With the clerk hypnotized, I ordered him to look up my account, override any holds, and issue a luxury car at subcompact rates. Add maximum insurance coverage at no extra cost so I could've rolled my rental off the Santa Monica pier and not owed this company a dime.

I left the clerk and the old woman comatose and naked on a table in the break room. Glazed donuts covered their naughty parts. The pooch swung from the overhead fan, his harness and leash tied to one of the blades.

The rental, a blue Chrysler 500M, was the kind of fancy, overly macho car a Klingon would've appreciated. I locked the box with Roxy's files in the trunk. What new clues waited for me?

New clues about Venin and Niphe.

But first I needed to do something I should've done earlier in my investigation. Visit the spot where Roxy Bronze had been killed.

I drove north to the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Cahuenga and passed the alley where she had been found. I circled the neighborhood. LAPD Hollywood Station and the city hall annex were four blocks south. What a convenient walk for the detectives «investigating» Roxy's murder.

I parked near the corner of Selma and Cahuenga, next to a cafe and close to the alley. Wooden scaffolds shaded the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. Posters covered the plywood sidings. Scruffy men mingled in the shadows, smoking cigarettes and sharing drinks from a bag.

This being Sunday midmorning, other than the customers in the cafe and the bums, there weren't many people out.

I walked up the street toward Hollywood Boulevard. I passed a couple of shops that sold either porn or really bad art-I couldn't tell through the dingy windows. There was a take-out barbecue joint and at the corner, a twenty-four-hour newsstand. Except for the newsstand and cafe, everything was closed.

Considering its glamorous reputation, Hollywood Boulevard seemed disappointingly low rent. Grime caked the shuttered storefronts. A dead pigeon rested near an empty tallboy of malt liquor. Trash on the sidewalk sullied the marble stars and brass plaques of the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

I returned to the alley and stopped at the entrance. A multistory office building stood to the right, the northern side. A two-story, gray brick building was on the left, the southern side. Posters for musical acts were pasted to the gray walls.

I walked into the alley, between tall metal gates secured in the open position. The alley turned left and made an L to the south. The asphalt in the immediate area seemed remarkably clean, as if steam blasted. Any traces of Roxy's death had long been obliterated. A roll-on Dumpster stood against the wall at the corner of the L. What little I had learned about the crime scene was that Roxy was found dead beside this Dumpster at a little after one in the morning.

I knelt and touched the spot where Roxy must have fallen dead. I closed my eyes and, in my memory, saw her face again, not the leer from the porno DVD but that warm, empathetic, and gracious smile of a high school girl.

I caressed the rough surface of the asphalt and imagined picking up faint sparks of Roxy's long-evaporated aura. I felt nothing of course; still, there was much of the supernatural world that I didn't know.

Standing again, I wiped the dirt from my hand.

The police report-a breezy, sanitized summary my hacker had found-said that a "small-caliber bullet" entered Roxy's torso at a horizontal angle. But where in her torso? There was no mention of gunpowder residue nor an estimated range from the shooter to Roxy. The police insisted the homicide was a random act, which meant the shot was remarkably lucky-or unlucky, from Roxy's point of view.

According to the report, the murder went like this: Pow. Roxy dropped dead. Happened faster than the snap of my fingers.

One small-caliber bullet dropped her? A .22? A .25? Pistol, according to the newspapers. One small bullet to the torso, and a strong, healthy woman like Roxy just collapsed and died? The one bullet could kill her, of course. Usually the victims bled to death, sometimes within seconds.

There wasn't anything random about the shot. Roxy was gunned down at close range. Meaning she had been comfortable enough with the shooter to let him-or her-get close, especially at that time of night.

There was a lot more to Roxy's murder than the remarkable ballistics of one little bullet. How convenient that the police had lost evidence. Too bad she had been cremated; otherwise, I'd get her corpse exhumed and autopsied again.

The entrance from Selma had battered metal gates, secured open with rusted padlocks. Weeds with yellow blossoms grew between cracks in the asphalt.

A scuzzy area, yes. But dangerous? Maybe at night, this area would be different.

On the drive to Coyote's home, I mulled over the images of the murder scene. They flashed like slides across my brain, and I imagined Roxy's corpse sprawled on the asphalt in the alley with a chalk outline around her body. The trip to Hollywood confirmed the obvious, that I didn't yet have the whole story about her murder.

I got off the freeway. Surprisingly, my Chrysler wasn't the fanciest set of wheels in the neighborhood. The homies were back in their cribs this Sunday morning. Scores of big customized SUVs and pickups made this part of Boyle Heights look like the impound lot of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

I carried my overnight bag and the box with Roxy's files toward Coyote's home. He sat in the shade under a blue tarp stretched from his porch and tied to a pair of crooked aluminum poles. He tossed golfball-size pellets from a greasy paper bag to the snapping jaws of three scrawny dogs.

Coyote blinked his bloodshot eyes. Even for a vampire, despite his makeup and leather skin, he looked pale.

I asked how he was doing.

"Not so good, vato." He shifted in the lawn chair. "It's that rat chorizo. Maybe there's a reason you leave the tails out." Coyote reached into the bag and lobbed a hunk of the malodorous sausage. "What's in the box, ese?"

"Homework."

"How was Veronica?"

"Healthy."

Coyote nodded and went back to feeding the dogs.

Inside the house I set my laptop computer on the kitchen table. I sent an email to my hacker and asked for anything regarding Lara Krieger, possibly the sister of Roxy Bronze.

I reviewed the files. I set aside the photo of Niphe, Rosario, and Journey standing together. Finding information that linked them was my immediate task, though if I wanted to dredge through notes and numbers like this, I would've been an accountant. I sorted the documents, cross-checking information, taking the occasional break for a coffee-and-blood pick-me-up. What I really wanted was a Manhattan and another shot of leg… Veronica's.

The last folder held large manila envelopes. I opened one and pulled out a cheap spiral notebook. Scotch tape held photocopies of news clippings to the pages. Judging by the dates, this information went back more than ten years, long before Project Eleven.

One photo from the Los Angeles Times showed a much slimmer Rosario and a woman in her midthirties, dark hair, oversize glasses, passing one another in a vestibule within the city hall building. The caption identified her as Councilwoman Petale Venin. The accompanying story described the controversy surrounding the rezoning along Loma Alta Drive in Altadena and the use of eminent domain to displace the residents for commercial development.

But what stood there now was Dale Journey's church. What happened to the commercial development?

I read through the clippings in the notebook and learned that the development trust pushing for eminent domain had gone bankrupt. After the homes had been demolished, the vacant land, with its magnificent views of the San Gabriel Valley, lay fallow.