Fallen (Seven Deadly Sins #2)(6)
Author: Erin McCarthy

She was spinning around on one foot, looking at his white boards, scanning over his bulletin boards jammed with newspaper clippings and timelines he’d printed out, of pivotal dates. Then she saw the sketch of Anne and she walked straight up to it, hand raised like she might touch, but stopping herself.

“Is this her? Anne Donovan?”

“Yes.” Gabriel forced the admission out, the familiar and ever-present guilt rising up in his throat and squeezing. He didn’t look at the sketch. He knew every line, every nuance, every smudge of charcoal.

“She’s lovely. There’s something . . . I don’t know . . . hopeful in her eyes.”

It was a cruel irony to him that Sara of all people would recognize that. Anne had been hopeful in the months before she died, and Gabriel had obviously been aware of it on some level since he had captured it in various sketches and paintings he had done of her. But he had not been consciously aware of it at the time. He had only been aware of the satisfaction and pleasure he gained from taking his opium and absinthe in her presence.

“Amazing, if you think about it, considering the life she led.”

Sara glanced over at him. “As a prostitute, you mean?”

“Yes. It must have been an achievement to still feel hope.” It wasn’t like he had been any sort of consolation or source of hope for Anne. He often struggled to understand what the hell she had seen in him.

“God, I understand that,” she said in a soft whisper, then quickly turned, her cheeks pinking, like she realized she had just revealed too much. She cleared her throat. “So where do you start with a book like this? It’s a hundred-and-fifty-year-old murder mystery. Where do you even begin?”

The way he did with all his books, even if this one was personal. “You start with the murder. That’s what grabs reader interest. Then when you’ve shocked them into attention, you go back and scene set.”

“Scene set?”

“Try to set the stage for the murder. What life was like in 1849 New Orleans for a prostitute. Trace the timeline of the principle parties involved. Introduce the characters.”

“I don’t know if my brain works like that. I’m a forensic lab grunt. I stare at gel slides all day.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “And they’re not characters. They’re people. Real human beings who lived and died.”

“I know that.” He struggled with the weight of that pressing down on him every single day. Gabriel pulled the schedule out of the printer and handed it to Sara. He wanted her gone, out of his space, away from his guilt, his raw self-hatred. “That’s why I write the books I do. We both want to solve a murder, don’t we? You want to solve your mother’s murder, and I want to solve Anne Donovan’s. And that takes logic, the kind of logic a lab grunt understands. But you also can’t solve a crime without understanding the people involved and the world in which they lived.”

She took the paper and gave him a slow nod. “True. I can see that. But I want your reassurance that whatever you write, you won’t treat my mother’s death like a juicy soap opera.”

Sorry for her pain, feeling a new rush of guilt for his role in reopening her wounds of grief, Gabriel spoke softly. “I have no intention of doing that, Sara. I want to show how the use of DNA and forensic evidence can solve crime. It can solve Anne’s murder, and it can solve your mother’s murder, if handled correctly, and result in a conviction. But that ultimately it’s the human factor that determines whether a crime will be solved, or if someone will be put behind bars for it. I don’t think the police or the courts did their job, and that’s not fair to you, or your mother.”

Maybe he shouldn’t have stated that so baldly, because she blanched. Glancing around the room at his cluttered file cabinets, stacks of papers, bookcase crammed with reference materials, she said, “I know you could have gone ahead and done this without my involvement. I know you didn’t need my permission. The case is public domain, as much as that disgusts me. So I appreciate you contacting me, but at the same time I have to wonder why you did. It would have been easier for you if you had just proceeded on your own with an independent forensic consultant.”

That was a legitimate question he had asked himself a multitude of times since he had contacted Sara and requested she work with him. Especially now that she was standing in his office, beautiful and wrenching in her grief, her determination. “I asked you to be a part of this project, because yes, I want your technical expertise, but I also want to respect your feelings, make sure I handle the presentation in a way you’re comfortable with. And I want the tenacity of someone who is personally invested.”

Now she looked like the one who wanted her gone. She even took a step back toward the door. “I am personally invested. Unfortunately.”

He hadn’t meant to nick at her wounds. He’d been trying to reassure her that he was in fact intending to be considerate of her feelings, of the personal nature and newness of her mother’s death. Yet he had obviously upset her, and Gabriel rubbed his jaw, not sure what to say. Social skills were not his forte and he was starting to feel frustrated. So he just said what he was thinking. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t know. And I agreed to do this, so I shouldn’t be grilling you like this.”

“It’s going to be fine. I think we’ll work well together. I’ll see you tomorrow at one. Here.” That was most likely a huge mistake, but all his materials were in his office, and if he was intimidated by one little broken blonde, then he wasn’t man or fallen angel, but simply pathetic.

She nodded, clutching the schedule and her purse, backing up another step.

“Let me walk you out.” His eighteenth-century manners, buried under a century of solitude, resurfaced, along with his feeling that he had control of the situation. He could deal with this.

“No, no, I’m fine.” Sara moved, revealing the sketch of Anne pinned to the wall behind her. “Bye.”

Then she was gone and he was staring into the pleading eyes of his long dead lover, captured by his own hands, and possibly killed by the very same.

Sara had only walked a half block on Royal Street when she saw a coffee shop and veered straight into it. She needed an iced tea and a minute to sit down, gather herself. She hadn’t expected this would be so difficult, that she would feel so awkward in Gabriel’s presence. He spoke to her with such apparent effort, like he was struggling to carry on a conversation, yet his eyes pierced her, made her feel stripped and vulnerable, weak.