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reporter, Delgado assumed. Soon dozens of them would swarm over this neighborhood like flies crusting a garbage pail. This afternoon every local newscast would lead with the story, and the city’s panic, already high, would be ratcheted up another notch. Gun stores and home-security outfits would report a new wave of record sales. Not since the Night Stalker case had one killer generated a wave of paranoia of such frightening intensity. People acted as if the phenomenon of serial murder were new to L.A. It was not.
    The Gryphon, as Delgado and every other cop in the LAPD knew only too well, was far from the only repeat killer loose in Los Angeles on this chill March morning. No one in the department cared to speculate on how many unsolved homicides were the work of men who killed capriciously, not for gain but for the satisfaction of an anti-life impulse so primal it could scarcely be understood by a normal mind. L.A. had dozens of them, and they were rarely caught.
    The Gryphon had garnered more publicity than any of the others, in part because of the sensational aspects of the case, but in greater part because his first two victims, like his third, had been not prostitutes or runaways, not the faceless shadow figures who slept in alleys and turned tricks for a hit of crack, but “decent people,” in the cops’ own parlance. Julia Stern had been a young housewife; Rebecca Morris had been an upwardly mobile junior executive. So far the Gryphon had worked exclusively in L.A.’s Westside, a patchwork of middle- and upper-class neighborhoods, where attractive young women were not supposed to die random, senseless deaths.
    But then, nobody was supposed to die a death like that. Life, any life, was not meant to end that way.
    Delgado sighed, his brief smile fading.
    A moment later Gray returned with the news that Frommer was eager to get a look at the tracked dirt. “He’ll probably put it through microscopic analysis,” Gray remarked.
    Delgado was barely listening. “Let’s check out the rest of the house.”
    A narrow hallway led past a bathroom, a utility closet, and a guest room that Elizabeth Osborn had turned into a messy, but comfortable, study. At the far end of the hall was the bedroom. The table lamp on the nightstand was unlit. A piano concerto played from a clock radio; apparently the alarm had been set to awaken the woman with soft music. The bed was unmade, the quilted spread flung back hastily. The walls were bare save for an Arizona Highways calendar; the photo showed a grove of golden paloverde trees against a wall of striated purple.
    Definitely a relocated Arizonan, Delgado concluded.
    A stack of mail had been left on the bureau. Delgado looked it over and saw a Century Cable bill, a mailing from the Sierra Club, a Great Western Bank statement, and a catalog from Crane’s Department Store. The catalog’s cover featured a smiling woman in a straw hat and the cheerful announcement: “Summer’s On the Way!” It was a summer Elizabeth Osborn would never see.
    “Seb?” The voice was Gray’s. “You okay?”
    “Just ... thinking.”
    “It gets to you,” Nason said sympathetically. “You start seeing them in your sleep.”
    “And hearing them,” Delgado said. “Their voices.”
    Nason blinked. “I forgot about that. You kept that out of the papers, didn’t you?”
    “So far.”
    “Good.”
    The tapes, like many other details of the case, had been withheld from the press, partly to protect the victims’ privacy and partly to provide a means of debunking the endless phony confessions that came in over the task-force hotline. If necessary, such information also could be used to distinguish a copycat killer from the original. As yet, thank God, there had been no imitators. In time there would be. In time ...
    “So how do you figure it?” Nason asked abruptly. “You think maybe he woke her up, hustled her out of bed, cooled her in the other room?”
    “No. That’s not his M.O. He doesn’t