city blues 02 - angel city blues by jeff edwards Read Free Book Online

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