Flashback by Justine Davis (classic reads .txt) 📕

minimal foot traffic passing by. The selection warned her he was wary about having the report out of the station, and she couldn’t blame him.

“Thanks for bringing it,” she said as she slid into the seat opposite him.

He gave a half shrug. “I figured the fewer people who knew I was even looking at it, the better.”

“You’ve been through it again?”

He gave her a sideways look, as if trying to assess why she had asked. “Yeah. It still bothers me.”

She liked him for that. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, although he seemed a bit embarrassed. She was saved from wondering why by the arrival of the waitress, who efficiently took her cheeseburger and a soda order and Eric’s somewhat rueful request for a grilled chicken salad and iced tea and departed.

“Recoil,” he explained, as if she’d asked. “My dad had to have a triple bypass a few months back, and he’s only fifty-nine. Scared me.”

“Scares me, too,” she said. “I only eat like this on the road. At home I stay much closer to healthy eating, with only the occasional foray into decadence and indulgence.”

That won her a grin. “That’s my theory. The occasional foray is necessary.”

He slid the thick file across the table to her. She opened it and began to read and take notes, forcing herself to forget that the blunt, grim descriptions were referring to a woman she’d known and liked. It brought back memories of having to do the same with reports about Rainy’s death. This was one area in which practice definitely did not make things easier. Sometimes the pain was as fresh and sharp as if it had been only yesterday.

She continued while they ate—after stealthily concealing the file while the waitress delivered their plates—knowing the detective would understand. He busied himself working on something else, tapping data into his PDA. And later playing a game of some kind; she caught a glimpse of a colored ball flying across the screen and blowing up several others.

When her cell rang, Alex almost let it go to voice mail until she saw who it was: Allison, at last returning her call. After perfunctory niceties, Allison quickly picked up that something serious was going on. Alex gave her the digest version, telling Marion’s daughter she was with the detective who had investigated the case right now.

“My God. You think you’re really onto something about my mother’s murder?”

“It’s possible. It may go nowhere, but…”

“You don’t think so.”

“My gut doesn’t.”

“Good,” Allison said bluntly. “I never believed that garbage about her interrupting a burglary,” she said, echoing Alex’s own thoughts. “I wish I could fly out there right now.”

“I know.” Alex didn’t even want to speculate on what Allison was tied up with. “If there’s more, if there’s finally an answer, I’ll find it,” she told her sister.

“I know you will.” Allison’s tone had been one of absolute certainty, and Alex wasn’t about to let her down. “Contact me when you can give me the whole story.”

“I will.”

It took her most of the meal to slog through the main portion of the numerous reports in the file. Murder cases were never, ever simple or short. That of a senator was beyond voluminous.

Photos and diagrams added more pages, so it was a while before she got to the supplemental reports. These she wanted to read carefully, because it was there that any theories that came to the investigators, suspicions, possibilities, all the things they couldn’t substantiate with empirical evidence, were laid out.

When the table had been cleared and refills on their drinks provided, she leaned back in the vinyl-upholstered booth and looked across the table at him.

“Was there anything that particularly stuck in your gut?”

“Yes,” he said, quickly enough that she knew he’d been thinking about it recently. “This. It was listed ‘Not for Press Release’ on the public copy, so the page isn’t in the report, but I had one.”

She looked at the paper he slid toward her, at the spot he indicated with one finger—he chewed his nails, she noticed, a not unusual habit for people in stressful jobs. But then her attention was seized by what was on the page he had indicated.

It was a copy of a summary of bank statements, pulled after Marion’s death. And beginning months before her murder was a series of regular, weekly cash withdrawals of five thousand dollars.

“We couldn’t find where it was going, or why it had started, after,” he said. “Rich lady like that, our first thought was drugs, but the autopsy tox screen didn’t show any sign.”

Alex managed to stifle her reaction to the very thought of Marion Gracelyn using drugs. “That would have been a pretty big jump, from nothing to a five-thousand-a-week habit,” she said neutrally.

“That’s what I thought,” he agreed. “And from what I knew of her, she wasn’t the type. I didn’t know her personally, of course, but I knew of her, and it just didn’t fit.”

“No, it didn’t. Still doesn’t.”

He nodded. “But I was junior at the time. I got to spend all my time saying ‘no comment’ to the gazillion reporters who kept hanging around, making things up when we wouldn’t talk to them. Vultures.”

“I know the feeling,” she said; she’d had her own run-ins with the media. “But you were right,” Alex continued. “She wasn’t the type. At all.”

He nodded, his satisfaction at being vindicated no doubt muted by how much time had passed. And that his then-partner wasn’t around to hear it.

“Any other ideas that hit you back then, about that money?”

“Other than she just went on several regular shopping binges?”

Now shop was something Marion could do, Alex thought. Her children, David and Allison—another Athenian—had rarely lacked for anything. And Marion herself had always dressed with an exquisite sense of style and flair. But she hadn’t been profligate.

“Other than legitimate, if extravagant, expenditures, yes,” she said.

He looked at her, hesitated, then finally said, “Blackmail.”

Alex blinked. She couldn’t imagine Marion ever doing anything that she could be blackmailed over,