city blues 02 - angel city blues (6 page)

Ninety-two files. That number bothered me, and the implications of that number bothered me even more. The only good thing I could glean from it was the knowledge that LA’s Finest had already covered a lot of my ground for me.

I rubbed my eyes. “House, start a pot of coffee. It’s going to be a long night.”

“Of course, David. Shall I put on some music?”

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s start with Billie, and see where the mood takes us.”

House didn’t answer, but the sensuous voice of Billie Holiday swelled to fill the room with sweet longing and heartbroken whispers.

I slid my chair up to the computer and opened the first file.

The crime scene files were detailed, but they didn’t tell me much. The police couldn’t even be certain that Leanda’s apartment had been the scene of the kidnapping, or the murder, or whatever had taken place. The forensics team had scrubbed it down to the individual carpet-fiber level without turning up any blood, or gunshot residue, or any real signs of a struggle at all. In fact, they had only two reasons to link the disappearance to the apartment: the security camera footage, and the fact that the AI in Leanda’s apartment had been tampered with on the same evening that she had vanished.

I called up a video recording from the seventeenth of September. My computer’s holographic display crawled with static and then resolved into a view of the lobby of Regency Towers, Leanda’s building. At the start of the vid, the time readout in the upper right corner of the display said 6:10 pm. A minute and a half into the recording, two middle aged men with briefcases walked across the screen toward the exit, accompanied by a stunning young African woman in a peach satin off-the-shoulder evening gown. Leanda Forsyth appeared at six fourteen, right on schedule. She walked directly—but not hurriedly—to the bank of elevators on the right side of the screen. The middle car opened a second after she touched the up button. She stepped into the elevator. She was turning to face the doors as they closed. And she was gone.

The picture freeze-framed, and a memo window popped open on my computer screen, reminding me that a frame-by-frame forensic search of all subsequent security camera footage had failed to turn up any additional shots of Leanda Forsyth. To all appearances, she had stepped into the elevator, ridden it up to her apartment, and vanished.

…
Or had she?
Did anyone know for certain that she had reached her apartment? According to the files, the police had questioned Leanda’s neighbors on the twenty-third floor, and reviewed the data feeds from each of the apartment AI’s. Leanda’s AI had been the only one tampered with, and none of the rest of the Artificial Intelligences on the twenty-third floor had recorded Leanda’s presence.

Did we even know that she’d made it to the twenty-third floor? Could she have been intercepted on the nineteenth floor? Or the eleventh? Could she have walked into someone else’s apartment on some other floor?

No. A bit more digging turned up the movement logs recorded by the elevator’s master computer. Elevator #3—the one that Leanda had ridden—had picked up one passenger at 6:14:22 p.m., and gone straight to the twenty-third floor. No stops along the way. Elevator #3 had remained on the twenty-third floor for five minutes, when the master computer auto-recalled it to its default waiting position in the lobby.

I closed the file. To all appearances, Leanda Forsyth had ridden the elevator to her own apartment.

I moved on to the police interviews of Leanda’s friends, acquaintances, and co-workers. One known romantic attachment: an off-again-on-again affair with a Mr. Martin Crane, a twenty-nine year old ex-engineering student who had dropped out of UCLA to become an artist. LAPD had started with him, a decision I applauded. As a rule, ex-lovers make excellent suspects. It’s amazing how often an ex-husband or an ex-girlfriend will resort to some violent form of revenge. In this case, though, it hadn’t panned out. Not only did Mr. Crane have a rock-solid alibi for the night of Leanda’s disappearance, but he had volunteered to submit to a scanning by the Inquisitor.

The technician in charge of the session had wrung him out like a dishrag. The scan was conclusive; Martin Crane had no idea what had become of his sometime lady-friend. I could safely scratch him off my list of suspects.

Interviews with Leanda’s employer,
TransNat Telemedia
, had also led nowhere. Leanda had been assigned to
Pulse
, one of the more reputable news vids, with a strong regional viewer base in the LA/San Francisco areas. The producer of her segment had referred to her as an up-and-comer with a good nose for a story and a talent for delivering it to an audience. In his opinion, with a little more seasoning and a hot enough story, Leanda had the stuff to go national. At the time of her disappearance, she’d been working on a story about price-fixing in cosmetic surgery boutiques. Hardly the stuff that kidnapping or murder conspiracies were made of.

Her last truly controversial piece had been an exposé on the spotty safety record of a major pharmaceutical company. That could certainly have earned Leanda some enemies, but the story had been snatched out from under her at the last minute by a rival reporter. The rival—whom the police report identified as a Ms. Evelyn Garza—had run her own by-line for the entire piece, including the ambush-style camera interview that had capped the whole thing off. It seemed reasonable that anybody who was really pissed off about the story would have gone after the Garza woman instead of Leanda.

I kept digging, but the deeper I went into the files, the more apparent it became that the cops had done their jobs well. Detective Becky Hollis and her replacement, Detective Bruhn, had run every lead into the ground. I was becoming increasingly hard put to dream up angles that they hadn’t covered. Of course, I could always go back to square one, and personally re-interview every potential witness. Actually lay my hands on all the evidence, what little there was. But that approach was already beginning to feel like a dead end. Hollis and Bruhn had been disgustingly thorough. I couldn’t see a lot that they had missed.

I closed my eyes and tried to work out some sort of coherent scenario in my mind. Leanda had ridden the elevator up to the twenty-third floor. What if she had walked down the stairs? One flight, or twenty. It wouldn’t really matter. The cops had given the other floors of Leanda’s building the once over, but not to the degree that they had given the twenty-third floor. So Leanda could have ridden the elevator up to her own floor and then walked down stairs to… oh… say the second floor. Then, she could have entered the apartment of some accomplice, climbed over the rail of the balcony, and dropped the three or so meters to the ground. That was a bit of a drop, but not too much for a young woman in good physical shape.

Could it have happened that way? I had to admit that it was possible. But, only if Leanda Forsyth had
wanted
to disappear. And even that didn’t make a lot of sense. Why go to the trouble of sneaking out of her apartment building and slicking her own AI? If she wanted to disappear without attracting attention, she could have simply walked out the front door and vanished into the night. No muss, no fuss.

Unless her disappearance was
intended
to cause a stir. I opened my eyes. That made a certain sort of sense. If she had dropped out of sight to investigate some super-secret undercover story, she might
want
her disappearance to be noteworthy. Then, when she triumphantly resurfaced with her story-of-the-century firmly in hand, she would get
twice
the media attention.
Intrepid Reporter Leanda Forsyth, back from oblivion with top story!

The thought brought two others in its immediate wake. One—Leanda Forsyth might actually still be alive. And, two—if she
was
alive, she should have her ass kicked. Her family was going through seventeen kinds of torture. No headline was worth that.

The holographic computer display hovered in front of my eyes. The Crime Scene Forensics Report listed all the clues
not
found in Leanda’s apartment. No body. No blood. No stray hairs. No semen. No gunshot residue. No signs of a struggle.

My eyes were getting blurry and my brain was tired. At least that’s how I would rationalize it later, when I finally realized that the answer had been literally hanging in front of my face. And in that frozen instance of time, I repeated the same mistake that the police had made. I’d focused my energies on Leanda’s movements, and on what the forensics team had found in her apartment. It never occurred to me to wonder about what was
not
in Leanda’s apartment.

It was a stupid mistake, but so easy to make. And it laid the rails for everything that came after.

I ejected the data chip, and shut my desk comp down for the night.

CHAPTER 3

I popped the last morsel of bacon into my mouth and chewed it slowly, savoring the salty goodness. When it was gone, I chased it with a quick swallow of coffee and slid my chair back from the table. “That was excellent, House. You really outdid yourself.”

“Thank you, David.”

I stood up. “You’re quite welcome, House.”

I generally prefer to do my own cooking, so I am doubly careful to compliment House on those rare occasions when I allow him to cook. I took another sip of coffee. It really had been a tasty breakfast though.

“Excuse me, David, but there’s a small matter we need to address.”

I grimaced, almost certain that I knew what was coming next. “What’s on your mind, House?”

“David, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to obtain organically-grown bacon. In fact, all forms of naturally-produced meat are becoming scarce, but pork products in particular. We must face the fact that fast-cloned animal proteins are displacing livestock-based food production.”

I sighed. “I’m aware of that, House.”

“I know you are, David. But you may not be aware that Spring Hills Ranch has just signed a deal to merge with FARMCO.”

“Shit!” I said quietly.

Spring Hills Ranch was the last—had
been
—the last ranch in California to raise real pigs. Not that their ranch was anything like the image conjured up by their business name. No rolling green hills, or babbling brooks. No postcard sun setting over the backs of gently grazing animals. Their facility was a brightly-lit, surgically sterile cage farm in one of the San Diego industrial dome complexes. But, at least the meat they produced came from animals.

I sighed again. “When did all this happen?”

“A story about it hit the newsfeeds about ten minutes ago,” House said. “It seems likely that we will soon be forced to purchase our pork products from a non-animal based source. That is, if you intend to continue eating pork.”

“Not a chance,” I said. “I am not eating anything that comes out of a test tube. I’ll go hungry first, or turn vegetarian.”

“As you wish, David. But, may I point out that you frequently eat synthetic food? Every time you order fast food, or purchase a microwave burrito from a convenience store, you’re eating cloned food stock.”

“That’s different,” I said. “That’s
out there
. When I’m out running around the maze with the rest of the rats, I do what all the other little rats do to survive.”

I tapped my foot on the floor. “In here is different. This is my
home
. This is my shelter from all the polymer-syntho-hormone-induced-digitally-enhanced-flavor-engineered-vat-grown-mechanically-optimized-consumer-friendly
crap
that passes for life these days.”

“I understand,” House said. “May I suggest a temporary solution?”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“Perhaps I should purchase as much of the available stock of animal-grown pork as possible, and then flash freeze it for future use.”

“Good idea,” I said. “Do it.”

“Very well, David. Of course, even a large store of frozen meat won’t last forever. This will only delay the inevitable.”

I fumbled in my pocket for my first Marlboro of the day. When it was lit, I inhaled deeply and exhaled the smoke with deliberate slowness. “House, my friend, that’s the cornerstone of my very existence—delaying the inevitable.”