“NICK?”
Mandy stood in the doorway to the office Nick shared with Greg, her head cocked to one side, dark hair hanging across one eye. She had a clipboard in one hand. Nick had been writing down some aspects of his report on Domingo’s house and vehicle while they were fresh in his mind, but he put down the pen. “What’s up, Mandy?”
“I got a hit,” she said, shaking back the stray hairs. “On those impressions you collected from Robert Domingo’s Escalade.”
“Good,” Nick said, glad something was coming easily for a change. His shift had long since ended, but there he was. Mandy, too. Time could mean everything when it came to catching a murderer, and he knew Catherine and Greg were on a case that involved a missing woman. Both were high-priority and meant that shift times were a flexible concept. “Who do they belong to?”
Mandy consulted her clipboard. “A woman named Karina Ochoa. She’s nineteen.”
“A young woman was in the nightclub with Domingo, according to Brass. She left with him. If it’s the same woman, then she had a fake ID.”
“She wouldn’t be the first. But I don’t know anything about that. I do know she’s Grey Rock Paiute, and I have an address here, along with her driver’s license photo.”
“Let’s see.”
She brought the clipboard to the desk and handed it over. Nick studied the picture closely. He had seen the video Brass brought back from Fracas, but the quality wasn’t great, and the woman had long, straight black hair partially obscuring her face. On the video, she could have been almost anybody. The young woman in the photo Mandy showed him might have been the same one. But this was a driver’s license picture, straight on, her hair off her face, with an impatient half smile. He couldn’t be sure.
“This is great, Mandy. Thanks.”
“I live to serve.”
“Yeah, right. Could you do me a favor? Get this and the video Brass got at Fracas compared with facial-recognition software, see if we can confirm that they’re the same person.”
“Sure. I don’t think anybody’s busy today. That’s a joke.”
“I got it.”
“I figured. Seriously, I’ll take care of it.”
“You rock.”
“I do, don’t I?” Mandy laughed and walked away, leaving the driver’s license enlargement with Nick. He called Brass and described what he had. “If FR gives us anything more concrete, I’ll let you know.”
“Sounds good,” Brass said. “I think we should head up there.”
“The reservation?”
“I’ll call someone on the tribal police, have him meet us. We don’t have jurisdiction there.”
“That’s right, sovereign nation.”
“Exactly,” Brass said. “So, you ready for some international travel?”
“You know me, I’m ready for anything.”
“Then let’s pay Miss Ochoa a little visit.”
The Grey Rock Paiute tribal police headquarters was in a steel building, painted white, with the tribe’s official logo—a sharply peaked grey mountain jutting up through fluffy white clouds against a bright blue sky, all of it contained within a triangle shape—on the wall facing the gravel parking lot. By the time they had parked Brass’s Dodge sedan, a uniformed tribal cop was shuffling across the hot gravel toward them. He was wide, his bulk accentuated by his duty belt with its holster and pouches, and his gut overhung the buckle a little. But he looked sturdy, maybe mid-forties, and he was beaming a smile at them all the way over.
“I was hoping it’d be you,” Brass said. “Rico, meet Nick Stokes, with the crime lab. Nicky, Rico Aguirre and I worked a case together a few years ago. How’ve you been? Looks like your wife’s keeping you well fed.”
“Can’t complain,” Officer Aguirre said. He eyed Nick from underneath a sweat-ringed straw cowboy hat and offered his hand. “Well, at least not where she can hear me.” He laughed, then added, “No, really, I’m good, Jim. A little crazed today, because of what happened to Chairman Domingo, of course, but that’s what the job’s about, right? Pleased to meet you, Nick.”
Nick shook his hand, the skin callused and hard. “You, too, Rico.”
“You can call me Richie,” Aguirre said with a grin. His eyes were hooded, not much more than slits, his nose broad and prominent. Deep-cut lines on his face looked like those of someone who laughed a lot. “Most white people do.”
The police headquarters was a few miles beyond the reservation’s boundary with Las Vegas. The morning sun shone down on rolling hills in shades of tan and brown, some of them dotted with cacti and other succulents, a few of the valleys carpeted in spring wildflowers. In other places, the land was almost as barren as a moonscape. In the distance, beyond the rectangle of headquarters, a purple mountain with a three-pointed peak shouldered up into an azure sky, almost a match for the logo painted on the building. There was beauty all around, but it was the kind of beauty one had to look for, the subtle beauty of a desert springtime.
Aguirre noted Nick’s gaze. “What do you think of our land? Did the Great White Father rip us off?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. “It’s pretty empty, but that’s not a bad thing. Maybe you guys got the better end of the deal by not getting the Strip.”
Aguirre laughed again. “See, you’re only here a few minutes, and you’re already thinking like an Indian.” He turned to Brass, suddenly all business. “So you want to talk to Karina Ochoa?”
“Do you know her?”
“Jim, I’m Rico Aguirre. I know everybody.”
“Is that a fact?”
“No, but I thought maybe you’d buy it anyway. I do know Karina, though.”
“That’s good, because I tried to get a map to her place online, and it seems the mapping services don’t do too well on the reservation.”
“’Cause we put a magical protective shield over it.”
“Right,” Brass said, sounding less than convinced.
“Man, you just can’t be fooled.” Aguirre addressed Nick. “Most people believe we’re all mystical and spiritual and stuff. If I told them I solved a case through diligent police work, they’d think I was full of it, but if I told them I magically made the guilty party appear in a dream, they’d be all over it.”
“We’re a little more reality-based at the crime lab,” Nick said.
“Not that I can’t do magic, mind you…”
“Can you keep the day from being hot?” Brass asked. “Because it’s starting to feel like it might be a scorcher, and that kind of magic I could go for.”
“Sorry, Jim. I can only do so much.”
“Okay, then, why don’t you start by taking us out to Ochoa’s place? If we need you to extract a confession from her magically, we’ll let you know.”
“That I can manage.” Aguirre led them to a white Jeep with tribal police markings, parked in the shade of a spreading mesquite tree. His duty belt creaked as he walked, spinning his key ring on his finger. “Our chariot awaits.”
When they were settled inside, he started the Jeep and drove out of the parking lot, turning right on the road Brass and Nick had taken to get there. “What do you want to talk to Karina about? She a witness to something?”
“She might have killed Robert Domingo,” Nick said.
Aguirre let the Jeep slip off the side of the road, then corrected his course. “No. You’ve got the wrong person, then.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know Karina. She wouldn’t do anything like that.”
“People can surprise you, Richie,” Brass said.
“That’s true. And I don’t know her all that well. But from what I do know… it just doesn’t sound like her. She’s kind of a political type, hangs around with some people who like to make a fuss. But she’s liberal, a peacenik type, not someone I can see getting involved in murder. I don’t believe she would ever get violent.”
“We know she was at a club with Domingo last night,” Nick explained. “We know she left with him and went for a ride in his Escalade. Someone smashed in one of the windows with a brick. We think that was her, too, but we’re still waiting for DNA results on the epithelials. A little while later, someone smashed his skull with a heavy cigarette lighter.”
Aguirre was nodding along as Nick spoke. He had pulled off the main road and was driving up a steep hill, taking tight switchbacks with comfortable familiarity. The road was jarring, every bump feeling as if it was compacting Nick’s spine a little more. “I’m sure you guys have your reasons for being here. I just have to believe there’s a disconnect somewhere along the way. I read the report on Chairman Domingo, and that was some brutal stuff. Maybe she broke that car window, but I don’t see her bludgeoning anybody to death.” He pulled into a packed-dirt driveway that led around a smaller hill, and parked in front of a tiny pink-stucco house. “You’ll find out for yourselves in a minute. This is her place.”
The yard was nonexistent, just raw desert right up to the front door. A couple of window air-conditioner units poked out, dripping into the dirt and breaking the smooth planes of the walls, but otherwise, the house was a flat-roofed box. White lace curtains in the windows added a homey touch. “She live here alone?” Nick asked as they got out of the Jeep.
Aguirre scanned the desert beyond the house, alert for anything. Nick wasn’t sure what he was watching for, but the murder of their chairman must have had everybody on edge. The tribal cop had seemed loose, casual, but Nick had noticed that his gaze caught every motion on the way over, every roadrunner or snake in the road, every hawk wheeling overhead. “No, her mom and a couple cousins live with her.”
“Crowded.”
“That’s what poverty’s like,” Aguirre said simply. He strode to the front door and knocked twice. “Karina Ochoa!” he called. “Get your clothes on, it’s the law!”
Guess they have different legal standards here,Nick thought.If I announced myself that way, I’d be written up for harassment.
A slim young woman opened the door, laughing. “You crack me up, Richie,” she said. She saw Brass and Nick looking at her, and her smile faded. “Who are they?”
Brass showed his badge and walked toward the door. “Miss Ochoa, I’m Jim Brass with the Las Vegas Police Department, and this is Nick Stokes with our crime lab. May we come in?”
She glanced at Aguirre, who nodded. She looked like the woman in the driver’s license photo and could easily have been the one in the video as well. Her hair was long and straight, as black as spilled ink. Her eyes were dark brown, and there was a light, metallic eye shadow above them, a heavy black line around them. Her plump lips had dark lipstick on them. She wasn’t dressed as she had been at the club but simply, in a blue tank top and black shorts. Metallic green polish, like a beetle’s back, decorated her toenails. Nick couldn’t help noticing her slender legs, accentuated by a silver chain around her right ankle, but he was professional enough to put them out of his mind and focus on her as a human being—and a potential suspect. “Sure, I guess,” she said.
Inside, she sat them down on a faded sofa in a living room covered in toys and children’s books. At the back of the room was a small kitchen with a table and six chairs. Two doors led out; one was closed tight, the other slightly ajar. Brass took a photo from his jacket pocket, a still from the surveillance video at Fracas, and put it down on the table in front of her, on top of a pile of Dr. Seuss. “That’s you, isn’t it?”
She barely glanced at it. Her mood had changed from jovial to sullen. Aguirre leaned against a wall, arms crossed over his deep chest, watching quietly. “Looks like it.”
“And that’s Robert Domingo with you.”
“If you say so.”
“And this was taken last night, at a place called Fracas.”
She tilted her chin up, as if warding off any inference that the nightclub was an improper place for a girl her age. Oddly, the gesture reminded Nick of how young she was, underage for the club, a child trying to pass as a grown-up. “So?”
“So you may or may not have heard, but Robert Domingo was murdered last night.”
“I heard.” Her voice betrayed no emotion, and her expression didn’t budge. Nick noted a thin blue vein in her neck pulsing, and he wondered how much effort it was taking for her to remain so outwardly calm. A lot, he guessed.
Brass sighed. “Okay, I guess I have to come right out and ask. Did you kill Chairman Domingo?”
Finally, emotion flashed across her face, her brow furrowing, her mouth dropping open in a scowl. “Hell no!” she said. “Of course not!”
“But you were with him at the club and then later in his vehicle.”
“Yeah, I was with him.”
“No.”
“Then why—”
“Just tell them, Karina,” Aguirre suggested. “Tell them about your buddies.”
“Okay, whatever. You see the way we live, right? My mom is keeping my little cousins in her room because you cops are here, but normally, this house is crazy with noise and activity. Domingo, though, he had, like, two houses at least, one here on the rez and that big one in town. I have these friends, that’s what Rico’s talking about. I guess you’d call them activists or whatever. Always making signs, trying to hold protests, whatever.”
“Protesting against Domingo’s chairmanship?”
She kneaded her hands together. “Against anything related to him. His lifestyle, his policies, everything. I mean, a few people on the rez have plenty of money, but most of us don’t. He always seemed to represent the ones who do, and he ignored the rest of us.”
“Okay,” Brass said. “I guess that makes him a politician. Par for the course. That still doesn’t explain—”
“I’m getting to that! I wanted to see if the things they said about him were true, about his houses and his spending and all that. So I watched him for a while. When I heard he was going to Fracas, I dressed up and went there, arranged to meet him.”
“A little face time with a constituent. What happened then?”
“And I guess it was all true. He dropped, like, a grand or something, buying drinks for people. Champagne and whatnot. I played nice, you know, stroking his thigh and purring like some damn cat, and he thought he was going to score with me. He sent the others away and paid attention to me for a while, you know, telling me how pretty I am and all. He thought he was pretty smooth. I left with him, got into his Caddy, and then while he was driving, I just laid into him. I went off about his spending our money, Grey Rock money, on women and strangers and whatever, about his car and his houses and how he was always ignoring the little people. You should have seen how fast his attitude changed. All of a sudden, he knew he wasn’t getting any, and he got pissed off. I was a spy, he said. Wanted to know who I was working for. I told him no one, everyone, the whole tribe. He was stealing our money, and he needed to stop it.”
“I don’t imagine he liked that,” Brass said.
Her brown skin had flushed as she relived her anger. She let out a deep breath, trying to cool down a bit. “Not at all. He stopped the car and told me to get out. We had only gone a few blocks. This was close to the Strip, you know, over near where Fracas is on Sahara. There was this construction site where he put me out, so before he drove away, I grabbed a brick off the ground and threw it at the car. It went right through the side window.”
“So we’ve seen,” Brass admitted.
“He yelled something at me and drove away. That was the last I seen him. He was alive then.”
“So you never saw his house. The one in town.”
“Hell no,” she declared. “I walked back to the club, got in my junker, and drove home. Breaking his window was good enough for me. I didn’t even expect to do that, but I didn’t like the way he was talking to me.”
“Did you call anybody on your way home, Karina?” Aguirre asked. “Is anyone able to back up your story?”
“I didn’t call anyone,” she replied. “I just came home. My mom can tell you what time I got in. She knew I was pissed, too, but I didn’t tell her about Domingo.” She glanced at the closed interior door, which Nick could tell wasn’t much thicker than a sheet of paper. “I guess she knows now.”
“Okay, Karina,” Brass said. “Tell you what, we’ll keep looking into this. You stay close to home in case we need to talk again, all right?”
“Yeah,” she said. She looked relieved somehow, as if she had been wanting to tell her story to somebody but didn’t know who. “Yeah, I’ll be right here.”
“One more thing, Miss Ochoa,” Nick said. “I need to collect the clothes you wore last night.”
“To the club?”
“That’s right.”
“They’re in my room, in the hamper.”
“Can you get them, please?”
Aguirre nodded again, and she left the room. The three police officers waited silently until she came back carrying a bundle of black clothing. Nick unfolded a big paper bag and put the bundle in. “Thank you,” he said.
Whoever had killed Domingo should have been covered in blood. Nick hadn’t smelled any when she handed him the clothes, just perfume and sweat.
“Thanks, Miss Ochoa,” Brass said, standing up. “Either we or Officer Aguirre here will be in touch soon.”
“See how I can barely contain my excitement?” she said. She shot Aguirre a look as if she considered him a traitor, and the three cops went out the front door.
“See what I mean?” Aguirre asked when he was back behind the wheel. Nick was in the back again, with Karina’s clothing on the empty seat beside him.
“What? I saw an angry young woman who didn’t think twice before throwing a brick through a man’s car window,” Brass said.
“But she’s no murderer,” Aguirre countered. “She destroyed property, and even that’s rare for her. She had to be pushed hard to get to that point. Karina’s not a firebrand, not any kind of real troublemaker. She’s had a few run-ins with us, but always minor beefs, trespassing because she’s carrying a picket sign on private property, that kind of thing. Maybe a couple of drunk-and-disorderlies, at parties and the like.”
“Well, Nick here will check out her clothes, and if we find any traces of her presence in the house, then we’ll have to have another conversation.”
“Understood.”
“In the meantime,” Brass said, “is there anyplace to grab a late breakfast around here? I’m starving.”