Flashback

ever stop someone determined to get in—and opened the door.
“This just came for you. Lieutenant Ryan asked that we hand deliver it. She didn’t want to wait for you to get around to your e-mail.”
“Thank you,” Alex said as she took the envelope. That, she thought as the woman walked back toward the elevator, was one person who was going to be glad not to see her again.
She closed the door, secured it again, put the Glock back in its place, and only then opened the envelope. There was a note from Kayla on top, with the details of her chat with the maid. The woman had seen the man out in the hallway while she was working on the unexpectedly vacated room. When she’d returned to the cart for towels, he’d stopped, chatted her up for a moment, then asked for directions to the hotel’s health club.
He had been perfectly nice, even affable, the maid had said. Had even offered to tip her, although she said she had refused. She’d gone back to her cleaning, and he, she had thought, had gone on his way.
But Kayla had pressed, and the woman had finally admitted it was possible that after she’d gone back to work he had loitered a few minutes longer. It was routine practice to prop the room door open with the cart of cleaning supplies and towels, so while he couldn’t have come in without her noticing, he could have had access to the door for a few minutes. Long enough to place something, tape most likely, over the door latch, so that it hadn’t secured when the maid had finished and closed the door. Which would explain the slightly sticky residue Alex had found, and how he had gotten access to the room to position the newspaper.
The woman had felt bad enough to spend considerable time with their computer artist—although, Kayla added wryly in her note, the fact that the hotel was no doubt paying her for her time might have had something to do with it—and they’d come up with a good composite. Of course, Alex knew, any composite, even a good one, was only as good as the human memory providing the data.
But it was better than what she had now, which was nothing, she thought as she reached in for the image. It was a clue. It was a place to start.
She pulled out the composite.
She stared at the photo-like image, startled.
It wasn’t the driver of the blue sedan. Not that she’d seen his face through the darkly tinted windows, but it didn’t matter.
Because she had seen this man’s face. Twice.
It was the driver of the gardening truck.

Chapter 7
Someone was getting very nervous. And that told Alex one thing for sure—somebody was hiding something. Somebody had been hiding something ever since Marion had been murdered.
And unlike the casual-burglar suspect the police had originally created, that somebody still had something to lose.
Was it simply that they knew the statute of limitations never ran out on murder? Or was there more to it? Alex didn’t want to become one of those who turned everything into a massive conspiracy, but after the recent revelations about Lab 33 and its connection to Athena, anything seemed possible.
She had called Kayla and let her know that the man the maid had seen outside her hotel room was the same man she’d seen on the road.
“He’s good,” she had told her friend. “He was ahead of me most of the time. And if it wasn’t for this composite, I would never have known it was him. I zeroed in on another car that was acting suspiciously, seemed to be following me.”
There was a momentary silence, and Alex could almost hear her old friend thinking, considering the possibilities.
“Any chance they were working together?” Kayla asked then.
The possibility had occurred to her. “Can’t say they weren’t,” she said.
“Did you get a look at the license on the gardening truck?” Alex had already given her the plate info on the blue car that now seemed to be a dead end.
“No. It was covered up. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, because it was just a burlap bag hanging down over the plate, the kind of thing you see in any truck like that.”
“Any logo or name on the side?”
Alex closed her eyes and reformed the image in her mind, the dusty red truck festooned with rakes and mowers and blowers.
“No. Or if there was it was covered up.”
“Driver only?”
“Yes.”
“Where, and what was his DOT?”
Alex gave the direction of travel from the location she’d last seen the truck. It felt odd, to be on this side of giving a basic statement. She was the one usually asking the questions, even if it was only of the evidence brought to her.
“I can put this out to patrol,” Kayla suggested. “See if we can find the guy.”
Alex hesitated. “If he hasn’t already figured it out, I’m not sure I want him to know just yet that he’s been burned.”
“And if he has realized it, he’ll likely change his M.O.”
“Yes,” Alex agreed. “Dump the gardener’s rig, at least. Although that was pretty clever.”
“Very,” Kayla agreed. “The kind of thing you look right past. So we’re not dealing with some kind of rent-a-dope, hired just to trail you around.”
“No.”
Neither of the women needed to say anything more about the ramifications of that fact. Alex had known going in that she could be stirring up an Arizona scorpion’s nest, but that didn’t change the bottom line: the woman who had been the very heart and soul of Athena had been murdered, and now, for the first time in a decade, there might be a chance to find out who had done it and why. It was not a quest Alex would easily give up on.
The cell phone readout said “Unknown Name, Unknown Number,” but Alex thought she recognized the voice that said tentatively, “Agent Forsythe?”
“Yes.”
“This is Detective Hunt.”
They’d