The Devil's Eye by Jack McDevitt

pick up her trail." "Alex, she was one person on a world of, what, about two billion?" "But she's well-known. There'll be media stories. Some people will have met her. It should be easy."
    Alex had been collecting the names of Salud Afar's reviewers, book dealers, other horror writers, the president of the Last Gasp Society, anybody who would have had an interest in talking to Vicki. We sent off about a hundred messages letting everybody know we were coming and inviting anyone who'd seen her or worked with her or knew about her to get back to us. When that was done, we made our jump into hyperspace and settled in for a long ride. Alex had always been an easy guy on this kind of mission. There aren't too many people I want to be cooped up with for a month at a crack. But Alex was okay. He could talk about almost anything, he could listen, he had an open mind, he let me pick the entertainment, and he was always good for a laugh. Once under way, he put the Vicki Greene puzzle aside. There was, he said, no point dwelling on it until we got more information.
    He took to reading her novels. I tried one of them, Etude in Black , in which a full-throated singer could, when aroused, literally bring down the house. And I know how that sounds, but if you've ever read Vicki Greene, you know she can get away with the most outrageous stuff. She made it believable, and I sat there for most of it with my hair standing straight up. The guy didn't want to do any damage, but his voice was so magnificent he simply couldn't resist occasionally taking things to the wall. After that, I'd had enough. But I read The Moron's Guide to Vicki Greene . It maintained she liked abandoned buildings, particularly crumbling churches, which inevitably produced terrible surprises for her characters, who, usually, were there because they'd been stranded in some way, a flyer had gone down, or a boat blown off course. The danger comes, not from a manic supernatural creature, as is usually the case in modern horror novels, but from a supernatural source accidentally provoked. One of the summaries argued that Greene's primary strength, the characteristic that makes her so popular, was her ability to create a sense of empathy with the person wielding the force that is scaring the wits out of everyone else. She wrote about people "getting lost in the cosmic maelstrom." I'm quoting here, and, yes, I don't know what that means any more than you do. But it gets its punch from a demonic possession, or a ghostly presence from another time, or a spirit bound to the mortal world because it can't get rid of some aspect of its physical existence. Or it's a lover who simply can't let go, or, as in Love You to Death , a man whose passions cause their objects to overheat. Literally. Well, okay. Not my kind of leisure reading. I scare too easily. But I could see that for some people, that sort of thing could become addictive. In the meantime, Alex read each of the novels and expressed his admiration for Vicki's writing ability. "I know the academic world doesn't take her very seriously," he said, "but her name is going to survive." I began devoting my attention to working on the Rainbow catalog, which had to be updated on a regular basis. I would have liked to include the Atlantean brick, which would have been a star attraction. It was a bit late for that, though. Most of the items, almost all of them, did not belong to us. Rainbow usually acted simply as a trading partner, putting buyers and sellers together. But that wasn't enough to occupy me for more than a couple of days. So we took to attending virtual
    concerts and watching musicals and doing whatever we could to help time pass. Alex had a passion for ancient American music, and we spent one particularly riveting evening listening to the Bronx Strings perform a medley of tunes from that distant era, including two of the earliest pieces of music known: "All That Jazz" and "That Old Man River." It was the first time I'd heard