“Yes,” G.C. said. “But that’s the very thing some powerful people were afraid of. Sad to say that some still are.”

  “Afraid enough to kill?”

  Even as she said it, Alex shook her head ruefully. Of all people, she knew better than to question that.

  “Just how bad was the opposition to Athena?”

  “Startling,” G.C. said. “Or at least it seemed that way to me.”

  “But you thought it was a good idea to begin with,” she pointed out.

  “Yes. I’d wished there was something like it from the time you were five years old and I realized what we had on our hands.”

  She blinked. “What you had on your hands?”

  G.C. gave her the amused and proud smile that had warmed and encouraged her throughout her life. He’d made the absence of her late father so much more bearable, even through his own pain at having lost his beloved son.

  “A girl who refused to see or set any limits,” he said, “no matter what anyone said.”

  He didn’t say it, he never would, but Alex knew he meant her mother, who had seemingly spent her life trying to rein in her rambunctious, redheaded daughter. Girls don’t do that was the phrase she remembered hearing most. She’d have been crippled by it if she hadn’t been so stubbornly resistant, and if it hadn’t been for G.C. countering her mother’s negativity with his own brand of high-powered encouragement.

  And, she had to admit, her brother, Ben, and his teasing that had goaded her on—intentionally, she later realized—to greater heights. If not for these things, she might have succumbed and become one of those women she had little use for, because they had little use.

  Women like, sadly, her mother.

  She jerked her mind out of that well-worn rut and back to the matter at hand. “What kind of opposition? From what quarters?”

  Resting his elbows on the arms of his chair, G.C. steepled his hands in front of him and rested his chin on his forefingers. It was his pondering position, and as a child who adored her grandfather, Alex had long ago adopted it herself. She saw his eyes go distant, unfocused, knew he was remembering.

  “Athena was truly Marion’s brainchild,” he said. “Her views on women’s rights were well-known. So, many were surprised when she opposed opening U.S. military academies to women. But she knew what they’d be facing, that they’d have to fight so much harder than the men at those institutions did.”

  Alex nodded. “And it was hard enough for the men, without adding intimidation, harassment and the just plain not being wanted that women would face into the mix. I understand all that. But didn’t a ‘separate but equal’ sort of solution placate those opposed?”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But we found that many simply opposed women being prepared for any part in what was then a man’s world. Some almost violently so.”

  “And one perhaps murderously so?” Alex said softly.

  G.C. sighed. “It certainly seems possible.”

  “Even probable.” Alex shook her head. “Although it’s hard for me to believe anybody could hate us that much.”

  “I’m not sure it’s about hatred,” G.C. said, “as much as hanging on to a tradition, a way of life that’s all they know.”

  “So was the Civil War,” Alex pointed out in a wry tone.

  G.C. smiled at her as if she were an exceptionally clever student. “Point taken.”

  Turning her attention back to the letter, she held up the last page.

  “What’s with this?” she asked, pointing at the drawing in the lower left corner.

  “I don’t know,” G.C. said, the tone of his voice telling her that he had spent more than a little time trying to figure out the meaning of the hand-drawn graphic that was almost cartoonish, yet at the same time quite ominous.

  Only, she told herself, because it was a spider. A big, fat one, crouched in the middle of a web made small by the looming body of the arachnid.

  “All I can tell you,” Charles said, “is that Marion was not a doodler.”

  Alex looked at the drawing again. “So…this isn’t a casual scribble. It means something.”

  “It did to her,” he confirmed.

  Which meant it did to Alex, as well. Marion Gracelyn was Athena; it wouldn’t exist without her vision and effort. And anything that threatened Athena or anything connected to it threatened Alex, because Athena was irrevocably entwined in her life and her heart.

  As was the case for all the Cassandras. They’d renewed their promises to each other and to Athena in the aftermath of the investigation that had begun with Rainy Carrington’s murder. She hadn’t expected to have the call come again so soon, but apparently it had. And she would respond.

  Any and every Cassandra would always rally to Athena.

  Chapter 2

  “So, what do you know about working cold cases?”

  Justin Cohen blinked, then drew back slightly as he stared at Alex across the table and the remnants of their lunch. He was in town from Phoenix for a week of seminars he’d been sent to attend, but their schedules were so chaotic that moments like this when they both had a few minutes of free time were pounced upon somewhat rabidly.

  “Probably not as much as you do?” he suggested, sounding puzzled at the unexpected question. “I mean, you’re the forensics expert, and forensics is where more cold cases are broken than just about anywhere else.”

  Alex stirred her glass of iced lemonade with the straw. “I’ve gone over and over what’s there, in our files. Nothing that led to a suspect at the time, but plenty to nail him once he’s found.”

  His eyes—those stunning blue-green eyes whose image she’d been carrying around in her head since she was a teenager—narrowed.

  “So you’re talking about a specific case, not just cold cases in general.” He didn’t make it a question, but she answered that way, anyway.

  “Yes.”

  “And a federal case, if we have a file on it.”

  “Yes. Federal because of who was involved.”

  “How cold a case is it, dare I ask?”

  “A chilly decade or so,” she answered.

  “Hmm. Well, I’ve heard of worse. It’s becoming more common as the technology advances. A guy I went through the academy with broke a thirty-five-year-old kidnapping case a couple of years ago.”

  “How?”

  “DNA,” Justin said. “But that was just the end result. He spent months before that talking to a lot of people, some of them old enough or sick enough that he had a lot of work to do sorting out what information was reliable. And going through every bit of paperwork and evidence with the proverbial fine-tooth comb. Over and over and over again. Until he found the guy to match the DNA to.”

  Alex’s mouth quirked. “I was afraid of that.”

  “You?” Justin scoffed in disbelief. “You’re not afraid of anything.”

  The response warmed her, but still she told him silently, Oh, yes I am. I’m afraid of you, how you make me feel.

  She knew her reaction was over the top, but the logical side of her mind kept insisting she was nurturing a childish fantasy she should have long outgrown.

  The Dark Angel.

  The memory of Athena’s midnight intruder, the boy the Cassandras had dubbed with that incredibly romantic nickname, kept getting in the way of her looking honestly at the man he’d become, who had so quickly become part of her life—mostly because he simply refused not to be.

  But that boy, so passionately dedicated to finding out the truth about his sister Kelly’s death back when Alex was still in school, had fired all their imaginations and been so deeply etched into her mind that…

  It suddenly struck her that he knew more about cold cases than she did on a very personal level.

  “You never gave up on your sister’s case,” she said. “You became an agent because of it.”

  He never liked talking about the reason he’d joined the FBI. She never doubted the death of his sister was the reason, but that kind of obsession was too Mulder-ish, he’d joked.

  But she knew it was true. She knew he’d been driven, some even said possessed, so much that she’d been a little concerned about what would happen, what he would do when his quest was finally over. And last year it had ended, as triumphantly as it could for him. But he seemed to have settled nicely into the life he’d carved for himself by sheer force of will and determination.

  Perhaps in the process of his quest, he’d found his true calling. She hoped so.

  After that moment’s inner acknowledgment of his success, she went on. “Even when everyone told you there was no case, that she had simply died in surrogate childbirth, you kept on. For nearly twenty years.”

  He sat there for a long moment. Alex guessed he was thinking, as was she, of the huge, frightening mess his sister had been devoured by—the mess she and the Cassandras had recently exposed. Since it had directly involved Athena, the Cassandras had vowed not to stop until the truth was uncovered. When it finally had been, the ramifications were so broad she still had trouble taking it all in.

  “That was personal,” he said at last.

  “So is this,” she said.

  “What? Your federal cold case is personal?” He seemed surprised.

  “It is. It’s connected to Athena.”

  “Isn’t everything you do?”

  His tone was wry, but he was grinning. Justin had come to know a great deal about Athena and the kind of women it turned out in the past year and a half. He knew what the school meant to all who attended, and Alex knew he’d come to appreciate the strength of the bond between the graduates and their alma mater.

  “Yes,” she said without embarrassment. “But this is different. It’s not just the school. This has to do with the…creator of Athena.”

  His brow furrowed. “Allison’s mother?”

  He’d met Allison Gracelyn during the unraveling of the mystery surrounding Lab 33 and its genetic experiments, the motive behind Rainy’s murder. Rainy had found out that the lab had used her for an experiment, back when she’d been an Athena student. And when her adult investigation had threatened to expose them, they’d killed her. Alex felt the usual pang the thought of Rainy, and how much she missed her, brought on. But she buried it for now; there was another Athena murder to unravel.

  “Yes,” she said. “Marion Gracelyn. Senator Marion Gracelyn.”

  His forehead cleared. “Ah. Hence the federal investigation.”

  She nodded.

  “Didn’t they determine she’d interrupted a burglar?” he asked.

  “That’s what they said,” Alex agreed, her voice neutral.

  “But you’re not buying it.”

  “I never did,” she said. “There was no reason an ordinary burglar would have broken into Athena.”

  He considered that for a moment. “Can’t argue with that,” he agreed. “It’s too far out, too isolated, and there wasn’t enough to steal—except maybe some hard-to-fence lab equipment and computers—to make it worthwhile.”

  She smiled, grateful he had so quickly seen the facts. His eyes widened, and she thought she heard him suck in a breath.

  “Whatever brought on that smile, tell me so I can do it again. And again.”

  Alex fought down the heat that threatened to rise in her cheeks. He always managed to do that to her. He was so…blunt, sometimes, about how much he wanted her, and wanted her to feel the same way. It was such a change from Emerson Howland’s cool, unaffected manner. It was taking her a while to adjust, to trust that it was real.

  She pushed thoughts of her former fiancé away, along with any effort to respond to Justin’s unexpected request. She knew she was going to have to quit putting it off soon, but now was not the time. She had too much on her plate right now.

  “There’s new evidence,” she said.

  He seemed reluctant to accept the change back to the original topic, but at last nodded at her to go on. She told him about the letter. And again he wasted no time with trying to explain things away.

  “So she knew someone—or maybe plural—was after her. And those supposed accidents were just failed attempts.”

  She nearly smiled at him again, but stopped in time; she wasn’t ready for another round of dealing with his ardency just now.

  “Exactly,” she said.

  “How long’s the list?” he asked.

  “Of suspects? Lengthy. I was thinking I’d start with the ones here.”

  “Here? You mean in D.C.?”

  She nodded. “There are a few of them who didn’t want to see Athena even exist, let alone succeed.”

  “Which it has, and then some. It’s a force to be reckoned with these days.”

  Athena Force. The new nickname they’d chosen for their expanding group of crime-fighting Athenians echoed in her head. The warmth of belonging to such a stellar group—and of having Kayla, one of her closest friends—back in her life, filled her.

  “Given the circumstances and that a lot of those people are still here, that’s where I’d start,” he said.

  “But?” she asked, hearing the unspoken qualifier in his voice.

  “In the end, I think most cold cases are solved at the scene, or in the place most closely connected to it.” He shrugged. “That’s why I kept going back to Athena over and over again after Kelly died. It was the only connection to her death that I was sure of.”

  She’d already had the feeling that she was going to end up back in Arizona. It all seemed to come back to that. As before, Athena seemed at the center of the storm. Marion had to have known she’d be stirring up things when she’d begun the academy for young women, but Alex wondered if she’d ever imagined just how much. Or how far and for how long the ripples would spread.

  So, she’d be going back. She hadn’t expected to be investigating another murder so soon, but when it came to her beloved school she’d do whatever had to be done. Any Cassandra would.

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  At Justin’s words she snapped back to the present. She appreciated the offer, but this was Athena, her home and her problem. Or theirs, she amended. She figured she’d end up calling on some of her fellow Cassandras before this was over and done. And Allison, of course. She was first on the list.

  But she’d leave the door open, she thought.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  He nodded as if he understood.

  And perhaps he did, Alex thought. He seemed to understand a lot. Perhaps it was just his innate knowledge and acceptance of the concept of loyalty. She knew he had it; the man had spent half his life pursuing the truth about his sister’s death. They’d been closer than most siblings, the barely legal Kelly having fought hard to keep her teenage younger brother with her after their parents had died. And Justin had never lost his determination to see through the last and only thing he could do for his beloved big sister.

  Would he be that dedicated and loyal to anyone he loved?

  She brushed away the question she wasn’t sure she wanted answered just yet. But she was going to have to deal with it soon. They were growing steadily closer, and she was going to have to make up her mind just how close she wanted to get to this man who was both a teenage dream come to life and a threat to her adult peace of mind.

  But for now she had to focus on Athena. And a decade-old murder.

  “I’ve moved on, Ms. Forsythe. Long ago.”

  Was there a bit of extra emphasis on the Ms.? Alex wondered. Was that General Stanley’s way of releasing a lingering distaste for what, at the time, he felt had been forced upon him?

  It made no sense, really. Marion had been one of the military’s greatest supporters, and to kill her over something like this would be an exceptionally grievous case of cutting off their own nose.

  She pondered her next words. She’d taken the week off work, hoping in that time that she could at least get a feel of how difficult investigating Marion’s death was going to be. She’d already made a flight reservation to Phoenix for a couple days from now, based on what Justin had told her, so she was pushing to either clear the people who were here in D.C. or pry a direction to look out of one of them.

  “How do you feel about Athena now, sir?”

  She made her tone respectful, both because of his two-star rank and because she wanted answers more than she minded giving a verbal bow to the man. She had tremendous admiration and respect for the military—“land of the free because of the brave” summed it up for her—so it wasn’t difficult for her to speak carefully to this veteran.

 

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