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  "You should have let the detectives make that call."

  "I know. I understand that now, really. At the time, I was just thinking of the promise I made to Daria."

  "Would her mother honestly have been upset? I thought maybe she knew, and that's why she – "

  "That's why she took me back? No way. She wasn't like that. She might even have canned me if she'd found out about me and Daria. But see, I just knew that's what people would believe. Helena took me back because she tried two other people in my job, and neither of them was any good at it. We fought sometimes, because I'm a person who says what he thinks and doesn't stop to think about how someone else might take it. Which is why she fired me the first time, because I said some things about other people around her that she didn't like. But when she found out no one could run the estate the way she likes it, she personally called me and asked me to come back."

  "How long has the affair with Daria been going on?" Catherine asked.

  "Six months, give or take. We've been friends for ages, and it just kind of moved to a new level one day. Believe me, if there was anything I could have told the police that would help find her, I would have. I've been worried sick about her."

  "Okay," Catherine said. She had plenty of experience reading people, living ones as well as dead, and he came across as someone who was telling the truth. "I won't say a word, unless I have reason to believe it would affect the investigation in some way."

  "Thank you!" he said. He was so effusive she was afraid he would try to hug her. "You're an absolute lifesaver! I do love my job here, and I wouldn't do anything to jeopardize it."

  "I'll do what I can," Catherine promised him again. "But if you think of anything – anything – that might help us find Daria, it's absolutely crucial that you let us know." She handed him her business card, even though she had given him one the night before.

  He slipped the card into his pocket without looking at it. "I will," he said. "I would have already, except that -"

  "I know. You made a promise. Promises are fine, but when lives are on the line, sometimes they have to be broken."

  17

  Ray didn't like the idea of Nick processing such a complicated scene on his own, out there on the Grey Rock reservation. Not that CSIs didn't have to work alone sometimes, but a multiple-shooting scene was always a big job. And if there was the possibility that the shooters might come back, then a difficult job became a nightmare.

  He wanted to get out there, to lend a hand if he could. He wrapped up what needed to be done in his office and started to head out, then remembered he wanted to check on progress in the trace lab before he went to the reservation. One never knew when the most seemingly insignificant fact would turn out to be the key to the whole case.

  Then again, insignificant facts were often, in fact, insignificant.

  Hodges was in the lab, peering into a comparison microscope, when Ray entered. "Excuse me, David?"

  With a dramatic flourish and a rustle of fabric, Hodges whipped his right hand into the air, holding up his index finger. Ray got the message – one second.

  As the seconds trailed on and Hodges kept staring into the binocular lens unit, Ray thought maybe he had meant one minute. He hoped it wasn't one hour. He had no intention of staying that long. But it didn't look as if Hodges had any intention of addressing him until he was good and ready. He just kept that finger in the air, as if he was testing the wind.

  Finally, Hodges raised his head from the scope and turned to face Ray. He still didn't speak, simply fixed what Ray supposed was meant to be an expectant look on his face and waited.

  "Hello, David," Ray said, determined to be polite. "I was wondering if you've made any headway on the materials from the Domingo scene."

  "Actually, I have," Hodges replied. "I'm not through all of it yet, but I have some results for you."

  "Excellent," Ray said. Hodges stood there for a moment, his expression unchanged. "May I know what they are?"

  "Oh," Hodges said, blinking as if his mind had been somewhere else entirely and he had just remembered whom he was talking to. "Sure." He flipped open a folder and glanced at some papers inside. "There was some plant matter found on the body. I've determined that it's from a soaptree yucca plant. Possibly more than one plant. I haven't gone so far as to have Wendy run a DNA comparison on the individual fragments, but I can if you need me to."

  "That shouldn't be necessary. Soaptree yucca – that's a pretty common plant in Nevada."

  "As common as slot machines."

  "Right," Ray said. "Anything else?"

  "You brought in some hairs that were found on or near the body."

  "Short orange ones, yes."

  "Cat."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Those hairs were from a cat, not a human. An orange cat. I did you the favor of making a couple of phone calls. Robert Domingo's next-door neighbors have an orange cat. The cat is outside at night, and it loves to visit Domingo's place. They're pretty sure he feeds it sometimes, although they've tried to discourage that. They said it came home with something brown and sticky on one of its paws this morning, and they washed it off. I told them it was probably blood."

  "So chances are, the cat went inside because the door was open, wandered around, rubbed against Domingo, shed some hairs, and left."

  "Unless you're planning to revise your theory about the murder weapon and suggest that maybe the victim was bludgeoned with a cat."

  "I don't think so. Thanks for making those phone calls."

  "Don't mention it. Seriously. It was a whim – I don't want everybody thinking I'll go that far for them."

  "My lips are sealed, David. Is that it?"

  "It just so happens that I was talking to Mandy about the cat thing, and she told me she hadn't been able to raise any finger impressions off the lighter. She got a partial palm print, but that's all. She can't match it to anybody yet, but if you come up with a suspect, there's a chance that it can be confirmatory."

  "Best we can hope for, I suppose. Thanks, David. I'm on my way to the Grey Rock reservation to join Nick."

  "Okay," Hodges said. "One thing, though. When you get back? Don't look for me. If there's any mercy in the world, I'll be home in bed."

  *

  "Catherine asked me to give you a call, Greg," Wendy said.

  "That was good of her," Greg answered. "It's a little lonely out here."

  "I think she had something more specific in mind than just checking in. Where are you?"

  "Hang on," Greg said, scanning out the Yukon's windshield. At the next corner was a sign he could barely make out from here. "West Warm Springs."

  "Where is that?"

  "It's off South Rainbow."

  "You mean five ninety-five?'

  "The guy who wrote these directions knew it as Rainbow. At least, that's what I'm counting on. I spent about twenty minutes looking for something that could be described as a rainbow before I realized that, for a change, he had used an actual street name. I'm really only guessing about Warm Springs. On the directions, he wrote that there were bulldozers and noise. I'm guessing he meant construction, and there are a bunch of relatively new houses down here. New since he wrote this, anyway. But I could be wrong. There's so much here that's just wide open to interpretation. Whoever this guy was, he was kind of… kind of crazy."

  "That's actually why Catherine asked me to call you," Wendy said.

  "To tell me he's crazy?"

  "No, to tell you who he is."

  "We know?"

  "We do now. Isn't DNA a wonderful tool?"

  "So who is he?"

  "He's Troy Cameron. The one and only son of Bix and Helena Cameron."

  Greg had been ready to hear almost anything, since he really had no idea who the John Doe was. But that… that took him off guard. "He is?"

  "He definitely is. Not only that, but those hairs and fingernail pieces you found in his tent? They belong to his sister, Daria."

  "The one who's missing?"


  "The very same."

  "Wow. Small world, I guess."

  "I guess so."

  "Listen, Wendy," Greg said. "I have to cover a few more blocks here, then I'll have to get out and hike, so I should go."

  "Hike? Like, in the desert?"

  "Looks that way."

  "Carry water," she said. "Plenty of it. And Greg?"

  "Yes?"

  "Are you talking while you're driving?"

  "I pulled over when the phone rang." he said. "But I need to drive now."

  "That's good. Don't be a dope, okay?"

  "Always an admirable goal," Greg said, but she had already hung up.

  He had, over the course of the past few hours, often had to park and walk around, searching for anything that looked like it might have ten years ago and could potentially correspond to the notes Troy Cameron had scribbled down over and over again.

  Some of it was virtually impossible. At one point, he had written, "Left at laundrymat." There was no Laundromat anywhere in the vicinity. Greg had gone into some of the shops that were there, in a strip mall that had probably not existed a decade ago, and asked if anyone remembered a Laundromat in the area. An elderly woman working in a card shop said that she did and spent fifteen minutes telling Greg about the surly man who ran the place and about the mouse she saw run underneath the dryers once. He was sure she would have told him precisely how many items she had washed there if he gave her enough time, but he had finally managed to extricate himself and continued on his way.

  Some of Troy's landmark descriptions had been surprisingly astute, in their own strange way. Greg had spent several minutes at one point looking for a half-moon, wondering if the guy had first written out these directions at night and how that would affect the attempt to follow them, before noticing an old iron manhole cover in the middle of the street with a smiling crescent moon on it – a little less than half a moon, to be precise, but close enough. At another point, Troy had written, "Left by woof woof woof." Greg wondered how in the world he was supposed to turn at a decade-old sound, but after a few minutes, he spotted an old chain-link dog run behind a ramshackle house, with the remains of a couple of wooden doghouses inside it. The fence drooped now, and the house was vacant, its windows boarded over. It didn't appear that any dogs had used it in ages, but they certainly had at some point. He made the left and found the next landmark shortly thereafter.

  He had never expected, when he first became a CSI, that he would spend a day doing something like this. Especially a day after he had already pulled a night shift. Walking around the city following old handwritten directions wasn't something they taught in school. But you did what the job demanded. The task of the moment set the agenda. If you tried to tailor the job to your preferences, you burned out fast.

  He parked the Yukon and got out, carrying the directions in one hand and a backpack, which contained water and survival gear, in the other. He had known there would be some desert travel and prepared for it, wearing hiking boots, a T-shirt with a long-sleeved cotton shirt over it, and a ball cap. He didn't look much like a CSI, but at least he wouldn't perish in the wilderness. And his cap had the word "Forensics" printed across the front, so he had that going for him.

  Warm Springs Road ended at Fort Apache. He doubted the road had extended that far back in Troy Cameron's time – at least, when he had described this route. Most of the houses Greg had passed had been newer than ten years old – the bulldozer stuff Cameron had mentioned. But Cameron did say that he walked for a long way in a straight line, away from the afternoon sun. That meant he was walking toward the east, and Greg, backtracking his way, had been driving into the west.

  From this point on, all of the descriptions were of desert scenery. Fortunately, Cameron hadn't used a lot of plants as landmarks, instead picking rocks that reminded him of animals or places, the shapes of individual hills, and in one case a cloud formation. Greg figured that one wouldn't be too helpful.

  He moved slowly into the wilderness, looking for a rock like a sheep's back, which was how Troy had described it. He guessed that would mean it had a woolly texture to it, maybe lots of lumps that would look like tight curls. It was, according to Cameron, on the side of a steep hill, and it was where he had turned toward the road.

  Greg scanned the hills rising before him. They were dotted with desert scrub: low yellow-blossomed rabbitbrush, spindly ocotillo, bright green creosote, mesquite bushes with thorns like stilettos. One slope was particularly steep, although farther from the road than Greg expected, and high up on it was something that might have been a sheep rock. He made his way to it, tramping across soft din and then hard, bare rock. On the way up the slope, he leaned forward, into the hillside, for balance. A walking stick might have been a good idea – the last thing he wanted to do around here was grab the local plants for support, since most of them had barbs or thorns, daggers waiting to impale the unwary palm. He also kept an eye out for rattlesnakes. It was a little early in the year for them, but he didn't want to happen across one that didn't own a calendar.

  When he got to the rock he had his eye on, not only was the upper surface oddly bumpy, but there was a broad main section and then a slightly offset smaller section on a top corner that, if he squinted a little, looked like a sheep's head.

  Almost every time he began to despair, to think that whatever Cameron had observed ten years ago no longer existed, he came upon something that did. Cameron might have suffered brain damage if that bullet in the head predated the directions he wrote out, or he might have been a little off all along. But he had a good eye for permanence – for all of the landmarks that were long gone, such as the "laundrymat," there were others, such as the sheep rock and the half-moon, that were still around and not that hard to find.

  After the sheep rock, he was looking for "the white cliffs of Dover." Las Vegas was a long way from the real Dover, a city facing onto the English Channel. Ferries and hovercraft from the European continent docked there, making Dover England's busiest passenger port, and Greg knew that even people who had never been there were familiar with its white cliffs.

  The folded hills grew progressively steeper and rockier, beyond the sheep-shaped rock, so Greg assumed he was looking for a sheer cliff face, pale in color. He turned the indicated way – really, the opposite of the indicated way, since he was still working in reverse – and started off, eyeing the hillsides.

  Tiny flies buzzed around his head – Grissom could probably have identified them from the sound alone, but as far as Greg was concerned, they were just airborne nuisances, nothing more – and he had to perfect a double-handed swat to keep them from just circling his head, avoiding first one hand and then the other.

  He hiked for fifteen minutes before he rounded a bend and saw it – a high cliff, almost directly perpendicular to the desert floor, with a light yellowish cast to the exposed surface. Greg probably would have made the Dover connection even if he hadn't been looking for it.

  He was walking toward the cliff, less than thirty yards away from it, when he saw the footprints.

  The prints had been made by hiking boots, small but new, the tread still so sharp it cut deep, clear grooves in the dirt. And they were headed straight toward the white cliffs of Dover.

  This was wide-open land, and there could have been a perfectly innocent explanation for them. Some nature lover out for a stroll on a spring afternoon. In another month or so, the weather would make it more difficult to do so, but desert rats loved these conditions, warm and bright.

  Still, the direction they were headed made Greg wary. He kept hiking in toward the cliffs, but he made sure to watch ahead and to check his back trail, as well as looking at his directions and searching for the next landmark.

  Believing in perfectly innocent explanations rather than expecting the worst was a good way to find himself faceup on Doc Robbins's slab.

  18

  Nick had been reluctant to let someone else drive the department's vehicle. But he had bee
n even more reluctant to leave the crime scene, and Brass hadn't objected to the idea. The cop who took the keys returned in twenty-five minutes with the Yukon, bearing no obvious new dents or scrapes, so Nick was glad Aguirre had been willing to send him. Those twenty-five minutes could have been crucial at the scene.

  Nick was under no illusions that the work he did there would ever wind up in a courtroom. The scene was way too compromised for that. And he was far out of his jurisdiction.

  But crime-scene investigation had different purposes at different times. For the most part, it was meant to seal a conviction, to help a prosecuting attorney present an ironclad case to a jury. But it could also help point the finger at the right suspect in the first place. That was what Nick was trying to do now – to see if he could figure out who had shot up Meoqui Torres's house. As a corollary to that, because he believed the two cases were somehow connected, he wanted to learn if that information pointed back at whoever had killed Roland Domingo. If one led to the other, it would more than justify the time and effort he spent there.

  The police who had arrived just before Brass and Aguirre left – and the EMS team that followed almost twenty minutes later – destroyed most of what little was left of the crime scene. The cops swarmed the porch, went into the house, stood around outside talking and smoking, trying to re-create the incident. They helped the remaining wounded, stabilizing them until the paramedics showed up, which Nick was glad of. But in their haste, they trampled what should have been evidence. The paramedics were worse; at least the cops recognized that they should have been more careful. And Nick didn't blame them for being anxious about the victims. He saw tears in the eyes of some as they tended to people who might have been brothers, cousins, or close friends.