"We lookin' for Chairman Domingo," the smaller one said. "Who the hell are you?"

Nick showed his badge. "I'm CSI Stokes, with the Las Vegas Crime Lab. Who are you?"

"Crime Lab?" the big guy echoed.

"That's right."

"Where's Robert?" the smaller one asked.

He had called him Chairman Domingo a moment ago, Nick noted. Was he trying to play up their familiarity now that he knew the police were involved? Or had the surprise of Nick's response elicited a more honest view of their relationship?

Nick watched the slender guy's face when he said, "He's dead."

The guy was good. Nick had to give him that. The shock registered in his eyes, which opened wider, but only for an instant, and in a sudden intake of breath. His spine straightened briefly, too, as if his muscles had tensed up all at once. But none of it lasted longer than a moment, and then he was back to normal, poker-faced, in that same aggressive stance.

The heavier guy wasn't as polished. Even though Nick had been watching the smaller one, he heard the other guy's gasp.

"That sucks," the smaller one said. "Let's go, dude."

"Wait," Nick said. "Since you know the guy, I'd like to ask you a few questions. Maybe you can help us find out who did it."

"Screw that, we got us some ass to kick," the slender one said. The two rushed back to the dark pickup and jumped in. The engine roared to life, and they screeched off into the waning night. Nick was able to catch the first four characters of the license-plate number – a tribal plate, he noted – in the first gray light of dawn, and he wrote them down on a notepad. It wasn't much, but the guys had reacted as if Domingo's death was a surprise, if not entirely unexpected, and a turn of events that demanded action. Reprisal, probably. They didn't come across as suspects at all, but they might be come suspects in a separate crime if they took the law into their own hands. He could call in the plate, try to make sure they didn't get into any trouble, but unless they actually committed a crime, they weren't his business. If nothing else, maybe they would lead the police to a suspect. Either way, he had to stay there and keep working, to make sure that when they did narrow down a suspect, they could close the case.

Ray stood by the window, looking into Robert Domingo's manicured backyard. Dawn was breaking over the valley, and in the soft light of morning, the yard looked peaceful, a good place for contemplation.

Ray was doing some contemplating of his own, thinking about "Quantum," that word written in blood (but with some sort of tool, not a finger, unfortunately). Ray figured the person who wrote it had used something like a stick or maybe a spoon. He hadn't found it in the house, but it was something else that would have traces of Domingo's blood on it and could help tie the killer to the scene. When they did locate it, they'd be one step closer to a conviction.

The dictionary definitions, as he understood them, were that a quantum was an amount, or else a small, indivisible unit, of energy. Quantum physics, quantum mechanics… the word was common place on the WLVU campus these days, at least in the math and science departments. But Robert Domingo was a businessman and a tribal leader, not, as far as Ray knew, a physicist or a mathematician. So it still didn't make any sense in this context.

Ray wondered if there was some other meaning of which he was unaware, something to do with tribal issues or with one of the various businesses that Domingo oversaw in his role as chairman. Brass had named a few of those enterprises but suggested that there might be more. Ray thought that perhaps his next step should be to find out more about the victim, in hopes of closing in on what "Quantum" meant and who might have wished Domingo harm.

Ray knew a couple of Native American experts at the university, scholars who were much better versed in such things than he was. He was an educated guy, good in his specialty, and with a wide grounding of knowledge in other areas. But the important thing was that he knew enough to know what he didn't know – the amateur's mistake was to believe he knew it all and didn't need to turn to anyone for help. Ray had always turned to others for help understanding things or finding out facts he didn't know, and had learned that most people enjoyed talking about their areas of expertise. They tended to study and work in fields they were interested in, and sometimes the opportunity to show off to outsiders – especially with information that would appear arcane, although other professionals would consider it common knowledge – was all but irresistible.

The hour was early yet, but he could head over there when he had finished up, see if the word rang any bells for his friends. His shift might be ending soon, but one of the first things he had learned about this job was that it didn't hew to any specific schedule. When you had a hot case, you ran with it. If you had any integrity at all, you went home only when there was nothing going on, no clues to follow up on, no statements to take, no bodies waiting for justice to be done.

The sun inched higher in the sky, and Ray knew that he was in for a very long day.

7

"Nothing." Detective Joe Spitzer spread his hands apart, as if to let the air between them indicate just how much nothingness he meant. "I got zip. Nada."

"But the Cameron family is very prominent in town," Catherine said. They were in a diner on Flamingo, not a place Catherine would have picked for breakfast, but apparently Spitzer ate there almost every day and hadn't died of food poisoning yet. He had named the meeting place, and she went along with it. "Daria Cameron couldn't have just vanished from the face of the earth. Somebody somewhere knows something about it."

"Far as I know, she was abducted by aliens." Spitzer had ordered three eggs, over easy, with sides of hash browns, bacon, and sausage. When his plate arrived, he had looked at it, looked at Catherine, and said, "Gotta toughen up the arteries, that's what I say. Mine are damn near invulnerable at this point." He had splashed Tabasco sauce on the eggs and ketchup on the potatoes. Now he was mopping grease off his plate with toast and shoving it into his mouth. He swallowed before he spoke again, a small mercy that Catherine appreciated. "Kind of a habit with this family, seems to me."

"Aliens are a habit?" The waitress lit briefly, refilled Catherine's coffee, and bustled off to help some other customer. The place was busy, buzzing with conversation and the clink of china and flat ware, shouts between waitstaff and chefs, and the sizzle of the grill.

"Disappearing is a habit."

"You think Daria had mob ties?"

The detective shook his head. He was rail-thin, and considering how loaded his plate had been at the start, she didn't know how he stayed that way. Catherine had gone with a muffin and a cup of coffee and didn't think she would finish the muffin. "I wouldn't say that there's no organized crime in Las Vegas at all," he said, spearing a runaway bit of potato. "But it's decreased in importance and power, decade by decade. When Bix Cameron and the kid, the boy, got iced, the mob still owned at least a piece of most of the major casinos. Those are all legit now, or mostly all. The kinds of things organized crime is into here nowadays are a different sort of animal – drugs, prostitution, that stuff. Your trafficking crimes. Gaming Commission keeps them away from the big money. It's nothing that a high-class woman like Daria Cameron or her mom would have any connection to."

"Okay, but -"

"I'm just saying. She's been missing for, what, seventy-eight hours now. She has plenty of credit cards, but none of them has been used. Her phone is off, maybe the battery's been pulled, and she hasn't made a call on it or made any calls that we know about on any other phone. She hasn't accessed her e-mail account. Way I hear it, she's a nut about staying in touch. Not so much on the phone, but she's one of those people who check their e-mail ten times a day. And she always calls her mother every day if she's not staying at the house. Since she hasn't done either of those things, I have to think the worst."