He lived not ten minutes from where they were. They drove to his apartment—a place that tried to look tropical and upscale but came across as a little desperate, and knocked on his door.

Colin was tall and heavy, kind of like a redwood tree. Or a hippo. Or a redwood tree that had mated with a hippo. His jaw was broad, almost like mandibles. He had just come back from a swim, judging from his wet swim shorts and the towel around his neck. He stood out on the landing, shivering a little in the towel over his shoulders.

But he didn’t complain about it.

They stood in a little knot, because his wife had just managed to get their newborn to sleep and he wanted to keep things quiet. Standing under the light above the door, moths flying patterns around them, crowded into the broad leaves of a banana tree from one story down, Colin described the man and woman who had signed for the car.

“He looked like your average middle class guy on vacation. Shorts, T-shirt. I see them all the time. Tired and kind of crabby. I would have forgot him if it wasn’t for the woman. Jesus, she was a knockout.”

“Can you describe her?”

He did, in great detail, down to the top that showed off her midriff and the skinny jeans.

“Anything about them that bothered you?”

“Not really . . . ”

“Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Anything that struck you? Good or bad?”

“Other than how hot she was? I wasn’t looking at the man.”

“Anything? Did they mention where they were going?”

“No. I will say he was in the pain in the ass category.”

“How so?”

“We went out to look at the car, you know, for him to look it over and check for scratches, paint, that kind of thing. He was the type who spent, like, an hour going over the car. Must’ve took a hundred photos with his phone. I’m talking like even a speck on the paint. The undercarriage, too. His girlfriend or wife or whatever, she looked annoyed.”

“Looked annoyed?”

“Stood there with her arms folded. Sighed a lot. Rolled her eyes.” He had a slight smile on his face, reminiscing. “I think she was flirting with me.”

Lucky new mother inside to have such a supportive husband, Laura thought.

“Anything else?”

“Just that he was full of shit.”

“Oh?”

“He went on and on about the Mercedes, like he was some expert. A know-it-all.”

“Like?”

“He said he owned a Mercedes just like it, said it was what the big guys in Vegas drove, ‘you know what I mean?’ Wink-wink. Like he was some kind of player. Hinted he was some big Vegas honcho or something.”

“Big Vegas honcho?”

“Like, you know, the mafia. That’s what he was hinting at.”

Laura said to Anthony, “If he felt bad about Aurora Johnson, he didn’t let it stop him from showing off.”

“You know what?” Anthony said. “He’d make a good character in a movie.”

They found a motel that DPS could afford (just this side of crappy) and caught a quick dinner in the coffee shop before going their separate ways, and met up the next morning. By then Laura had called around and found the red Dodge Viper in an impound lot.

They went by and were allowed in to the yard to take a look.

No signs of violence. The car was messy in back, fast food bags and some junk, which Laura and Anthony photographed and documented. There was a receipt on the floor from a Sonic in Kingman.

“Did that guy only eat fast food?” Anthony said.

“There’s the Heineken.”

“A lot of Heineken.”

Nine empties on the floorboard in back. The car smelled of it.

“Maybe it was Aurora?”

Anthony shrugged.

Laura didn’t recall the yeasty smell of beer in Perrin’s room. She made a note to ask if he drank beer. There had been no empties in his room back at the Madera Canyon Cabins, but Terry Delmonte cleaned his room while he was gone. Perrin hadn’t been found dead in his car until eight in the morning, and it might not have filtered back to the people at Madera Cabins until later.

They went through the glove compartment and trunk, sealed everything in them into evidence bags. All ordinary stuff, but you never knew. Anthony ordered a flatbed truck to transport the car down to the yard at the Department of Public Safety in Phoenix.

“Now what?’

A lot of receipts pointed to Kingman, which was on the way from Vegas.

Laura watched as the traffic whizzed by on I-17. “What do you think?”

Anthony shot invisible cuffs and threw invisible craps. “We’re goin’ to Vegas, Baby!”

12: Two Liars

The detective Laura had talked to on the phone was out of the office, but his partner, Stephen LeMer, met with them. He was a large black man with a shaved head and a gold loop earring in one ear. Laura had been surrounded by tall men and was beginning to feel small. He gave Laura and Anthony the basics, then led them to another section of the LVMPD and introduced them to Doreen McGill, who worked Vice. Doreen was short, plump and motherly in a gauzy paisley top that clung to her like a mist—but looks could fool you. She had a mind like an X-ACTO Knife, and was very familiar with Aurora Johnson.

Immediately, the picture changed.

“Aurora Johnson and Cedric Williams had a falling-out six months ago. She tried to steal some money and he canned her.”

“He canned his best prostitute?”

“Where’d you get that?”

“I heard she was his ‘bottom girl.’”

“She was one of his prostitutes a long time ago, but she wasn’t any good. He was friends and business partners with her brother so he hired her to work in their shop.”

“Shop?”

“High Fidelity Audio Systems. SISTMZ on the license plate of his Jaguar XJL. He has a few legitimate businesses—the shop she worked in installed audio systems in cars. High end stuff. She had a head for numbers so she worked the books. Unfortunately, she also had a head for drugs. He tried her as one of his girls, because face it, she had looks to die for, but she just didn’t have the right stuff.”

She launched into how he kept his prostitutes in line.

“These guys, they use the carrot and the stick. Shit, they’d use an iron on you if you didn’t please them. Cords, whips, chains, you wouldn’t believe it. Slavery, pure and simple. These girls may look like a million dollars, they may act like they came out of charm school, they drive Mercedes and dress in designer clothes, but they’re slaves nonetheless. It’s all about control. Build ‘em up, knock ‘em down. Manipulation. They’re just like any other commodity, but I gotta tell you, you need a real cruel streak to be a pimp in this town. The more sadistic, the better, as far as they’re concerned. Cedric brands his girls with a bullet tat on the inside of their forearms.”

Laura thought: like Aurora had.

“Williams is particularly vicious, but he knew with her that just cutting her loose was gonna be worse than any beating or slicing he could do to her. From what I hear, she was needy. Beautiful—an absolute knockout a couple of years ago—but she went downhill fast. He knew that treating her like he didn’t want her would hurt her more than anything else. Demoting her to accountant. No more fancy cars, no more glamorous nightlife or shopping sprees at Nordstrom. She was the lowest of the low—she couldn’t cut it, and whatever friends she had probably dissed her to her face. My feeling is, if she latched on to another guy and took off, he wouldn’t cry himself a river. He’d already destroyed her in every other way.

“You want to talk to him?”

“We do.”