Flashback by Justine Davis (classic reads .txt) 📕

she knew what they’d be facing, that they’d have to fight so much harder than the men at those institutions did.”

Alex nodded. “And it was hard enough for the men, without adding intimidation, harassment and the just plain not being wanted that women would face into the mix. I understand all that. But didn’t a ‘separate but equal’ sort of solution placate those opposed?”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But we found that many simply opposed women being prepared for any part in what was then a man’s world. Some almost violently so.”

“And one perhaps murderously so?” Alex said softly.

G.C. sighed. “It certainly seems possible.”

“Even probable.” Alex shook her head. “Although it’s hard for me to believe anybody could hate us that much.”

“I’m not sure it’s about hatred,” G.C. said, “as much as hanging on to a tradition, a way of life that’s all they know.”

“So was the Civil War,” Alex pointed out in a wry tone.

G.C. smiled at her as if she were an exceptionally clever student. “Point taken.”

Turning her attention back to the letter, she held up the last page.

“What’s with this?” she asked, pointing at the drawing in the lower left corner.

“I don’t know,” G.C. said, the tone of his voice telling her that he had spent more than a little time trying to figure out the meaning of the hand-drawn graphic that was almost cartoonish, yet at the same time quite ominous.

Only, she told herself, because it was a spider. A big, fat one, crouched in the middle of a web made small by the looming body of the arachnid.

“All I can tell you,” Charles said, “is that Marion was not a doodler.”

Alex looked at the drawing again. “So…this isn’t a casual scribble. It means something.”

“It did to her,” he confirmed.

Which meant it did to Alex, as well. Marion Gracelyn was Athena; it wouldn’t exist without her vision and effort. And anything that threatened Athena or anything connected to it threatened Alex, because Athena was irrevocably entwined in her life and her heart.

As was the case for all the Cassandras. They’d renewed their promises to each other and to Athena in the aftermath of the investigation that had begun with Rainy Carrington’s murder. She hadn’t expected to have the call come again so soon, but apparently it had. And she would respond.

Any and every Cassandra would always rally to Athena.

Chapter 2

“So, what do you know about working cold cases?”

Justin Cohen blinked, then drew back slightly as he stared at Alex across the table and the remnants of their lunch. He was in town from Phoenix for a week of seminars he’d been sent to attend, but their schedules were so chaotic that moments like this when they both had a few minutes of free time were pounced upon somewhat rabidly.

“Probably not as much as you do?” he suggested, sounding puzzled at the unexpected question. “I mean, you’re the forensics expert, and forensics is where more cold cases are broken than just about anywhere else.”

Alex stirred her glass of iced lemonade with the straw. “I’ve gone over and over what’s there, in our files. Nothing that led to a suspect at the time, but plenty to nail him once he’s found.”

His eyes—those stunning blue-green eyes whose image she’d been carrying around in her head since she was a teenager—narrowed.

“So you’re talking about a specific case, not just cold cases in general.” He didn’t make it a question, but she answered that way, anyway.

“Yes.”

“And a federal case, if we have a file on it.”

“Yes. Federal because of who was involved.”

“How cold a case is it, dare I ask?”

“A chilly decade or so,” she answered.

“Hmm. Well, I’ve heard of worse. It’s becoming more common as the technology advances. A guy I went through the academy with broke a thirty-five-year-old kidnapping case a couple of years ago.”

“How?”

“DNA,” Justin said. “But that was just the end result. He spent months before that talking to a lot of people, some of them old enough or sick enough that he had a lot of work to do sorting out what information was reliable. And going through every bit of paperwork and evidence with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. Over and over and over again. Until he found the guy to match the DNA to.”

Alex’s mouth quirked. “I was afraid of that.”

“You?” Justin scoffed in disbelief. “You’re not afraid of anything.”

The response warmed her, but still she told him silently, Oh, yes I am. I’m afraid of you, how you make me feel.

She knew her reaction was over the top, but the logical side of her mind kept insisting she was nurturing a childish fantasy she should have long outgrown.

The Dark Angel.

The memory of Athena’s midnight intruder, the boy the Cassandras had dubbed with that incredibly romantic nickname, kept getting in the way of her looking honestly at the man he’d become, who had so quickly become part of her life—mostly because he simply refused not to be.

But that boy, so passionately dedicated to finding out the truth about his sister Kelly’s death back when Alex was still in school, had fired all their imaginations and been so deeply etched into her mind that…

It suddenly struck her that he knew more about cold cases than she did on a very personal level.

“You never gave up on your sister’s case,” she said. “You became an agent because of it.”

He never liked talking about the reason he’d joined the FBI. She never doubted the death of his sister was the reason, but that kind of obsession was too Mulder-ish, he’d joked.

But she knew it was true. She knew he’d been driven, some even said possessed, so much that she’d been a little concerned about what would happen, what he would do when his quest was finally over. And last year it had ended, as triumphantly as it could for him. But he seemed to have settled nicely into the life he’d carved for himself by sheer force of will and determination.

Perhaps