"Okay, Karina," Brass said. "Tell you what, we'll keep looking into this. You stay close to home in case we need to talk again, all right?"

"Yeah," she said. She looked relieved somehow, as if she had been wanting to tell her story to somebody but didn't know who. "Yeah, I'll be right here."

"One more thing. Miss Ochoa," Nick said. "I need to collect the clothes you wore last night."

"To the club?"

"That's right."

"They're in my room, in the hamper."

"Can you get them, please?"

Aguirre nodded again, and she left the room. The three police officers waited silently until she came back carrying a bundle of black clothing. Nick unfolded a big paper bag and put the bundle in. "Thank you," he said.

Whoever had killed Domingo should have been covered in blood. Nick hadn't smelled any when she handed him the clothes, just perfume and sweat.

"Thanks, Miss Ochoa," Brass said, standing up. "Either we or Officer Aguirre here will be in touch soon."

"See how I can barely contain my excitement?" she said. She shot Aguirre a look as if she considered him a traitor, and the three cops went out the front door.

"See what I mean?" Aguirre asked when he was back behind the wheel. Nick was in the back again, with Karina's clothing on the empty seat beside him.

"What? I saw an angry young woman who didn't think twice before throwing a brick through a man's car window," Brass said.

"But she's no murderer," Aguirre countered. "She destroyed property, and even that's rare for her. She had to be pushed hard to get to that point. Karina's not a firebrand, not any kind of real troublemaker. She's had a few run-ins with us, but always minor beefs, trespassing because she's carrying a picket sign on private property, that kind of thing. Maybe a couple of drunk-and-disorderlies, at parties and the like."

"Well, Nick here will check out her clothes, and if we find any traces of her presence in the house, then we'll have to have another conversation."

"Understood."

"In the meantime," Brass said, "is there anyplace to grab a late breakfast around here? I'm starving."

10

The Western Las Vegas University campus still felt like home. Ray knew every walkway, every window, every landscaped planter, all of it as familiar as if he had never left. Even the call of a mockingbird that roosted in a tree in one of the landscaped areas sounded like a hail from an old friend. Sunshine filtered through the trees and cast mottled shadows on concrete walkways.

Only a few students were around this early, most of them wearing jeans, backpacks slung over one shoulder. They hurried to classes or lounged on wooden benches. Couples held hands and leaned their heads together. A few people clutched paper to-go coffee cups as if they held the elixir of life itself.

Ray guessed that whenever he got around to retiring, the campus might, in his memory, be his favorite workplace. The crime lab was endlessly fascinating, with new challenges every day and interesting people to work with. At the hospital, he had felt fulfilled by the prospect of saving lives and helping the sick and distraught at every patient he lost. But as a university professor, he had the satisfaction of helping to mold young minds, to instill in people an early love of learning that they would carry with them the rest of their lives. Students loved to challenge their professors, to test their intellectual wings, to throw off the tethers of old ideas, so he was constantly being confronted, and the intellectual stimulation that provided kept him forever engaged and excited. In the campus environment, he could count on each day bringing at least one student who was convinced that Ray knew nothing of the world, and that kind of adventure was worth its weight in dead bodies and ninhydrin.

But his new life, his new career, came with a certain amount of adventure of its own. On campus, he didn't usually have guns pointed at him or have the opportunity to put murderers in prison. The guns he could do without, but the knowledge that every shift he worked left the world a little safer was hard to beat.

Still, walking across campus sent a blade of nostalgia right through his heart, and it brought with it an undeniable longing for times gone by. He couldn't split himself in three, though: one to work at the hospital, one to teach, and one to perform crime-scene investigation. Failing that, he had to take one job at a time, and for now, he was a CSI.

Ray went into the history department's building, stepping into the cool hush of an air-conditioned hallway, and headed toward an office he had visited many times. He was looking for Keith Hyatt, who taught American history with an emphasis on the Western United States and Native American issues, and whose wife Ysabel was Grey Rock Paiute. Not only did he hope for some explanation of what "Quantum" might mean in relation to the late Chairman Domingo, but he also hoped that Keith could offer some insight into any other tribal issues that might have led to murder. Domingo's slaying wasn't necessarily connected to his role as chairman – it might have been a simple break-in gone bad – but the possibility couldn't be discounted.

Ray couldn't remember Keith's office hours, but the door was open, so he tapped twice and went in. Keith's side of the office was as neat as ever. Keith, he had often thought, was not really cut out to be a university professor, because Ray had never seen another one who kept his office so tidy, every book in its place in the bookcase, student papers in crisp manila folders, pens and pencils contained in a made-in-China "Indian" vase a student had given him once as a gag. He had never looked inside Keith's filing cabinet, but he suspected it would be every bit as orderly.

That side of the office was as shipshape as always, but Keith himself wasn't there. On the office's sloppy side – Keith and his office mate, Brandon Romero, were sometimes called the Odd Couple of WLVU – Brandon sat, engrossed in a paper, red pencil in his right hand. From the amount of red Ray could see, the paper's author would not be getting a very good grade. "If you're looking for Keith, he's not here," Brandon said without looking up.

"Well, I was, in fact," Ray said. "But how are you, Brandon?"

At that, Brandon lowered the paper and raised his head. "Ray! It's good to see you."

"You, too. Everything going okay?"

"For me, yeah. I mean, you know, students being what they are and everything." He rattled the paper in his hand. There was a pile of similar papers on his desk, along with several books, other sheets of paper, pens and pencils, a computer, a paintbrush, a rubber monkey's head in a net bag, what appeared to be six marbles, and a telephone only partially visible beneath it all. "What do you do when someone tries to argue that rural electrification was a cause of the Civil War?"

"Send them back to high school?" Ray offered. "Or junior high?"

"Would if I could."

"On the other hand, sometimes students with outlandish ideas also come up with some of the best insights."

Ray was thinking specifically of a student's essay Keith had told them both about, which had prompted a lively lunch-hour debate about whether or not the surrender of Geronimo to the United States Army had been a net positive or negative for native peoples. The student had argued that if he had remained free, Geronimo might have been able to lead a revolution that could have resulted in a separate native home land within what was now the U.S.-Mexico border region. The three professors had discounted that idea but taken different sides on the overall question. Ray had believed that since the white population wasn't going anywhere and the reservation system was already established, achieving a lasting peace was a necessary step toward some workable reconciliation. Keith had argued that Geronimo was most valuable as a symbol of freedom and that he should have tried to remain free no matter what. Brandon 's theory had been closest to that of the student: that Geronimo should have kept up his raiding, trying to achieve concessions that would have bettered the lives of the reservation Indians as long as he could. They had achieved no certain outcome, but the conversation had been loud and lively.