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.
'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
