“Didn’t sound like nothing.” Her drawl, accentuated by the arch of a single, perfectly plucked eyebrow, accused him of the lie.

No way was he going to tell her that the document on the computer screen was personal. The last thing he needed was Meri-Jo breathing down his neck.

After being shut down by Bentz at the homicide crime scene, he’d spent a little time talking to the building’s superintendent, extracting the basics for his story, along with some sketchy information on the victim, Teri Gaines. He’d been careful not to cross the line, hadn’t pushed to view the crime scene or anything that would, at this point, piss off anyone in the department. He needed to do this job, of course, but it would be downright stupid to step on any toes in the New Orleans Police Department if he wanted to join their ranks.

“Wait. You’re working on the murder of the prostitute, right?” Meri-Jo was interested because she wanted his job. She knew he was thinking of leaving, and she made zero bones about the fact that she coveted his position as the crime writer. She wanted it now. Or sooner. “Trying to tie this one in with Father John?” She waved a hand, as if shooing away a bothersome fly. “Right? That psycho who dressed himself as a priest and killed hookers.” She gave a fake shudder. “What a douche.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“The truth, Bridges. The only way I ‘put it.’” She hooked her fingers into air quotes and glared at him as if he’d somehow offended her. Meri-Jo prided herself on being a fact-finding, truth-seeking, hungry-but-honest reporter who took her job more than seriously.

“Yeah, right,” Matthew Kennedy said as he cruised by with what was probably his second super-sized Diet Coke of the day. “That’s you, Meri, taking journalism to a whole new level.” Pushing sixty, with an I’ve-seen-it-all smile and a nose for self-important BS, Kennedy had been with the newspaper through three or four incarnations and still, he survived. “Thank God you’re keeping us old warhorses on the straight and narrow.”

“Shove it, Kennedy.”

“My pleasure,” he said, and sauntered off.

“God, he’s such an asshole.” She was perturbed, her truth-and-justice feathers seriously ruffled. But before she could launch into a diatribe about “old reporters not giving the new, innovative generation a chance,” her cell phone chimed and she snatched it from her desk, checked the screen, and turned her back to Jase.

Good.

Now he could absorb his discovery in private.

And absorb he did as he flipped from one page on his screen to another. After putting together his story on the homicide of Teri Gaines, he’d searched for information on his own family and dug up documents he had never seen before.