Fallen (Seven Deadly Sins #2)(27)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“He might have killed her! Why was he filing her death certificate? That’s just weird.”

“Do you think he killed her?” Gabriel asked. He was curious. He wanted, needed, to see that he was innocent. But Sara had no such stake. Maybe she would come to a different conclusion than him, and who was to say who was right? Without DNA confirmation, they could only rationalize. They couldn’t know conclusively. But he wanted to come as close as possible.

“I don’t know,” Sara admitted. “I don’t know enough yet. But I want to investigate John Thiroux a little better. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of information on him in these papers.”

She wouldn’t find much either. John Thiroux had suddenly appeared in New Orleans in 1847, and had just as suddenly disappeared in 1851. Gabriel had reassumed his true name when it had become apparent he wouldn’t be leaving. That he had been locked out forever, bound to New Orleans for an indefinite amount of time.

“So that’s your mission?” He felt a strange guilt that she was determined to research and ferret out facts about him, the man sitting straight across from her, the man she had slept in the same bed with the night before. He had offered her comfort then, and he had enjoyed that. The closeness, the sense of just being with another person. It was wrong to let her traverse down a path that would result in a dead end, wasting her time. He knew all the answers she wanted. Yet he couldn’t give them. She would never believe he was immortal, never understand his punishment.

“I think it is. That feels like the logical place to start to me, since there are no other suspects. What about you? How do you piece this book together? You said you start with the crime, then scene set. Then what?”

“The principal players. Which are John Thiroux, who you are handling, Anne Donovan, and absinthe. The autopsy suggested she’d had a child . . . did it survive? What happened to it? Did Anne have enemies? A husband or boyfriend she’d left before becoming a prostitute? And I want to know if absinthe is psychoactive. I can’t explain exactly the process of how I lay out a book . . . it’s logical to me, but I can’t really explain it.” He followed the story, wrote it like a story, albeit with facts. But that was normally, when he wasn’t personally involved. Anne’s story was different, and he wasn’t unbiased. He had a desperate stake in the outcome, an intense need, or maybe hope, to solve it, to give Anne justice and to right the wrong. He also wanted closure for Sara, in some way, with her own mother’s case.

Sara tapped her finger on her bottom lip. She had gone home after they’d woken up, and Gabriel had doubted whether she would actually come back that day or not. She had looked embarrassed, had acted uncomfortable when the morning arrived and they were sharing a bed. But after breakfast and a shower, she had come back with her cat, and had attacked his stacks of research documents tenaciously.

“I guess I’m just going to have to trust you to write it.” She smiled at him. “Since it is your book, after all. But you know what’s bugging me? If Anne was a prostitute, don’t you think it’s odd that there was no evidence of sexual intercourse? I mean, wouldn’t they have had sex when Thiroux got there? I don’t think he was paying her to chat with him.”

No, Gabriel hadn’t paid her to chat with him, though Anne had been companionship. He wondered now what Anne had thought of their relationship. It hadn’t seemed crass or dominating to him at the time, but maybe she had felt that way. Maybe she had despised him, only saw him as a means to an end. He would never know. “If he’d consumed enough alcohol and opium I doubt sex was first and foremost on his mind.”

The bigger question in Gabriel’s mind was why there was no evidence of intercourse when he himself had walked in on Anne with another man. He hadn’t been drunk yet, though he had been distracted by withdrawal symptoms. But he had seen a man overtop of Anne, thrusting in perfect parody of sex. He was absolutely 100 percent certain of that. So why hadn’t the coroner found evidence of that?

He also wanted to know who the man was, because aside from himself, the stranger was probably the most likely suspect. But in all witness statements, there was no mention of him. On the witness stand, Madame Conti had denied Anne had seen a client before him, even when Gabriel’s attorney had asked her point-blank. Which meant she had been lying. But why?

“It’s hard for me to believe that sex is ever far from a man’s mind.”

Gabriel gave a laugh. “Yeah, well, when you’re making love to the bottle, a woman isn’t always necessary.”

Her face fell. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make light of alcohol addiction.”

“It’s fine, Sara. You don’t need to walk on eggshells with me. I’m not overly sensitive.” Maybe that was true, maybe it wasn’t. Sometimes he did feel hypersensitive, but not with her. Maybe because she didn’t seem like the type to insult him intentionally, nor was she a know-it-all. She had too many of her own issues to pass judgment on his.

“Can I ask how long you’ve been sober? You seem like you’re handling it really well.”

He couldn’t tell her it had been seventy-five years without her doubting his sanity, so he said, “Seven and a half years.”

She looked impressed. “Wow. That’s fabulous.” She bit her lip and glanced down at the stack of papers in her lap. Then she met his eye. “Can I tell you something?”

“Sure.” Even as he said yes, he knew he shouldn’t encourage intimacy with Sara, but he wanted it. He knew he did, and he was encouraging it, fostering it. Which made him wonder if he had learned a damn thing in the last century.

“I was addicted to sleeping pills. After my mom died. I couldn’t sleep, and I started taking sedatives, then more and more, then suddenly I realized that I had a serious problem. I just got out of rehab six weeks ago.”

She drew back slightly, like she expected a backlash from him. A verbal blow, maybe. But Gabriel wasn’t surprised, nor was he disappointed in her. He understood what it was like to feel the crushing pressure of reality weighing down on you, how appealing and easy it was to escape it artificially, to seek answers where there were none. What impressed him about Sara was how quickly she had fought back. Her mother had only been dead a year, so he figured she’d really only struggled with the sedatives for six months or so. That was commendable, that she had reached out for help so quickly. And watching the determination on her face, and from what he’d seen of her personality since they’d met, he had no doubt that she would conquer her dependency. Even if she couldn’t conquer her demons, given that she had no idea one was sitting four feet away from her.