"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 announced myself that way, I'd be written up for harassment.
A slim young woman opened the door, laughing. "You crack me upRichie," 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 low 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."
"Were you and Domingo dose?"
"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."