Maybe she should be grateful to feel something other than confusion. Baines being gone had left a huge gaping hole in her life and in Kennedy’s. The end to the marriage had been terrible, but the years before came with a sprinkling of humor and good times. They’d built this life together, and she still couldn’t believe how quickly it had crumbled under her.

Her emotions bounced all over the place. None of them rose to the level of true grief, of weeping in pain over his loss, because she wouldn’t let herself think of anything but the questions about his death.

That probably explained why she’d become fixated on the man who lingered in the back of the church during the reception before the service. The same man who followed them to the private gravesite ceremony and stood away from the crowd now.

Any other time she would have ignored him. He probably wouldn’t have registered at all, but she was on edge. Every noise and movement caught her eye and dragged her mind away from the finality of the day. The stranger wore jeans and a blazer, a bit too casual and not what she’d expect from one of Baines’s business associates. His face didn’t look familiar at all.

She walked toward him, noting how his eyes grew larger the closer she got. “Are you a friend of Baines?”

Present tense. It would take weeks, maybe months, to think of him in the past tense.

“Uh . . . no. I’m a reporter.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” The tenuous hold on control snapped inside Gabby. She couldn’t think of a worse time for some big business angle to a story. “Why are you here?”

“Rob Greene.” He held out his hand.

She stared at it. “Answer the question.”

The last minutes in Baines’s office circled in her head. Not suicide. Maybe this guy had found out and was doing an article. That would be more than Kennedy could handle right now.

“This is the seventh funeral this year,” he said.

Not the answer she expected at all. “What are you talking about?”

“Powerful, very wealthy men in the DC metro area. All killed in strange accidents. The most recent being Alexander Carlisle’s supposed accidental shooting. The one before that, a suicide.”

Gabby’s head started spinning. She could hear Kennedy calling for her from about fifty feet away and caught a brief glimpse of Liam’s concerned expression.

The reporter held out a card. “I didn’t mean to bother you. Not today. This is the wrong time for this talk.”

“No kidding.” But she looked at the card. Just a name and a phone number. No organization or any media identifier that she could see.

“There have been too many deaths, Mrs. Fielding. Too many for this to be a coincidence. It’s a pattern.”