Violets Are Blue

disappearing in the past year. Lot of ranches in the area. Nobody believes in vampires, of course.
But
— Santa Cruz has a certain reputation. The kiddies call it the vampire capital of the U.S. Occasionally, the kids are right.”
    “I need to see what you have so far,” I told her. “I’m going to try and get a little sleep. But I want to read whatever Santa Cruz sends you. Can you send it to me?”
    “My friend Tim at the
Examiner
promised to send me the relevant files. Meanwhile, today’s my day off. I might just take a ride.”
    I opened my eyes wide. “If you go, bring somebody along. Bring Tim. I mean it.” I told her about the murder of the vice detective, Maureen Cooke, here in New Orleans. “Don’t go there alone. We still don’t know what we’re dealing with.”
    “I’ll take somebody along,” she promised, but I didn’t know if I could believe her.
    “Jamilla, be careful. I don’t have a good feeling about this.”
    “You’re just tired. Get some sleep. I’m a big girl.”
    We talked for a few more minutes, but I wasn’t sure if I had gotten through to her. Like most good homicide detectives, she was stubborn.
    I shut my eyes again, and started to drift away, then I was gone.

Chapter 80

    JAMILLA WAS remembering a line from a favorite Shirley Jackson novel,
The Haunting of Hill House
, which had been made into a really disappointing movie. “Whatever walked there, walked alone,” Jackson had written. That pretty much summed up how she felt about the murder case. And maybe even about her life lately.
    She drove her trusty, dusty Saab toward Santa Cruz. She gripped the steering wheel a little too firmly most of the way, and her hands felt numb. The kink in her neck was getting worse. This was a disturbing case, and she just couldn’t let it go. The killers were out there somewhere. They were going to keep murdering until somebody stopped them. So maybe she should stop them.
    She had tried to get her current boyfriend to go with her, but Tim was covering a bicyclists’ protest for the
Examiner
. Besides, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to spend the whole day with him. Tim was sweet, but, well, he wasn’t Alex Cross. So here she was getting off Route 1, entering Santa Cruz all by her lonesome.
All by her damn lonesome again
.
    At least she had alerted Tim that she was going to Santa Cruz, and of course she was a big girl, and armed to the teeth.
Ugh, teeth
, she thought. She cringed at the thought of fangs, and the horrible deaths of all those who had been bitten.
    She had always liked Santa Cruz, though. Maybe because it was practically the epicenter of the Loma Prieta earthquake back in ’89 — 6.9 on the Richter scale, sixty-three dead — but then the area had come back. The gutsy little town and the people there had refused to fold. Lots of earthquake-proof construction, nothing higher than two stories. Santa Cruz was pure California, the best.
    As she drove, she watched a big blond surfer climb out of a VW with a surfboard strapped to the roof. He was finishing off a drippy slice of pizza, heading into the Bookshop Santa Cruz. Pure California.
    There was quite a mix of people here — post-hippies, high-tech start-up folks, transients, surfers, college kids. She liked it an awful lot. So where were the goddamn vampires hiding? Were they here? Did they know
she
was here in Santa Cruz, looking for their gnarly asses? Were they among the surfers and post-hippies she was passing on the street?
    Her first stop was the town’s police department. The lieutenant, Harry Conover, was totally surprised to see her in the flesh. She guessed he couldn’t imagine any detective going out of his or her way on the job.
    “I told you I’d pass along everything I found on the Goths and wanna-be vamps. Didn’t you believe me?” he asked. He shook his head of longish blond curls, rolled his soft brown eyes. Conover was tall, well built, probably in his mid-thirties. Around her age. Jamilla could tell that he was a big flirt, and that he had a high opinion of himself.
    “Sure, I believed you. But I had today off, and this case is burning a hole right through me. So here I am, Harry. Better than E-mail, right? What do you have for me?”
    She sensed that he wanted to tell her to get a life, to enjoy her day off. She’d heard it all before, and maybe he was right. But not now, not with this case still on the boards.
    “I read in a couple of the reports that some of the local ghouls