Neither, as it happened.
It was Greg, but there was a lot of background noise. 'We have her, Catherine!' he shouted.
'You have who? Where are you, Greg?'
'I'm in a helicopter,' he replied, which explained the roar around him. 'With Daria Cameron!'
'You found her!'
'Her and Bix Cameron, too. He's long dead, but she's alive. The chopper's taking us to Desert Palm Hospital. There's a bus bringing Bix to the morgue.'
'I guess I'll have a lot to discuss with Helena Cameron and her people. Thanks, Greg, that's great work.'
'No problem. I'll talk to you again after we land, when I get a better sense of Daria's prognosis.'
He hung up, and Catherine sat in the car for another couple of minutes, gathering her thoughts. This was going to be a very different conversation from the one she had expected to have.
When it was over and Ecklie heard about it, she hoped she'd still have a job.
22
Brass and Aguirre made several more frustrating stops before they could begin to claim any real progress. They talked to some of the senior staff at the old Grey Rock Casino and the project manager at the construction site for the new one, a tall, triangular-shaped structure that mimicked, in steel, concrete, and glass, the real Grey Rock territory. They stopped at Ruben Solis's home and Shep Moran's.
The only thing everybody they talked to had in common, besides their heritage, was the fact that they all claimed to have no idea where Solis and Moran might be.
At the casino, there had been four police vehicles and an ambulance, because a verbal argument had escalated into a physical one, and a guy had been slammed onto a roulette wheel, injuring his back and totaling the wheel.
Finally, they stopped at the home of one of Solis's aunts. She was in her late twenties, not much older than her nephew. She had long black hair and dark skin and a tired look on her face. The dusty front yard was littered with tricycles, a slide, a sandbox (which seemed more than a little redundant to Brass, given the home's nonexistent lawn – sand was in more plentiful supply than almost anything else), a couple of Razor scooters, and an assortment of balls and other sporting equipment. But the house was as large and modern as anything in a Las Vegas suburban development, the only apparent concession to the bare desert surrounding it a paucity of windows, and those few remained blocked by heavy drapes.
'Nice place,' Brass said as they approached from the road. 'Does that mean she's on Domingo's good list?'
Aguirre eyed Brass without turning his head. 'I hope I haven't given you cause to underestimate us, Jim. There's a lot of poverty on the rez, but we're not just that. There are Indians who leave the rez and stay poor and others who stay here and get rich. Some have jobs in town, some here at one or another of the tribal businesses. Some of us have college degrees, advanced degrees. I'm one of them. I was recruited by the FBI, but I thought I could do more good here than in a Bureau office in California or Rhode Island or someplace.'
'My apologies. I didn't mean -'
'It's okay, Jim. I have a problem seeing slights that don't exist outside my own head. Forget I said anything.'
When Solis's relative came to the door, she had a toddler clinging to her left leg. 'Hello?' she said.
'Hello, ma'am,' Aguirre said. 'Are you Ruben Solis's aunt?'
The toddler hid behind the woman's leg, peeking out at Brass as if afraid the police captain might like to have him for an afternoon snack. 'Yes,' she said. 'Is there something…'
'No, ma'am,' Aguirre said. 'We're just concerned about him. I don't know if you've heard about all the trouble, the fights and things going on around -'
'Just a little,' she said. 'I've been pretty busy, but I had the radio on, the rez station, and they said something about that.'
'Well, we have reason to believe that someone might try to hurt Ruben,' Aguirre told her. 'But he's hiding out someplace, and we're having a hard time finding him to warn him.'
Brass didn't like it when cops lied to civilians. He had already called Aguirre on it, in private, after Aguirre had used the same story earlier. But the tribal cop said he was just stretching the truth in a good cause. A rubber band could be stretched, Brass thought, but sooner or later, it would snap, and as often as not, it would come back and sting the person doing the stretching. He hoped that wasn't the case here.
The baby started to fuss, and she clucked at it, rocking it back and forth in her arms. 'Did you try Shop Moran's mom's place?'
'No, we haven't looked there,' Aguirre said. 'Does she live on the rez?'
The young woman shook her head. 'No, Shep's mom isn't Grey Rock, but his father was. After they broke up, she had a place in the city, but it got foreclosed on. She's moved to Phoenix with her new boyfriend's parents. But the house is sitting empty, and sometimes Shep and Rubin go out there and party.'
'We'll try it,' Aguirre said. 'Thank you for your help. You don't happen to have the address -?'
Brass cut him off. 'That's okay, we can find it.'
'Thank you,' Aguirre said again.
The woman closed the door, aided by the toddler, who pressed his hands against it and shoved, just in case Brass might change his mind and lunge for him.
'She could have given us the address,' Aguirre said as they climbed back into his Jeep.
'And while she had it handy, she could have made a quick phone call to let him know we were coming,' Brass pointed out. 'This way, she still has her hands full with the kids, and she's less likely to dig for the number.'
'But how do we -?'
'We know the place belongs to Shep Moran's mother. You get me her name, and I can track that down in ten seconds.'
Aguirre shrugged. 'Okay,' he said. He started the engine and reached for his radio at the same time. 'I won't have any authority there.'
'We'll be on my turf,' Brass said. 'So now I'll be the escort, and you can be the guest.'
'I can't wait,' Aguirre said, thumbing the button for the mic. 'That means you buy dinner.'
Shep Moran's mother had lived in a neighborhood about twenty minutes from the edge of the reservation. The good-sized single-family homes were built on quarter-acre lots, so there was some space around each one for the now-standard xeriscaped yards. The whole development wasn't more than ten years old, and some of it appeared newer than that. Probably built in phases, Brass guessed, and her place was in one of the later phases. What little vegetation grew there was immature, so the houses were exposed to the full strength of the Nevada sun.
They had stucco walls and tile or shingle roofs, covered entryways, dormer windows. Brass could almost picture the flags snapping in the breeze, the signs offering easy terms and upgrades and low, low interest rates, back when the developer had been trying to entice people to buy these houses. Back when money flowed freely and credit was cheap.
The place was a ghost town.
It wasn't hard to tell which houses were still occupied. They had curtains hanging in the windows, maybe a vehicle in the drive and flowers n the garden.
But even most of those homes had For Sale signs standing out front. Anybody who was stuck in one of these houses wanted to get out, once all the neighbors had been forced from their homes. Brass couldn't blame them. They had moved into a neighborhood, which implied the presence of neighbors, friends for the kids to play with, block parties. Instead, there was the forest of For Sale signs on those posts that looked disturbingly like gallows.
He had been in too many Las Vegas neighborhoods just like this one recently. The recession had hit the city
