I drove down Santa Monica Boulevard through the heart of the city, passing out of Dome #7 and the gleaming chrome and glass of Beverly Hills ¾ through Domes 8 and 10, and the frenetic glitz of West Hollywood ¾ and into that squalid little haven that we call Dome #12: East Los Angeles. I parked at the corner of 55th and Fortuna, and walked the two blocks to the barricade. I don’t live in Dome #12; I live in its neighboring enclave: the Zone.

Its official title was Los Angeles Urban Environmental Enclosure 12-A, but the title itself was the fanciest thing about the place. It wasn’t even a dome in its own right, just a huge geodesic blister of translucent polycarbon grafted onto the eastern flank of Dome #12. It was an ugly thing, as much like the soaring arcs of the other domes as a remora is like the shark that it clings to. But it kept out the acid rain, and cut the solar ultraviolet down to something that the human body could tolerate, so those of us who lived there didn’t complain. Or, rather, if we did complain ¾ nobody listened.

I certainly don’t have any room to complain, myself. Unlike most of the other Zoners, I could afford to live somewhere else. Not in Vivian Forsyth’s neighborhood, certainly, but some place nicer than the Zone. I liked my house, though. It was my home, and had been for years before the neighborhood had gone to the street gangs. Chalk it up to my stubborn streak. I wasn’t planning to move.

Plus, I’d been secretly hoping that the city would get around to cleaning up the Zone. Now it didn’t look like that was ever going to happen. With their usual flair for brilliance, the City Planners had decided to build a new dome on the other side of the city ¾ lots of parks and shiny new buildings ¾ while East LA continued its slide into the cesspool.

I declared my Blackhart at the barricade, and produced my ID chip, coded with my concealed-carry license and the mandatory ballistic map of my gun barrel. The cops waved a sensor wand over me anyway, for no reason that I could determine; I had already shown them that I was carrying a military grade 12mm. Were they afraid that I might smuggle in a pen knife?

After this useless ritual was complete, they opened the barricade and waved me through. As always, I entered the Zone on foot. Very few people are stupid enough to drive their cars into the Zone any more, and there hasn’t been a cab within a block of the barricade in years. The MagLev trains don't run through the Zone anymore either. LA-Trans had discovered the hard way that sending a Lev into the Zone did not necessarily equate to getting it back out.

Fifty-fifth Street was poorly lit, the majority of the carbon-vapor streetlights having fallen prey to vandals. I scanned the shadows carefully as I walked. I’d never had to pull my Blackhart in this particular stretch of the Zone, but I’ve always felt that the three blocks leading to Alameda Street were an ambush waiting to happen.

In other parts of the city, two out of three buildings sported holo-facades: brightly-colored holographic projections that hid graffiti-mottled walls behind illusions of emerald cities, or waterfalls, or idealized jungle tree-houses ¾ anything but the dismal face of reality. It was a typical Los Angeles response; it was much cheaper to disguise a run-down building than to repair one.

It wasn’t a perfect solution, of course. Bright light weakened the holograms, washed out their bright colors, destroying the illusion. When the sun was up, the buildings stood naked and ugly, stripped of their dazzling mirages. But, for the darkened half of the planet’s rotation, everything could be beautiful. Rouge over rot. What my grandfather used to call ‘masking tape over a hole in the wall.’

There were no holo-facades on 55th Street though, not on this side of the barricade. The old buildings had only the darkness to hide their tired faces. In the Zone, the holographic hocus pocus was reserved for the bars and massage parlors over on Santa Fe Avenue.

I turned right onto Alameda. In the distance, I heard three gunshots. There was a pause, and then a brief burst of shots from an automatic weapon. The sounds had come from behind me, and to my left ¾ the direction of 52nd and Imperial. Probably the VC butting heads with the Aryan Fist again.

There wouldn’t be any sirens. LAPD Tactical rarely ventured into the Zone after sundown, and when they did, it was always in squad-strength or better. The bodies, if there were any, would lay on the sidewalk until the cops swept them up in the morning. Or, more likely, they’d be snatched off the street and shoved into a liquid nitrogen freezer by one of the teams of organ poachers that prowled the Zone at night. Spare body parts were a lucrative business, especially to poachers who could take their pick of the meat that the street gangs left lying around.

I turned right onto Gage. Jolene Hampton sat on the hood of the graffiti-covered Mercury station wagon that marked the edge of her turf. It was an old-style wheeled car, but the tires were long gone, along with the windows, and the seats, and everything else that could be pried or broken loose from the car’s moldering carcass.

Jolene bounced to her feet when she saw me coming, and stood there, waiting for me to get closer. She flexed her knees constantly, one after the other, like a speeded-up version of the half-dance that a little boy does when he has to pee. Her ghost-white hands were vibrating at the frequency of the drugs pulsing through the veins of her skinny arms. She flashed me a come-hither smile that she’d probably stolen off some assembly-line perfect fashion model in one of the slick European magazines. "Stalin, you want a blow job?"

I shook my head. "Not tonight, Jolene."

She made a pouty face from the same magazine. "You always say that."

I walked past her and said over my shoulder. "Then why do you keep asking?"

She took three quick steps to catch up with me. "I need food. A girl’s gotta eat. Just a couple of E-M, so I can get a sandwich later on." She snatched at the sleeve of my windbreaker. "Okay?"

"Come on," I said. "I’ll make you a sandwich."

She slapped at my arm. "That’s not funny!"

"I’m not joking," I said. "If you’re hungry, I’ll make you something to eat. I will not give you money so that you can support your Jag habit."

"I don’t do Jag," she said.

"Whatever it is you’re doing," I said. "I’m serious about the sandwich. That’s my best offer."

Jolene stopped. "I want to go home, okay? I just need a little money for a ticket."

I stopped and turned to face her. "Where’s home?"

"Bristol, North Dakota," she said.

I pulled out my cigarettes and thumped one out of the pack. "There’s no such place."

"Yes there is," Jolene said in a wheedling voice. "It’s a small town. My Daddy used to own a farm there before the rain got so polluted that it couldn’t support the crops. Now he drives a truck for the nitrate refinery."

I lit up, sucked a lung-full and exhaled. "You’re bullshitting me, Jolene."

"No I’m not," she said. "I just want to go home." She made a visible effort to still the drug-induced tremors running through her body.

"How much is a ticket back to Bristol?"

"Five hundred Euro-Marks."

I stared at her.

"Okay! Okay! It’s four twenty-five, but I need a little food money for the trip."

I took another hit off my cigarette. "Tell you what," I said. "I’ll buy you a ticket myself, one-way, non-refundable. But I’m going to have it coded for you only, so you can’t sell it or trade it for whatever your drug of the week is. I’ll even make you a big bag of sandwiches for the ride. How does that sound?"

"You don’t have to go through all that. Just give me the money," she said. "I’ll take care of it."

I shook my head. "Not a chance."

She shoved me. "Fuck you, Stalin!"

I started walking again. "Not tonight, Jolene."

From behind me, she yelled, "you some kind of freak? Can’t get it up for girls? Is that why you never want anything?"

I smiled. "If I say ‘yes,’ will you stop asking me?"

"Fuck you!" she said again. It was apparently her best parting-shot.

When I got to my front door, I paused while House scanned me. The ID scan took less than a second, and then House opened the door and let me in.

"Good evening, David."

I peeled off my windbreaker and started unbuckling my shoulder rig. "Good evening, House."

I walked into the kitchen and dropped weapon, holster, and jacket in a little bundle on the counter.

"You have two messages from a Ms. Dancer," House said. "Shall I play them back?"

Dancer was a cop, an LAPD Homicide Detective. I’d had run-ins with her in the past. She was the body-builder type, and she made little secret of the fact that she’d like to go a couple of rounds with me in an alley some time. I consider myself a fair brawler, but ¾ if I ever tangled with Dancer ¾ I would cheat. Even then, I’d probably come away with a few broken bones.

I opened the cabinet over the sink and pulled down a half-full bottle of Cutty Sark. It was getting hard to find it in bottles anymore, and I refused to buy scotch in those silly squeeze-tubes.

I poured three fingers of Cutty into an empty coffee mug and took a swallow. The scotch was warm and good going down.

"Okay, House" I said. "Play the messages. Audio only, please."

A second later, Dancer’s voice poured out of hidden speakers in the ceiling. "Stalin? This is Dancer. I need to talk to you. It’s urgent." She rattled off a phone number with a West Hollywood area code. That was her division, West Hollywood. The second message was a carbon-copy of the first, except that she stressed the urgency of my return call a little more.

"Would you like for me to call her back?" House asked.

"No thanks," I said. I was pretty sure I knew what she wanted. The last time Dancer had needed to speak to me urgently, she and her partner, an older guy named Delaney, had rousted me out of bed one morning to accuse me of a murder that I hadn’t committed. I’d done a thing or two since, to even up the score, and she was probably calling now to throw her weight in with good old Detective Nicoletti. Another oblique shot from his end of the court. Vivian Forsyth could clamp down on him, but not on every cop on the force at the same time.

I took another swallow of scotch and exhaled through my nose. "Let’s just assume that I’ve been sufficiently threatened by LA’s Finest, and leave it at that."

I drained the cup with one last gulp and looked at the bottle for a few seconds. No. One was enough for now. I expected to be working as soon as Vivian’s courier showed up with the files. I put the bottle back into the cabinet and closed the door. It wasn’t going anywhere.

Contrary to the apparent opinion of the LAPD AI’s, I did not have an alcohol problem. Or, if I did, I was so far into denial that I couldn’t see it. I didn’t drive when I drank, and I didn’t tie one on more than a few times a year. On the other hand, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone all day without at least a couple of fingers of Cutty.

Any one of the West Side clinics could have cured me of my taste for scotch. I had a fleeting vision of some little geek in a lab coat poking around in my DNA until I couldn’t even stand the smell of alcohol. The idea appealed to me about as much as letting them cure my cravings for nicotine. Hell, why not go the distance? Maybe there was a gene they could tweak to make me stop listening to the Blues... and another one that could help me stop dreaming about all the things that might have been.

I went to the door of my workshop, opened it and stood at the threshold without going in for the fiftieth time. My tools were right where I’d left them. The laser cutter and arc welder waited patiently for me to walk in, grab an interesting scrap of metal from the bin in the corner and start to work on a new piece. The pedestal at the center of the room was empty. It had been since I’d moved my last piece of sculpture, No Resurrection, up to the loft nearly eighteen months before.

Don’t think, I said to myself. Just do it. Walk in, put on the leather apron, and go to work. Do it, you stupid bastard. Do it!

I stood for perhaps another thirty seconds before I closed the door.

I walked to the den and settled into my favorite chair, an overstuffed brown wingback that’s older than I am.

I reached for my cigarettes and then realized I’d left them in the pocket of my jacket.

I sighed. "House?"

"Yes, David?"

"Bring me a pack of cigarettes, will you?"

"Of course, David."

A few seconds later, one of House's service drones glided into the room on its fat yellow neoprene wheels. It was Rube-Goldberg looking contraption that bore no resemblance to the humanoid robots in adventure vids. It was built like a gantry crane, about three-quarters my height, with twin vid cameras mounted on top. Its tubular alloy arms were long and multi-jointed. It rolled silently to a stop about a half-meter from my chair. It held out a pack of Marlboros in one of its three-fingered manipulators.

I took the cigarettes. "Thanks, House."

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

I peeled the plastic off 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 Brenda Forsyth in my mind.

Item #1: She was an investigative reporter. As I’d pointed out to Vivian, that raised the possibility that she had dropped out of sight on purpose, in search of some juicy undercover story ¾ 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 Elton Forsyth, and his equally wealthy and powerful wife, Vivian. 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 Atila the Hun. Was it possible that his political enemies were holding Brenda 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: Brenda 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 a half-dozen reasons that she might have gone missing ¾ 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 Vivian’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 Asian kid, early twenties maybe, with the sort of generic good-looks that the lower-end surgical boutiques tend to pump out ¾ 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.

Vivian 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 Brenda 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 desktop computer in my den.

I plugged the data chip into a hidden slot near the right edge of the mahogany desktop. I flipped the power switch, and a holographic display field unfolded in the air above the desk, a translucent blue rectangle ¾ 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 seventy-two files. Seventy-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. Half as many? A third? How much time did LAPD expend when somebody like Jolene 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.

Seventy-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 Brenda’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 Brenda’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 for a half-second and then resolved into a view of the lobby of Regency Towers, Brenda’s building. At the start of the clip, 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. Brenda 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 Brenda 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 sure that she had reached her apartment? According to the files, the police had questioned Brenda’s neighbors on the twenty-third floor, and reviewed the data feeds from each of the apartment AI’s. Brenda’s AI had been the only one tamper with, and none of the rest of the Artificial Intelligences on the twenty-third floor had recorded Brenda’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 Brenda had ridden — had picked up one passenger at 6:14:22 pm, 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, Brenda Forsyth had ridden the elevator to her own apartment.

I moved on to the police interviews of Brenda’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 Brenda’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 Brenda’s employer, TransNat Telemedia, had also led nowhere. Brenda 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, Brenda 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 Brenda some enemies, but the story had been stolen out from under her at the last second 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 ¾ 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 Brenda.

I kept digging, but the deeper I got into the files, the more apparent it became that the cops had done their jobs well. Detective Becky Hollis, and her replacement, Detective Nicoletti, 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. Personally 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 Nicoletti 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. Brenda had ridden the elevator up to the twenty-third floor. What if she had have walked down the stairs? One flight, or twenty. It wouldn’t really matter. The cops had given the other floors of Brenda’s building the once over, but not to the degree that they had given the twenty-third floor. So, Brenda 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 four meters or so  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 Brenda Forsyth 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 she wanted her disappearance 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 note-worthy. Then, when she triumphantly resurfaced with her story-of-the -century firmly in-hand, she would get twice the media attention. Intrepid Reporter Brenda Forsyth, back from the dead with top story!

The thought brought two others in its immediate wake. 1 — Brenda Forsyth might actually still be alive. And, 2 — If she was alive, she should have her ass kicked. Her family was going through seven 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 Brenda’s apartment. No body. No blood. 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 Brenda’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 Brenda’s apartment. A mistake that laid the rails for all that came after.

I ejected the data chip and punched the power button, shutting my desk comp down for the night.