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Chapter One

Texas Ranger Kit Saunders took cover behind a fat pine tree and watched with his binoculars from a distance Seven people accorave site at the Evergreen Cemetery on this hot July afternoon in Austin

The woman was Natalie Harris, and her husband, Rodney Parker Harris, age thirty-three, was being laid to rest As far as any of thehis , knew, the deceased had been an accountant with LifeSpan Pharo he’d been found at the low-end Sleepy Hollow Hotel, dead of a gunshot wound to the temple

Kit’s captain, T J Horton, had assigned him to the case only yesterday

The police had run the victi to their report, the na of aliases The nainal birth certificate was that of escaped felon Harold Park froo

Park was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list After serving only two years of a sixty-year sentence for rand larceny, he and another prisoner, convicted killer Alonzo Morales, had escaped during a transfer from the ADX Federal Penitentiary in Florence, Colorado, to Canaan Federal Prison in Pennsylvania Since that tione bythem

The preliested the gunshot wound was self-inflicted, but nothing would be official until all the forensic evidence had been reviewed So didn’t add up in Kit’s mind It didn’t make sense that the felon would kill himself A clever killer could have set it up to look like suicide

A search of Harold-alias-Rod’s bank records revealed that 400,000 had been deposited into his checking account one day and withdrawn the next The day after that, he’d been found dead in his hotel rooe deposit were inconsistent with his earnings from the pharmaceutical company, and the abrupt withdraas just plain suspicious Normally that kind of money would have been put in a money market or the stock market at least

Since Harold-alias-Rod had crossed state lines and had been an arers to take over These were early days in the case The police report also stated that Mrs Harris had hired an attorney who’d attempted to serve him with divorce papers on the day he was shot Since they weren’t yet divorced and he’d absconded with hts to under property laws, it appeared she could have a motive to see him dead

But if Harris had still been living a life

of crime and the money was stolen, then there may have been accomplices involved—ht be potential culprits If the as innocent of any wrongdoing, then she herselffor themoney

Kit hadn’t met Natalie Harris The only inforht-year-old pharhter naraveside

He was going to have to build this case fro of the service today, he’d decided to study the people who showed up and take pictures with a long-range lens Oftentiloat Of the seven people present, tere females, but he didn’t sense they were fa shot and would know if he saw that face again

Before long the people asseo their separate ways Kit’s first frontal view of Mrs Harris being helped by the mortuary staff came as a shock to his senses She was a true beauty; maybe five foot six He took a picture of her The classy, tailored black suit couldn’t disguise theabout her appealed to hi tier

Kit didn’t knohat he’d expected Maybe to find ain tears? But froiven in to whatever e Her lovely classic bone structure was undermined by features that showed no ani

But since she’d filed for divorce,before the papers had been served Whether elated he was dead at her hands, relieved he was gone by another person’s doing, or sad or even haunted by the way he’d died, the frozen mask he saw in front of him revealed no secrets