Flashback by Justine Davis (reading e books .TXT) 📗

“Do you remember anything unusual about the time she was killed?” Alex asked.

“It’s all a little foggy, I’m afraid,” Christine admitted. “I was so shocked. They asked me if she’d done anything out of the ordinary recently, or said anything. Other than being here a bit more than usual, she hadn’t—not that I’d noticed, anyway.”

“How did she seem to you, in those last days?”

“Wired,” Christine said frankly. “Wound up. But then, that was Marion. She was never a serene person to be around in any case.”

“Any more so than usual, then? Like maybe there was something more specific she was focused on?”

Christine looked thoughtful. “Perhaps. She did seem a little more…intense, maybe. But she always was, so if there was something really wrong, I’m not sure I would have noticed a difference.”

Christine left them alone to work, and she and Justin quickly divided up the items to slog through with an ease that pleased Alex. It was good to have help on this, she thought.

Even if it is a test of my self-discipline to keep my mind on the task at hand, she added to herself, keeping her eyes on the stack of letters she had before her.

The work of being a senator, Alex soon realized, was vast, varied, and complex. She was amazed at the things people wrote to complain about, and expected someone on the level of a U.S. senator to handle.

She was even more amazed at the number of those petty things Marion Gracelyn had actually handled.

It didn’t take long for them to figure out the method Marion had used to organize things. Topics, issues and legislation were grouped individually and then chronologically within those separate files. It was supremely easy to follow any one issue or problem from beginning to end, perfect for their purposes and much easier than if they’d been filed in chronological order only.

Alex read as quickly as she could while still being thorough, making notes of anything that seemed to have left anyone unhappy. However positive or constructive something was, it seemed like there was always somebody who didn’t like it. And there were a few somebodys who seemed to have made a hobby out of not liking it, no matter what the “it” was.

“Some people just say no to everything,” she muttered, making notes of the names that kept popping up.

“I’ve never been able to figure out if those types think they know better than the rest of us or just don’t like any idea, no matter how good, if it’s not their own,” Justin said, clearly finding more of the same in the stack of stuff he was going through.

“Problem is they don’t have any good ideas of their own,” Alex said, then laughed. “Gads, I sound like G.C. watching the evening news.”

“Good for you,” Justin said. “He’s a wise man.”

She glanced up, then. He wasn’t looking at her but at the papers in front of him, so she had a chance to watch him unobserved for a moment. And as she did, the wonder of what had happened between them struck her anew.

She may have been a fool for a long time, dragging her feet with him, she thought, but she was certainly over it now.

I am so over it, she thought, and lowered her head again to mask her grin in case he looked up.

“So,” Alex said as they drove back toward downtown Phoenix, “we have a longer list of names.”

“Including every obstructionist in the state of Arizona, I’d bet.”

Alex laughed. “Scary part is some of them are in office now. G.C. would be gagging.”

“At a guess I’d say most of them are harmless,” Justin said. “At least, when it comes to something like murder. They seem more the letter-writing, demonstrating, get-my-name/cause/photo-in-the-paper types.”

“I tend to agree.” She sighed. “Too bad guesswork doesn’t hold up in court.”

Justin laughed. “Wouldn’t our lives be so much easier if it did?”

“I think those three we found in the e-mail records might lead somewhere, though.”

“The save-the-Gila-monster guy caught my eye,” Justin said.

“Me, too. Especially since they’re hardly endangered. Made me wonder if he was talking about poison in a broader sense.”

The exchange of e-mails had been entertaining at first, but toward the end, it had taken on a faintly threatening tone.

“Anybody who’d keep them as pets isn’t wrapped real tight anyway,” Justin said. “Look, let’s give it a rest for a bit, okay? We’ve done nothing but dig through this stuff all day. We need to let it perk for a while.”

She was more than happy to agree. When he proposed a nice steak dinner after the day of poring over the papers that were supposed to have been made obsolete with the coming of the computer, she said yes immediately.

They stopped by his place to change clothes when he told her the place he had in mind frowned on jeans for dinner. She was ready quickly, since she had a very limited choice of wardrobe. She’d only brought one dress. It was a basic black sleeveless that she could accessorize like mad, to make it look different each time she wore it. This time she added only a colorful scarf, dangling earrings and a gold-and-diamond pendent G.C. had given her upon her graduation from the FBI Academy.

“You’re an agent now, and I’m immensely proud of you,” he’d said, “but I don’t want you to ever forget you’re also a beautiful woman.”

She caught her hair up in a knot in the back, leaving a few tendrils down to frame her face, and did a touch-up on her makeup. When she came out of the bathroom, Justin looked up from the piece of newspaper he was reading. He went very still.

“Wow,” he said, sounding a bit wobbly.

Apparently, he agreed with G.C., Alex thought, with a spurt of purely feminine pleasure she hadn’t felt in a long time.

“You’re going to ruin the scientist stereotype,” he added, beginning to smile.

“You clean up nice, too,” she said with a grin.

He laughed, and offered her