city blues 02 - angel city blues

by Jeff Edwards

  ANGEL CITY BLUES

  Jeff Edwards

  Stealth Books

  ANGEL CITY BLUES

  Copyright © 2014 by Jeff Edwards

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Stealth Books

  www.stealthbooks.com

  Cover Artwork & Design by Slobodan Cedic

  ISBN-13: 978-1-939398-29-1

  Published in the United States of America

  To my big sister, Elie,

  who taught me the meaning of adventure.

  They call this the City of Angels,

  But angels don’t come around here.

  The street’s gettin’ colder and darker,

  Ain’t seen the sun in a year.

  God must be lookin’ somewhere else,

  Doesn’t have time for this place.

  They call it the City of Angels,

  But angels don’t come to LA.

  Rusty Parker — Angel City Blues

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank the following people and organizations for helping to make this book possible:

  Alexander Preuss, Don Davis, and Rick Guidice for firing my imagination with their visionary paintings of human orbital habitats.

  The University of California, San Diego Department of NanoEngineering faculty for answering my questions about theoretical limits in certain applications of nanotechnology.

  The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the American Society for Engineering Education, Ames Research Center, and Stanford University for technical aspects of the Stanford Torus concept presented in Space Settlements: A Design Study (NASA Publication SP-413).

  Dr. James Seshadri for insight into the role of robotics in reconstructive surgery.

  Valerie Elkins who provided Japanese translations for some very odd phrases.

  Slobodan (Bob) Cedic for knocking my eyes out with another of his fantastic cover designs.

  Barbara Collins for her sharp proofreader’s eye, her never-ending kindness, and her unfailing encouragement.

  Brenda Edwards, for helping me research and reconstruct the long-lost map of the Los Angeles domes, for telling me when the story wasn’t working, and—most of all—for believing.

  Don Gerrard, who has been leading me, teaching me, and inspiring me since I first started to take this writing thing seriously.

  And, as always, to my advance readers for doing their untiring (and usually futile) best to keep me from making a hash of things.

  The comments, advice, and assistance I received from these fine people were flawless. Any errors that have crept into this book were strictly of my own making.

  CHAPTER 1

  Holographic warning stripes flared into existence as I approached the door. Diagonal swaths of vibrant yellow laser light, contrasting sharply with the muted illumination of the foyer. The words POLICE CRIME SCENE crawled across each stripe in five languages, including basic iconics for the illiterate.

  I spotted the unit bonded to the frame over the apartment door: a brick of circuitry in a matte gray plastic housing, embossed with the logo of the Los Angeles Police Department. I’d encountered crime scene perimeter monitors before, but this one looked to be a cut above the usual grade. LAPD was showing off the good stuff. Not much of a surprise, given the importance of the alleged victim.

  I dug around in the pocket of my windbreaker for the key chip—also embossed with the LAPD logo—and held it out toward the perimeter monitor’s scanning field. Some miniscule fraction of a second later, a man-sized opening appeared in the holographic barrier. I took this as permission to enter, stepping forward to run the key chip through the door lock’s sensor track.

  The door glided open without so much as a whisper. I walked through the doorway, into the private penthouse lair of Ms. Leanda Forsyth.

  With the master computer shut down, the apartment was very much a dead thing. The subtle pulse of the housekeeping machinery was missing. The cleaning robots lay dormant in their maintenance alcoves, the all-seeing Artificial Intelligence banished to whatever land that machines dream of when they sleep.

  Lights and ventilation still worked—along with sinks, toilets, and anything else that could be controlled manually—but the automatic functions were all dead.

  That was action-item #1 on the Standard LAPD Crime Scene Check List: Freeze the area within the perimeter of the scene, to preserve the forensic evidence. It usually meant shutting down the domestic gadgetry as quickly as possible. Automated cleaning systems have a nasty habit of vacuuming up telltale hairs and fibers, or scrubbing blood off of floors and walls. Not that after-the-fact cleanup efforts could completely wipe out trace evidence, but they could certainly remove or confuse a lot of the available indicators.

  This extravagantly-furnished apartment didn’t look much like a crime scene, though. No blood. No signs of a struggle. No corpus delicti. Just that vague empty feeling that a home gets when the owner is away and probably isn’t coming back.

  I stopped at the edge of the lavish rug that dominated the living room floor. As I watched, the color and pattern of the rug changed in synchronization with the five or so paintings that adorned the walls.

  The paintings had been something else a moment ago; I was sure of that. But they were all Picassos now—cubist studies, in browns, beiges, and neutral grays.

  No… That wasn’t right… The paintings were in the style of Picasso, but the compositions were all from other famous artists. I recognized van Gogh’s Landscape at Saint Rémy, Monet’s Haystacks at Sunset, and Renoir’s Little Girl with a Hat, along with a couple of pieces that I probably should have known, but didn’t. Not imitations of the original works, or even attempts at pastiche. More like reinterpretations. What each painting would have looked like if Picasso had been the original artist.

  The paintings changed again and I was looking at the same five masterpieces as they might have been painted by Cézanne. The rug changed hues and patterns to match, becoming an abstract collage of Cézanne’s vivid impressionist palette.

  Odd taste notwithstanding, the synchronized art arrangement spoke of money and privilege. It was difficult to believe that foul-play would dare to rear its ugly head in this bastion of luxury, but the police perimeter monitor at the front door seemed to suggest otherwise.

  Interspersed among the paintings were at least a dozen pictures of the missing woman, from small framed photographs with family and friends—to near-poster sized trids in hi-rez 3D. She was (or had been) an investigative reporter for one of the news vids, and most of the trids looked like publicity stills. The centerpiece was a 3D shot of her standing—microphone in-hand—in front of an expanded-foam police barricade, while a rioting crowd overturned vehicles in the background.

  If the pictures were to be believed, Leanda Forsyth was a beauty. Dark hair, dark eyes, and an intensity of expression that came across as smoldering.

  I turned my attention to the rest of the room. The panoramic windows opposite the door were set to opaque. I spotted the local operating panel, walked over to it, and ran my thumb across the control sensor. The glass cycled itself from mirrored black to full transparency.

  Leaning against the windowsill, I stared out into the deepening twilight. Los Angeles flickered and shimmered twenty-three stories below me, a dazzling latticework of holograms, animated billboards, and laser imaging systems which seemed to etch the streets in grid lines of liquid neon. A hu
ndred meters overhead, the lightshow repeated itself on the underside of the dome, glimmering ghost images mirrored in faceted panes of transparent polycarbon.

  Through the eastern curve of the dome, I could see cascades of falling sparks where construction robots were arc welding high in the superstructure of the new dome. It was too dark to see the robots now, but I’d seen them plenty of times before: metallic centipede-shapes with multi-jointed appendages that could double as arms or legs. It would be full dark soon, but the robots didn’t care. They didn’t need light to see by.

  Detective Bruhn’s voice came from behind me. “She sure as hell didn’t go out that way.”

  I straightened up and turned away from the window. “I’m sorry?”

  Bruhn gestured toward the window. “The Forsyth girl… She didn’t go out the window. Not that one, anyway. Or, if she did, nobody reported scraping her off the sidewalk.”

  I reached for my cigarettes and then caught myself. This was someone else’s apartment, and a crime scene. “So you don’t believe that Leanda Forsyth is dead?”

  Bruhn shrugged one shoulder. “She’s not classified as a homicide. Not yet, anyway. Officially, she’s just missing.”

  “I’ve heard the official police party-line,” I said. “What do you think happened to her?”

  Bruhn stuffed his hands in the pockets of his dark blue LAPD jacket. “I’m not getting paid to do your thinking for you.”

  I sighed. “Okay, fine. Just get me copies of the files, and we’ll call it even.”

  Bruhn shook his head. “The lieutenant told me to show you the apartment, so I’m showing you the fucking apartment. He didn’t say anything about giving you access to the files.”

  “Come on,” I said. “We’re both trying to figure out what happened to Leanda Forsyth. There’s no reason we can’t work together on this.”

  “I had the departmental AI run a data pull on you,” Bruhn said. “It summed you up in four words… Drunk. Loser. Has-been.”

  “I’m pretty sure that ‘has-been’ is a hyphenated compound word,” I said. “So that’s really only three words.”

  “I don’t give a shit if it’s three-hundred words. I don’t need you to grade my fucking grammar, and I don’t need your help with this case.”

  I rubbed my left eye and thought about the cigarette again. It had been a long day and it was getting longer. “Can we skip the bad cop routine? I’m just trying to do my job.”

  “Your job is interfering with police business,” Bruhn said. “And if your client wasn’t Ms.-Rich-Bitch-Senator’s-Wife, I’d tell you to take your job, and stick it up your ass.”

  “Unfortunately for you,” said a voice from the other end of the room, “Mr. Stalin’s client does happen to be Ms.-Rich-Bitch-Senator’s-Wife.”

  My eyes jumped to the source of the voice. Vivien Forsyth stood in the open front doorway of the apartment. Even from across the room, she was strikingly attractive. Her coal-black hair was short, but stylishly cut. She wore a beautifully-tailored turquoise silk business suit that probably cost more than my car.

  She walked through the opening in the perimeter hologram and strolled toward us. The door slid shut behind her.

  The fabric of her suit adjusted itself minutely as she moved, tensioning itself in some areas and relaxing in others. Not silk then, some sort of intelligent fabric that reacted to her every movement, keeping its smoothly tailored appearance regardless of her body posture. Was there such a thing as smart silk? I had never heard of it, but then I hardly traveled in the same circles as Vivien Forsyth.

  I knew from personal research that Vivien was in her late fifties, but she had the benefit of the finest surgical boutiques and genetic tailoring that money could buy. Between them, the scalpel and the test tube had halted her apparent age at about twenty-nine. Young enough to be beautiful, but old enough to be regal.

  Bruhn turned to face her. “Ms. Forsyth, I take it?”

  Vivien gave him a patently false smile, flashing a set of even white teeth that undoubtedly cost more than the suit. “An astounding display of logical deduction,” she said. “You must be a detective.”

  Bruhn returned her fake smile with a twitch that only included one side of his mouth. “That’s what it says on my badge.”

  Vivien stopped about a meter from his position. Her gray eyes had a sparkle to them that might have been amusement, or might just as well have been annoyance. “I see you boys aren’t getting along. Is it something serious? Or are we just comparing Testosterone levels?”

  I made eye contact with Bruhn. “Nothing we can’t work out.”

  Bruhn opened his mouth, but Vivien interrupted. “Excellent. I was told we’d have full police cooperation, and I expect nothing less.”

  Bruhn stiffened. “The department can handle this case, ma’am. Your rent-a-cop here is only going to get in the way.”

  Vivien arched an eyebrow. “I compliment you, Detective. You work quickly. You promoted me from bitch to ma’am in... what? About four seconds? That’s got to be some kind of record.”

  Bruhn’s neck turned red.

  Vivien smiled. “And it’s hardly fair to call Mr. Stalin a rent-a-cop. He’s a detective, just like you are. He just happens to work in a private capacity.”

  Now, my ears were burning. This felt altogether too much like having my Kindergarten Teacher defend me from the class bully.

  “Don’t try to compare my job to his,” Bruhn snapped. “This guy hasn’t got—”

  Vivien cut him off again. “You’re right. It’s not a fair comparison, is it? Mr. Stalin has a reputation for getting results. My daughter has been missing for nearly two months, and your department has produced no results whatsoever.”

  Bruhn’s right hand jerked, and for a fraction of a second, I thought he was going to hit her. But some deep-buried survival instinct must have warned him that his career was sliding toward the abyss. He flexed his fingers slowly and then extended his hand to be shaken. “Detective Lawrence Bruhn, Missing Persons, West Hollywood Division.”

  Vivien brushed his fingertips with a minimalist handshake. “Vivien Forsyth,” she said. “But you can call me Ms. Rich-Bitch.”

  She glanced around the apartment. “What happened to Becky Hollis? I thought she was working Leanda’s case.”

  Bruhn started to say something, and then he caught himself. A half-second later, he said, “They moved the case to me. I usually get the ones that are at a standstill.”

  “I see. Detective Hollis wasn’t up to the job?”

  Bruhn shook his head. “I didn’t say that, ma’am. But, as you pointed out, she had the case for two months without making any real headway.”

  “So Hollis was the B-Team, and you’re the A-Team?”

  The corner of Bruhn’s mouth crooked. “I didn’t say that either,” he said.

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I’ve got the case, ma’am. I’ll handle it.”

  Vivien nodded. “A nice diplomatic answer. It dodges my question rather neatly. But the real answer is that someone pulled the plug on Detective Hollis. If I’m not mistaken, she’s on indefinite loan to Traffic Division.”

  “It’s... ah... not appropriate for me to discuss departmental politics with a civilian,” Bruhn said. “No offense, ma’am.”

  “None taken,” Vivien said. “But you don’t have to worry about airing your department’s dirty laundry in front of me. I already know about Detective Hollis. I’m the one who had her taken off the case.”

  Bruhn stared at Vivien.

  “Detective Hollis was dragging her feet,” Vivien said. “Refusing to share information with me. So I made a couple of calls. It’s amazing what a little pressure can do, if one knows where to apply it.”

  Bruhn’s eyes narrowed. “Is that some kind of threat, ma’am?”

  “Consider it a prediction,” Vivien said. “I predict that you will give Mr. Stalin full access to my daughter’s case files, and you will answer
his questions—and my questions—without the need for strong arm tactics and circumlocutions. Otherwise, I predict that you will have a long and illustrious career handing out parking citations.”

  Bruhn’s voice hardened. “This is a crime scene,” he said. “As senior officer present, I’m exercising my right to clear it of civilians. I’m going to have to ask you both to leave.” He held out his hand. “Stalin, give me the key.”

  Vivien’s eyebrows went up. “Are you trying to show me the size of your testicles, Detective?”

  “The key,” he said again.

  I dropped the key chip into his palm.

  “Don’t test me,” Vivien said.

  Bruhn pointed to the door. “I am formally directing you to leave the premises,” he said. “If I have to ask you again, I’m going to consider it obstruction of an on-going police investigation. I’m also formally admonishing you against making threats, however veiled, to an active duty police officer in the performance of his duties.”

  He seemed to take particular pleasure in those last words. This was his threat, disguised even more thinly than Vivien’s had been.

  Vivien stood for a couple of heartbeats, and then smiled. “I understand completely, Detective Bruhn. Of course Mr. Stalin and I will vacate your crime scene.” She nodded to me and then headed toward the door.

  I followed.

  As soon as we were on the other side of the holographic police barrier, she stopped and pulled a slim oblong of blue polymer from her pocket. It was a phone, the exact same shade of turquoise as her silk business suit. “Wait here,” she said. I waited while she walked to the other side of the elevator lobby to make her call.

  I leaned against the wall next to the door and watched her out of the corner of my eye. It looked more like three calls, all of them extremely short. I couldn’t hear anything that she said, but it was obvious that she was pleased by the results. I fully expected her to stomp back into her daughter’s apartment and take Bruhn by storm. Instead, she pushed the button for the elevator and beckoned me over.