The Spinoza Trilogy Read Free Page B

here is clearly nuts.”
    “ Nuts or not, we have a missing girl, who’s most likely a minor.”
    “ I still say she’s a runaway. A runaway of a runaway is low priority for a prestigious law enforcement agency like the LAPD.”
    “ But not for me.”
    “ Do I really need to answer that?” he said. “Anyway, since you get paid to do this shit, you’re the lucky bastard who gets to look into it further.”
    “ Yeah,” I said. “Lucky me.”
     
     
     
    Chapter Three
     
     
    I spent the next two hours in my office poring over the file Gladys had given me. I was on my own with this case. The LAPD had effectively shelved the case, and, quite frankly, I was Gladys’s only hope.
    Perhaps Veronica’s only hope, too.
    No pressure or anything.
    There was a time when I was without hope, too. A pathetic, hopeless drunk. There had also been a time when I couldn’t have been happier. A wonderful marriage. A sweet little son. Within a matter of years, two tragic accidents, and a lot of alcohol later, it was all lost to me. My wife, my son, and my freedom. I had spent a year in prison, sobering up.
    Vehicular manslaughter.
    With that afternoon’s donuts still churning sluggishly in my digestive system, I locked up my office and decided to hit the first name on the list.
    According to Gladys’s notes, the first name was Veronica’s best friend. Gladys didn’t have a number for the girl, but she knew where she worked. She car-hopped at Industrial Burger in Hollywood.
    “Oh, goody,” I said to my empty Camry. “More grease.”
     
    * * *
     
    I was in luck. And luck is imperative in my business.
    In this case, my luck consisted of catching Veronica’s good friend, Nicole, on the right day at work. According to the manager, (after, of course, I showed him my P.I. license and slipped him a $20 bill), her shift would start in just under an hour.
    Happy that the investigation was off to a good start—not always the case, trust me—I ordered a Diet Coke and sat in my car and waited.
    While I waited, I did some research on my iPhone; in particular, I Googled vampire slayers. I was disheartened to see nearly three million hits came up, most about Buffy, the Vampire Slayer .
    I adjusted my search parameters: vampire slayer -Buffy .
    Better. Only five hundred thousand. So I settled in with my diet soda and spent the next hour or so reading about all things undead and those who hunt them.
    My conclusion after an hour of reading?
    Well, outside of popular literature, no one took vampires or vampire hunting very seriously. There seemed, in fact, to be very little evidence of real vampires anywhere. Outside of a vampire hunting kit on display at the Ripley Museum in Niagara Falls, NY, and the ludicrous incident of the Highgate Vampire Hunt in England, which featured a couple of goofballs running around a cemetery claiming to be hunting vampires, there was remarkably little information about honest-to-God vampire hunters. Unlike ghost hunters, whole groups of which numbered in the tens of thousands around the world.
    So what was I to make of this?
    Apparently, more people saw a need to hunt ghosts than vampires. In fact—a quick Google search later—there were no legitimate vampire hunting groups out there.
    Conclusion: obviously more people believed in ghosts than vampires.
    I sat back in my hot seat and thought about it. So why in the hell would a teenage girl claim to be a vampire slayer?
    I opened Gladys’s file next to me and took out the two blown up pictures I had of Veronica. Included with the two pictures was a hand written note apologizing that these were the only two pictures she had.
    The girl in the picture was not small. In fact, the girl seemed to have grown three or four inches between the two pictures. One featured a defiant-looking young teenager at a BBQ, holding a paper plate overflowing with food. She was looking at the camera with a smoldering look, daring the picture taker to take another shot. Her hair