The Mastermind was still out there.
Could he be in San Francisco right now?
Was Jamilla Hughes safe in her own city?
Chapter 20
THE RINGING of the telephone in my hotel room woke me early the next morning. I was groggy, still half asleep when I picked up.
It was Jamilla, and she sounded a little breathless. “I got a call late last night from my friend Tim at the Examiner,” she told me. “He’s got a lead for us. This could be good stuff.” She quickly filled me in on the sketchy details of an attempted murder, an old case. We had a witness this time. She and I were going on the road again. She didn’t ask if I wanted to go—it was apparently a done deal.
“I’ll pick you up in half an hour—forty minutes at the latest. We’re going to L.A. Wear black. Maybe you’ll get discovered.”
United flies an hourly shuttle between San Francisco and Los Angeles. We just made the nine o’clock and were in L.A. an hour or so later. We didn’t stop talking for the entire trip. We rented a car at Budget and headed to Brentwood, where O. J. Simpson had lived and presumably killed once upon a time. I was as pumped up about the new lead as she was. The FBI was also in on the game in L.A.
On the way to Brentwood, she checked in with her pal at the Examiner, Tim. I wondered if Tim was a boyfriend. “You find out any more for us?” she asked. Jamilla listened, then repeated what she heard for me. Part of it we already knew.
“Two men attacked the woman we’re going to see. She managed to get away from them. Lucky girl, incredibly lucky. They bit her severely. Chest, neck, stomach, face. She thought the perps were in their mid-forties. The attack occurred over a year ago, Alex. It was a big story in the supermarket tabloids.”
I didn’t say anything, just listened to her, took it all in. This case was so strange. I hadn’t seen anything quite like it.
“They were going to hang her from a tree. There was no mention of any tiger in any of the articles my friend was able to dig up. A detective from the LAPD is meeting us at the station house. I’m sure we’ll hear more details from him. He was the lead detective on the case.”
She looked over at me. She had something here, something good. “Here’s the kicker, Alex. According to my source, the woman believes her attackers were vampires.”
Chapter 21
WE MET with Gloria Dos Santos at the police station in the Brentwood section of L.A. It was a one-story concrete building, about as nondescript as a post office. Detective Peter Kim joined us in a small interview room, which was about six by five feet, soundproof, with padded walls. Kim was slender, around six feet, in his late twenties. He dressed well and seemed more like an up-and-coming Los Angeles business executive than a policeman to me.
Gloria Dos Santos obviously knew Kim, and they didn’t seem too fond of each other. She
called him “Detective Fuhrman,” and she used the name over and over until Kim told her to “can it” or he would lock her the hell up.
Dos Santos wore a short black dress, high black boots, leather wristbands. There were about a dozen earrings in strategic locations on her body. Her frizzy black hair was piled high, but some also cascaded down to her shoulders. She was only an inch or two over five feet and had a hard face. Her lashes were thick with mascara, and she used purple eye shadow. She looked to be in good physical shape—like all the other victims so far.
She stared at Kim, then at me, and finally at Jamilla Hughes. She shook her head and smirked. She didn’t like us, which was fine—I didn’t much like her either.
She sneered. “Can I smoke in this rattrap? I’m going to smoke like it or not. If you don’t like it, then I’m going the hell home.”
“So smoke,” Kim said. “But you’re not going home under any fucking circumstances.” He took out some David ranch-style sunflower seeds and started to eat them. Kim was a strange boy himself.
Dos Santos lit up a Camel and blew out a thick stream of smoke in Kim’s face.
“Detective Fuhrman knows everything that I know. Why don’t you just get it all from him? He’s brilliant, y’know. Just ask him about it. Graduated with some cumma honors from UCLA.”
“There are a few things we aren’t clear about,” I said to her. “That’s why we came all the way from San Francisco to see you. Actually, I came from Washington, D.C.”
“Long trip for nothing, Shaft,” she said. Gloria Dos Santos had a zinger for every occasion. She wiped her hand over her face a few times as if she were trying to wake herself up.
“You’re obviously high as a kite,” Jamilla cut in. “That doesn’t matter to us. Relax, girl. These men who attacked you hurt you pretty bad.”
Dos Santos snorted. “Pretty bad? They broke two ribs, broke my arm. They knocked me down ’bout six times. Fortunately, they knocked me right down a goddamn hill—side of a mountain, actually. I started rolling. Got up. Ran my ass off.”
“The initial report said that you didn’t see either of them very well. Then you claimed that they were in their forties or fifties.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It was foggy. That’s an impression I had. Earlier that night, I went to the Fang Club on West Pico. It’s the only place where you can meet real vampires and live to tell about it. So they say. I was going to a lot of Goth clubs back then—Stigmata, Coven Thirteen, Vampiricus over in Long Beach. I worked at Necromane. What’s Necromane?” she asked, as if it were a question we would want answered. She was right. “Necromane is a boutique for people who are really into the dead. You can buy real human skulls there. Fingers, toes. A full human skeleton if that’s your thing.”
“It’s not,” Jamilla said. “But I’ve been to a shop like that in San Francisco. It’s called the Coroner.”