CYCLE B  |  Book 6

Shores of Darkness

PREVIEW | Shores of Darkness

It was three o'clock in the morning, and Kari LaMarca was up on the Citadel, staring out on the lake.  To protect herself from would-be rapists, she had a gun in her bag.  It was a Desert Vulcan.  It was a gun that was almost as big as her arm.

Kari considered taking the gun out her bag right now.  She could fire it into the darkness and maybe kill one or more of the archons who were presently haunting her, screaming at her, telling her it was time she went after whoever had killed her friend Gina.  Kari's reply to the archons, at least for now, has been that her primary goal is to reveal the truth about Gina's death, to prove that it hadn't been the result of a kinky sex game gone horribly gone.

Kari has now made a significant breakthrough in her investigation of what she's come to calls the Gina mysteries.  She first of all determined that Gina, not long before she was murdered, made a backup of all her important computer files.  She did so with the help of one of her graduate students, Toby Pritchard, a man Kari often refers to as "the creepozoid."  The backup was stored in a CD tower in Toby's apartment, which is downstairs from the one Gina was occupying at the time of her murder.  Kari found a way to enter Toby's apartment, grab the backup, make her own copy of it, and then return it -- all without Toby's knowledge.  

Observation of Toby tells Kari that he's lazy, smart, and opportunistic.  She perceives that he could have killed Gina in order to steal the historical research she accumulated over many years working in Russian archives; he could use this research to advance his own academic career.  Creepozoid that he is, he would have disguised the murder as an act of sadomasochistic sex taken to an extreme end.  Kari knows she has no way of proving these conjectures.

Rather than go down that dead-end road, she's engaged in another project. She intends to examine the backup and determine how much important information it contains.  She's hoping it will enable her to solve at least some of the Gina mysteries.