Martha and Robert Harris walk Saturday through a desert area in Henderson during a search for clues in the disappearance of their daughter. Lindsay Harris, 21, hasn't been seen since May. Henderson police focused their search on the area because a rental car in the missing woman's name was abandoned nearby. Photo BY STEVE ANDRASCIK/REVIEW-JOURNAL Henderson police Detective Jamie Brooks photographs a backpack found Saturday in a desert area in Henderson. About 250 police officers and volunteers scoured the desert outside Anthem looking for clues in the disappearance of Lindsay Harris, 21. Photo BY STEVE ANDRASCIK/REVIEW-JOURNAL

Las Vegas was no place for Martha Harris' daughter.

It had too much temptation and too many dangers for a naive small-town girl who was a little too trusting.

Harris feared that something bad would happen when her daughter left her rural New York hometown for the growing metropolis of Las Vegas. But she never expected the bad news that came a few days before Mother's Day last year: Lindsay Marie Harris was missing.

Eight months later, Henderson police still don't know what happened to the 21-year-old. On Saturday they took their search for clues to the desert near Anthem on the southern end of the valley, not far from where a car rented by Lindsay Harris had been abandoned.

More than 250 police officers and volunteers scoured the desert, overturning rocks and poking through the brush with walking sticks and gloved hands. Investigators hoped to find anything -- clothes, jewelry, weapons, bones -- that could lead them to Lindsay Harris.

"It could be we turn up nothing today, but it could be we find Lindsay and give her family some closure," said Lt. Fred Thompson, the police department's top detective.

Police officially consider Lindsay Harris a missing person, but they and her family think she's probably dead. Since disappearing May 4, she hasn't used any credit cards and hasn't been in contact with any members of her family, even her twin brother, Ryan.

"There's always hope," Martha Harris said. "But in my heart, no, I don't think she's alive."

When Lindsay Harris left for Las Vegas in January 2003, she planned on remaining in the valley for only a short time. She would spend time with her older brother, Jared Harris, who was stationed at Nellis Air Force Base, then move to San Diego, where she had other relatives.

When she got to Las Vegas, Lindsay Harris moved in with her new boyfriend, Solomon Barron. The two had met at a jazz festival in Syracuse, N.Y., not far from the Harris home in Skaneateles, a town of about 7,400 people in the Finger Lakes region of New York. At the time, Harris' family didn't know that she was moving in with Barron, a self-described music promoter.

The family also didn't know about her double life working as an escort along the Strip or her numerous arrests for prostitution. The family didn't find out about that until after her disappearance.

News of her daughter's secret life was hard to take for Martha Harris, a second-grade teacher. She and her husband, Robert, a director of special education, didn't raise their daughter like that, she said.

"She didn't know what she was getting into," Martha Harris said. "She was too young and too naive and went down the primrose path without realizing what she was getting into until it was too late."

Martha Harris said her daughter had called her before she disappeared, sounding depressed and homesick and saying that she didn't like Las Vegas. The conversation included hints of returning home.

Saturday's search of the desert turned up nothing, leaving police and the Harris family with just as many questions as when the day started.

Martha Harris said she thinks about her daughter every day, grappling with the unknown. She wants to find her, dead or alive. Either way, Lindsay Harris will be out of Las Vegas and back to where she belongs: home.