Aguirre was nodding along as Nick spoke. He had pulled off the main road and was driving up a steep hill, taking tight switchbacks with comfortable familiarity. The road was jarring, every bump feeling as if it was compacting Nick's spine a little more. "I'm sure you guys have your reasons for being here. I just have to believe there's a disconnect somewhere along the way. I read the report on Chairman Domingo, and that was some brutal stuff. Maybe she broke that car window, but I don't see her bludgeoning anybody to death." He pulled into a packed-dirt driveway that led around a smaller hill, and parked in front of a tiny pink-stucco house. "You'll find out for yourselves in a minute. This is her place."

The yard was nonexistent, just raw desert right up to the front door. A couple of window air-conditioner units poked out, dripping into the dirt and breaking the smooth planes of the walls, but otherwise, the house was a flat-roofed box. White lace curtains in the windows added a homey touch. "She live here alone?" Nick asked as they got out of the Jeep.

Aguirre scanned the desert beyond the house, alert for anything. Nick wasn't sure what he was watching for, but the murder of their chairman must have had everybody on edge. The tribal cop had seemed loose, casual, but Nick had noticed that his gaze caught every motion on the way over, every roadrunner or snake in the road, every hawk wheeling overhead. "No, her mom and a couple cousins live with her."

"Crowded."

"That's what poverty's like," Aguirre said simply. He strode to the front door and knocked twice.

"Karina Ochoa!" he called. "Get your clothes on, it's the law!"

Guess they have different legal standards here, Nick thought. If announced myself that way, I'd be written up for harassment.

A slim young woman opened the door, laughing. "You crack me upRichie," she said. She saw Brass and Nick looking at her, and her smile faded. "Who are they?"

Brass showed his badge and walked toward the door. "Miss Ochoa, I'm Jim Brass with the Las Vegas Police Department, and this is Nick Stokes with our crime lab. May we come in?"

She glanced at Aguirre, who nodded. She looked like the woman in the driver's license photo and could easily have been the one in the video as well. Her hair was long and straight, as black as spilled ink. Her eyes were dark brown, and there was a light, metallic eye shadow above them, a heavy black line around them. Her plump lips had dark lipstick on them. She wasn't dressed as she had been at the club but simply, in a blue tank top and black shorts. Metallic green polish, like a beetle's back, decorated her toenails. Nick couldn't help noticing her slender legs, accentuated by a silver chain around her right ankle, but he was professional enough to put them out of his mind and focus on her as a human being – and a potential suspect. "Sure, I guess," she said.

Inside, she sat them down on a faded sofa in a living room covered in toys and children's books. At the back of the room was a small kitchen with a table and six chairs. Two doors led out; one was closed tight, the other slightly ajar. Brass took a photo from his jacket pocket, a still from the surveillance video at Fracas, and put it down on the table in front of her, on top of a pile of Dr. Seuss. "That's you, isn't it?"

She barely glanced at it. Her mood had changed from jovial to sullen. Aguirre leaned against a wall, arms crossed over his deep chest, watching quietly. "Looks like it."

"And that's Robert Domingo with you."

"If you say so."

"And this was taken last night, at a place called Fracas."

She tilted her chin up, as if warding off any inference that the nightclub was an improper place for a girl her age. Oddly, the gesture reminded Nick of low young she was, underage for the club, a child trying to pass as a grown-up. "So?"

"So you may or may not have heard, but Robert Domingo was murdered last night."

"I heard." Her voice betrayed no emotion, and her expression didn't budge. Nick noted a thin blue vein in her neck pulsing, and he wondered how much effort it was taking for her to remain so outwardly calm. A lot, he guessed.

Brass sighed. "Okay, I guess I have to come right out and ask. Did you kill Chairman Domingo?"

Finally, emotion flashed across her face, her brow furrowing, her mouth dropping open in a scowl. "Hell no!" she said. "Of course not!"

"But you were with him at the club and then later in his vehicle."

"Yeah, I was with him."

"Were you and Domingo dose?"

"No."

"Then why -"

"Just tell them, Karina," Aguirre suggested. "Tell them about your buddies."

"Okay, whatever. You see the way we live, right? My mom is keeping my little cousins in her room because you cops are here, but normally, this house is crazy with noise and activity. Domingo, though, he had, like, two houses at least, one here on the rez and that big one in town. I have these friends, that's what Rico's talking about. I guess you'd call them activists or whatever. Always making signs, trying to hold protests, whatever."

"Protesting against Domingo's chairmanship?"

She kneaded her hands together. "Against anything related to him. His lifestyle, his policies, everything. I mean, a few people on the rez have plenty of money, but most of us don't. He always seemed to represent the ones who do, and he ignored the rest of us."

"Okay," Brass said. "I guess that makes him a politician. Par for the course. That still doesn't explain -"

"I'm getting to that! I wanted to see if the things they said about him were true, about his houses and his spending and all that. So I watched him for a while. When I heard he was going to Fracas, I dressed up and went there, arranged to meet him."

"A little face time with a constituent. What happened then?"

"And I guess it was all true. He dropped, like, a grand or something, buying drinks for people. Champagne and whatnot. I played nice, you know, stroking his thigh and purring like some damn cat, and he thought he was going to score with me. He sent the others away and paid attention to me for a while, you know, telling me how pretty I am and all. He thought he was pretty smooth. I left with him, got into his Caddy, and then while he was driving, I just laid into him. I went off about his spending our money. Grey Rock money, on women and strangers and whatever, about his car and his houses and how he was always ignoring the little people. You should have seen how fast his attitude changed. All of a sudden, he knew he wasn't getting any, and he got pissed off. I was a spy, he said. Wanted to know who I was working for. I told him no one, everyone, the whole tribe. He was stealing our money, and he needed to stop it."

"I don't imagine he liked that," Brass said. Her brown skin had flushed as she relived her anger. She let out a deep breath, trying to cool down a bit. "Not at all. He stopped the car and told me to get out. We had only gone a few blocks. This was close to the Strip, you know, over near where Fracas is on Sahara. There was this construction site where he put me out, so before he drove away, I grabbed a brick off the ground and threw it at the car. It went right through the side window."

"So we've seen," Brass admitted.

"He yelled something at me and drove away. That was the last I seen him. He was alive then."

"So you never saw his house. The one in town."

"Hell no," she declared. "I walked back to the club, got in my junker, and drove home. Breaking his window was good enough for me. I didn't even expect to do that, but I didn't like the way he was talking to me."

"Did you call anybody on your way home. Karina?" Aguirre asked. "Is anyone able to back up your story?"

"I didn't call anyone," she replied. "I just came home. My mom can tell you what time I got in. She knew I was pissed, too, but I didn't tell her about Domingo." She glanced at the closed interior door, which Nick could tell wasn't much thicker than a sheet of paper. "I guess she knows now."