city blues 02 - angel city blues Page 4

  I took the cigarettes. “Thanks, House.”

  “You’re welcome, David.” The drone did an about-face and rolled out of the room.

  I broke the seal on the pack and thumped out a cigarette. When it was lit, I slouched back into my chair and went over what little I knew about Leanda Forsyth in my mind.

  Item #1: She was an investigative reporter. As I’d pointed out to Vivien, that raised the possibility that she had dropped out of sight on purpose, in search of some juicy undercover story—in which case, she probably wouldn’t want to be found. I hadn’t pointed out the natural corollary to that thought: Maybe she had poked her nose into the wrong people’s business, and gotten it chopped off.

  Item #2: She was the daughter of the wealthy and powerful Senator Elden Forsyth, and his equally wealthy and powerful wife, Vivien. This made her a potential target for kidnappers—a theory that I didn’t favor in view of the fact that she’d been missing for nearly two months without any sign of a ransom demand. On the other hand, what if it was a politically-motivated kidnapping? According to his reputation, Senator Forsyth’s political orientation was somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. Was it possible that his political enemies were holding Leanda hostage to ensure his cooperation on some major issue? A bit drastic for run-of-the-mill political maneuverings, but what if it was something really big?

  Item #3: Leanda Forsyth was an attractive woman. Unfortunately, that could be enough to make her a target for abduction all by itself.

  I took a drag off my cigarette and exhaled. I knew next to nothing about the woman and already I could think of several reasons that she might have gone missing—and that was without even taking into account jilted lovers, long-term enemies, accidents, or random acts of violence.

  Lots of possibilities meant lots of potential leads. This case was either going to be a piece of cake, or a goddamned nightmare, and it was too early to even guess which.

  I stood up and headed for the stairs. I had a little time to kill before Vivien’s courier was due to arrive, so I decided to take a shower.

  The courier was late. I was just about ready to give him up for the night when he showed up at my door, escorted by two walking mounds of steroid-fueled muscle who were obviously hired-guns.

  The courier was an athletic looking Latin kid, early twenties maybe, with the sort of generic good-looks that the lower-end surgical boutiques tend to pump out—a carefully non-specific synthesis of the top ten or so leading vid stars. If his escorts had ever been under the knife, the surgical robots had been programmed for industrial-strength ugly. They looked at me just long enough to ensure that I wasn’t going to eat the courier, and then turned their attention to the street. They didn’t like the look of my neighborhood, and I couldn’t really blame them.

  “Nobody will bother you as long as you’re close to my house,” I said. “My anti-intrusion system is pretty extensive. The neighborhood bad-asses have pretty much gotten the message.”

  The courier used a pocket comp to scan my left thumb print and my right retina before he released his package to me.

  Vivien was undoubtedly paying him well, but I over-tipped him anyway. It took guts to come into the Zone at night, even with a pair of trained gargoyles at your heels.

  As soon as he was gone, I let the door slide shut and ripped open the seal on the little package. Three microchips fell into my hand. I frowned. I’d only been expecting two: a copy of Leanda Forsyth’s missing persons files, and the key chip to her apartment. The third chip was a strange triangular affair, a format I’d never seen before.

  I pocketed the key chip and the weird triangular job. The data chip, I carried to the desk comp in my den.

  I plugged the chip into a hidden slot near the right edge of the mahogany desk top. A holographic display field unfolded in the air above the desk, a translucent blue rectangle—empty, except for a slowly flashing cursor.

  The keyboard was a hologram as well, projected over a matrix of infrared sensors that read the position of my fingers in relation to the virtual keys.

  The cursor disappeared after a few seconds, replaced by a bright red legend—WARNING: THIS DATA REPRODUCED AT LOS ANGELES CITY TAXPAYER’S EXPENSE. The holographic words circled in the air above my computer, orbiting the streamlined ultrachrome logo of LAPD’s West Hollywood Division.

  I called up a menu. There were ninety-two files. Ninety-two? For a missing persons case that was less than eight weeks old? And that wasn’t even counting whatever data was recorded on the triangular chip in my pocket. LAPD must be working overtime on this one. The long arm of wealth and power again.

  I couldn’t help but wonder how many files the case would have generated if the missing woman’s parents hadn’t been Senator and Ms. Blueblood. A third as many? A quarter? I thought about Kerri Hampton living in an abandoned car down the street from my house. How much time did LAPD expend when somebody like Kerri vanished? They would never even know she was gone until her body turned up in a trash dumpster somewhere, minus whatever parts that the organ poachers could salvage.

  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 litt
le 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.”

  I wasted the next two hours on the phone, trying to wrangle an appointment with Gary Thurman, Leanda’s producer at TransNat Telemedia. I managed to talk to his people’s people’s people, and finally to his people’s people. But I couldn’t get anywhere near his actual people, much less the great man himself.

  “Jesus Christ,” I finally said to the fifth or sixth Administrative Assistant who showed her face on the vid screen of my phone: Ms. Rosen-something-or-other, a fortyish woman with tired blue eyes and deeply creased frown lines. “Who is this Thurman guy?” I asked. “The President of the United States?”

  Ms. Rosen-something’s frown lines deepened. “Mr. Thurman is a very busy man—”

  I cut her off. “I’m not asking him to have my children. I just want to talk to him. Fifteen minutes, tops.”