Shiver (14 page)

Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n, Rood thought, quoting Mr. John Milton, who in turn had been quoting Lucifer.

He turned south on Beverly Glen Boulevard, passing the apartment building where Miss Rebecca Morris had lived. The sight evoked pleasant memories; he smiled in warm nostalgia. Miss Morris had made a fine kill, but there were far finer ones to come. What he had done in the past few years was only the beginning. Dimly he’d glimpsed his future, and it was magnificent. Songs and poems would commemorate him. Some unborn Homer would chart his odyssey. Statues would be raised in his image, and monuments in his name.

It had been a long road he’d traveled to reach the threshold of such greatness. As a child he could never have predicted his awesome destiny. He had been weak then. Yes, weak from the beginning.

His mother had often told him the story of his difficult birth, three weeks ahead of schedule, and how the small, wet, shriveled, wailing thing in her arms had not been expected to survive for more than a few days. An inauspicious arrival for one who would someday become the destroyer of worlds.

He had survived, of course, and grown; but he had not grown well. His weakness as an infant hung on like a stubborn illness. He developed into a skinny, nearsighted child blinking at life through thick lenses in owlish frames. He couldn’t run more than a few yards without tiring, couldn’t bat a ball or throw one, couldn’t chin himself even once. He had no skill at sports, no confidence in any aspect of life pertaining to physical activity. His body was an alien vessel in which his mind was trapped.

The only escape for him lay in imagination. Fantasies became his life. In daydreams he was strong, strong enough to take revenge on those who wronged him daily. He could shape his private inner world to whatever specifications he desired, edit and alter it at will, control the outcome of any situation. He could be a god.

Reality was less malleable, and for that reason, it was terrifying. He remembered the day in gym class when the teacher ordered the kids to climb a rope. The others did it with varying degrees of ease, most of them nimble as monkeys, a few grunting and straining but getting the job done. Then it was his turn. He stared up at the knotted line that extended to the ceiling a million miles high. He knew he couldn’t do it; and what was worse, he knew that the others knew it also. He felt the pressure of their eyes on him, the tension of their suppressed laughter straining for release.

“Hurry up, Frankie.” It was the gym teacher’s voice, empty of compassion. “Get going. Quit fooling around.”

He managed to climb five feet before his meager strength gave out. Then he just hung there, unable to go higher and afraid to slide down. Around him rose the sound he feared more than anything, the sound of children’s laughter, the ugly, hooting, chattering laughter heard only in treetops and playgrounds.

Afterward, in the locker room, the others ganged up on him. Holding him by his arms and legs, they slammed his head into the steel door of a locker again and again while his small fists flailed uselessly.

Weakling, they called him. Baby girl. Faggot.

Finally they shut him in the locker and left him there. For two hours he was trapped in that lightless coffinlike place, breathing through the vents and whimpering softly. Eventually the janitor heard him weeping and let him out.

Rood winced at the memory and tightened his grip on the steering wheel.

There had been many such incidents. Children were evil creatures; they sensed weakness and preyed on it. In any group of youngsters, there was one who would be cast as the outsider, the loser, the perpetual victim. In the small town where he’d grown up, in the school that had been his prison, he had been assigned that role, and there was no escaping from it.

He was twelve years old when he developed an interest in the opposite sex, an interest confined to sexual fantasies; he was sure he had no chance with any of the girls in town. They knew too much about him. They knew he was a sissy because he was the one picked on by the other boys. They knew he was weird because he kept to himself and rarely spoke above a mumble. They knew he was a fairy because he wore glasses and was no good at sports. Oh, yes, they knew everything.

He did his best to satisfy his urges in secret. His collection helped, at least for a time. He spent many hours pressing his lips to the satin smoothness of stolen panties and running his tongue over the cups of bras. But articles of clothing, no matter how seductively feminine, were not enough. He needed a woman, a woman who would love him and whisper tender words to him and stroke him in the dark. He needed love.

Only three times in his life had Rood tried to establish any form of intimacy with a woman. He made his first attempt while in the tenth grade. After helping a girl with her homework on several occasions, he summoned all his courage and asked her to a school dance. The look on her face when she turned him down—that mixture of discomfort and shock and imperfectly concealed amusement—was a splash of acid burned into his memory.

His second attempt came four years later, on the night of his twenty-first birthday, when he visited a whorehouse. He still wanted a woman, wanted one desperately, but he was terrified of facing rejection again.

The whore did not reject him. His wallet was full; that was all she cared about. But when she took him to bed with her, a terrible thing happened, a thing that shamed him worse than any humiliation of his childhood. He was impotent with her. His manhood, which had never failed him when he huddled alone in the bathroom, was limp and unresponsive. The whore told him that it was all right, that it happened all the time; but he heard the contempt in her voice, the words she had not spoken, the words she must have been thinking.

Sissy. Weakling. Faggot.

His third and final attempt took place on a winter afternoon six years ago, the day when he dared to ask Miss Kathy Lutton to a movie. At the time he hadn’t known her last name; he learned it a year later from news reports of her murder in the parking lot outside the restaurant. A murder that had never been solved.

Miss Lutton had rejected him, but he had not taken rejection and humiliation passively that time. At last he’d found a way to exercise power over women. The ultimate power, the power of life and death, the power of a god.

Even as a child. Rood had known of the power that was his when he did things to animals. He’d thrilled at their helplessness, their frantic squirming and final convulsions. He’d known other varieties of power as well—the power that came from shoplifting, from breaking into homes, from setting fires and watching the flames leap up.

But none of that had been enough to make him truly strong. Murder was different. Murder was the medicine that cured him at last of the disease of weakness.

Now he was more powerful than any of the bullies who’d beaten him, more powerful than any of the frigid, sexless, man-hating bitches who’d done their best to emasculate him. He’d strengthened his body with a rigorous exercise regime, and he’d strengthened his character with ever greater tests of his courage and cunning. Over the past five years he’d taken many lives, each time refining his technique and polishing his skills.

There was Miss Georgia Grant, whom he encountered on a hiking trail in 1987. After that, the teenage girl he kidnapped outside of Boise; he saw to it that her body would never be found. Then, in 1989, two kills: Miss Lynn Peters, the escort-service whore in Nampa, and Miss Stacy Brannon, the hitchhiker on Route 15.

Shortly afterward he moved to L.A., where he found new opportunities. A nameless female transient he buried in Griffith Park. A few months later. Miss Erin Thompson, the UCLA student whose body must still be moldering in a cave near Paradise Cove. Then Miss Kelly Widmark, who worked at a video store in Santa Monica, and who died in the alley behind the store. Her murder, unlike most of the others, was impulsive and unplanned; the sight of her as she stood at the checkout counter, so young and virginal and yet so very ripe, jolted him with desire, and he simply left the store without renting a tape, then waited in the alley, hoping she would leave via the rear door. She did. And more recently, less than a year ago, in fact, there was Mrs. Carla Aguilar, the housewife from Culver City. He saw her on the street and followed her for hours before ambushing her in the parking garage of a shopping mall.

His first kill in Twin Falls was rushed and rather sloppy. Only gradually did he learn to draw out each murder by means of physical or psychological torture, to enjoy the corpse afterward, and to take parts of it with him for purposes of preservation; he’d always taken pleasure in keeping the animals’ remains. At first fingers and tongues seemed particularly appealing; the possibility of taking the head did not occur to him until later. He tried it first on Mrs. Aguilar, but the cheap hacksaw blade made a mess of things and foiled his intent. Only once he bought a tungsten-carbide blade could he be sure of taking the trophy he most wanted.

Now the Gryphon would strike again. And the city would tremble before him. And he, Franklin Rood, would laugh.

Power, yes. He had power. Unlimited power.

He was the most powerful man in the world.

As he headed east on Pico Boulevard, approaching Miss Alden’s neighborhood, he found himself humming along with the new song on the radio, which was “Sweet Dreams.”

9

After dinner Wendy and Jeffrey crossed Pico Boulevard, jaywalking at his insistence, and entered the Westside Pavilion, a cavernous postmodern shopping mall echoing with footsteps and the blare of Muzak from trendy little stores. They rode the escalators from floor to floor, people-watching and window-shopping, stopping once to purchase two strawberry frozen-yogurt cones. They ended up at the multiplex theater facility on the top floor, where they debated seeing a movie—or, rather, Jeffrey knocked around the pros and cons of the idea while Wendy listened impassively. There was no shortage of first-run films to choose from, but none of them really appealed to Jeffrey, so he concluded that they didn’t want to go to a movie after all. Wendy agreed.

“Well,” Jeffrey said, which was what he always said when they reached the terminal point in one of their dates.

“Well,” she echoed foolishly.

“You’ve got yogurt on your nose,” he informed her.

She wiped it off. “Thanks.”

“So I guess we’ve had our fun for tonight, huh?”

“I guess so.”

He walked her back to her Honda. They stood on the curb watching random cars whiz past, headlights tracing white comet tails in the darkness. The dry wind was stronger than before; trees rustled ominously, and scraps of newspaper cartwheeled like tumbleweeds down the street.

“There’s still some yogurt on you,” Jeffrey said.

“Where?”

He kissed her mouth gently. “There.”

“Gone now?”

“Not quite.”

He kissed her again. His lips lingered. Her sudden awareness of his body, so close to her own, was frightening. Nervously she pulled away; then, to compensate for breaking contact so abruptly, she smiled.

“Thanks for dinner.”

He nodded, showing nothing in his face. “I’ll call you.”

Quickly she got into her car, turned the key in the ignition, switched on the headlights. She pulled away from the curb and left Jeffrey standing there, alone on the sidewalk, his hand lifted in a wave.

She’d been planning to drive straight home, but on impulse she took a detour into Westwood Village, where the sidewalks were always crowded, even on a Tuesday night. She cruised past movie theaters dressed in neon radiance, bars and restaurants throbbing with the electronic pulse of amplified music, storefront windows framing pyramids of record albums and platoons of T-shirts gliding on automated racks. A sudden inexplicable urge seized her, the urge to get out of her car, join the crowds, become part of that cheerful chaos just beyond her windshield, just out of reach.

The feeling passed. After she’d circled the Village a few times, crawling at five miles an hour in the sluggish traffic, she had no urge to do anything except go home and climb into bed.

She took Wilshire Boulevard east to Beverly Glen, cut south to Pico, and pulled into her parking space at nine-thirty. She got out of the car, carrying the shopping bag from the jewelry store, which now contained only an empty box; she stuffed the bag in the trash dumpster at the side of the building.

As she passed Jennifer Kutzlow’s apartment on the ground floor, she noted with relief that the lights were out, the place silent. Then she remembered having seen Jennifer leave this morning. Off to Seattle, she’d said, swinging her overnight bag. Well, there would be no rock and roll tonight, thank God.

Wendy checked her mail and found nothing but the usual assortment of bills and advertising circulars. She climbed the outside staircase, walked along the second-floor gallery, and unlocked her door. Stepping inside, she flipped up the wall switch; light flooded the living room. Automatically she glanced around to see if the place had been burglarized; it hadn’t.

She hung up her coat in the hall closet, then went into the bathroom to pour a glass of water. Her reflection in the mirror over the sink caught her eye. She stared at herself. The necklace sparkled like spilled wine. It really was beautiful. Beautiful—but wasted. Wasted on her. Because nobody would ever look twice at her, necklace or not.