Their destination was on North Robertson Boulevard. Traffic was heavy on Santa Monica.

Frank pulled the phone away from his mouth and said, “Take this right up here—Hilldale. Then left onto Keith.”

Frank returned to his call. He’d spent the entire drive on the phone, coordinating what Sebastian was sure was a surveillance operation. Frank, maddeningly, wouldn’t provide details. No sooner had he hung up with someone than he dialed another number, telling Sebastian, “All shall be revealed, my friend.”

Normally it would bother him, Frank’s holding out. Sebastian, though, heard the smile in his friend’s voice, which was about as expressive as Frank got when he was excited. Frank, Sebastian knew, was working on something big—something, Sebastian was sure, that had to do with Paul.

After Sebastian turned onto Keith Avenue, he took a left onto North Robertson Boulevard. “We’re here,” Frank said into the phone. He hung up. “You’re going to want to park up there, on your right, in front of the Starbucks.”

“There aren’t any spaces.”

“There will be in a moment. Slow down.”

As if on cue, the lights of a gray Audi parked against the curb came to life. The driver pulled out of his spot and Sebastian pulled in and parked. It was well after midnight—and well past his bedtime—and yet WeHo was alive and kicking like it was New Year’s Eve, the streets packed with people bar- and club hopping.

Someone knocked on Frank’s window. He cracked it an inch, just enough to allow a white envelope to slide into the car.

Frank opened the envelope and removed a small clear baggie. It held a pair of black capsules.

“Meet Paul’s new sexual-enhancement drug,” Frank said. “MDMA, otherwise known as ecstasy, or molly, mixed with carrier blood—a pregnant woman carrier’s blood. Supposedly it gives you the most incredible orgasms of your life.”

“Does it work?”

“Hard to say. MDMA causes arousal. The sexual stimulation we heard about involving Sophia Vargas—that, most likely, was from a transfusion. All we know at the moment is that Paul has been testing his new drug out in a couple of high-end nightclubs downtown, charging about five hundred bucks for a couple of these pills.”

Sebastian took the baggie and turned on the map light. The capsules were dark red, not black, and looked sloppily put together—not by a machine but by a human hand.

“Why would Paul be wasting his time with this bullshit?” Sebastian asked, more to himself than to Frank.

It didn’t make sense; Paul said he had a product that was better than Pandora—Pandora 2.0, he called it—and went on about how his product offered all of the health and physical benefits of Pandora (although Paul didn’t technically know what made Pandora so special, but Sebastian was sure Paul had some solid ideas about it). Pandora 2.0 came with an extremely potent side effect: making the user more sexually desirable and uninhibited. Got you off way better, too.

But the real gains—and the real money—came from whole-body transfusions. Why would Paul do this nickel-and-dime shit, creating these handmade capsules to sell at—