Athena Force: Books 1-6

by Justine Davis, Amy J. Fetzer, Katherine Garbera, Meredith Fletcher, Catherine Mann

  “I’ve still got a bit more personal leave time coming,” she said. “My boss has been a bit of a pain about it, but since I’ve never taken any personal leave until now, he’s stayed fairly calm. He’s not happy about me taking it all at once, but there’s not a whole lot he can do.”

  “Stick you on graveyard and make you file?” Kayla suggested wryly.

  “He hasn’t tried that yet,” Alex said. “Is that the voice of experience speaking?”

  “Yep.”

  “Who’d you tick off?”

  “Which time?” Kayla asked.

  Alex’s mouth curved slightly. “That often, huh? How did you do that? Besides being female, Navajo and smart, I mean.”

  “That isn’t enough?”

  They both smiled then, relaxed and easy, and it was almost like old times between them. And it felt good, Alex admitted. Darned good.

  The signal finally changed to green and Kayla moved the SUV smoothly into traffic. Once she was settled in a lane, she spoke again.

  “What does your fiancé think about you taking off across the country like this?”

  “He’s not happy, but he understands. Or if he doesn’t, he doesn’t say so.”

  “Wise man.”

  “It’s more that nothing rattles him much.”

  “I imagine to be a heart surgeon like he is, you have to be steady.”

  Someone had clearly been keeping Kayla up-to-date if she not only knew Alex was engaged, but that he was a doctor. And a heart surgeon specifically. She wondered if the information had been offered, or if Kayla had asked about her.

  “He’s that, all right. Unshakable. Although sometimes stick-in-the-mud fits better.”

  She hadn’t meant to say that, but that kind of thing had been popping out lately. All of her small dissatisfactions seemed to be bubbling to the surface, manifesting in stray thoughts and slips of the tongue like this one. She’d chalk it up to tension about Rainy, but if she was brutally honest she had to admit it had been happening even before.

  Kayla changed lanes to dodge a truck that was spitting out rocks from its uncovered load. “Doesn’t sound like you’re very happy with him right now.”

  “He’s a brilliant surgeon, and saves a lot of lives,” Alex said, aware she was sounding a bit defensive. But what she was saying was true. “And he’s generous, calm and very patient. He doesn’t like my choice of work, particularly, but he understands how important it is to me. Just as I understand how important his is. It’s a…comfortable relationship.”

  “Comfortable?”

  “Yes,” Alex said, not liking the sound of it herself when she said it out loud. “Emerson’s all right.”

  “Emerson?” Kayla’s voice rose just slightly, as did one arched eyebrow.

  “Yes. It’s a family name. The first one was named after the poet.”

  “But…do you really call him that?”

  Alex frowned, puzzled. “It’s his name. What else would I call him?”

  “I don’t know.” Kayla shot her a sideways look. “I guess I just have a hard time imagining anyone calling out ‘Emerson’in the middle of having sex.”

  Alex flushed. “That’s not a problem, since we’ve decided to wait until we’re married.”

  Kayla blinked. “Wait? Haven’t you been engaged nearly a year?”

  That the ease with which Emerson had suggested they wait until they were married and the fact that it had been his idea in the first place bothered her, was not something Alex often admitted. It wasn’t like she was a virgin saving herself for marriage, after all. As time went on, she was beginning to worry about whether they were going to be compatible or not. And Kayla’s astonishment rubbed along that particular nerve, which was already a bit raw.

  “And your point would be?” she asked in her chilliest Forsythe voice.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all.” Kayla fell silent. Rather pointedly silent.

  “If there’s something you want to say, just say it,” Alex said, although she wasn’t sure they wouldn’t be better off if she just let it pass. They’d been slowly heading toward mending the rift between them, and now the old monster seemed to be rising anew.

  “There’s nothing I have any business saying. I’m hardly in a position to dispense advice on the subject.”

  Caution warred with the need to get it all out, even though it might open up the barely scarred-over wound between them. Alex finally decided there was no point in healing if it just covered up an infection that still raged.

  “What advice would that be?” she asked carefully. “That we shouldn’t get married without having had sex? Or that there’s something wrong with us?”

  Kayla hesitated for a rather long moment. Alex waited. Kayla gave her a quick glance, then shrugged.

  “At least when I made my big mistake,” she said, “I did it with passion.”

  Alex bit back a snappy reply. She didn’t want to go back to the nearly nonexistent relationship of before and the painful truth of what Kayla had said stopped her.

  Passion.

  Yes, if there was something missing in her personal life, it was passion. Emerson would find such strong emotion unseemly, she was sure. He liked his life calm, tidy and organized, and passion was not. Passion was high-strung and messy. Passion made you act first and think later, which was something she couldn’t recall Emerson ever doing since she’d known him.

  He was passionate about his work, she knew that. The hours he put in certainly suggested it. She had finally decided his style of passion was simply different than hers, not that it didn’t exist.

  Or perhaps he was so passionate about his work that there was none left for anything else.

  Including her.

  And suddenly she saw her whole relationship with Emerson Howland through new eyes, and she didn’t like what she was looking at. And for the sake of restoring a friendship that had once been at the center of her life, the least she could do was admit it.

  “Touché,” she said quietly.

  Clearly startled at the concession, Kayla glanced at her for a brief moment before she had to turn her attention back to the road.

  “You’re not angry?”

  “Yes, I am angry. But not at you. At myself, for letting my life…slide. I’m going to have to do something about that. Soon.”

  “You will,” Kayla said, sounding relieved. “You’re the strongest woman I’ve ever known.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short. You’ve done well,” Alex said softly. “As Tory said, you pulled it out.”

  Kayla let out a slow, drawn-out breath, as if she’d been holding it for a very long time. “I admitted long ago that Mike was a mistake. But because of him, I have Jazz. And that makes up for it.”

  Alex almost told her then, almost poured out her fears that what had been done to Rainy had also been done to her. Her fears that she might never have her own child to hold and cherish. That she would never have what Kayla had. And the sudden, unexpected desire to have it was an irony not lost on Alex, considering Kayla’s means of getting it had been what had driven the wedge between them.

  But at the last second she held it all back. She could see no sense in confusing the issue when she wasn’t certain it was even true.

  But she made up her mind to find out, as soon as the opportunity arose. She needed to know. Had to know.

  Even if she dreaded the answer.

  Dr. Deborah Halburg’s office was in a fashionable building with a wonderfully cool—relatively speaking, since the temperature was into triple digits today—underground parking garage. There were several cars already parked there, but the lot was by no means full. Alex drove past a Mercedes dwarfed by a big luxury SUV, then a long, black BMW, a nondescript dark blue sedan and a pearl-white Lincoln. Mostly very upscale, she thought as she found a spot in the middle of the row where the elevators were, at the far end of the garage.

  The garage elevator opened into a glass-and-marble lobby graced with southwestern art ranging from a mural
of a coyote howling at the desert moon to a Kokopelli statue that actually played flute music. While Alex loved the haunting sounds of the native American flute, she found it somewhat disconcerting here amid all the marble and glass. To her it was music for the canyons and the wild places.

  She crossed the cool, elegant lobby to the bank of three elevators on the far wall. She pushed the button to summon a car, and while she was waiting for one to arrive she read the directory next to them to confirm she had the right suite number from Kayla.

  The elevator doors opened with a quiet whoosh, and she stepped inside. The elegance continued here, with marble and mirror. She pushed the button for the seventh floor, and instinctively scanned the car as the doors closed and it began to rise. There was the standard trapdoor in the ceiling, and a smoked glass bubble in one corner that she guessed hid a surveillance camera.

  The numbers of the floors were announced with a chime worthy of Westminster. When the light labeled seven lit up, the door slid open to reveal a foyer furnished like some grand hotel. A long table sat beneath a huge mirror on the opposite wall, and on the table sat a huge arrangement of flowers. Hibiscus, fragrant frangipani and a couple of others she didn’t know the names of offhand, but a tropical luxury here in the desert she was sure. And they were real, there was no question about that.

  Since she had grown up with this kind of elegance, she had a pretty good idea how much it cost. Assuming there was an arrangement on every floor, and likely several more besides, replacing the flowers alone—for she was certain no droopy or fading blooms were ever allowed—would be nearly a full-time job.

  The atmosphere of elegance and wealth made her think of her mother. And the thing she thought of was her mother’s reaction when Alex had told her she preferred to do the gardening herself, to get her own hands dirty. Her mother had been appalled at the idea—although she preferred it to some of Alex’s less genteel pursuits.

  The rock climbing about put her over the edge, Alex thought. Funny how belting around a course with dozens of fences aboard over a half-ton of hot-blooded horse was acceptable, but a simple climb to the top of a rock face was not. Her mother lived by a strange set of rules, rules Alex had been forever breaking. That her brother had gotten away with so much more, simply because he was a boy, was a double standard she had bucked until the day she’d left her mother’s home for good. Only the fact that Ben had agreed with her, and on occasion fought it beside her, had made it bearable even that long.

  Shaking her head as if to clear it of useless reminiscing, she looked around. A polished brass plaque directed her to her left for suite numbers 701-705. Only five suites taking up an entire side of this building gave her a clue as to the spaciousness of the offices. Rainy had paid a high price, Alex guessed, in her effort to conceive a child. It made what had possibly happened to her even more infuriating.

  The door to Dr. Halburg’s office stood ajar by a fraction of an inch. Alex almost laughed at herself as she stared at it for a moment, memories flooding her. This was the third door she’d found ajar since this chaos had started, and each time she’d found somebody with no business there behind them. But this was a doctor’s office, in a large office building, surely…

  Making assumptions had gotten her into trouble twice already. This time she’d be ready for anything, and when she opened the door to find a receptionist busy behind a counter and patients sitting quietly in the waiting room, she’d feel relieved, not foolish.

  She shifted her shoulder bag and slid her fingers between the two sections so that she could retrieve her weapon in an instant. Then she nudged open the door.

  The office was dark.

  It was as elegantly, albeit somewhat more contemporarily, furnished as the rest of the building. But it was empty, except for some fish in a large, colorful saltwater tank. No patients. No receptionist. No lights on except one in the fish tank. And apparently, no doctor.

  But the door had been open.

  Silently, Alex stepped over to the high counter that enclosed the reception desk. Between the open door to the corridor and the fish tank, there was enough light for her to see even though there were no exterior windows. There were no files out on the desk, nothing to indicate anyone had been here at all today.

  Curious, she walked around the counter and sat down in front of the computer. She assumed the appointment files would be secured by a password, but she thought it worth a try. And it was. She couldn’t get into the appointment program, or any patient files, but she did manage to open up a calendar. A calendar that had an entry for two days ago, to notify all scheduled patients their appointments for the next ten days were cancelled and would be rescheduled later.

  She frowned at the screen. Was the doctor herself ill? Family emergency? Her absence had obviously been last minute.

  She sat for a moment longer, looking around. There was no sign of a file cabinet of any size, no patient records. She wondered if Dr. Halburg kept them in a separate room, or perhaps her personal office. There were many other types of businesses besides doctors in this building, she’d noticed, so she hoped they wouldn’t be tucked away in a central file repository as was often the custom in hospitals or all-medical buildings.

  She got up and headed through the door at the back of the reception area. Immediately she noticed one door of several, the one at the very end of the hall, was ajar.

  Four open doors, she thought. What are the chances?

  As Tory had said, nil to none. First, she looked around until she saw a door just to the left marked exit, which she guessed would put patients back out in the hall without having to trek back through the waiting room. Now that she had her escape route should she need it, she reached for her bag again, this time curling her fingers around the butt of her Smith & Wesson.

  She crept down to the slightly open door. There must be an exterior window in this office, because light streamed through the crack. She listened for a moment, heard the faint rustle of paper.

  The doctor?

  She didn’t think so. Her gut didn’t think so.

  She nudged the door with her toe, leaving both hands free.

  She had barely three seconds to register the scene before her. A man silhouetted by the sunlight coming through the window across the room, bent over the large, cherrywood desk in the center of the office. Files scattered all over the gleaming surface.

  The gun in his right hand.

  She knew she hadn’t made a sound, but he somehow seemed to sense she was there. The gun in his hand leveled on her as he turned.

  She made a split-second decision and dived out of the doorway. She hadn’t really expected him to shoot, and he didn’t. But she’d had about enough of this. She’d had about enough of him.

  She ran out the exit door she’d noted earlier and, guessing he would come after her, she headed not for the elevators but for the stairwell at the end of the hall. She would have hit the button for the elevator as a false trail, but she doubted she’d have had time. She knew in seconds that she was right; she barely got through the door to the stairwell—holding it so it closed quietly—before he raced out into the hallway.

  The stairway was much more utilitarian than the rest of the building, although it was still painted in coordinating colors rather than the usual institutional gray or white. It was also carpeted.

  That would help, she thought. Figuring he would see the stairway and check it out, she grabbed the railing and went over, dropping down to the next floor landing. The carpet indeed muffled any sound.

  One more floor, she thought, in case he’s thorough.

  She went over the railing of the landing again, down to the fifth floor landing. She’d noticed on the floor above that there were round metal cross supports beneath the stairs. With a leap, she was able to grab one. She doubled up, hooking her feet over another support and lifting her body upward. Now she should be out of sight even if he came down to the next landing and peered over. She could have gone through the door onto another floo
r, but she didn’t want to risk the noise, plus, she didn’t want a second closed door between them. She wanted to be able to hear what he did.

  She’d barely gotten herself into position when a door above her opened. It sounded the right distance away to be the seventh floor door she’d gone through. She waited, listening. Nothing happened for a moment. Was he listening as she was? Then steps began, down the flight above her, to the first landing she’d jumped to.

  Okay, so he was thorough.

  Assuming it was him. For the first time she wondered what she would say if a startled stranger saw her. But on the next landing, the one above her, the steps stopped again. She held her breath. He was so close now she swore she could smell him, swore she got the faintest whiff of some spicy kind of aftershave or something.

  What a stupid thing to notice while you’re hanging here like a giant redheaded bat, she snapped at herself. Keep on task here, Alexandra!

  The only time she called herself that was when she was angry at herself. And she was now, because her mind was wandering when she should be focused on evading the man hunting for her.

  She closed her eyes, hung there and listened.

  Steps again. Retreating this time. And at last the upper door opening and closing again. And then, fainter, another door. He’d gone back to the office.

  Still she waited, in case it had been a feint. But at long last she let herself down, gratefully; clinging to those supports for that long had taken some strength out of her. She shook her arms a little, letting the muscles relax after the exertion.

  And then she reached for her cell phone and called the cops.

  Let Mr. FBI Special Agent Justin Cohen wiggle his way out of this one.

  Alex felt a great sense of satisfaction as she sat in her rental car a block away and saw two Tucson Police units arrive. She’d been careful to make her anonymous report casual, saying she’d just passed the office door, seen it open and heard something inside, when she knew the doctor was gone.

  She hadn’t mentioned the gun; for all her irritation she didn’t want the guy to get shot by cops going in thinking they had an armed burglar on their hands. At least, not until she learned if he had something to do with Rainy’s death. And he would get it all straightened out, she was sure; for all their irritation with the feds, as Kayla had mentioned, locals still had respect for that FBI badge. But with any luck, it would take him a while to worm his way out of it, explain why he had broken into a well-known doctor’s office.