a Range Rover. Cute little bugger, too," I added, just to get a rise out of Mike. The driver's license photo revealed a serious guy who, if you used your imagination, looked like a young Hugh Grant.
"What about the address?" Mike asked.
I'd completely forgotten the purpose of our search. "Oh yeah. Well, this address is not the place I was staking out. According to this, he lives right on the Strip."
Mike nodded. "I think that's City Center."
"Yeah, it has to be," I murmured. City Center was a massive complex consisting of a number of different hotels, casinos, and luxury condos. The developers had the bad luck of trying to finish the complex during the height of the global financial crisis, but they'd managed to get it done, and now it was a rousing success.
"Those places aren't cheap," Mike said. "I think the one-bedrooms are about a million-five or something like that."
I nodded, turning over the situation in my mind. My own place was very swanky—swankier than I deserved—but it wasn't on par with the condos at City Center, which were designed as second or third or fourth homes for people with serious means.
"Plus," I said, "the guy apparently has a Range Rover. At least he did three months ago, when his registration was updated."
"Well, something's going on," Mike said, stating the obvious.
"You busy today?" I asked.
Mike surprised me by admitting he was free. Normally he would put up a little bit of a stink, but apparently his calendar was so free that he didn't have the energy to fight me.
"Print that out," Mike said, pointing at the screen. "We might need the photo to ID the guy."
I nodded. It turned out pretty grainy on the printer, but it would do.
"How do you propose we watch him?" I asked.
"Well, security will be a problem. They don't let just anybody get in those condos."
I nodded. "That's what I was just thinking. Not much security at UNLV, though. Public school and all."
"Yeah, but that's a big place. Twenty thousand students walking around there."
I shrugged. "But he's a grad student. I assume he sticks to a pretty small area for his graduate work. They probably have their own building all to themselves."
Mike agreed to give it a try, mainly because there didn't seem to be any other options.
We climbed in my car and breezed over to campus in less than ten minutes. Finding a parking spot took just as long, and then we started our wandering. We found a map, which told us that the Harrah School of Hotel Management was located inside the Frank and Estella Beam Hall, which wasn't too far from where we'd parked. The September heat was already kicking in, so I was glad when we arrived and soaked up the central air-conditioning.
Beam Hall was a modern university building with a surprisingly large and classy courtyard partially open to the air. The building also housed the business school, so that added another thousand or so kids to our search. I wasn't feeling too confident about the whole idea, but it was all we had.
"Split up?" Mike asked.
"I suppose we'll cover more ground that way," I said. "I'll head down to those soda machines."
Mike nodded and wandered off in the other direction. At 10:50 it seemed pretty quiet, so I guessed classes were in session, which meant we'd have little chance of seeing Kent immediately. I sat down and paged through the university newspaper that was jammed into the side of the chair's cushion. Even after four years as a student, I had never grown accustomed to the paper's name. The Rebel Yell sounded like something I might find in South Carolina or Georgia, but apparently the name fit right in with the Runnin' Rebels of UNLV. The lead article was a laudatory piece about a female student who'd invented a new kind of slot machine and sold it to a large gaming company, which caused me to wonder whether the underlying purpose of universities, especially public ones, had gone awry somewhere. Were the taxpayers subsidizing public education so that people could invent
Anne McCaffrey, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough