Lamborghini and Cadillac pulled up a pair of shootings, one in L.A., the other in New York. Two gangsta rappers gunned down leaving late-night recording sessions, one alone in his Murciélago, the other caravanning with an entourage in a tricked-out Escalade. Officially, both cases were unsolved. But everyone in the hip-hop world knew whodunit.

Bentley and Aston Martin came up empty. Mercedes elicited nothing about Ella Mancusi, probably because of the lack of media coverage — and that made me question the value of the search. Benz produced photos of Hitler in both of his massive 770Ks and a rant from a Qatar-based blogger who believed Der Fuhrer had been a misunderstood “cool guy everyone thinks is a murder.”

I typed in Lincoln, not expecting much.

So much for my powers of prediction.

Double homicide, nine years ago, in Ojo Negro, a struggling agricultural hamlet north and inland of Santa Barbara. The case had been logged on DarkVisions.net, a borderline-literate Web site that delighted in listing gruesome, unsolved killings and posted crude cartoons and grainy photos cribbed from true-crime books.

The facts, as recounted by the site’s “soal author and webmaster, DV Zapper,” were spare and brutal: Leonora Bright, owner of the only beauty parlor in Ojo Negro, and Vicki Tranh, her resident manicurist, had been murdered sometime after closing the shop, their bodies found the following morning “multipally stabbed,” and “maybe disamenbered.”

A black Lincoln Town Car had been parked near the shop just before dusk. A tall man in a floor-length canvas duster and ten-gallon hat had been seen earlier in the day. Exiting the car, walking past the salon, driving off.

The car was later identified as a rental, stolen from a hotel parking lot in Santa Barbara.

Cowboys were no novelty in Ojo Negro; several nearby cattle ranches struggled against Big Agribusiness. But the stranger’s swagger and the costume-like getup attracted glances.

“Pale Rider,” the site tagged him. “And in Wilde West days, the Detroit beast could probably a been a cole-black stalleon.”

The morning after the sighting, a parcel-service driver delivering nail polish and “other cosmetic items made a stomach chorning discovery.”

“What I wonder,” mused DV Zapper, “is was Leona was married and maybe Vicki also and if yeah why didn’t there husbands go looking for them the hole time?”

I ran a search using the victims’ names.

Only one story, printed in The Santa Barbara Express a week after the murder. Two new facts: The car had been stolen at the Wharf Inn. And: “Sheriff Wendell Salmey is currently talking to Santa Barbara detectives.”

Googling Salmey evoked zero hits and the computer’s suggestion that I really meant Wendell Salmon. Just to be safe, I said I did and got connected to the Web site of a Washington State Fish and Game booklet for children.