Proof. Justine Davis

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СКАЧАТЬ She didn’t care as long as he took some action. Her main concern was to have the area secured until she could get Rainy out of there.

      “Hmm.” The security man rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Your friend who died, was she FBI, too?”

      “No. She’s an—she was an attorney, in Tucson.”

      He noticed her stumble on the change in tense and seemed to reach a decision. Thankfully, it was the decision she had wanted.

      “I’ve got a couple of hours of paperwork to do this morning before the end of my shift. I’ll just grab myself a chair and do it sitting down here. That give you enough time to make your arrangements?”

      “It should.” Alex smiled at him gratefully. “Thank you. Thank you very much. I really appreciate this.”

      He didn’t mention calling the sheriff’s office, and she was glad of that even though it suggested he still didn’t quite believe there was reason for alarm. Alex knew she was already on thin ice here. Only professional courtesy, the fact that police lieutenant Kayla Ryan had requested it and a fierce, stubborn insistence on her part had enabled her to sit in on Rainy’s autopsy that morning in the first place.

      They’d cut her some slack because she was FBI, but it wouldn’t take much more to wear out her welcome. It never took a whole lot to wear out a fed’s welcome with city, county or even state law enforcement. And pointing out that they were all supposed to be on the same side never seemed to help much.

      The local authorities hadn’t been enthused about the autopsy in the first place. They had clearly already resolved the case in their minds.

      Rainy had fallen asleep at the wheel just outside Eloy, then gone off the road and crashed into a pole. Period. There was nothing left but the loose ends to tie up. That was the way the official report read, and that was what the investigating officers believed.

      Alex knew the autopsy had been done because there were no apparent reasons for the accident. She guessed that the officers suspected Rainy had been drunk or on something illegal.

      As if.

      Alex had the sudden thought that she herself had sometimes dismissed the claims of family and friends about their loved ones.

      In the lab, she let the fascination of the scientific process keep the reality of death at a safe distance. The fact that she was in the trace evidence department and dealt mostly with hair, fibers, paint, blood, glass and other things added to that buffer.

      When the evidence pointed strongly one way, sometimes you did have to go with the numbers, simply because you had nothing else to base a decision on. If the odds were high in one direction, it took a lot of solid evidence to counter them.

      And that was evidence they didn’t yet have for Rainy.

      “Yet” being the operative word there, she told herself, shoring up her determination.

      But she was going to have to tread very carefully. Those local authorities had also made it clear what they thought of her getting any more involved because of her personal relationship with the deceased.

      The deceased.

      That’s what Rainy was to the officials. All she was. Just another fatality case. Already death was stealing away Rainy’s identity, stealing away the essence of who and what she was. These people here, making these decisions, had never known the brilliant, beautiful, generous woman she’d been. The woman who by sheer force of personality had changed six young lives and touched countless others, and who would never have tolerated being referred to in such an impersonal manner.

      But Alex had known her. And loved her. And she’d be damned if she’d let anyone reduce Rainy to a case number, a statistic, just another nameless driver falling asleep at the wheel. There was more to this than that, much more. Her gut was screaming that there was, and she’d learned to trust it, whether in the lab or in life.

      The problem was, her gut feelings and what little strange evidence she had led to Athena Academy. And Alex wasn’t about to draw any attention to the school unless there was no choice. For now, the team name the Cassandras had chosen all those years ago would have an ironic significance—they were all feeling there was more to Rainy’s demise than the official determination of “accidental death,” yet, like the prophetess of old, they could get no one to believe them.

      As she waited for the security man to return with the mentioned chair, Alex retrieved the smock she’d hastily stuffed into the trash can just down the hall after calling in the intruder to security. There was a laundry cart standing unattended outside another door, and she ran down and stuffed the disguise into the soiled linens bag.

      By the time the security supervisor came back she was standing back where she’d been, looking as if she’d been there all the time. In addition to the chair, he carried a large clipboard with a stack of forms on it, so he’d clearly been truthful about settling in to do paperwork.

      She thanked him again, clasping his hand in hers, and told him she’d let him know as soon as arrangements were made to move Rainy. Then she headed quickly toward the elevators. It took her a few minutes to find a place at the hospital where she was both allowed to use her cell phone and able to get a signal. She ended up back at the main front doors, and even then she had to walk out from under the huge cement quadrangle-shaped portico that marked the entrance.

      It was just after 6:00 a.m., but she didn’t hesitate in dialing Kayla Ryan’s cell phone.

      She felt a strange sense of both familiarity and oddness as she made the call. There had been a time when she would have called her old Athena classmate anytime there was something bursting out of her that she simply had to talk about. But that closeness had disappeared a long time ago, and the chasm that had opened between them over Kayla’s affair with Mike Bridges, the cocky young officer who had fathered Kayla’s daughter and then deserted them both, had never quite healed.

      But none of that ancient history mattered now. The Cassandra promise had been invoked. Every one of them would live up to the promise, and they would all pull together as if the years since they’d left Athena Academy had never existed.

      Kayla answered on the first ring.

      “It’s Alex.” She wasted no time on preamble. “An intruder was in the morgue at the hospital. He was trying to do something to or with Rainy.”

      She heard Kayla suck in a breath, could imagine the change in her expression as she snapped into police mode. “Any idea who?”

      “No. Didn’t get a look at him at all. He was tall, in good shape. He was good, maybe a pro. Probably covered his tracks well. But I’m not even sure what he was going to do. I interrupted him just as he was…reaching for her.”

      She bit her lip. Hard. Tasted blood. Didn’t care. God, this hurt so much, to even think that the cold, lifeless body in a drawer was really, truly Rainy. Or at least all that was left of her in this world.

      “We’ve got to get her out of there and back on Athena turf,” Kayla said, with a briskness Alex guessed hid feelings similar to her own. Kayla had also voiced her own first choice; she’d feel much better when Rainy was out of the hands of strangers who didn’t know who they had, how special she was, that she was worth any effort.

      “Yes. To the morgue there in Athens, preferably,” Alex said, referring to the small town adjacent СКАЧАТЬ