'But why are you here tonight?' Catherine asked. 'The family's finances aren't involved in the shooting in any way, are they?'
'Of course not,' Dustin Gottlieb said before Stilton could answer.
'I was still here when it happened,' Stilton said. 'I had been working with Helena on some financial matters until late in the evening. When we finished, we were relaxing with a drink. There's a guest room in the house that has, I'm afraid, turned into my home away from home, so I was just getting ready to bid her good night and turn in when all the ruckus started. It was terrible, the shooting and the sirens and all of it. Just awful.'
'Where's Mrs. Cameron now?' Catherine asked.
Dustin Gottlieb was built like a tennis pro, with long legs, broad shoulders, and a lean torso. He was tanned, with short dark hair cropped close to his scalp and a friendly, open face. 'Ms. Willows, I'm Mrs. Cameron's estate manager. I don't know how much you know about the many stresses on Mrs. Cameron these days…'
'Fill me in.'
'Well, heavens. She and Daria have both been very ill. The reason Mr. Stilton was here working with her is that she doesn't expect to live much longer, and she wants to know that everything is squared away before she dies.'
Stilton shook his head sadly, but he didn't deny Gottlieb's words.
'And Daria,' Gottlieb continued, 'her daughter, has gone missing. A couple of days now. We're just frantic over it.'
Now that he mentioned it, Catherine remembered hearing something about the young woman's disappearance. Day shift had the case, though, and she had been plenty busy with her own workload, so she hadn't paid much attention to the details. It was hard enough to track her own shift's cases without filling her head with work that didn't immediately concern her. 'I'm sorry.'
'You know how it is in this city. The police never believe someone is truly missing until years have gone by. Until then, they assume the person is a runaway or having an affair or something.'
'There's a large transient population here,' Catherine agreed. 'People come and go a lot. They don't always leave forwarding addresses.'
'Not Daria Cameron. She's a smart young lady, accomplished. She grew up here. She wouldn't just leave voluntarily, and even if she did, she wouldn't do so without telling Helena where she was going. Not after what happened to her father and brother. I wasn't with the family then, but I've heard she was just literally destroyed by that. She would never do the same thing to her mother. And especially given the state of Helena 's health – neither of them is well, in fact.'
'What's the matter with them?' Catherine asked.
'I can't tell you that.'
'Why not?'
'Not only is it a personal matter, but the fact is that there is no diagnosis as of yet. All I can say is that they're not in good health. And if nothing else, I believe that would prevent Daria from abandoning her mother.'
Catherine could have refuted that argument but didn't see the point in it. Sometimes people went away to die. Sometimes encroaching death brought old family arguments, long since buried, out into the open and set them off again. She would let day shift worry about trying to convince the family and staff of those things – that wasn't what she had come for.
Gottlieb stuffed his hands into his pockets. 'So when I heard there had been a shooting on the grounds, I didn't want Mrs. Cameron to know about it. Maybe tomorrow, in the light of day. But not tonight. She's too weak, and her physical and emotional states are too precarious to have to worry about something like that. I interrupted her drink with Mr. Stilton, gave her a pill, and sent her to bed.'
'A pill.'
'A sleeping pill. Prescription. There are no drug addicts in this house, if that's what you're thinking. But she's not well, and Dr. Boullet provides her with the medication that she needs.'
'I wasn't implying anything, Mr. Gottlieb, and I'm sorry if I sounded as if I was. It's just that if she was having a drink -'
'Mrs. Cameron drinks only sparkling water at night, nothing alcoholic. I apologize if I jumped to conclusions, Ms. Willows. I guess all of our nerves are more than a little frayed. Daria's disappearance – particularly in the light of Mr. Cameron and Troy vanishing, ten years ago last month… it's all a bit too much. Just entirely too much.'
'I'm sure.'
Marvin Coatsworth stepped up behind Sam Vega and tapped him on the arm. 'Detective Vega, are we quite through for tonight? I'd like to allow Mr. McCann to retire. He's been through an emotional occurrence.'
'Not just yet, Mr. Coatsworth, but soon, all right? My crime-scene people will be here for a while, and the coroner's assistant has just arrived, so it'll still be a while before the John Doe is removed from the driveway. But I'll be able to cut these people loose soon enough, I think.'
'Sooner rather than later, please.' Coatsworth spun around and returned to McCann's side. If there was any love between Coatsworth and Stilton, Catherine hadn't noticed it. The air had been almost glacial when the two men were in close proximity to each other.
Sam pulled Catherine aside. 'The very rich,' he said. 'Just like you and me, except that they're not, right?'
'I don't think I'd want to be like them, but if they wanted to pay some of my bills, that would be okay.'
'Did you sense anything from any of them?'
'Other than the fact that the people working for Mrs. Cameron don't like each other very much? Nothing that seems to have any bearing on the case, at least at first glance.'
'There are two eyewitnesses, as well: Lyle Armstrong, a security officer who was monitoring the whole thing from the security command room inside the main house, and Kathleen Slides, a housekeeper who was watching on a video monitor inside McCann's suite.'
'Two witnesses, one step removed, and there's also surveillance video?'
'That's right.'
'Why haven't we all gone home?'
'Hey, I agree with you – I think this is just what it appears to be. But the intruder didn't have a gun. Daria Cameron is missing, and there hasn't been a ransom demand or really any clue whatsoever where she's gone. Dustin Gottlieb seems like a perfectly nice guy, but apparently, he was fired a couple of months ago, then rehired three weeks ago. Some of the other members of the household staff seem a little resentful of that. This place is more than a little on edge, and I want to cover all our bases as to what went down before we call it a justified kill and let McCann walk.'
'Well, we need to find out who the dead man is first. Find out where he got a piece of paper with the address and the front gate's combination code on it.
'When we know those answers, I'm sure the rest will fall into place.'
'We're already on it, Sam. I don't know about falling into place. In my experience, crimes seldom do that when you want them to. But maybe this one's the exception. Let's hope.'
'Oh, I'm hoping,' Sam said. 'Believe me, I'm hoping like crazy.'
3
The word was written on a smooth white wall in foot-high red letters. The medium of choice appeared to match the substance spread around the living room, most of it close to the dead body that was the reason Ray Langston and Nick Stokes had joined police captain Jim Brass in the house. If the word hadn't been scrawled in blood, it was a good imitation.
'Quantum?' Nick said, apparently noting that Ray's attention was drawn to the wall. There were several reasons for that. Ray had been a doctor once, specializing in forensic pathology, and since then, he had been a university professor. At Gil Grissom's invitation – shortly before Grissom left the crime lab – Ray had become a Level One CSI. He had found that there was a significant difference between examining the victim of violent crime
