city blues 02 - angel city blues

• ANGEL CITY BLUES
  
• To my big sister, Elie,
  
• They call this the City of Angels,
  
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  
• CHAPTER 1
  
• CHAPTER 2
  
• CHAPTER 3
  
• CHAPTER 4
  
• CHAPTER 5
  
• CHAPTER 6
  
• CHAPTER 7
  
• CHAPTER 8
  
• CHAPTER 9
  
• CHAPTER 10
  
• CHAPTER 11
  
• CHAPTER 12
  
• CHAPTER 13
  
• CHAPTER 14
  
• CHAPTER 15
  
• CHAPTER 16
  
• CHAPTER 17
  
• CHAPTER 18
  
• CHAPTER 19
  
• CHAPTER 20
  
• CHAPTER 21
  
• CHAPTER 22
  
• CHAPTER 23
  
• CHAPTER 24
  
• CHAPTER 25
  
• CHAPTER 26
  
• CHAPTER 27
  
• CHAPTER 28
  
• CHAPTER 29
  
• CHAPTER 30
  
• CHAPTER 31
  
• CHAPTER 32
  
• CHAPTER 33
  
• CHAPTER 34
  
• CHAPTER 35
  
• CHAPTER 36
  
• CHAPTER 37
  
• CHAPTER 38
  
• CHAPTER 39
  
• EPILOGUE
  

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 hundred 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.”