Flashback

cover, scanned the first page of neatly written, single-spaced notes. “Are you sure you don’t want to just make me a copy and keep the originals?”
“I’d just as soon you had to bring them back,” he said.
Her gaze snapped back to his face. Had she interpreted that right?
He gave her a one-shouldered shrug. “You brighten up the decor around here,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said, a little taken aback. But he didn’t press any further, and she was left not certain if he’d meant it as merely an aesthetic comment or an invitation.
He walked with her back to the front of the department. As they neared the doors, Alex held back. “Would you do me a favor? Look out and see if you see a medium-blue sedan with very dark tinted windows parked anywhere within line of sight?”
“The license plate?” he guessed.
She nodded. Without further questions he walked over to the doors and stepped outside. After a couple minutes he came back inside. “Don’t see him. But if you want, I’ll open the back gate for you, and you can get out using our employee exit. Maybe a pile of marked units will make him think twice.”
“Thanks,” she said, meaning it as much for the fact that he hadn’t asked her any questions as for the escape plan.
As she pulled out of the rear parking lot, drawing some curious glances from uniformed personnel, she was relieved to see no sign of the blue car there, either. Perhaps it really had been a coincidence. But once again she had to admit, there were times when her distinctive curly red mane of hair was a definite drawback.
In case it was not a coincidence—and she was inclined to go with her gut reaction that it was not—she headed back to the hotel by a different route than she’d come by. She had Eric’s personal notes in her satchel, and her plan for the afternoon was to settle into her room and go over them inch by inch. It would take a while; he hadn’t been kidding when he’d said he wrote everything down.
But that could only help her in her quest for anything that would mesh with the new information she had from Marion’s letter. Hopefully, he would have the original case file by tomorrow, and she could plow through that, hot on the heels of the notes, and everything would mesh together.
At her hotel room door she had to shuffle her load of satchel and the lunch she’d picked up on the way—a fast-food drive-through purchase that would have made her mother faint dead away—to insert her card key again. And again.
Nothing. No blinking green light to signal the unlocking of the door.
With a sigh she looked around, spotted the courtesy phone in the elevator lobby and headed that way. She called the desk and explained her problem.
“I’m so sorry, Ms. Forsythe. Let me just check something here….”
There was a pause that went on a moment too long, and Alex’s antenna for trouble snapped up.
“Is there a problem?” she asked.
“Well…I…we thought you had checked out,” the young male voice said, sounding nervous.
“Checked out? I just got here, and my reservation is open ended.”
“I know, but…let me check this note on the file…here it is, it says you had to return home unexpectedly. A family emergency.”
Alex went cold, the chill weakening her joints and making her skin clammy.
“Who gave you that information?”
“Um…it doesn’t say.” The young voice sounded even younger, and very worried now. “But I’ll send someone up right away with a new key.”
“To a new room. And send someone with a clue about how this happened, please.” She realized she had sounded very sharp, and tried to ameliorate it. “I realize this is not your fault, but I need to know how and why this happened for…other reasons.”
“Very good, Ms. Forsythe.” The voice seemed calmer then, and Alex hoped that would result in answers to her questions sooner.
But first she had a much more important question that had to be answered immediately.
She yanked out her cell phone and hit the voice-activated key. She had to rein herself in to say “G.C., home,” in a tone the phone would understand.
The five rings before his voice mail picked up seemed to take forever. She left a hasty message and hung up to try the private line to his home office; if he was busy there he often didn’t answer the house line.
No answer again.
Damn this age where we all have so damned many phone numbers, she thought as she tried his cell phone.
It went immediately to voice mail, telling her he was either on it or it was turned off. He always turned it off at home or in meetings, she told herself. Or when he simply didn’t want to be reached, wanted to, as he put it, slip the electronic leash. She left another message.
Her hands were shaking now, and she took a deep breath to steady herself before her last chance. She apparently didn’t do that well, because the phone didn’t recognize her voice command on two tries. She canceled the effort and hit the speed-dial button to dial her grandfather’s office in the city.
She held her breath until his assistant, Ruth Epson, answered.
“Ruth? It’s Alex.”
“Hello, dear! How are you?”
A normal greeting, Alex thought, her hammering pulse slowing a bit. “Fine, but in a bit of a rush. May I speak to my grandfather?”
“Oh, he’s not in today, dear. He has that meeting with the FTC, remember?”
She did, suddenly. There was a Federal Trade Commission hearing coming up, about a proposed new tax structure on textiles, and her grandfather, as usual, had been called upon to explain the facts of the industry to those ignorant of it.
“Have you seen or spoken to him today?” she asked Ruth, who had been G.C.’s right hand for twenty years.
“This morning,” she said, relieving Alex’s worries a bit more. “He called to pick up messages before he went to the meeting.”
“Did he seem…all right?”
“Why yes,