LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      Texas Ranger Kit Saunders took cover behind a fat pine tree and watched with his binoculars from a distance. Seven people accompanied the honey-blonde widow standing at the grave 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 the mourners, including his widow, knew, the deceased had been an accountant with LifeSpan Pharmaceutical, a huge private corporation in Austin. A week ago 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 victim’s DNA through the database and, according to their report, the name Rodney Harris was the latest in a string of aliases. The name on the deceased’s original birth certificate was that of escaped felon Harold Park from Colorado, who’d disappeared eight years ago.

      Park was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. After serving only two years of a sixty-year sentence for murder, embezzlement, armed robbery and grand 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 time both fugitives had gone by many false names that prevented the Feds from recapturing them.

      The preliminary report from the detective here in Travis County suggested the gunshot wound was self-inflicted, but nothing would be official until all the forensic evidence had been reviewed. Something 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of Harold-alias-Rod’s bank records revealed that $400,000 had been deposited into his checking account one day and withdrawn the next.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 room. The size and date of the large deposit were inconsistent with his earnings from the pharmaceutical company, and the abrupt withdrawal was 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 armed, dangerous killer, the police had asked for the Texas Rangers 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 money she had half rights 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—maybe even other ex-felons from his past life—who might be potential culprits. If the widow was innocent of any wrongdoing, then she herself might be a target for interested parties still looking for the missing money.

      Kit hadn’t met Natalie Harris. The only information he had on her so far was that she was a twenty-eight-year-old pharmacist and had a sixteen-month-old daughter named Amy. There was no sign of the toddler at the graveside.

      He

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