To an eye trained in more than the basics of crime, the records of the deceased had a connection stronger than the tenuous nature of death.

A killer was on the loose. Perhaps it took one to know one.

Chapter 2

Gabriel Moss loped through the hallway at Burkeen University Monday morning, his loose, confident strides eating up the tiled floor. Though he covered ground quickly, his gait was easygoing. He had learned young that the person at the other end would probably wait until he arrived. He swung around a corner into another corridor of numbered doors. Since he wasn’t in any real hurry to reach his destination, he slowed his steps even more. Genevieve was more than a little annoyed with him, and he couldn’t blame her. Her messages had piled up while he’d been away. Messages he’d studiously ignored. As long as he didn’t answer, he figured, she couldn’t tell him about Mirren Enterprises’ latest attack on his fledgling newspaper, the Bayou Ledger. And the longer he could wait before he confronted its head rat, Nick Jacoby.

Still, if she was going to be angry, he had a perfect defense. Running the Ledger left little time for niceties like returning phone calls. He had to refurbish a dilapidated production center, hire staff, set up a website, and convert the fourth-floor administrative center into a place for him to sleep when he could steal an hour. When he was in New Orleans.

Which, as of late, hadn’t been too often. For weeks now, he’d been traveling the country, scratching together new investors and allaying fears about the fate of the paper. Luckily, he trusted his managing editor, Peter Cameron, to run the weekly print edition and the daily electronic edition without him. On his last swing through town, he’d hired a business manager to do the day-to-day number crunching and negotiating that he despised.

He had been and always would be a reporter first. The rest was a matter of survival and revenge.

By his internal clock, he knew he was already fifteen minutes late for their 11:00 A.M. meeting, but he also knew Gennie would forgive his tardiness. After almost thirty years, his baby sister had no doubt grown used to his fluid relationship with time, much as he had accepted her fanaticism about punctuality.

Maybe he should have brought a peace offering, he thought, pausing midstep. Gennie was a sucker for boxed chocolates. He stood in the hallway, debating whether he had time to run out to a drugstore.