Casinos—not these, but primitive early versions of them, mostly downtown on Fremont Street—had transformed a little watering hole in the middle of a vast and forbidding desert into an international tourist destination. Big casino hotels, the ones that now lined the Strip with reproductions of other destinations—Paris, Venice, New York, Egypt, ancient Rome, the emerald city of Oz, a volcano, a feudal castle—had swollen its fame and created more showrooms for big-name performers, and then still more sophisticated hotels without glitzy, artificial themes created an air of maturity for a city that was still mostly dedicated to allowing adults to live like teenagers, without responsibility or rules. Legal or not, every sort of activity took place in the city, every imagin-able sexual liaison, every form of gambling, and various other transactions involving weapons and drugs and flesh. A law enforcement officer in Las Vegas never had much cause to be bored. Catherine, who had been born in Las Vegas, and then in a way reborn out of its seamier side when she shifted from a career as an exotic dancer to one in law enforcement, didn’t romanticize the city she lived in.
