. “You never answered my question,” she said softly. “What’s going to happen tonight?”
“Oh, nothing so awful.” He was smiling again. “We’re going to get to know each other a little better, that’s all. We’ve been enemies, and now we’re going to be friends. And something more than friends.”
Her voice was a whisper. “Something more?”
“Lovers, Wendy,” he breathed. “That’s what we’ll be. And I promise you, once you’ve known my passion and my power, then you will love me too.”
25
Delgado was still at Cedars-Sinai when the Dodge Aries was found in the alley.
He’d arrived at the hospital at nine-fifteen, twenty minutes after Wendy’s abduction, having left most of the task-force detectives at the scene of the wreckage with instructions to comb the area for clues. The chance of finding anything significant on the fire-ravaged mountainside was remote, but no possibility could be overlooked.
Plainclothes and patrol officers were crowding the lobby and parking garage of the medical center’s North Tower when Delgado entered, accompanied by Tom Gardner and Rob Tallyman. Delgado hunted down the detectives in charge. They were Frank Nason and Chet Gray, who had taken him on a tour of Elizabeth Osborn’s house two weeks ago.
“Fill us in on what happened,” Delgado said brusquely.
“He came and took her,” Nason answered, outrage in his voice. “The nerve of the bastard—he put on Sanchez’s uniform and just waltzed right in here and signed her out.”
“Fed the receptionist and the guards some cock-and-bull story about taking her to the station for safekeeping,” Gray added. “Detective Delgado’s orders, he claimed.”
“The staff must have gotten a look at him,” Delgado said.
Gray nodded. “Yeah, the IdentiKit artists are sharpening their pencils, but I don’t think they’re going to come up with much. The nurse on duty remembers he had brown hair and he was tall. The guards say the same thing.”
“And the uniform,” Nason said. “They remember that, for all the good it does us.”
“Nothing else?” Tom Gardner broke in impatiently. “Nothing specific?”
Nason spread his hands. “You know how it is. One dude in uniform looks like any other.”
“He would have been counting on that,” Delgado said grimly.
“Yeah, he’s smart, all right,” Tallyman muttered. “And he loves taking chances, spinning that wheel.”
“From what we can tell, even Miss Alden was fooled,” Gray said. “No one observed any indication that she left under duress.”
“How the hell did he even know where to find her?” Gardner asked.
“That one’s easy.” Nason shrugged. “Every TV and radio asshole in town has been broadcasting that information all morning. You should see these TV creeps doing their live stand-ups on the steps outside.”
“Freedom of the press,” Gardner hissed. “Fucking First Amendment gets on my fucking nerves.”
“Funny how his cover story matched your orders,” Tallyman told Delgado thoughtfully. “You think he was monitoring the police band and picked it up?”
Delgado shook his head. “I delivered those orders by landline. And the black-and-white was told to keep it quiet on the way over for exactly that reason. It’s just a coincidence. Or perhaps he knows the way my mind works.”
“Wish we could say the same about him,” Gardner said.
In the parking garage, Delgado got a break. The attendant who manned the exit gate remembered one car in particular that left within the appropriate time frame. It was a late-model blue Dodge Aries—he was pretty sure it was a coupe— and it caught his attention because his girlfriend’s mother drove one just like it. Yes, there was a man at the wheel, but the attendant recalled nothing about his face. No, he wasn’t wearing a uniform; the attendant was certain he would have noticed that. And no, there was no woman in the car—none who could be seen, anyway.
Delgado radioed Dispatch with orders to put every patrol car on the alert for a blue Aries coupe driven by a brown-haired man, possibly alone, possibly in the company of a blonde female.
He was interrogating the security guard who’d noticed Sanchez’s nameplate, hoping to coax an additional detail from the man’s memory, when Tallyman ran up to him, out of breath.
“News on the Dodge.”
“They found it?” Delgado asked, forgetting the guard.
“No. But they know where it came from.” Tallyman consulted a scrawled note on his steno pad. “Vehicle matching the Dodge’s description was stolen at eight-fifteen, approximately one half hour before the kidnapping. Owner is a guy named Levy, Robert Levy. He parked outside a health spa on Sepulveda Boulevard—outdoor lot—and was struck from behind by a blunt instrument while locking the door. Regained consciousness roughly five minutes later; car was gone.”
“Did he see the assailant?”
“No such luck.”
“This man Levy should consider himself fortunate,” Delgado said slowly. “The Gryphon doesn’t normally leave his victims alive.”
“Maybe he was in a hurry.”
“Could be. All right, I want unmarked cars dispatched to cruise Sepulveda for at least five miles north and south of the spa. If the Gryphon was there once, he might have returned to lift a new car or ditch the stolen one. Tell them to look in the side streets, alleys, everyplace a car might be hidden, and take note of any suspicious vehicles, not just the Dodge.”
“Right, Seb.”
While he waited for word of the car, Delgado returned to Wendy’s room. The empty bed pained him. He checked out the bathroom, opened the bureau drawers, and looked under the bed, being careful to touch as few things as possible; the room had not yet been dusted, and it was possible the Gryphon had left prints. He told himself that he was searching for some small item the Gryphon might have dropped, some clue that would magically reveal his identity, but he knew the truth. He simply wanted to be in a place Wendy had recently occupied, to feel some connection with her, however tenuous and unreal. He didn’t want to feel he’d lost her forever.
In the middle of the room, between the two beds, he stopped, wondering for the first time if he had fallen in love with Wendy Alden.
No, he decided after a moment’s reflection, he was not in love, not exactly. What he felt for her was the prelude to love, the wordless intuitive conviction that he could love her if given the chance.
It was a chance he might never have now.
There was a knock on the frame of the open door. He turned and saw Gardner standing there.
“Seb, they recovered the Dodge.”
“Where?”
“About two blocks from where it was lifted. Parked in an alley just east of Sepulveda.”
“And?”
“It’s empty. Looks like it was abandoned there.”
Delgado lowered his head. “Damn.”
Obviously the Gryphon had anticipated the possibility that the car used in the abduction would be seen and remembered by someone. So he’d taken a sensible precaution. He’d stolen Levy’s car, then switched to another vehicle— probably his own.
Delgado had no idea what kind of car or truck or van that might be. And he could not put out an APB on every brown-haired man in Los Angeles.
There was no way to track the Gryphon now. No way to guess where he might go. No way to find Wendy and save her.
No hope for her at all.
“Seb? Are you all right?”
Delgado didn’t answer. Slowly he raised his head and looked at the sun-streaked room around him, the room where he’d sat at Wendy’s bedside only a few hours earlier, holding her lovely, delicate hand.
26
The time was exactly ten o’clock by Rood’s wristwatch when Wendy guided the Ford Falcon onto San Fernando Road. His special place was less than fifteen minutes away.
The road swept into the lower fringes of the Mojave Desert, where windblasted rock formations jutted up at unnatural angles amid bleak stretches of pinkish alkaline sand. In the crisp, slanting sunshine the landscape was rendered forebodingly alien and slightly unreal, like a movie fantasist’s vision of the surface of Mars.