just cleared the Phoenix city limits, so I’m about a half hour out. But I’ll be…securing things at the morgue in Athens first.”
The former army captain didn’t miss the inference. She also didn’t make the mistake of pursuing it in a cell conversation that could be monitored. “I see. I should expect you in the early evening, then?”
“Probably. I’ll call you.”
“All right.” There was a pause. “Alex?”
“Yes?”
“It will be good to spend time with you. I just wish the circumstances were different.”
“No more than I,” Alex said fervently.
After the call Alex tried to think of other things. Of how strange this place had seemed to her east-coast eyes the first time she’d come here. Used to the rolling green hills of northern Virginia and the time-worn mountains of the east coast, she’d found the dry desert flatness and jagged peaks as strange as any moonscape.
She’d initially wondered why on earth they’d located the school here, when they’d had the entire country to choose from. She’d even asked her grandfather, Charles Forsythe, one of the founders and main backers of Athena, why they’d picked that spot. And had asked it, she’d much later realized, with all the arrogance of a teenager who was certain she knew it all.
He’d told her that they’d chosen this place for all the reasons she thought it was a bad choice. She hadn’t understood then, but eventually she’d realized the wisdom of the selection.
And she had come to love it for its own kind of stark, harsh beauty, and to respect it for what it had to teach the women of Athena about reality and survival and the incontrovertible facts of nature and life. It had become their sanctuary even as it was their proving ground. Being dropped in the wilds of the White Tank Mountains with minimal supplies and told to find your way back had a way of teaching you a new perspective.
But she doubted there was any perspective to be gained in this case. There had been no one in her life quite like Rainy. And there never would be again. There had been only five years age difference between them, but at times Rainy had seemed as much a mother figure as an older sister. Perhaps, Alex had thought more than once, because her own mother had been so cool and distant.
She’d felt closer to Rainy than even her own blood sibling. She loved her big brother, Bennington, dearly, but he also had the knack of irritating the heck out of her more than anyone else ever could. In fact, she’d felt closer to Rainy than any of her family except her grandfather Charles, or G.C., as she’d called him since childhood. It was a nickname her mother had despised, which of course had guaranteed Alex would use it as often as possible.
Alex reached over to the passenger seat and grabbed the bottle of spring water she’d tucked inside the large shoulder bag she used as both purse and briefcase. And holster, if it came to that. The bag had a special outside-access pocket for her duty weapon concealed between the two divided sections.
She took a long drink, knowing that keeping hydrated in this desert climate was crucial. She’d been gone long enough to have lost some of her adaptive abilities to this kind of arid heat; Washington D.C. was beyond hot in the summer, but arid was not a frequently used adjective there. She was thankful the new FBI crime lab was in Quantico; the proximity to the Potomac gave a bit of relief when the capital itself was sweltering.
The black van in front of her changed lanes to go around a slow-moving truck, and Alex had to wait for a break between vehicles to follow. There hadn’t been this much traffic when she’d attended Athena, either, she thought. She’d graduated just thirteen years ago, but the roads between Phoenix and Athens had been a lot emptier then. Traffic would thin out the closer she got, but still, there was a marked difference.
Not for the first time she was grateful to the people, including her grandfather, who had had the vision for Athena. The late Arizona senator Marion Gracelyn had begun it, and it had evolved from her initial idea of a military-type academy just for women into the much bigger, more far-reaching thing it was now, an institution dedicated to helping women take their rightful place in a world that was still very much run by men.
When she’d first arrived, after the trek through a strange land to a strange place, she’d been wondering why she’d worked so hard to come here. She’d known it was expected of her, the Forsythe fortune having helped found the school. But as seventh grade and the time to go to the school she hadn’t chosen neared, she had rebelled against this set future even as it closed in on her, purposely refusing to do her schoolwork and messing around during national testing. Only the awful disappointment of her beloved grandfather had shaken her off her mutinous course and sent her back to work.
As it was, she’d lost a year and had come to Athena as an eighth grader. She’d been assigned an orientation group with seventh-grade girls who would become the Cassandras. The age difference had made for problems in itself, but Rainy had straightened that out as she had straightened them all out.
She had been the force that had brought them together, had taken the young girls they had been and transformed them into a cohesive unit of smart, capable, skilled women who could handle anything thrown their way.
Alex blinked rapidly as tears blurred her vision. This was impossible. It just could not be happening. She could not be driving back to Athena behind a van carrying Rainy’s body.
Her cell phone rang, startling her. She’d forgotten it was still in her lap. She glanced at the caller ID, considered letting it go to voice mail, then chided herself for being a coward. She flipped the phone open.
“Hello, Emerson.”
“Alexandra.”
Emerson Howland, Alex’s fiancé, was the only person on the planet besides her mother who called her that. Even her grandfather called her Alex. Emerson’s manner sometimes made her feel as if the age gap between them was even greater than twelve years. But he had told her once he thought Alexandra a lovely name, so she’d finally given up trying to break him of the habit. She admired so much about him—the man’s work was, after all, saving others—that it seemed a petty thing to nag him about.
She waited for him to speak. He seemed to be waiting for her to do the same. She was never sure if it was some kind of power thing on his end, or simply that generation’s deep, inbred, sometimes cool politeness that marked his every interaction.
She found she was in no mood for that, either. “You called me,” she pointed out.
There was a pause, just long enough for her to consider how snippy she’d sounded. But before she could say anything, he spoke again.
“Your mother says hello.”
“Oh?”
She stopped herself from pointing out that her mother had her number if she wanted to say hello. Not likely, she knew. Odd, when her own mother would rather speak to Alex’s fiancé than her. But then, her upper-crust mother highly approved of Emerson. In fact, she usually seemed happier to see him than her own daughter on those occasions they were together—which came as infrequently as Alex could manage.
“Yes, I dropped some flowers off at the house today. For her birthday.”
Drat. I forgot. I’ll have to send something. Fast.
“That was
