amilla 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 Tim to go with her, but he 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 to the fact 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 image of fangs, and the horrible deaths of all those who had been bitten.
She had always liked Santa Cruz, though. Maybe because it had been practically the epicenter of the Loma Pietra earthquake back in ‘89 - 6.7 on the Richter scale, fifty-seven 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 Book Shop of 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 wannabe 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 ............