The girl looked at her contemptuously. “So I’m fucking impressed? You must be very cool. You must live right on the edge.”
I spoke again. “We’re trying to help you. We—”
She cut me off. “Bullshit. You’re trying to help yourselves. You’ve got another big case. Those kinky murders in San Francisco, right? I can read, man. You could care less about Gloria Dos Santos and her problems. I got lots of them. More than you know. Who gives a shit, right?”
“Two people were killed in Golden Gate Park. It was a massacre. Did you read that? We think it might be the same men who attacked you,” I told her.
“Yeah, well, let me tell you something you better get straight. The two men who attacked me were vampires! Got that? I know this is impossible for you to wrap your little minds around, but there are vampires. They set themselves apart from the human world. That means they aren’t like you!
“Two of them almost killed me. They were hunting in Beverly Hills. They kill people every fucking day in L.A.! They drink their blood. They call it feeding. They chew on their bones like it’s KFP—that’s Kentucky Fried People, chumps. I can see you don’t believe me. Well, believe me.”
The door to the interview room opened quietly. A uniformed patrolman popped in and whispered something to Detective Kim.
Kim frowned and looked at us, then at Dos Santos. “There was a killing on Sunset Boulevard a short time ago. Someone was bitten and then hanged at one of the better hotels.”
Gloria Dos Santos’s face twisted horribly. Her eyes grew small and very angry. She flew into a rage, started to scream at the top of her voice. “They followed you here, you assholes! Don’t you get it? They followed you! Oh, my God, they know I talked to you. Oh, Jesus Christ, they’ll get me. You just got me killed!”
Part Two
BLOOD LUST
Chapter 22
I ALWAYS liked working tough murder cases with Kyle Craig, so I was glad that he would be joining Jamilla Hughes and me in Los Angeles later that day. I was surprised, however, when I saw Kyle already at the murder scene in Beverly Hills when we arrived. The body had been found at the Chateau Marmont, the hotel where John Belushi had overdosed and died.
The hotel looked like a French castle and rose seven stories over the Sunset Strip. As I entered the lobby, I noticed that everything looked to be authentic 1920s, but dated rather than antique. Supposedly a studio boss once told the actor William Holden, “If you have to get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont.”
Kyle met us at the door of the hotel room. His dark hair was slicked back, and it looked as if he’d gotten a little sun. Unusual for Kyle. I almost didn’t recognize him.
“This is Kyle Craig, FBI,” I told Jamilla. “Before I met you, he was the best homicide investigator I ever worked with.”
Kyle and Jamilla shook hands. Then we followed him into the hotel room. Actually, it was a hillside bungalow: two bedrooms, a living room with a working fireplace. It had its own private street entrance.
The crime scene was as depressingly bad as the others. I recalled something typically pessimistic that a philosopher had written. I’d once had this same thought at a grisly crime scene in North Carolina: “Human existence must be a kind of error. It is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens.” My own philosophy was a little cheerier than Schopenhauer’s, but there were times when he seemed on the mark.
The worst of all had happened to a twenty-nine-year-old record company executive named Jonathan Mueller, and in the worst possible way. There were bites on his neck. I didn’t see any knife cuts. Mueller had been hung from a lighting fixture in the hotel room. His skin was waxy and translucent, and I didn’t think he had been dead very long.
The three of us moved closer to the hanging body. It was swaying slightly and still dripping blood.
“The major bites are all in his neck,” I said. “It looks like role-playing vampires again. The hanging has to be their ritual, maybe their signature.”
“This is so goddamn creepy,” Jamilla whispered. “This poor guy had the blood sucked out of him. It almost looks like a sex crime.”
“I think it is,” Kyle said. “I think they seduced him first.”
Just then the cell phone in the pocket of my jacket went off. The timing couldn’t have been worse.
I looked at Kyle before I answered the call. “It could be him,” I said. “The Mastermind.”
I put the receiver to my ear.
“How do you like L.A., Alex?” the Mastermind asked in his usual mechanical drone. “The dead pretty much look the same everywhere, don’t they?”
I nodded at Kyle. He understood who was on the line. The Mastermind.
He motioned for me to give him the phone, and I handed it over. I watched his face as he listened, then frowned deeply. Kyle finally took the phone away from his ear.
“He broke off the connection,” he said. “It was like he knew you weren’t on the line anymore. How did he know, Alex? How does the bastard know so much? What the hell does he want from you?”