I met Detective Moreland for coffee the next morning. He was a working man, so it was only a short event. It also was very amiable. Despite my earlier expectations, though, the man was not as free with his speech as I had envisioned.

Beyond my offering my condolences for the death of his partner, there was little said beyond simple chitchat. He admitted that his young colleague was far from a perfect man. What was it he said? "The fella had an awful lot of bad habits for someone so young."

Well, I suppose that said something, though I wasn't sure what. Generally I'm good at getting people to open up and share, but the detective was as canny as he was smart. He was a shrewd man who played his cards close to the vest and who let slip very little. Did he suspect me of anything? Did he credit Keebler's unfounded assertions that I was a killer? I didn't believe so, but Moreland ... what an interesting man.

It gladdened me to no end to discover that my initial estimation of the policeman was a truthful one. He really was a good and standup guy, the kind that we all deserved to have protecting us.

It wasn't often that people cruised into my life who I wanted to keep there, and it was with great happiness that I found that Sam Moreland was one of them. It was my good fortune to meet him and Dani Gaudin in such a short time.

After our goodbyes, I headed for the main library in midtown. It may surprise you to learn that I had a library card. The Internet was useful, but there simply were some things that were better learned the old-fashioned way.

Along the route, I took a detour and stopped by the offices of a titling company that I sometimes used. I'd purchased pieces of real estate over the last year under the name of several companies that I owned. I gave the title company people a list of properties that I'd drafted and asked them to gather whatever information they could find on the current property owners. Nestled within that rather long list were the addresses of the four properties that I knew my new bratva friends had been using. There might be a pattern there that I could see, and I was unusually good at puzzles.

I then went to the library and caught up on my newspaper reading, going first through the most recent editions of the city's daily rags that the library had still on paper, and then later leafing through the older stuff on microfilm.

It wasn't entirely clear what I was seeking. Sometimes when I listened to people, or when I read newspapers and books, things just jumped out at me, odd things, patterns and the like. It was the same way I was able to gather hints about whether other blood drinkers were in the area. I didn't have to see the blood drinker. They simply left things in their wake, things that sometimes drew my attention.

Perhaps the same was true of the bratva. I was no investigator like Dani or Detective Moreland. They no doubt occasionally relied on their guts, but most of their work was about facts and figures. I was all about intuition.

As I had hoped, the time I spent on the local papers in the library was time well spent, though not in the way I had imagined. There were hundreds of papers in the city, and not all of them were available online. Even more, the Internet was a morass. It was possible to find enormous amounts of information online with great speed. But so much important material was lost in the searching. The Internet just threw so much garbage at users that it sometimes was hard to find the genuine nuggets.

The things that leapt out at me over the next hours had nothing to do with the bratva or any other organized crime family. It was about blood drinkers and the patterns that I had habituated myself to find within the dross of everyday information.

There were a small handful of us in the city. Folk like me were cunning but such slaves to compulsion that they often left themselves vulnerable to detection. I knew of six of our kind in Manhattan, two of those by name. Just by reading newspapers and occasionally consulting a map, I could account for the activity of those six. None of them were heavy eaters, and no doubt they did most of their hunting far from home, as any reasonable person would.

There clearly were a small handful in Brooklyn and on Staten Island, but there was every indication that Queens had more than just a few.

But, my heavens, how had I not seen it before? The Bronx appeared to be positively infested with folks like me. There either were a great number of us there, or a few of us who had little or no self-control. It wasn't apparent which it was.

Well, that was bad, and I wasn't sure if there was anything I could do, or should do, about it. Blood drinkers liked blood. That was the way of life. Who was I to second-guess someone's eating habits?

But such a hive of activity threatened to shine too much light on who we were and what we did. There was a time not too many generations before when most folk considered us merely part of the woodwork, an accepted part of life. Most folks nowadays laughed at the notion that blood drinkers existed. We were part of myth, part of Hollywood glitz and schlock.

There already were enough people in the world who knew we were real; we didn't need it again to become common knowledge. For several hours, I was torn on what to do.

I finished up my reading in the late afternoon and headed home. There wasn't much to find in the newspapers regarding organized crime in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx that I hadn't already found, so perhaps I would need to trot up that way and have another look around.

It also would not be a bad idea to head up that way to examine the local community of blood drinkers. I hadn't yet convinced myself that I would do anything about their wanton habits, but more knowledge on a subject was never a bad thing.

When I got back home, a package was awaiting me from the titling company. My heavens, those people were prompt. I hadn't expected anything back from them for many days. In hindsight, that extra hundred that I'd slipped the office manager may have done the trick. I'd have to go back later and thank the nice man again.

The results that they gave me were interesting but not world changing. The four buildings controlled by the bratva were owned by four different limited liability companies. But here's the onion; all four companies were named in a similar fashion, one that suggested an attempt at appearing random and unrelated.

I'd learned much about how companies moved money around from my dear friend Ben Garcia many years before. Limited liability companies, LLCs for short, were just one kind of disinterested company that money people used to push cash around.

An LLC was easy to set up, it was easy to manage, and it was a great way to hide assets and ownership because of its high degree of anonymity. Honestly, such a company could be named anything. But as Ben had noted, and I had found out through experience, there were common conventions for naming such entities just so business folks easily could remember which of the many companies they controlled was which.

Each of the four companies my title people had discovered were named with a three-letter designation (WER, FGH, JKL, and CVB) LLC, respectively. It was a childishly simple attempt to look random and for the companies to appear unrelated to one another. But a mere glance at an English language keyboard showed it was obvious the companies had been created by the same person. They even used the same resident agent.

Whoever had formed those four companies obviously had done so with the intention that the names sound random, so that no connection between the companies could be divined. But they weren't random at all. The knuckleheads had used similar keyboard sequences.

Whoever owned those four buildings clearly were connected in some way. I just needed to find out how.