What if Howard Hughes wasn't the flower of Vegas vampiredom? What if these warped, hidden creatures were the king and queen of the ancient vampire breed and they were gathering armies under the city?

What if they weren't the only ones? That would explain why the Imiut fetishes were found in Tut's tomb and in others going back to the First Dynasty. The fetish is still considered "strange" by Egyptologists despite its link to the bandages used in mummification.

King Tut had died young, about age nineteen. So had Loretta's European vampire prince-except Prince Krzysztof died the vampire's true death six centuries after his fifteen-century birth: beheaded, then buried in Sunset Park. He remained in his grave for sixty years until Ric and I found his skeleton with a coin in the skull's fleshless mouth. Could Tut also have been beheaded, proving him a vampire?

Alas, an article I found online written by modern radiologists said the original 1925 autopsy X-rays showed the skull attached rigidly to the cervical spine, but further research revealed intriguing contradictions. Those same radiologists, examining better X-rays taken in 1968, noted a "bright beaded line" of solidified resin that might have masked a possible severing.

The mummy was stuck fast to its coffin by hardened embalming liquids used to anoint it, so Howard Carter's team cut it into large pieces. (Poor Tut!) They sliced off the arms and legs and halved the trunk. But-and here my instincts quickened-King Tut's head, cemented to its lavish golden mask by the solidified resins, was severed by the archeologists and removed from the mask with hot knives. So he had been beheaded in 1925, millennia past his burial date.

Egyptian antiquities authorities now guard his mummy as closely as Quicksilver guards me, but they did allow a CT scan back in 2005. This examination showed a fracture at "the first cervical (topmost) vertebra and the foramen magnum (large opening at the base of the skull)." There was, according to the scientists, no way to know if this happened during the ancient embalming process or if the rough handling by Carter's crew caused it. The king may have been decapitated back in 1327 BC after all.

One way or another, more than three thousand years ago or less than one hundred, Tutankhamun had lost his royal head.

I also had a huge "Aha!" moment reading this extremely suggestive notation about the Tut skull scans: "He has large front incisors and the overbite characteristic of other kings of from his family (the Tuthmosid line)."

Of course, even in the post-Millennium Revelation world authorities like to hush up finding vampires under every cultural icon. No one would thank an amateur like me for this theory.

Long teeth and beheading might not be proof of vampirism, but they were clues my theory could be right. I found others.

Vegas Coroner Grisly Bahr had said that the Sunset Park bone boy's head had been cut off and a coin placed in his mouth because that was a tried-and-true old European method of killing a vampire forever.

Might not the ancient Egyptians also have had vampires and used the same decapitation method to destroy them forever, sans the coin? My research revealed Egyptians didn't use coins until the Greco-Roman era, a thousand years after Tutankhamun's reign.

Yet were there, layered among Tut's wrappings, items that functioned like the coin in the mouth to keep a slain vampire dead?

Studying detailed drawings (reproduced on a Web site) made when the mummy was first unwrapped, I noticed many of the one hundred and fifty or so amulets and articles of jewelry on the body were clustered around the neck. But many items were also centered on the chest and forearms and in the pelvic, thigh, lower leg and scrotum area. Pretty much everywhere I'd spotted tattoos on the tandem Pharaohs.

The Book of the Dead prescribed the various placements of these pieces, so they were probably potent magic, even more effective than coins.

Maybe the scientists wouldn't buy it, but I found further proof for ancient Egyptian vampires in the fact that juniper was probably used in the embalming materials. In later European tradition, juniper, hawthorn and ash wood are recommended for staking vampires. Likewise, keeping a branch of juniper or holly in the home supposedly helps protect it from vampires.

Maybe that's why so much resin was used on Tut's body. It was literal overkill.

If Egyptians had entombed vampires, the Imiut fetishes featuring headless animals dripping blood could have been a warning to future generations that the tomb's mummy was a beheaded vampire and not to be interfered with. That meant even beheading might be circumvented. Certainly Keph and Keph thought they could resurrect the beheaded Prince Krzysztof and it was possible someone had revived the royal pair themselves centuries earlier.

And those tattoos I'd noticed…

I called up Groggle again and searched for major artery locations in the human body. A "play" vampire, like Undead Ted, the anchorman at WTCH-TV, would want to bite a neck, but avoid the carotid artery there, just under the skin. A seriously hungry real vampire would want a royal road to the blood source. I found artery sites in the neck, wrist, inner arm and knee, groin and inner thigh, the very sites where Kephron and Kepherati bore tattoos. Their mostly bared bodies had acted as billboards advertising their breed and habits.

That answered the "vintage" treasure versus reproduction question. Vampire Egyptian artists and sculptors could replace aging monuments and furnishings endlessly.

Oh, my God. Who did I warn first? Ric, of course, but who would believe us? Who would have the will and power to confront this undiscovered cabal of vampires, or even believe the urgency of some major force dealing with them?

First things first.

I needed to let Ric know so we could figure this out together. If only he hadn't been out of touch since mid-morning. Damn Las Vegas ' notoriously spotty cell phone reception on the Strip and off! I took out my cell and hit redial. Again, voice mail. Where was he?

And then the true, awful meaning of two CinSims's unheard-of struggle to escape their venues to reach out and communicate hit me like a bolt of lightning.

My cell phone hadn't made or accepted calls underground at the Karnak either.

I had to place my dawning, stomach-churning suspicion into a logical scenario.

The royal freaks had taken an interest in me and were annoyed with me because they thought I'd disturbed the bone boy's sleep before they had time to "reclaim him." Then, their interest deepened because of the showdown in the Spring Mountains with the Cicereau Mob werewolves. They'd been fascinated that zombies had been raised to help defeat the werewolf packs. When I'd been in their royal clutches, they'd asked more about who had raised the dead than about me. A "servant of Anubis," they concluded, must have been present.

I'd assumed they were interested in zombies, since they commanded companies of them in the form of mummies and Egyptian warriors.

Were they really interested in Ric's abilities to raise the dead? Were they after not merely the bone boy, not merely zombies, but long-laid-to-rest vampires reborn, the age-old powerful vampires so absent in the Vegas of today? Except for themselves.

Ugarte had sent me Casablanca 's "Rick" as a messenger for two reasons.

One, this Bogart persona was already working at the Inferno, a hotbed of CinSim defiance. Peter Lorre/Ugarte had a second major film connection with Bogart, so maybe he could use some form of telepathy to break the "Rick" Bogart lose from his venue. But how the heck could he pass on the Lip Venom case I'd dropped during my athletic escape leap? Maybe he had somehow gotten to the Inferno in person. I blinked. My eyes felt as dry as my little gray cells.