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that mean?”
    Ron looked truly agonized. I knew this because his uni-brow was arched halfway up his forehead. “Look. She’s meeting with someone.”
    I didn’t like his answer, mostly because I knew it was bullshit. I hit Roy hard with the back of my hand. It’s amazing how much kinetic energy you can generate with a simple backhand swing. Roy felt it. He stumbled backward and yelped.
    “ Jesus, what the fuck was that for?”
    “ What’s she doing up north?”
    “ Look, I don’t—”
    I didn’t like the beginning of that answer, either, and my other hand shot out, low. It caught him in the gut and he doubled over. I grabbed the back of his hair and pulled him up to face me. His nose was trickling blood. He was gasping hard as if he had just run a marathon and it took all my willpower not to slap him again just because I hated his stupid eyebrow.
    “Talk. No lies. Or this starts going very badly for you.”
    He gasped, sucking wind. I could feel his heartbeat reverberating up through his hair.
    “Look, she’s...she’s searching for the thing that killed her parents.” Suck, gasp. “He’s somewhere up north.”
    “ Who is he? What’s his name?”
    “ I don’t know. She never tells us anything. She only drops, you know, clues. Says it’s better that we don’t know anything.”
    His words jived with Nicole’s. They also had the ring of truth. I always listen for the ring of truth. It’s there, if you know how to find it. I let him go, and he collapsed in a big velvet chair. He looked defeated and fucked up. Good.
    “And how did you meet Veronica?” I asked.
    He smiled weakly. “Anyone looking for vampires eventually ends up here,” he said, spreading his arms.
    “Do you have any clue how fucking lame that sounds?”
    “ Do you have any clue what you’re talking about?” he countered, and wiped his bleeding mouth and stared down at the blood on his hand. The word longingly came to mind.
    “ And what do people do in here?” I asked, motioning to this back room.
    Roy licked his hand.
    “Anything they want, man.”
    I stood, sickened.
    “You’ll be seeing me,” I said, and left.             
     
    * * *
     
    I was sitting in a Starbucks a few streets away.
    Adrenalin was still pumping through me. I still felt a strong desire to kick someone’s ass. The name Roy popped into my mind. Maybe later.
    I had no clue what was going on, and that was the frustrating part. I’ve been frustrated on cases before, trust me, but this one was taking the cake.
    Seriously, what the fuck was going on?
    Sipping on a latte of some sort and eating a scone of some sort, I waited while my laptop fired up. Starbucks was mostly empty. No surprise there since it was coming on to midnight. My hands were still shaking a little. Adrenalin does that to you. Sometimes it takes me a little while to come down from my ass-kicking high.
    Finally online, I did a quick Google search and came up with nothing. I sensed a very thorough beating in Roy’s immediate future. If that weird, blood-sucking asshole lied to me....
    A few tries later, after trying different keywords, I came upon the article I wanted. For now, Roy was spared.
    The article was in the L.A. Times . There had, indeed, been a car fire in Echo Park, one that had burned nearly half the hillside. Two charred bodies had been found inside a Cadillac. No indication of foul play, and no mention of the daughter who had witnessed the attack. The article gave the couple’s names: Jeremy and Tonya Fortune.
    I quickly accessed my various data mining websites, proprietary sites available only to licensed private investigators, and found them soon enough. Jeremy and Tonya Fortune out of Reseda, California. The valley. About an hour north of Los Angeles. It had to be them because all their personal information abruptly stopped three years ago. I even verified the Cadillac.
    I dug deeper.
    Jeremy and Tonya Fortune had one daughter. Valerie Fortune.
    Valerie?