Flashback

exactly where Marion had been when she’d been struck down. And her three-dimensional knowledge made it easy for her to picture the sequence of the attack.
A nighttime intruder could have easily hidden in the shadow of the big storage cabinets that stood around the perimeter of the entire room and never been noticed by someone who had no idea there was a problem. The unsuspecting Marion most likely would have walked right by without seeing a thing.
Which, of course, had given him a tremendous advantage—the opportunity to catch her completely by surprise. The fact that he’d attacked her when he could have safely stayed hidden told Alex this hadn’t been coincidence, or just a matter of Marion being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That had been a thin theory before, but with what she now knew, it had even more holes in it.
Enough holes to make it totally implausible.
She wondered why the police had given up so easily. Eric had told her that, as the junior officer, he’d had little input, had even been scoffed at when he tried—but why had his superiors let it go so easily? Had it simply been eagerness to put this high-profile, pressure-laden case behind them? Or was there more to it? Pressure from outside, perhaps?
Several nefarious and repugnant possibilities came to mind, and she didn’t like the smell of any of them. She didn’t like believing the world could really run that way, but she knew it could.
As she drove toward the county administration building, which housed the main office of the county attorney, she pondered the growing mountain of questions. She knew that one of the most basic tenets of law enforcement was that in most cases, the simplest, most obvious answer was the true one.
But in this case, she just couldn’t believe it.
It would, she thought as she made the turn onto Jefferson and began to look for parking, be so much easier to just take the path of least resistance.
But Athenas never took the easy road.
She stuffed a bottle of water into her satchel—and removed her weapon and locked it in the trunk, since taking it into the building would be more hassle than it was worth—and headed for the doors. There weren’t that many people left who had been there when Marion had been the county attorney, so she guessed talking to them wasn’t going to take too much time.
It was what she had to do after this that was going to eat up the hours.
When she left the building three hours later, the only thing she knew for sure was that if anyone had anything bad to say about Marion Gracelyn, they were keeping it to themselves.
She’d run into situations before where death suddenly elevated an ordinary person to near sainthood. It was a normal response born of complex human emotions, and she’d been trained to look beyond it for the truth. But those cases had been for the most part without the complication of legal and political machinations.
Unlike this one. No one got to the rank of U.S. senator without making an enemy or two along the way, but if Marion’s were in the county attorney’s office, they were deeply hidden now.
She went back to the hotel with a handful of notes, stopping for ice at the vending area on her floor. Once she was at her room she carefully inspected the several markers she’d left in place after the maid had finished cleaning.
The thin thread she fastened at the top of the door, where no one would likely look, remained unbroken and attached. The faint dusting of powder she’d spread inside the door was undisturbed, no sign of a footprint. The bit of tape she’d left on the inside lip of the drawer that contained her laptop was intact, the thread tied to the inner latch of her suitcase unbroken.
Everything else was as she’d left it; the book on the nightstand at the same exact angle, the drapes open exactly the length of her forearm, the bathroom door exactly the length of her running shoe away from the edge of the tub.
She was as certain as she could be that no one had been in the room. Or if they had, they were so good she wouldn’t have been able to tell anyway.
She got out her laptop, connecting the power cord for what she knew was going to be a marathon session. As it booted up, she quickly changed into some casual yoga pants and a T-shirt, put some ice in a glass and filled it with water, then sat down at the table to begin.
First, she turned off her cell phone; just about everyone she knew had the number, and she didn’t want to be interrupted for casual chat. She’d given only the people she would want to talk to right now the hotel name and number, trusting even the hotel-routed landline more than the too-easily monitored cell phone just now.
She logged on to the FBI system, went through the security process and started. The list of names, all of them culled from cases Marion had prosecuted, was long and varied. It took her a few minutes to get into the rhythm of the system; she was much more familiar with the evidence software than running suspects.
The first one she checked was the rapist G.C. had mentioned. Gary Finkle. The man had gotten out of prison, briefly, but he’d immediately gone back to his old ways and was back inside in less than a year, this time with no possibility for parole, after he’d murdered his next victim.
“So much for rehabbing sexual predators,” Alex muttered and went on.
She wished things were as simple as they seemed on television; she’d love to be able to wrap this up in an hour or so of fast-paced effort.
Maybe with music, she thought. A nice rock score.
Laughing inwardly at her silliness, Alex plowed on, knowing that if nothing promising turned up among these names, she was going