Flashback Read online

  Justine Davis

  Justine Davis2006

  ISBN 1-55254-440-0

  en

  Harlequin

  Copyright © 2006 by Harlequin Books S.A.P.D.F.

  Flashback

  FLASHBACK

  JUSTINE DAVIS

  Published by Silhouette Books

  America’s Publisher of Contemporary Romance

  * * *

  SILHOUETTE BOOKS

  ISBN 1-55254-440-0

  FLASHBACK

  Copyright © 2006 by Harlequin Books S.A.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

  ® and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Books S.A., used under license. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

  www.SilhouetteBombshell.com

  * * *

  Special thanks and acknowledgement are given

  to Justine Davis for her contribution to the

  ATHENA FORCE miniseries.

  * * *

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 1

  The satisfaction of a tight grouping in the ten ring on her shooting qualification was fading as Alexandra Forsythe sat cleaning her new Glock on her grandfather’s front porch.

  Charles Bennington Forsythe was rarely jittery. That he was now acting as if he’d been mainlining double espressos for hours was a fact not lost on his granddaughter. When he resorted to pacing the farmhouse porch, she couldn’t hold back any longer.

  “G.C.?”

  Alexandra Forsythe used the nickname with affection and concern. As a child she’d made it up for this beloved man, who was more a father to her than her real one had been, even before his untimely death. “Grandfather” had seemed too distant, and “Charles” far too lacking in respect. The fact that G.C., her shortening of Grandfather Charles, had made her mother wince was merely a side benefit.

  He kept pacing as if she’d not spoken, which began to make her jittery in turn. Normally she would not push him, having learned in her years as a forensic scientist for the FBI that patience usually paid off. But this was so uncharacteristic of him that she found she couldn’t just ignore his mood.

  The afternoon breeze swirled her hair, and she shoved red-gold curls back from her face. Determined now, she quickly finished up on the Glock, put it back in the case, then got up from the cushioned wicker chair that sat near the porch railing. She leaned forward onto the rail, taking in the expansive view of Forsythe Farms.

  This was the place she loved most, the place she considered home, and of late the only place she found peace. But peace was obviously not within her grandfather’s grasp this afternoon, and neither, apparently, was patience within hers. Not when G.C. was this edgy.

  “You have two choices,” she said without preamble. “You can either tell me what’s chewing on you or I can go saddle Twill and he can beat it out of you.”

  She’d finally gotten his attention. He turned to look at her, one corner of his mouth quirking.

  “So, you’d like to see your old grandfather groveling in the mud, would you?”

  As she knew from personal experience, the big bay hunter was a handful, by turns all heart or all contrariness as the spirit moved him on any given day. But her grandfather had been a horseman for decades, and there were few he couldn’t handle.

  “As if even Twill would have the nerve to toss you,” she said, in exaggerated outrage.

  He gave her that smile that had always made her feel as if she could conquer the world. “Only because you’ve taught him to trust.”

  “True. Now, if I could only get you to trust me with whatever it is that’s bothering you,” she said, looking at him steadily.

  Her grandfather sighed. “I trust you,” he said. “You know that I always have.”

  “But?”

  “I’m not sure that what’s bothering me matters after all these years.”

  She studied his face for a moment, saw the troubled look in his eyes and the furrow between silver brows that matched his still-thick mane of hair.

  “It matters to you,” she said softly. “So it matters to me.”

  His expression softened. “Inside with you, then. I’ll tell you over lunch.”

  Their weekly lunch was a tradition Alex worked hard to maintain whenever she was at home. She’d gone through thinking she was going to lose her grandfather once before, and the awareness that he wasn’t getting any younger rarely left her mind. She didn’t like thinking about it, but there it was.

  The only thing she thought about more was Justin. And that in itself bothered her. She wasn’t sure how she felt about her fellow FBI agent, wasn’t sure she wanted to feel about him at all. That he’d already assumed such importance in her mind was disconcerting enough.

  But she couldn’t deny she was tremendously attracted to him; he was good-looking without being pretty, confident without being cocky, and smart without being a smart-ass. He also seemed determined to make their relationship exclusive, and she didn’t know if she was ready for that. She wished she could get him out of her head, at least for a while.

  As was his wont, G.C. flipped on the noon news for background as they ate. No new disasters had struck the world, no one they knew had died, and the stock market had held steady. Alex had hopes this would cheer him, but then a clip of a politician flinging some charges G.C. strongly disagreed with set him off on a rant.

  “He’s an idiot. Most of them are, anymore. Hasn’t been a decent senator elected since Marion,” he muttered as long-time cook and housekeeper Sylvia Barrett set bowls of her homemade sorbet in front of them.

  “Speaking of Marion,” her grandfather began, then stopped. Finally he reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. Again he hesitated, enough unlike him to make Alex’s concern rise again. But finally he handed it across the table to her.

  “And this is?” she asked, still focused on him rather than the envelope she’d taken from him.

  “I’d like you to read it yourself and tell me what you think.”

  Something in his tone and manner told her he was speaking to his granddaughter the FBI agent. This relieved her; she’d been afraid what he’d handed her was some sort of medical report she wasn’t going to like.

  She studied the envelope for a moment. The paper was heavyweight, rich feeling. It was addressed to her grandfather here at the farm, in a bold, looping hand that looked familiar. There was no return name or address, only an Arizona postmark, which made her frown. Her forehead creased when she noticed that the letter had been postmarked ten years ago.

  Her gaze flicked to G.C., who sat across the table from her with an expression she couldn’t read. He rarely used the mask honed by years in the upper echelons of power and the business world on her, and that he was using it now told her this was even more important than she’d guessed.

  She slid out the folded pages. They were the same rich, ragg-heavy paper of the envelope. When she lifted the pages above the first fold, a familiar letterhead at the top of the page stopped her dead.

  She knew now why the writing had looked familiar.

  “Marion,” she murmured under her breath.

  She glanced at her grandfather again, saw that he was quietly, expressionlessly waiting. She looked back at the words handwritten on letterhead from the United States Senate, further labeled in the upper corner as from Arizona senator Marion Gracelyn. The list of committees she’d served on during her tenure as junior senator ran a considerable length down the left margin.

  Alex fought off the instinctive shiver a communication from the dead gave her and read. And reread the letter, her shock growing. Finally she lifted her head and stared at her grandfather. She’d wanted a distraction, and she’d gotten one in spades.

  “She knew,” she whispered. “She knew someone was trying to kill her.”

  Charles let out a suppressed sigh. “I was almost hoping you’d see something different there.”

  She shook her head slowly. “It’s…right here. Three accidents, that close together, that weren’t really accidents? What else could it be?”

  Charles nodded. His eyes were full of remembered pain as he gestured at the letter she held. “It’s as if she’s saying goodbye.”
>
  Alex looked at the letter again. Looked at the closing line she had at first skimmed over in her shock at the other revelations the page held.

  I don’t want this to sound like a letter from a foxhole, Charles, but I hope you know how much I love you and yours. We too often don’t tell the ones we should, and sometimes we leave it too late.

  He was right, Alex realized. She’d been focused on the warning implicit in the letter and hadn’t recognized the tone of farewell until he pointed it out. Marion had not only known someone was after her, but had been convinced they were likely to succeed.

  “What could have made her expect to be murdered?” Alex asked, forgoing the obvious next step, that Marion had been exactly right.

  “More to the point, who on earth thought they could get away with murdering a U.S. senator?” Her grandfather’s tone was grim.

  And why hadn’t this come out before now, all these years later? Alex wondered.

  When Marion Gracelyn had been bludgeoned to death in a lab building on the grounds of her brainchild, Athena Academy for Women, it had been headline news for weeks. Speculation, both wild and informed, had flown around the country.

  And if she’d been too young to know then, Alex certainly knew now what kind of pressure that type of high-profile case put on investigators. She’d borne the brunt of some of the frustration agents working such cases felt, when they wanted evidence processed immediately and everybody thought their case was more important than anyone else’s.

  She could only imagine what it must have been like after the murder of a United States senator.

  So why hadn’t this come to light? Why hadn’t the investigators back then put it together? In all the digging she knew had to have been done, how had this been overlooked, the fact that Marion had known someone was trying to kill her?

  Once more she looked at the second page of the letter, which held the short, stark documentations of the three events that on the surface looked like accidents or to the mystics, a string of Mercury retrograde bad luck. An automobile malfunction, a fire at her home and the crash landing of the small plane she’d chartered to make it to D.C. in time for a crucial vote.

  Taken individually, Alex might have thought the same. But when you looked at them all together, she thought, took into account that they had all happened in the space of two months, and added the final, grimmest fact, that Marion had indeed been murdered, there was no way to see it differently.

  And Marion had known it.

  “Why didn’t she tell me before?”

  There was an undertone to her grandfather’s voice, an almost plaintive note that made a long-ago and long-forgotten suspicion resurface in her mind, that her grandfather and the late senator had perhaps been closer than she herself had then been aware of. And something she’d at first skimmed over made her look back at the first page of the letter, addressed, she only now realized, to “My Dearest Charles.”

  She wondered, but she knew this was not the time to pursue that particular possibility.

  “I don’t quite understand, G.C. Have you had this all this time?”

  “Yes and no,” he said, his mouth twisting slightly. “I had it, but didn’t know it. Obviously, from the postmark it came around the time Marion was murdered. Sylvia found it tucked away in the back of a drawer, under some linens. Our best guess is that one of the staff, knowing we were all grieving, put it out of sight to avoid causing more pain at that time, and then forgot about it.”

  And so it had languished there, hidden, for a decade, Alex thought. Only to surface now, when the case was as cold as a winter desert night at Athena.

  “I suppose we need to step up the spring cleaning around here,” G.C. said, but the quip fell flat. And since she didn’t know what to say, Alex instead reread the details of the three incidents.

  “She must have had some idea who was behind all this,” Alex said, almost under her breath. “Why didn’t she say so?”

  “Marion was never one to make accusations without having specific proof,” Charles said, his voice level again.

  Alex looked at him. “Do you have any ideas?”

  “Obviously, her death wasn’t at the hands of the casual burglar the police wrote it off to,” he said.

  “Obviously. But that leaves a host of other possible suspects, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Charles agreed. “Marion made enemies as both a prosecutor and as county attorney.”

  “And from what you’ve told me about her, some of them were near the top of the criminal food chain.”

  He nodded. “And some were people who had a great deal to lose.”

  “She took down a couple of politicians, too, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. Powerful ones. And it wasn’t easy. In fact, that’s why she ended up running for office, when she saw how much housecleaning needed to be done.”

  “Which means somebody with some dirt under the rug might not be too happy with her,” Alex speculated, thinking that the list of possible suspects was growing exponentially.

  “And then, of course, there’s Athena,” Charles said quietly.

  Alex’s breath caught. “Do you think it could be related to what happened to Rainy?” Alex and her best friends and Athena Academy classmates, the small, tight-knit group self-dubbed the Cassandras, had just gone through a nightmare of untangling a vicious-threaded mess of science corrupted and murder freely practiced. A nightmare that had begun with the loss of one of their own, Lorraine “Rainy” Carrington.

  “It could have been, although the timing falls between when Rainy’s eggs were harvested and her murder twenty years later. I think it’s more likely that it’s connected to Marion founding Athena Academy. Opposition to the academy was…virulent, in some quarters. And it was her brainchild, her vision that brought it to life.”

  Alex knew this. She’d always thought of Marion Gracelyn as a sort of unofficial aunt and a personal hero, but above all she’d been grateful to her for envisioning and making real the place that had changed Alex’s life—and the lives of countless other women—forever.

  Thanks to Marion, Athena Academy existed, and women had chances that had been denied them for so long, chances to make the most of themselves in whatever field they chose…as long as they could excel to meet Athena’s stringent standards. Law enforcement, the military, science, athletics, whatever the discipline, it was open for Athena’s students, and in the relatively short existence of the school her graduates were already proving themselves all over the world.

  “The Athena Factor,” Alex said softly, lost for a moment in the immensity of what Marion’s dream had accomplished. She’d been hearing the phrase more and more, as the power brokers of the world ran into the results of an academy devoted entirely to the advancement of women without interference from misguided or antiquated views and glass ceilings.