Then Wendy’s shock cleared, and she understood.
Behind the first three jars, nearly invisible in the dim wavering light, were pairs of detachable stereo speakers connected by long wires to the three cassette players on the nearest table.
Tape recordings. That was all the voices were. Recordings of the pleas and confessions the Gryphon extorted from his victims before he pulled the circle of wire taut. Recordings that had been edited to remove the killer’s threats and lying promises, leaving only the voices of the dead.
“... can’t do this,” Julia breathed. “You just
can’t
.”
Rebecca groaned. “I’m asking you ... if you have any mercy ... please ...”
Elizabeth was sobbing. “I’ll do anything, anything at all ...”
He must have recorded what I said too, Wendy thought numbly. When he has my head in a jar, he can make it talk. Can make me beg forever, beg and reveal my secret hopes. He’ll sit here in this chair, and he’ll listen to me babble about going to Santa Barbara and falling in love and wanting to live. And he’ll laugh.
A shudder rippled through her body and left her feeling ill and dizzy.
The voices grew louder and took on a tinny quality. She looked at the table where the cassette players were displayed. The Gryphon had moved over there. He was adjusting the volume controls and fiddling with the equalizers to boost the treble. Perhaps he fussed constantly with the knobs and levers, customizing each performance, raising the volume ever higher till the trailer rocked. No wonder he’d lined the walls with cork.
It occurred to her that she was hearing some of the same words for the second time. The tapes must have been spliced into loops. They would play forever, the agonies they preserved never to end.
“... you’re so powerful,” Elizabeth whispered, “you’re a god, more than a god, more than anything I’ve ever imagined ...”
“Think of my baby,” Julia moaned.
“You’re going to kill me anyway,” Rebecca said tonelessly. “I know you are.”
Suddenly the Gryphon was laughing, a cheerless rasping sound. Wendy saw that he’d turned away from the cassette players and was watching her, thrilling at the horror that must be written on her face, drinking it in like blood.
“Well, what do you think, Wendy? Aren’t they talented, my four beauties? Don’t they put on a
wonderful
show?”
She looked at him, candlelight sparkling on the blank lenses of his glasses, and then at the pickled heads, gibbering and weeping, and suddenly she was shaking all over, shaking and wanting desperately to be anywhere but here, in this trailer in the desert, this den of death.
Desperately she twisted her wrists, still trying to loosen the tape that bound them. She lurched sideways in her chair, and her struggling hands banged the corner of the card table beside her. The table rattled. It was metal.
And the corner felt sharp.
“I do love to watch them, Wendy,” the Gryphon said loudly, almost shouting to be heard over the keening voices. “Sometimes I come here at night and stay till dawn, when the batteries have drained and the tapes are playing at one-quarter speed. The happiest moments I’ve ever known have been spent here, in my special place, with my beautiful friends.”
Carefully, hoping she would not be seen in the weak fluttery light, Wendy lifted the vinyl tablecloth and folded it back to expose the corner of the table. She touched it. Yes, it was sharp, all right. Sharp enough to cut through the tape binding her hands. If she had time.
She began to rub her wrists against the corner. Up and down. Up and down.
“Soon you’ll join my friends, Wendy. You’ll be one of them. I’ve got a jar all ready for you.” The Gryphon went on laughing, laughing, while the dead women whimpered and groaned. “I’ll put you in the place of honor. Just think of it, my dearest. Why, soon you’ll be the star of the show!”
33
A Bell Jet Ranger helicopter, painted with the blue and white color scheme of the LAPD, swooped down on Van Nuys Airport less than three minutes after Delgado arrived. He was running toward it even before the skids touched the tarmac. Ducking under the overhead rotor, he climbed into the backseat behind the two Air Support Unit officers—pilot and observer—in the cockpit.
“Take me north!” he shouted over the engine roar. “To the Mojave!”
The pilot pulled up on the collective-pitch lever. Engine noise increased as the throttle opened. The airport shrank to a dark irregular stain, then glided away as the pilot’s feet worked the yaw pedals to steer the chopper north.
“Follow the 405 to the 5,” Delgado ordered. “Give me all the speed you’ve got.”
“Yes, sir.”
Delgado looked out the side window, staring down at the wide white streak of the San Diego Freeway five hundred feet below. On either side of the freeway, the rooftops of shops and apartment buildings glided by, some darkened briefly by the copter’s oblong shadow. Parking lots, open jewel cases at this height, glittered with shiny treasures that were cars. Lawns and public parks gleamed bright and fuzzy, squares of green velvet.
The chopper took less than ten minutes to reach city limits, where the Valley ended and the high desert began. Delgado spent the duration of the trip considering where best to look for Franklin Rood. The man might have gone anywhere, of course. Might have traveled fifty miles into the desert. Might still be driving, perhaps headed for Bakersfield or San Francisco—or the Canadian border, for that matter.
But Delgado didn’t think so. If his assumptions were correct. Rood was going to a place already known to him, the place where he kept his trophies. Some secluded hideaway, close enough to be convenient, most likely on one of the back roads that snaked through the desert like trails traced by a restless finger in the dust.
He saw such a road running parallel to Route 5 and decided to try it first.
“Fly over that route,” he said, leaning into the cockpit and pointing. “At a lower altitude.”
The pilot pulled the lever down, decreasing the pitch angle of the main rotor blades. The pale pink Mojave expanded as the helicopter began its descent.
Delgado accepted a pair of binoculars from the observer, then scanned the roadside, looking for a white car that resembled a Ford Falcon. He saw one old junker that intrigued him for a moment, but when the copter obligingly dipped still nearer to the ground, he shook his head.
Several other roads, some of them little better than dirt paths, branched off from the one they were following. At Delgado’s order, the pilot showed him each in detail. The roads hugged the scalloped rims of canyons or meandered into the desert and dead-ended amid the cholla and bitterroot. Delgado saw nothing that looked like the car he sought.
“Let’s try the Sierra Highway,” he said. It was the next logical place to look.
There was little to see along the highway itself except a few isolated ranches and what appeared to be large sheds or cheap repair shops with metal roofs. The few vehicles parked here and there were all wrong.
Again Delgado tried the back roads. Scanning the first one that branched off the highway, he saw a horse ranch, a scatter of picnic tables at a campsite, and a young boy who gazed up at the helicopter, waving his arm in broad sweeps.
The chopper returned to the Sierra Highway and continued north. A second side road crawled into view like the dry tributary of a dead river. The pilot took it without the need for an order. Delgado peered down. He saw a graveyard of abandoned automobiles, a desolate ranch, and, not far ahead, the silvery shimmer of a trailer.
Near the trailer was a car. White. Not new.
Suddenly the back of his neck was warm.
“Lower,” he said. The word came out so softly as to be nearly inaudible. He had to repeat it to make himself heard.
The copter descended.
“Don’t hover. Pass by.” He didn’t want to make too much noise. Just in case.
The copter swept past the car. It was a Falcon. Delgado was sure of that.
But was it Franklin Rood’s Falcon? He would have to read the license plate.
The observer glanced at him. “What now. Detective?”
“Set us down on the road about fifty yards from the trailer.” Delgado touched the grip of his Beretta, simply to reassure himself that it was there. “I’m taking a closer look.”
34
Wendy was sure the tape on her wrists was beginning to split. She needed only another minute or two, that was all, and she would be free. Then maybe somehow she could find a way to fight back. Maybe—
“I hope you’ve appreciated this wonderful performance, my dear.” The Gryphon had turned away from the display on the cabinet and was smiling at her, smiling like a skull. “But now I think you’ve seen enough.”
Oh, no, she thought with a chill of fear. Not yet. Please, not yet.
He crossed the room to the futon. Looking over her shoulder, she saw him kneel and reach into the drawstring bag, which had fallen on the floor during his ugly, pointless attempt at lovemaking.
From the bag he removed a hacksaw. The blade gleamed in the candlelight.
“Normally I wait until my victim is dead before taking my trophy.” He circled around the card table with the hacksaw in his hands. “But not this time.”
She tugged at the tape. It was partly worn through, but still it wouldn’t yield.
“This time I intend to try a new technique. I’m going to cut your head off while you’re still alive.”
He was coming toward her. Still smiling. His eyes dead.
“And I’m going to do it right now.”
She had to free her hands or she was dead. She had to. Had to.
With a final desperate tug she ripped the tape apart, then sprang to her feet, facing him from a yard away. He stared at the torn black adhesive clinging to her wrists.
“You never quit, do you?” he breathed, the words almost swallowed in the confusion of voices from the stereo speakers. “Well, it makes no difference. I’ve got you now.”
He advanced on her. She retreated. She backed into the cabinet. The two candles there, the only ones still lit, guttered fitfully. She grabbed the nearest one and thrust it at his face.
Blind him, a crazed inner voice was screaming, burn out his damn dead eyes!
But he was too quick. He dodged the flame, then swatted the candle from her hand. It hit the floor and went out.
She seized the one remaining candle and held it in front of her. Absurdly she thought of a movie heroine wielding a crucifix to ward off a vampire.
The Gryphon took another step toward her. He was laughing, enjoying her fear, savoring the pain he was soon to inflict. It was all a game to him, wasn’t it? Torture, murder—a game. He’d used that very word in the alley. The women he killed were the unwilling contestants in that game, and their heads were the prizes he won.
Their heads ...
Suddenly she saw a way to hurt him, really hurt him, let him taste at least a hint of the suffering he’d caused.
With a sweep of her arm she sent the four jars sliding off the cabinet to shatter on the floor.
His laughter died in a hiccupping gasp. The sharp, biting odor of formaldehyde rose in the air. He stared aghast at the wreckage of his trophies, the pools of clear liquid soaking into the carpet, the four heads rolling amid the litter of glass shards.
“No,” he whispered in disbelieving horror. The word trailed into a moan, then rose to a wail of pain that reminded her incongruously of a baby’s cry.
His head jerked up. His eyes locked on hers. She stared at him past the leaping flame of the candle in her hand.
“You ... you shit,” he hissed. “You filthy, evil little
shit
!”
He tossed the hacksaw aside. Scrabbled at his holster. He would point and shoot. Couldn’t miss at this range.
Unless he couldn’t see.
With a puff of breath, she extinguished the candle.
Darkness.
She dropped to her knees, then crawled blindly, seeking a place to hide. The darkness was total, absolute. Even her own hands, groping inches from her face, were invisible.
The disembodied voices of the dead went on and on, still more eerie in the sudden unreal night.
“... help me, somebody, please help, oh, God, please ...”
“I’ll do anything you say, anything ...”
“... want to live, that’s all, don’t you understand,
I want to live
!”
She kept crawling. Her breath came in ragged bursts. Could he locate her by the sound of her breathing? Maybe he already had. He might be right behind her. At any second she might feel his hand on her neck. Her body shivered with ghost sensations of his touch. She glanced around wildly and saw nothing but impenetrable blackness on all sides.
“I’ll get you, Wendy,” the Gryphon boomed from some indeterminate distance, not near, not far. “You can’t escape.”
He was right. He could flick his lighter and find her, or hunt her in the dark if he preferred.
She crawled faster, then collided with something—him—his legs—no, no, only the futon, that was all, keep calm now, try to stay in control.