Flashback by Justine Davis (classic reads .txt) 📕

he released his grasp and turned back to the task at hand.

“Now. What else can I do to help? If you want to see these people, do you need me to make some calls?”

She’d been thinking about this. “Not yet. I think I’d like to nibble around the edges a bit first. Like with the people who would know them best but not feel compelled to tell them someone’s asking questions?”

“Hmm.” He looked thoughtful. “You could talk to Marlene, Corbin’s housekeeper, I suppose.”

Alex thought a moment, then placed the woman. She worked for the man who had inherited a business empire, without, some said, the acumen to run it.

“The one whose oldest daughter I taught to ride years back?”

He nodded. “I’m sure she’s still grateful enough to help you. And talk to our Jacob right now. He’s close with Senator Rankin’s valet.”

“All right.”

Alex couldn’t quite get past someone still using the word valet in a context that didn’t include car keys at the restaurant. But Rankin was old school, and that was the least of his affectations. It would be interesting to see what Jacob Garner, who had been the Forsythe’s head groom most of her life, had to say.

She started by saying, “I won’t lie to you, Jacob, this is not just personal. I don’t want you to find out later and think I pumped you without telling you why.”

“And that is why I will answer you as best I can,” he answered.

What the wiry man had to say, after some prodding and insistence that she wanted the truth, not pap cleaned up for her consumption, was telling if not helpful. Gerard, Rankin’s valet, was nearly as self-absorbed as his employer. He had apparently bought in to Rankin’s opinion of his own importance, ergo the idea that this made him more important.

Once she got Jacob talking, Alex picked up a brush and began to help with the grooming of the young bay he was working on. It was something she liked doing, and it would do the filly good to get used to more than one person working on her.

“He doesn’t socialize with the likes of me,” Jacob said. “Or anyone else who works for anyone he considers ‘lesser’ than ‘the senator.’”

“Does he talk about Rankin?”

“Endlessly,” Jacob said with a roll of his eyes.

Alex chuckled. “That bad?” she asked as she worked the red-brown coat to a high shine.

“Worse. To hear him tell it, you’d think the man had more power than the president.”

“Does he ever say anything about Rankin personally? Like does the senator rant, go off on anyone, threaten anyone?”

Jacob’s dark eyes widened, as if he’d only now recalled that Alex worked for the FBI. But he answered. “He calls people names. Anybody who doesn’t agree with him or his mentor, the grand Waterton, is an idiot and doesn’t deserve to live.”

“Typical partisan stuff, then,” Alex said.

“Sad to say,” Jacob agreed.

“Did you ever get the feeling Gerard thought he would actually do something…extreme to any of those opposition people?”

“Extreme?”

Jacob looked puzzled, but Alex knew it was likely because it would never occur to him that people might actually do violence when their views were challenged. She waited, and saw understanding dawn gradually.

“You mean…hurt someone?”

“Or worse.”

The man let out a low whistle. “I can’t say for sure, but Gerard once said, as if he were proud of it, that his boss could be as ruthless as he had to be.”

Did that include murder? Would the man actually murder another United States senator for political reasons?

“I don’t much like you having to deal with this kind of thing, Miss Alex,” Jacob said.

“Sometimes neither do I,” she admitted.

“Jacob deserves a raise,” Alex told her grandfather when she returned to the house.

“Do you know what I’m paying him?” G.C. asked.

“No, but whatever it is, he deserves more.”

G.C. laughed. “Yes, he does, dear. But he won’t take it.”

Alex blinked. “What?”

“I tried to give him a raise at the first of the year. He told me he was already making nearly double that of his colleagues in similar positions, and that was quite sufficient, thank you.”

Alex laughed. “That sounds like him, all right.”

“Was he of any help?”

“In specifics, no. Adding to the database, yes. And he told me enough to know talking to Rankin’s man would be a waste of time.”

“That helps. What’s next?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. I need to talk to other people, Rankin’s friends, and Whitman, our favorite lobbyist, and a couple of others. But I don’t want to tip them off by asking anyone directly.”

“Well, my dear,” her grandfather said, “there’s only one easy way I can think of to pump the people around them.”

“And that is?”

“Doing what you least like to do.”

Her brow furrowed as she looked at him. And then, when she saw the teasing twinkle in his eyes, she groaned.

“Oh, Lord, no. Not that. Anything but that.”

“Face it, girl, it’s the best way. The least likely to arouse suspicions. And they’ll be so startled, they won’t even think about your motive.”

He was right. Damn it, Alex thought, he was right. It was the best, easiest, least obtrusive way to get information on some of the stellar lights of beltway society.

Alex Forsythe, FBI agent and forensic scientist, was going to become Alexandra Catherine Forsythe, former debutante and society belle.

“I’ll warn your mother,” G.C. said, and Alex thought it uncharacteristically cruel of him to laugh about it.

Chapter 15

“Why, Veronica, I had no idea your daughter was back in town! I had the idea she was off in Myanmar, or some such exotic place.”

Alex bit her lip and managed to keep from pointing out to Mrs. Elizabeth Garfield that officially it was still Burma to the United States. She also managed to keep herself from flicking a glance at her mother, who no doubt had spread the exotic-place tale herself, to avoid embarrassment over the fact that they barely spoke.

“Oh, I’ve been all over,” Alex said, affecting the breezy, superficial