"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."
"I'm getting that impression myself. Where was she last seen?"
"The estate. She was visiting her mom. Then she left, said good-bye, said she was headed back to her condo. It's in one of those luxury high-rises overlooking the Strip. But she never got there. Staff never saw her come in, she didn't show up on security video. It should be, what, a twenty-minute drive? Maybe up to forty with Strip traffic, if she didn't take the back roads. Which she would have done, since she's a native and knows her way around. Still, say between twenty and forty, tops. But it's been seventy-eight hours." Spitzer glanced at his watch. "And change. Fifteen, sixteen minutes and counting. She's just gone. Poof. Vanished. Like I said, aliens. She's on a flying saucer headed for the Crab Nebula."
"And there haven't been any ransom demands?"
"No communication with the family at all, from her or anyone making any claims about her. They haven't publicized her disappearance, so as not to bring out the wackos. But if it was a garden-variety kidnap for profit, we'd have heard something by now."
"Have you located her vehicle?"
"We're still looking for it."
"You think I can get a copy of the crime-scene report on her condo?" Catherine asked.
Detective Spitzer rubbed the end of his nose. Catherine had never known the cop well, but she had heard stories about him and met him several times on different cases. He had been a hotshot, right out of the police academy, had gone into uniform determined to make a difference. He'd been so gung-ho that it had caused him problems, reprimands for getting in over his head, trying to make busts he wasn't good enough for yet. His approach had soured a few high-profile investigations, ended up getting cases kicked out of court because he had violated procedure or failed to amass the proper evidence.
But that early ambition had been tempered with time and experience. He had become an exemplary street cop and had finally made detective. His career had seemed to be climbing a steadily upward path. Then, in the space of less than a year, his partner had been busted for graft – he'd been taking payoffs, in cash and favors, from a prostitution ring to look the other way when its girls operated – and Spitzer's wife of three years had left him for another man… a criminal defense attorney with a big house, a handful of fancy cars, and a seemingly unlimited financial future.
Joe Spitzer had taken the double whammy hard. He crashed and burned, coming to work drunk and getting into fights with fellow officers and suspects alike. He was on the verge of losing his job and his pension when he pulled himself together. He'd been on an even keel since, but his early enthusiasm had never returned. These days, he seemed mostly to be piling up the years to retirement, doing the least he could do without earning a reprimand or another black mark in his jacket.
The way he had investigated the Daria Cameron case did nothing to alter Catherine's opinion of him. He was a smart cop, but he had turned lazy. If he had been one of her CSIs, she would have found a way to get rid of him. Lazy and law enforcement didn't go together. Every profession had its good members and bad, she knew, but when the job was on the cops, she wanted everyone to be at the top of their game.
"There isn't one," he told her. "Condo's not considered a crime scene. She never got there, right? If we find her car, that'll most probably be a crime scene. But the condo? It's clean."
"I see. Does Daria have a boyfriend?"
"She's single and unattached, according to the family. Last guy resembling any kind of steady boyfriend was more than a year ago. She was never big on dating anyway. Way they talk about her, she sounds like kind of a nun. Half a nun, anyhow."
"Does she work?"
"Not that she needs to, with that family money. She did have a job at an art gallery, but she quit when she got sick. Hasn't been in touch with anybody there since she left."
"So she never saw anybody except family?"
"That's about the size of it. The staff at her building, I guess. She had a couple of close friends, other women around her age and social station, but none of them has heard from her, either. They all describe her pretty much the same way. She's serious. She doesn't go out much. She reads a lot. She's very close to her mother. That's the picture I got. Half a nun."
"There are a lot of blank spaces in that picture."
The detective shrugged. "What can I tell you? I'm trying to fill those in. I'm one guy, and I have a caseload like you wouldn't believe."
"Oh, I'd believe it," Catherine said. She was no stranger to the Las Vegas Police Department's ways. But a heavy caseload didn't excuse laziness. "You can trust me on that."
Seventy-eight hours gone by. For evidentiary purposes, Daria Cameron's condo was already a bust. It hadn't been secured, which meant that anyone could have come and gone over the past several days. Anything inside it that might have told Catherine where Daria had gone could already have been compromised, altered, or taken away.
Still, Catherine wanted to see the place. She stopped at the front desk in a marble-floored lobby that soared at least three stories high. The desk was surrounded by a profusion of potted plants, and a young woman with the vitality of a personal trainer at a fitness center greeted her with a smile. She wore a navy-blue polo shirt tucked into snug red shorts, white sneakers, and her brown hair pulled back into a neat ponytail. Her teeth were so white Catherine regretted leaving her sunglasses in the Yukon.
Catherine showed her badge and introduced her self. "I need to get into Daria Cameron's unit," she said. "I'm investigating her disappearance."
The young woman made a face as if she had just bit into something spoiled. "Oh, that's sucky," she said. "But… I can't let you into her place. That's totally against the rules."
"I'm sure the rules can be bent for law enforcement."
"Do you have a… whaddyacallit?"
"A warrant?"
"Yeah, that!"
"I don't have a warrant," Catherine said. "I just want to take a look around, see if I can find anything that might help us find her."
"Yeah, I get that, only I like my job, you know? Anybody found out I let you in, I'd be back at the mall selling smoothies. And I hated that."
"Is there someone else I can talk to?" Catherine asked. Seventy-eight hours so far – by the time I turn this ditz around, it'll be a hundred and eight. "A manager? Building security, maybe?"
"Oh, yeah, totally. Hang tight." The young woman swiveled in her chair, snatched up a telephone, and touched a couple of buttons. In a moment, she explained to somebody that there was a cop outside with no whaddyacallit who wanted to go upstairs to look for somebody who was missing.
A minute later, a well-groomed, crisply efficient woman in a tailored suit emerged from a door at the back of the lobby. In the cool stillness, her heels clicked loudly against the marble. "Yes?" she asked. Her hair was dark and as crisp as the rest of her. She snapped a business card into Catherine's palm. "I'm the chief security officer on duty."
Once again, Catherine explained her mission. "Of course," the woman said. "Come with me."
An elevator door slid open as they approached it. The woman boarded, and Catherine followed her. The woman didn't push any of the floor buttons, but the one for seventeen illuminated on its own. The perky thing at the desk was controlling it, Catherine figured. She had been in other buildings with similar systems, but that didn't mean they weren't always a surprise when she saw one in action.
On the seventeenth floor, the woman led her out into a carpeted, softly lit hallway that had the hush of a cathedral. Downstairs, Ms. Perky had at least given the place a feeling of life, but this corridor felt almost funereal by contrast. "Cheery," Catherine said, unable to help herself.
"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.