Free Slab City Blues - The Collected Stories: All Five Stories in One Volume by Anthony Ryan

file: Dr Janet Vaughan, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Classical Studies, Lorenzo City University (Yang Faculty).
    “Janet?” I said. “What kind of vamp is called Janet?”
    *
    I pushed out the regulars a few minutes before closing time, told Marco to go home, he could clean up in the morning. I went upstairs in company with a bottle of Red and the vamp’s smart, checked my own for messages - one from Joe, three from Sherry - and settled onto the futon making the thousandth firm resolution to buy a couch tomorrow.
    Dr Janet’s files were neatly arranged in a web-matrix familiar to anyone who’d ever seen a crimint report; lines interlinking subject nodes with time stamps. Thomas DeMarco was highlighted in red. I opened the file finding a brief bio and a crime report of sorts, all open source stuff missing the more lurid details, but I had a vivid memory of those already.
    Thomas DeMarco, aged sixty-two, father of three daughters, self-styled King of Curry as owner and CEO of the Pipin’ Hot lamb curry franchise, third largest home delivery and restaurant chain this side of the Axis. A rich fellow by Yang-side standards, when he went missing it was naturally assumed he’d been kidnapped for ransom, a tradition of the small but vibrant Mexican criminal sub-culture in our fair city. Except no ransom demand was forthcoming. Six days and no calls, no notes, no body parts in the post. Which is not to say Mr DeMarco’s case was a dismemberment free zone. A worker in one of his slaughterhouses on Yang Thirty found an unlogged barrel of rendered animal fat in a quiet corner of the yard, inside was Thomas DeMarco, all six pieces of him, bobbing in the grease like an underdone stew.
    The family was rich and demanded the best from Chief Arnaud. He gave them me and Sherry, and we found nothing. Granted I’ll confess my mental state was nothing to boast about at the time, Consuela’s death was only three months gone and my apartment was beginning to resemble the cage of a gorilla with a serious fast-food problem. But I would like it on the record that I did my detectively best for poor dis-constituted Mr DeMarco.
    He’d last been seen paying a visit to a handsome young man in a nicer corner of Yang Thirty-Two. DeMarco had an active sex life and, not one to discriminate, maintained an expensive stable of young men and women scattered throughout the Yang levels. Mrs DeMarco was clearly an understanding wife, evidenced by the fact that many of these specialist employees were invited to the funeral and eager to help with enquiries. The young man who had last enjoyed DeMarco’s company was a square-jawed youth of muscular proportions whose evident grief didn’t prevent him slipping me his smart ID when Sherry’s back was turned. DeMarco’s visit had been routine, if apparently vigorous, the King of Curry spent a lot on rejuve treatments, and he left in company with two bodyguards at nearly midnight. The bodyguards were both ex-military, highly experienced and working under strict Duress Protocol. They boarded an empty Pipe carriage for the journey home. Ten minutes or so later the lights went out along with the security cams, and the carriage came to a sudden and jarring halt, throwing both guards off their feet. Sixty seconds later the lights came on and they were looking at the space where DeMarco had been. Both claimed to have neither heard, smelt or felt anything, a testimony which stood up to some hard grilling and a court-ordered dose of sodium pentathol.
    We ran intensive forensic scans over the Pipe carriage and found nothing. Same for the remains and the barrel they came in. Ricci’s autopsy found no trace of sedative or poison, though he advised that death had been caused by the first dismemberment, inflicted with a standard-grade automated power saw of the type used in the production line at the very slaughterhouse where the remains had been discovered. Tests of the plant confirmed it. DeMarco had been put through his