Brass gave a low whistle. "That would buy a couple bottles of Taittinger."

"I'm still just getting started processing him," Ray said. "I should get back to it but wanted to let you know that."

"Thanks, Ray. I'll check into it."

Ray ended the call and dropped the phone back into his jacket pocket. He bagged the receipt and wrote the pertinent details on the plastic, then added it to the trove he was developing. Domingo's pockets had contained keys, a wallet, the Fracas receipt, a couple of Mont Blanc pens, and a partial roll of mints.

On Domingo's clothing, Ray found a couple of short orange hairs – they stood out like neon against the shiny black of his silk shirt – and three pieces of some dry plant fiber he couldn't identify. He bagged those, too.

"How's it going, Ray?" Nick asked, coming back in through the open front door.

"It's going." He filled Nick in on what he had found so far. Nick told him he found footprints at a back door, leading by a roundabout route out to the street a couple hundred feet from the house, but no finger-ridge impressions on the doorknobs and no signs of entry at any other doors or windows. Then he left Ray to his work and went back out to process the Escalade with the broken window.

Ray took samples of the blood on the floor, the blood on the lighter, and the blood on the wall. It was probably all the same blood, but until it was tested, that was no certainty. He didn't want to dust the lighter for prints here, although he had become much more proficient at the process than he had been when he'd started on the job. But he saw no patent prints, even in the blood, and he wondered if the lighter had been wiped and then dropped into the pooling blood, instead of having been dropped immediately after it struck Domingo. There didn't seem to be any good way to transport the thing to the lab without further smearing the blood, and he finally decided to set it aside until he was finished, hoping the blood would have dried on the metal, then carry it in a paper bag.

He had been surprised at first to learn that damp or wet items were put into paper bags rather than plastic. But once it was explained that in the more airtight confines of a plastic bag, moisture could cause bacterial growth or molds that would then contaminate precisely what the investigator was trying to preserve, he understood why. Paper wasn't airtight, and that was exactly the point. Even if the blood on the lighter seemed dry to the touch by the time he was ready to go, he would bag it in paper, just in case.

With the body as closely examined as he could manage in that setting – soon the coroner's crew would arrive to take custody of it, and they would do the more detailed examination back at the morgue – he shifted his attention back to the rest of the room. There was a black leather sofa, with highly polished black steel end tables flanking it. On the right-hand table were a couple of business magazines and an ashtray with a cigar butt in it. The furniture was reasonably clean, but a thin layer of dust coated the table, and a dust-free spot showed where the lighter probably ordinarily rested. Next to the magazines was a cut-glass tumbler with about an eighth of an inch of some pale amber liquid left inside. Ray sniffed the glass. Scotch, watery. There had probably been ice cubes in it when he started drinking it. Condensation had made a ring in the tabletop dust. He would collect the liquid and get it to the tox lab to check for poison.

So Domingo spent his evening at a nightclub, leaving there a little after midnight, having racked up an eleven-hundred-dollar bill. He came home. At some point, somebody – maybe he himself – smashed the window of his SUV. Where was that – at the club? In the parking lot? On the way home? Or right there, where it was parked in front of the garage? At any rate, Domingo probably knew about it. They would have to check his phone records to see if he called in a criminal complaint.

Once he got home, he took off his shoes, sat on the couch, smoked a cigar, and drank some scotch on the rocks. Maybe he flipped through the magazines. He kept his house clean, even leaving his shoes by the door so he didn't track anything on the floors. He was, by all available evidence, a fairly meticulous guy.

But at some point, his late-night relaxation was interrupted by… well, that was the million-dollar question, wasn't it? Someone came inside. There was, Ray guessed, an argument. While Domingo's back was turned, the other person snatched up the nearest heavy object and bashed Domingo over the head with it. Still holding the lighter, he – or she, no telling yet, although the person was probably at least as tall as Domingo and strong enough to kill with a single blow – wiped his fingerprints off it. He wrote the word QUANTUM on the wall, presumably using a tool and not his finger, since he was obviously careful not to leave fingerprints anywhere else, and then he took his leave.

The killer had not, at a glance, left any signposts pointing to his identity. Unless the mystery word was somehow one. If so, it was as vague a signpost as Ray could imagine.

Ray had not been at the job for as long as his colleagues, but he understood the fundamental principles underlying it. All people left traces of themselves on those with whom they came in contact. Maybe it was the orange hairs, maybe the bits of plant fiber, maybe fingerprints he had not yet located, but somewhere in this house was the key, the signpost Ray needed.

He would keep looking until he found it.

He knew when he took the job that it wouldn't be easy. The hours, Grissom had promised, were terrible, and the pay was lousy. Gil was true to his word. Ray thought with a wry grin.

But the rewards – well, they were beyond measure. So far, Ray had found it absolutely worthwhile, in every conceivable way.

4

Fracas was still open when Brass got there. Doesn't anyone in Las Vegas ever sleep? he wondered. Besides me? He knew cops who moonlighted as security at places like this, sometimes making more money in a single late-night shift than they did in a week in uniform. He couldn't begrudge a working person the extra dough, but he hoped his life never depended on the shooting ability of a police officer who'd had only eight hours of sleep in the last seventy-two.

The parking lot wasn't as full as it would have been earlier in the evening – well, morning – but there were still vehicles scattered about, and the valet parking area held its share of BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, and Jaguars and even a few American luxury cars, Caddys and Lincolns, mostly of the SUV variety. The valets wore black shirts, maroon bow ties, white and gold vests, and black pants with maroon stripes up the side – kind of an old-fashioned look, half-mobster, maybe, but at least it made a statement.

The building looked smallish from the parking lot, a concrete-block rectangle with the name in red neon letters on the wall. But small neon. Discreet, if such an adjective could ever be applied to red neon. Just inside the door – no rope line to handle, not this time of night – stood a human-shaped mountain with a bald head and thick-framed black plastic glasses. Not a cop; Brass doubted if the uniform existed that could have fit the man. The specs were a nice touch, giving the bouncer a kind of egghead quality, but from the size of his shoulders and mitts, you wouldn't want to cross him. Behind him was a second door, and Brass could feel bass notes from behind it rattling his teeth.

Brass was reaching for his jacket, to draw it back and badge the guy, when the bouncer smiled and said, "'Morning, Detective."

"It's that obvious?"

"You might as well wear a uniform. To be fair, I've been doing this a long time."