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thousand men and women with an avid interest in vampires. Surprise you, Detective? You thought we were a more modest cult?”
    “It might have a week ago, but not now,” I said. “Nothing surprises me much anymore. Thanks for talking to me.”
    Westin and I took seats at a large oak library table. He had selected a dozen or more volumes on vampires for me to read, or at least leaf through.
    “I especially recommend Carol Page’s
Bloodlust: Conversations with Real Vampires
. Ms. Page is the real deal. She gets it,” he told me, and handed over
Bloodlust
. “She has met vampires, and records their activities accurately and fairly. She started her investigation as a skeptic, much like yourself, I expect.”
    “You’re right, I’m very skeptical,” I admitted. I told Peter Westin about the most recent murder in Los Angeles, and then he let me ask whatever questions I wished about the vampire world. He answered patiently, and I soon learned that a vampire subculture existed in virtually every major city as well as some smaller ones, such as Santa Cruz, California; Austin, Texas; Savannah, Georgia; Batavia, New York; and Des Moines, Iowa.
    “A real vampire,” he told me, “is a person born with an extraordinary gift. He, or she, has the capacity to absorb, channel, transform, and manipulate pranic energy — which is the life force. Serious vampires are usually very spiritual.”
    “How does drinking human blood fit in?” I asked Peter Westin. Then I quickly added, “If it does.”
    Westin answered quietly. “It is said that blood is the highest known source of pranic energy. If I drink your blood, then I take your strength.”
    “My blood?” I asked.
    “Yes, I would think you’d do nicely.”
    I recalled the nocturnal raid on the funeral parlor north of L.A. “What about the blood of corpses? Those dead for a day or two?”
    “If a vampire, or a poseur, were desperate, I suppose blood from a corpse would suffice. Let me tell you about real vampires, Detective. Most of them are needy, attention seeking, and manipulative. They are frequently attractive — primarily
because
of their immorality, their forbidden desires, rebelliousness, power, eroticism, their sense of their own immortality.”
    “You keep emphasizing the word
real
vampires. What distinction are you trying to make?”
    “Most young people involved with the underground vampire lifestyle are merely role-players. They are experimenting, looking for a group that meets their needs of the moment. There’s even a popular mass-market game, Vampire: The Masquerade. Teenagers especially are attracted to the vampire lifestyle. Vampires have an incredible alternative way of looking at the world. Besides, vampires party late into the night. Until the first light.” His lips curled into a smile.
    Westin was definitely willing to talk to me, and I wondered why. I also wondered how seriously he took the vampire lifestyle. His clothing shop in town sold to young people looking for alternative trappings. Was he a poseur himself? Or was Peter Westin a real vampire?
    “The mythology of the vampire goes back thousands of years,” he told me. “It’s present in China, Africa, South and Central America. And central Europe, of course. For a lot of people here in America it’s an aesthetic fetish. It’s sexual, theatrical, and very romantic. It also transcends gender, which is an attractive idea these days.”
    I felt it was time to stop his spiel and focus on the murders. “What about the murders — the actual violence taking place here in California and Nevada?”
    A mask of pain came over his face. “I’ve heard Jeffrey Dahmer called a vampire-cannibal. Also, Nicolas Claux, who you may not be familiar with. Claux was a Parisian mortician who confessed to murders in the mid-nineties. Once he was captured he took great pleasure in describing eating the flesh of corpses on his mortician’s slab. He became known all over Europe as the Vampire of