Free Shiver by Michael Prescott

in Idaho two years ago seemed the likeliest connection. The body of a female hitchhiker had been discarded in a roadside ditch; the girl’s tongue had been cut out, her fingers methodically removed. Again, the body had been used as a sexual object by a man typed as AB positive. The Idaho authorities had formed a small task force of their own and were digging through their files to find similar crimes. A number of possibilities had cropped up—a call girl, Lynn Peters, raped and strangled in Nampa three years ago; a high-school teacher, Georgia Grant, stabbed to death on a hiking trail in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area in the summer of 1987; a Twin Falls waitress, Kathy Lutton, bludgeoned to death in a parking lot at Christmastime in 1986—but none could be definitely linked to the current investigation.
    Well, that was hardly surprising. Nothing definite had developed anywhere. And while Delgado’s task force pored over arrest records and filled in tip sheets and canvassed neighborhoods and made inquiries at art galleries and gift shops, that man was out there, the brown-haired man who eluded them, mocked them. Even now he might be at work. At any moment the phone might bring word of another corpse.
    Slowly Delgado replaced the chunk of agate. His gaze traveled to the tape recorder on his desk. He looked at it for a long moment.
    Then, while he watched as if from a distance, his hand opened the top drawer of his desk. Inside lay a pair of foam-cushioned miniature headphones and three audiocassettes. The cassettes were copies; the originals were locked in storage, as evidence.
    The tapes had come by first-class mail, addressed to Detective Sebastián Delgado, care of this divisional station; the words had been printed in large block letters with a felt-tip pen. There had been no return address, of course, and the two postmarks had been different. The existence of the tapes had never been made public, and so far the Gryphon had chosen not to contact any of the local news services. Only one fact pertaining to the tapes had leaked out, and that was the name selected by the killer to identify himself.
    Delgado stared at the tapes. He didn’t want to hear them. He’d played them many times, too many, and it was pointless, an exercise in self- torture, to play them again.
    But he would anyway.
    His hands shook only a little as he removed the headphones from the drawer and slipped them on.
     

 
    4
     
    From nine to twelve Wendy worked steadily, rarely looking up from her word processor. She typed briskly and accurately, using two fingers; in time with the tapping of the keys, columns of radium-green characters marched across the display screen, forming sentences, paragraphs, chapters. But not the great American novel or anything—just another booklet for Iver & Barnes Consultants, Inc.
    Iver & Barnes was an actuarial firm specializing in pension plans for medium-size corporate clients. The people in the communications department, Wendy among them, had the task of explaining the complex plans to the clients’ employees. The most common approach was a pamphlet ten or twelve pages long, written in simple declarative sentences and illustrated with goofy little cartoons. Once you got the hang of it, the actual writing was ridiculously easy, almost mindless; long ago Wendy had learned that each new job involved merely rearranging the same basic phrases in slightly different patterns.
    The department functioned as a halfway house for aspiring writers. They arrived fresh out of college, worked for a year or two, and moved on. All of the people who’d been there when Wendy arrived five years ago were long gone. Many had gone into publishing; a few of the braver ones had saved up money, then embarked on a freelance writing career.
    But she remained, grinding out paragraphs and pages, going nowhere.
    At noon she broke for lunch. She pushed the keyboard away from her and rose from her chair, yawning hugely, then damned Jennifer