He found himself turning off the Strip and onto the quieter streets that paralleled it. The glitter and flash of the big hotels were still visible, but they were less overpowering. The farther away they got the better he felt, so he just kept going.

Clive wasn’t stupid. He knew the shadows that lay alongside the expensive glare of a place like the Strip held their own, much less civilized dangers-but his own less civilized self, the ape that lived at the back of every human’s brain, was telling him that no one would dare mess with him right now. And even if they did, they’d be sorry. Hell, just let them try.

There was a man sprawled out on the sidewalk ahead.

At first, he thought the man was just drunk. A tourist like himself who’d had a few too many Bloody Marys with his eggs-Vegas was the only town Clive had ever been in that had a drinks section in the breakfast menu-and wandered off for some desert air to clear his head, who needed to just lie down for a moment…

Then he got closer and saw the blood.

Grissom stared down at the dead man as David examined the body. Some break, he thought. Grissom was supposed to be at a conference, exchanging ideas with fellow professionals, and had found himself dragged back by the Harribold case. Now he was answering another call, simply because they were so short-handed. Maybe I was fooling myself by thinking I could get away at all. Maybe that’s how it’s always going to be.

Maybe Sara was right.

David pulled the wallet from the dead man’s back pocket and handed it to Grissom. “Tourist taking a walk found him. Can’t have been dead more than an hour-almost no rigor, no postmortem lividity.”

Grissom opened the wallet. “Paul Fairwick. Thirty-eight, has an address in Henderson. I’ve got an all-access pass to the Athena Jordanson show, too.”

“Oh, she’s great,” said David. “I took my wife to see her Motown revue for her birthday. Amazing voice.”

Grissom bagged the wallet, then knelt down beside the corpse. “Well, COD seems pretty obvious.” There was a bullet hole in the center of the forehead. “Powder burns and a muzzle sta mp-he was shot at close range.”

David held up one of the man’s arms. “Ligature marks on the wrists, too.”

“But very little blood. He wasn’t killed here, just dumped.”

“Strange place to dump a body. It’s awfully close to the Strip.”

“Not if you’re trying to send a message…”

Aaron Tyford did his best to fill the interview room with the hate radiating from his eyes. He was a tall, wiry man with a scar that ran along his jawline and a nose that had been broken more than once. His body language told her there was nothing he’d enjoy more than throwing her through the nearest window.

“You’re lucky you don’t glow in the dark,” said Catherine. “Guess you left the chemistry to Boz, huh? Moving product is probably more your line.”

“You’re crazy, lady. Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“There are three things essential to any business, Aaron. You need someone to do the work, you need someone to sell what you’re offering, and you need the capital to get started in the first place. Everything else is details.”

“If you say so.”

“You and Diego had the business plan. Boz had the skills, you had the contacts-all you needed was the cash to get started. Which is where Hal Kanamu came in.”

“Hey, I barely knew the guy.”

“But you wanted to know him better. You wanted to be more than just party buddies-you wanted his respect.”

He leaned forward, his jaw clenching before he spoke. “Listen-everybody respects me. You know someone who doesn’t, give me his number and I’ll pay him a little visit.”

“Sorry, I don’t give my number out on a first interrogation. And what you’re talking about isn’t respect, it’s fear-fine for intimidating business rivals, but not so good for someone you want as an investor. What happened, did Kanamu get cold feet, decide to back out at the last moment? Or did you just get impatient, decide to kill him and take the money?”

He studied her for a moment, and then a cold smile spread across his face. “You want to know what happened? Nothing. Maybe I did float a business idea his way, and maybe he was too stupid to see how sweet a deal it was. But since you seem to know so much about business, let me ask you this: how many investors do you think an entrepreneur is going to attract if he starts killing everyone that says no?”

He shifted in his seat, leaning back and throwing an arm over the back of the chair. “Maybe that’s what a small-timer would do, grab t he cash and run. But that’s not my style.”

“Sure it is. I’ve got a detailed review right here.” She tapped the sheet on the table in front of her. “Not a very good one, either-most of the people involved gave you zero out of five stars. Or, more accurately, seven out of ten years.”

He shrugged. “Live and learn. I’m still alive, so I guess I’m doing something right.”

“Changing your approach?”

“Absolutely. Look, Kanamu was high most of the time and paranoid all the time. He knew who I was, what I’ve done. You really think he’d be alone in a room with me and Diego and a big pile of cash? Forget it. He was always talking about all this Hawaiian folklore crap and that big party out in the desert-that was what he was into. He had all the money he wanted; he didn’t care about making more.”

“Unlike you.”

Aaron spread his arms wide. “Hey. It’s the American dream.”

Greg Sanders loved science, even as a kid. He loved it the way some kids love comic books or video games or TV shows; to him, it was a window into another world, one that seemed infinitely more interesting than the one he lived in. To him, science and imagination went hand in hand, one just as full of possibilities as the other. The Norwegian myths and legends his grandparents told him fed his imagination growing up, and he loved the show The X-Files; it combined science and fantasy in a way he found irresistible. It was too bad that mix wasn’t available in real life…

And then he heard about Burning Man.

The festival attracted much more than the partying maniacs portrayed by the mass media. Engineers of every stripe were not only common but necessary: you didn’t build a city of fifty thousand people in the course of a week without serious planning and execution, especially not in the middle of a desert. Structures in Black Rock City ranged from people sleeping in pup tents anchored to the playa with two-and-a-half-foot lengths of rebar to pyramids that towered five stories high. And those were just the buildings; the art was the truly impressive part.

A fifteen-story-high tangle of yellow wooden beams, made of a hundred miles of wood and shaped like a distorted wave. Two full-size oil tankers bent around each other and stood on end like mechanical caterpillars swing dancing. Temples of intricately carved wooden filigree like the skeletons of cathedrals. The largest flame cannon ever built, shaped like an oil derrick and fueled by two thousand gallons of propane and nine hundred gallons of jet fuel…

Maybe this year he’d actually go, instead of just staring at pictures on the web. But despite his fondness for the place, Bu rning Man was a place of extremes; one of those extremes could easily be murder.

He got online, made a few inquiries. The electronic presence of the Burner community was huge; they were one of the first groups to embrace the Internet. Greg had heard one person describe the festival as a physical extrusion of cyberspace into the real world-all the theme camps were like live versions of websites. Free, interactive, and limited only by imagination.

There was a bar that hosted Burner events in Vegas, and one of those gatherings was happening tonight. The purpose of these events was usually twofold, the first being simply to try to re-create that sense of freedom and connection that the festival itself fostered.