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The Gryphon had done the job by hand. He was strong, then, with a powerful grip. But Delgado had already known that. It would take a strong man to sever muscle and bone with only a hacksaw. Ordinarily a surgeon’s electric saw would have been needed to do a job of that kind.
    The hacksaw, however, was unlikely to have been the murder weapon. Too unwieldy. No, something else had released the spray of blood that measled the walls. Most likely the same weapon that had been used in the other cases. But what?
    There was no way to know. Not now.
    Delgado stared down at the dark mushroom of blood sprouting between Elizabeth Osborn’s shoulders, crusted brown, soaking into the gaps between the floorboards. It looked eerily like the distorted shadow of the head that was not there. The head that had been sawed off at the base of the neck and taken away.
    He sighed, feeling older, much older, than his thirty-six years.
    Detective Sebastián Juarez Delgado had spent his entire adult life in the LAPD, and he knew about cops, all cops—plainclothes and uniformed, raw recruits and tarnished brass. He knew how they liked to grouse about their jobs, about the long hours, the bureaucratic paper shuffle, the stretches of enervating boredom interrupted by flashes of electric danger. And he knew, perhaps better than most of them, that such talk was only misdirection, a magician’s sleight of hand.
    Overtime, red tape, fatigue, risk—none of that was the bad part of the job, the part that made a young man old. The bad part was facing things like this. Not the physical reality as such, not the lake of blood that had gushed from a severed neck, but the implications to be drawn from the sight. Had Elizabeth Osborn been decapitated in a freeway accident, the condition of her body would have been much the same, but its emotional meaning utterly different.
    A man had done this. A member of the human species. A man had hacked through gristle and bone to take the prize he wanted. Had he carried it under his arm, or in a zippered bag, like a bowling ball? Had he whistled cheerfully as he left the house, his night’s work done?
    After what seemed like many long minutes, Delgado looked up from the body again and saw that the SID technicians had entered the living room. He nodded to Frommer, the leader of the team; the thin, bespectacled, constantly agitated man had supervised evidence recording and collection on both of the previous cases. He was infuriated by the Gryphon, who so far had refused to leave anything interesting.
    “Hello, Eric,” Delgado said, getting to his feet.
    “Detective.” Frommer nodded in a distracted way. “Christ, I hate the smell of blood.”
    “You should try these.” Delgado tapped his nostrils. “Cotton balls moistened with Aqua Velva. I can’t smell a thing.”
    “I experimented with something like that once. Only I used Mennen Skin Bracer. And I’ve tried cigarette filters and swimmers’ nose plugs too. Problem is, when I stick anything up my nose, I feel I can’t breathe. I know it’s irrational—just breathe through your mouth, right?—but I can’t help it. The only thing that works for me is coffee grounds on the stove. Handful of fresh grounds in a saucepan, no water, on a hot burner. In five minutes it masks every other smell in the place.”
    “I’ll keep that in mind.”
    Frommer stared down at the body. “Jesus, look at her. Just look at her. First thing to do is bag the hands and that goddamned statue. You know, I used to like sculpture.”
    Delgado nodded. “So did I.”
    Two of the evidence techs in Frommer’s team were busily unpacking their kit bags, removing canister vacuum cleaners, compasses and calipers, four-by-five cameras and video equipment, fiberglass brushes and vials of gray and white fingerprint powder. The cartographer was already plotting the coordinates of the room on graph paper, prior to marking down the exact location of every item of furniture, every ashtray, every