Blood Quantum Page 7

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.

  8

  Sam Vega accompanied Greg to the nameless tent city.

  The place sprawled for what seemed like miles. Greg was amazed and not a little appalled. "I had no idea it had grown so much," he said as they approached it.

  "The city's grown, too," Sam pointed out. "More people, more poverty. This place has been around for more than a decade, but it's never been this full before. There are shelters in the city, but they've had funding issues, and most of them are at capacity. The economy has really done a number on Vegas. We were one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, and as long as we were booming, the construction jobs, tourist-trade jobs, even high-tech were booming, too. But when things skidded to a stop nationally, they slowed here, big-time – worse than in most places – and tipped a lot of people over the edge. More houses in foreclosure, more personal bankruptcies, more jobs lost, more families living in tents here."

  They're not just tents, Greg realized. People there lived in tents, in parked cars, in shacks thrown together from cardboard, sheets of galvanized aluminum, carpet scraps, and whatever else they had been able to get their hands on. Some lived in cars or vans, sometimes with a piece of tarp propped up on posts or rods as a sunscreen. The homes – they were homes, Greg knew, however raw, however mean; they were occupied by human beings, and he didn't want to lose sight of that – were packed close together on a vast plain of bare dirt, arranged along pathways big enough for a small truck to travel. Some of the places had trash piled up around them; others were neat, as tidy as their residents could keep a thrown-together hovel in a field of dirt.

  He couldn't see any source of running water. Someone, probably Las Vegas city officials, had put up some portable outhouses, but Greg guessed that anyone who wanted a shower had to find one at a shelter, a truck stop, or some similar public
place.

  In the space of a few hours, Greg had gone from a luxurious estate in one of the city's most expensive neighborhoods to a swath of ground where probably several hundred people lived. Some of the homes appeared to be occupied by individuals and others by families. Here and there, he could see signs of children: a doll in the dirt, a plastic play structure with one of those two-foot slides for toddlers, probably sturdier in a high wind than the blue tarpaulin lean-to it stood in front of. The combined wealth of all of the residents there probably wouldn't buy the land on which the Cameron house stood. From the city's richest to the poorest, Greg thought, in a matter of a few miles. Practically neighbors. With a pang of self-criticism, he realized he had felt more at ease at the Cameron estate than he did at the tent city, even though someone at the estate had just shot a man. As far as he knew, violence in the tent city was nonexistent.

  He and Sam didn't have a specific destination in mind, and they couldn't see anything like a central meeting place, a town hall, or any real community organization. It appeared that if someone wanted to move in, all he did was pull up a square of dirt and erect shelter of some sort. There had been that agreement, the rules Greg had found, which were mostly commonsense behavioral issues for people living close together: no loud music after nine p.m., no fighting, no drug dealing, prostitution, or other illegal activity. But that had been from years ago, and for all he knew, whoever had instituted those rules and tried to enforce them had long since found a job and moved away from there.

  So they walked from Sam's car up what appeared to be the main road in and out, dirt hard-packed by constant travel. People were out of their homes, sitting in small clutches talking, a couple openly drinking, some just walking without apparent purpose or destination. They spotted Sam and Greg, though, and most of them stared with suspicious frowns or downright hostile gazes.

  "Didn't take long for us to be made," Sam said.

  "I guess we don't exactly blend in." Even as he said it, though, Greg saw what looked like a middle-class white family, sitting on folding lawn chairs around a Jeep, drinking lemonade. Those people didn't seem to fit, either, but the more closely he observed the residents, the more he saw others who didn't seem as down-and-out as he would have expected. "Looks as if some of the locals don't like the police very much."

  "Cops represent the system," Sam said. "Anyone living here, the system has failed."

  "I guess that's true."

  Sam and Greg approached one resident near the front entrance – entrance being a vague term in a place with no fences around it and little in the way of organizational structure but defined in this case by an open space around the dirt path. The man gave them a frank but not unfriendly gaze. He was an African-American guy, wearing clothes that had seen better days but were at least neat and mended. He had long hair, which years of exposure to the elements had turned mostly gray, and he was sitting in a faded and worn outdoor chaise-longue in front of a tent that appeared to be well cared for, reading a book.

  "What's shakin', Officers?" he asked as they neared him. He put the book down gently on the chair and stood up. "Welcome to our home."

  "Thanks," Greg said.

  "I'd like to ask you a favor, sir," Sam said. He pulled a photograph of the dead man from the Cameron estate out of his pocket and showed it to the guy. "Do you know this man?" he asked.

  The man shook his head. "Just 'cause a dude looks homeless don't mean he lives here."

  "It's not that," Greg put in. "He had this, like a rental agreement from here. Who would have had him sign it? Is there some sort of hierarchy here? A controlling authority of some kind?"

  The man showed a big smile. "You mean, do we got a government? I remember that agreement you're talking about. I signed it, too. That was with the mayor."

  "The mayor of Las Vegas?"

  "The mayor of the Happy Hunting Ground. That's what he called this place, anyway, but the name never stuck. And he's the one called himself mayor. Nobody else objected, though, so pretty soon everybody called him mayor." He nodded toward one of the tents with a trash pile behind it, flies buzzing around. "'Course, not everybody abided by the rules on that piece of paper, then or now."

  "Can we see the mayor?" Sam asked. "Maybe he remembers this man."

  "Wish you could," the guy said. "But he died, what, three years ago now. Hit by a city bus, you believe that? He had lived here almost nine years by then. Lived on in the hospital for three days after he was hit, and some folks said it was the cleanest they had ever seen him."

  "This city, I believe anything," Sam said. "I'm sorry to hear it, though."

  "And there's no new mayor?" Greg asked.

  "Plenty of people wish they were the mayor. Some folks like to make others run through hoops, right? Walk some kind of line. But there's nobody like the mayor anymore. Everybody loved him, most folks wanted to make him happy, so they went along with things like that agreement and his rules."

  "So if someone wanted to move in here now…"

  "They'd find a space and fill it. There are social workers coming around all the time. They try to keep track of who's here, keep some sort of inventory, I guess you'd say. But lately, even they're coming around less. Some of them got fired, I guess, and the ones left got too many cases to follow up on."

  "There's a lot of that going around," Sam said.

  "Are there any of those social workers here today?" Greg asked. "Someone we might be able to ask about this man? It's important."

  "I haven't seen any. Could be some around later, or not. Can't really tell, one day to the next."

  "Do you have any other suggestions for us?"

  The guy smiled again, shrugging at the same time. "Keep asking around, I guess. Watch out for knives while you do. Some here don't much like the law, but most of us are respectful, decent folks."

  "We'll keep that in mind," Sam said. "Thanks for your help."

  "Hope you find your man," the guy said.

  "Yeah, we're like the Mounties," Greg told him "We won't give up until we do."

  Most of the residents they met were less helpful than the first. Some gave them the cold shoulder, ignoring them altogether. Others simply scowled or spat curses at them. A few turned away at their approach, ducking inside a tent, shack, or van with sheepish expressions, as if embarrassed to find themselves reduced to such a lowly standard of living. Greg suspected he would feel the same way, even if, as was no doubt true in many of these cases, it was entirely bad luck that had landed him there and no personal failing on his part. He supposed if it came to that, he would rather live there than on the street, and he would eventually get past the humiliation he felt. But it would take time to reach that point, and it wouldn't be easy. There was, he reasoned, no shame in making do in whatever way one had to. That didn't mean, however, that he wouldn't feel shame anyway.

  Some people were willing to be engaged, though, and they were finally directed to a woman called Crazy Marge. "Crazy Marge, she knows, like, everybody," a kid told them. He was probably ten or eleven, slightly built, with sandy blond hair and a coating of grime over almost every inch of him. He should have been in school, but Greg wasn't about to start in on that when the boy was being helpful. "Talk to her."

  The kid pointed out Crazy Marge's home, an almost palatial fifth-wheel pop-top tent trailer with guy lines extending from its corners and bits of colored fabric tied to the lines, creating the effect of pennants. A soft breeze blew through the tent city, making the pennants flutter cheerfully. For someone living in meager circumstances, she made the most of things.

  Sam announced them as they neared the trailer. "Hello? Excuse me…? Marge?" he said. "We're with the Las Vegas Police Department. Nobody's in trouble, we're just trying to identify someone and were told you might know him."

  "I don't know nobody," a woman said from in side. "Not till you call me by my right name."

  "Your right…" Sam trailed off.

  "Sorry," Greg took up. "He meant to say 'Crazy Marge'."r />
  She threw back the trailer door and stepped out side. "That's better," she said. "Now, who you tryin' to find?"

  Greg was glad they weren't trying to identify Crazy Marge, because he could hardly get a sense of her. Her race was indeterminate, her skin dusky and leathery, but whether that was from sun exposure or racial identity was anybody's guess. Her hair was dyed a vivid pink and cropped short, blunt at the edges, and uneven around the sides. She might well have done it herself with scissors. Maybe with out the benefit of a mirror, Greg thought. Her smile was huge, her mouth glinting with gold. She was pear-shaped, narrow above the waist and wide below, and she wore tight-fitting pants, yellow with a bright floral pattern, that accentuated her figure. She also wore jewelry, lots and lots of it, bracelet upon bracelet, necklace overlying necklace, pins and brooches all over her red smock top, what looked like dozens of earrings clipped to or stuck through her ears. None of it looked expensive, but taken all together, it certainly made a statement.

  Sam started to show her the photo, but she didn't even look at it. "Someone probably told you old Crazy Marge knows everybody. They all say that. 'Cause it's true." She laughed, throwing her head back, and Greg spotted more gold. If she sold all the gold in her mouth, she could probably afford to buy a house.

  "Thing is, I'm one of the originals. Only but a few people been living here longer than me, and most of them's passed on. You stay someplace long enough, and you look like I do -" She shot a hip at them and lowered her eyelashes, looking sideways in what Greg supposed was meant to be a coquettish pose. "People get to know you."

  "I'll bet they do," Sam said. There was no malice in his tone; clearly, he was enjoying Crazy Marge's performance just as much as she was.

  "Ain't nobody like Crazy Marge, that's what they all say. So of course they wants to be my friend. And some of them menfolks… they wants to be more than just a friend, if you know what I mean." She gave an exaggerated wink.

  "Who could blame them?" Sam asked, playing along.