"Our residents appreciate an oasis of quiet amid the noise and tumult of Las Vegas," the woman replied.
"Tumult," Catherine echoed. "Good word for it."
The woman used a key card to open the door of Daria Cameron's unit. "Here it is," she said. She started to go inside, but Catherine rattled her crime-scene kit. "This could take a while," she said.
"How long?"
"Anywhere between an hour and a day," Catherine said. "It all depends on what I find."
The woman didn't hide her sigh. "I suppose you can be trusted."
"I like to think so."
"Please lock the knob when you leave. Stop by the office and tell me you're done, and I'll come back up and lock the deadbolt."
"That'll be fine," Catherine said. She entered, closing the door gently behind her, and then took the condo's measure.
It was an expensive unit, and Daria hadn't spared any expense furnishing it. Her tastes were eclectic, mildly funky but in a way that would have won the favor of professional designers. A wooden dining table and chairs were Louis XVI. They stood on what looked like an antique Persian rug, mostly the color of red wine but with blues and yellows and whites and other colors melded into a lovely whole. A couple of large modern art pieces in minimalist frames hung on the wall over a Danish teak side board. She made it all work by accessorizing. Colors of dishware on the sideboard picked up accents from the rug, the paintings, and a centerpiece on the table. Above it all hung a contemporary crystal chandelier, with some of the same colors in it.
The other rooms were much the same – although the particular styles were different, they were furnished with a broad range of approaches, all brought together through the use of repeated colors and, in some cases, patterns. In a store, Catherine would never have thought to try mixing and matching to such an extent, but Daria, or her decorator, had pulled it off.
The condo's real appeal, and the reason for the huge price tag that went with it, was the view. Floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room and large ones in the bedroom looked out across the Strip and toward the mountains beyond the valley floor. For the first time in Catherine's memory, one couldn't look at Las Vegas Boulevard for long with out seeing abandoned construction cranes, parked outside half-finished buildings on which work had been halted without any indication of when it would start again. She could see them in both directions, projects begun when credit was flowing, killed when credit dried up.
The place had heavy draperies and shutters that rolled out of the wall at the touch of a button, because conceivably a resident might want the place dark enough to sleep in at night. When the lights of the Strip were blazing, the view from these windows would be dramatic but almost daytime-bright.
Catherine spent a few minutes browsing the bookshelves in Daria's home office. People could, and did, buy books by the yard specifically to fill library shelves, but Catherine believed you could tell a lot about a person who chose books one at a time and read them. From the contents of these shelves, Daria Cameron appeared to be that sort of person. The books were arranged by subject and included a variety of philosophy, science, history, biography, and a great deal of psychology. Fiction was in short supply, as were the sort of big expensive art books displayed mostly to impress visitors.
All in all, Catherine had the impression of some one who bought things one by one, whether books or art or furnishings, because they appealed to her and then figured out how to fit them into the whole. Daria came across as a woman of taste and discretion, not a spoiled rich kid but a woman with some intellectual heft. Catherine hoped she'd have a chance to meet Daria at some point, and not just as one more corpse on Doc Robbins's slab.
More to the point, perhaps, she saw no sign of a struggle, no indication that the condo was any kind of crime scene. From the looks of things, the building management and surveillance video had been right – Daria had never made it home from the estate the night she vanished.
Notwithstanding its uselessness in a court of law, there might still be something in the place that would point to where Daria had gone. If she was in hiding for some reason yet to be determined, chances are she would have made her arrangements there rather than at her mother's house. And if she had been taken by someone else, that person or persons might have come to the condo, either before or after her abduction.
So Catherine went to work, processing the unit as if it was a crime scene, collecting hairs, fibers, and prints, searching through wastebaskets for discarded notes. Daria owned a laptop computer, sitting on her desk, but when Catherine checked it, she found that it was password-protected. Archie Johnson would have to examine it. If Daria owned a planner, it was with her. There was a calendar in her office with a few notations, appointments, and so on, but nothing that seemed out of the ordinary and nothing that gave any indication of where she might have gone. The sun rose into the sky as Catherine finished up the open living and dining area; the office, which was an interior room, windowless; and the meticulous, modern kitchen.
Her only real surprise came in the bedroom. The sheets on Daria's antique four-poster bed were mussed, and there was a pale stain on the bottom one. Catherine played a hunch, based on the tangled condition of the bedding. It was, of course, possible that Daria was a restless sleeper. But to Catherine, it looked more like the sort of disarray that it took more than sleep to accomplish.
She ran a moist swab across the stain, then dripped a combination of Brentamine Fast Blue and alpha-naphthyl phosphate on the swab. Within twenty seconds, it turned bright purple, an almost certain indication that there was semen on the sheet. Just in case, she swabbed a second time and tested this one with a periodic acid-Schiff reagent. The magenta color confirmed the presence of vaginal fluids as well.
So Daria is a woman with no boyfriend, but she's having unprotected sex with someone in her bed? It seemed unlikely to be stranger sex, if what Catherine had already surmised and been told about the woman was true. Half a nun doesn't fool around with strangers.
It didn't necessarily factor into her disappearance, of course. But it seemed to indicate that Daria's life wasn't as cut and dried as Detective Spitzer thought. There were complications the detective hadn't found out about.
And where complications came in, trouble could follow.
The Cameron family was looking more and more complicated all the time.
8
Sam Vega accompanied Greg to the nameless tent city.
The place sprawled for what seemed like miles. Greg was amazed and not a little appalled. "I had no idea it had grown so much," he said as they approached it.
"The city's grown, too," Sam pointed out. "More people, more poverty. This place has been around for more than a decade, but it's never been this full before. There are shelters in the city, but they've had funding issues, and most of them are at capacity. The economy has really done a number on Vegas. We were one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, and as long as we were booming, the construction jobs, tourist-trade jobs, even high-tech were booming, too. But when things skidded to a stop nationally, they slowed here, big-time – worse than in most places – and tipped a lot of people over the edge. More houses in foreclosure, more personal bankruptcies, more jobs lost, more families living in tents here."
They're not just tents, Greg realized. People there lived in tents, in parked cars, in shacks thrown together from cardboard, sheets of galvanized aluminum, carpet scraps, and whatever else they had been able to get their hands on. Some lived in cars or vans, sometimes with a piece of tarp propped up on posts or rods as a sunscreen. The homes – they were homes, Greg knew, however raw, however mean; they were occupied by human beings, and he didn't want to lose sight of that – were packed close together on a vast plain of bare dirt, arranged along pathways big enough for a small truck to travel. Some of the places had trash piled up around them; others were neat, as tidy as their residents could keep a thrown-together hovel in a field of dirt.