DARK CITY a gripping detective mystery by CHRISTOPHER M. COLAVITO Page A

not a loose board in this floor, so there's no hidden trap door. We're stuck.”
    “Yes we are. I looked around, and none of the walls surrounding us are deep enough to accommodate a hidden passage. There really was no way for anyone to have gotten in and out of here, other than the locked doors and windows.”
    “Which no one could have done.”
    “Exactly.”
    “So we just wound up right back where we started.”
    “Yes, but you were right about needing to challenge ourselves. It didn't work this time, but it will eventually.”
    “You sound more confident than I do. How can that be?”
    “Because you didn't hear the good news yet.”
    “We got kicked off the case?”
    “No. The tech guys have finished decrypting the drive we found. Let's go find out if there's anything useful on it.”
    “There had better be.”
    “Admit it, you had fun ripping this place apart.”
    “Sure, but puzzle solving is only fun when you know there's an answer waiting for you. For all we know, we're trying to lasso the moon.”
    “Maybe, but think what a trick it would be if you pulled it off.”
    “You're not helping.”
    “I don't try to. It's not my style.”
    “No kidding.”

Chapter 14
    Yelling At Clouds
     
    Computers were strange beasts to Detective Knox, plastic boxes filled with magic, a portal into a world he didn't want to understand. Walking into a room filled with them, and the artificial hum of life they give off, made him uneasy. The light was different in rooms filled with technology, fuzzy, as though your eyes were out of focus. He understood that technology brought with it great advances, leaps that were able to make his job easier, but his relationship with it was still strained. He did not want his job to be easier. The difficulty of sifting through clues, to be able to string them together in the perfect fashion, that was the beauty of the job.
    Detective Knox had not remained in the force as long as he had, as the very foundation of the world cracked and shattered under his feet, for any other reason. He lived for the puzzles, and the elegance of solving them. There were now countless tools created by geniuses to help him achieve that goal, but just as many were being used to obfuscate the truth and change the rules of the game. Technology, he reckoned, existed merely to give people something new to complain about, though the task at hand never changed. A new coat of paint was slapped upon the same old problem, and people were convinced they were looking at a whole new work of art.
    Detective Lane's youth gave him a different insight, and his ignorance of the old ways made him prone to thinking Knox was merely upset that the world was not the way he remembered it. Lane was quick to embrace anything that could help him in his quest to be a detective, not because he wished to take the easy way out, but because he was determined to help people, to answer the call and give people answers in their darkest moments. In doing that he would often require help, and he was not too proud to ask for it.
    “Let me guess, Lane, you're going to try to explain all of the technological gobbledygook the nerd squad is going to run through. Let me save you the trouble. Please don't.”
    “You really need to learn at least a little bit of this stuff. You're going to sound like you don't know anything if you get put on the stand at a trial. If you want to put killers away, you have to have an air of authority about you.”
    Detective Knox laughed at his partner, not a snort of derision over the idea that his younger cohort had any idea what authority meant, but a gentle acknowledgment that despite how much time they were forced to spend together investigating crimes, Lane had yet to understand how Knox's mind worked.
    “Did it ever occur to you that what you described is precisely what I'm going for?”
    “Why on earth would you ever want to sound ignorant?”
    “Because, partner, the ignorant aren't asked to be expert