Fallen (Seven Deadly Sins #2)(67)
Author: Erin McCarthy

Sara narrowed her eyes at Jocelyn. “Wait a minute. I only sent you one fingerprint scan. How the hell could that match prints in AFIS?”

“Because it’s the same person.” Jocelyn looked at her blankly. “What do you mean? Why did you send it if you weren’t looking for a match?”

What she meant was that the print she’d sent Jocelyn had been the bloody fingerprint on the sketch of Anne Donovan, left there in 1849. Almost a hundred and sixty years earlier. She’d sent it merely to ask Jocelyn if she thought there was any possibility of extracting DNA from the bloody fingerprint on the original sketch, but she’d never actually gotten around to asking that of Jocelyn, so her friend had obviously assumed she wanted to search for a match. Which hadn’t occurred to her as even a possibility because of its age. “It’s an old print. There’s no way there should have been a match.”

“How old?”

“It was from 1849.” A chill went up Sara’s spine. Something was very wrong, only she had no idea what it was.

“What? That’s impossible. Patricia doesn’t mess up like that. She’s an expert fingerprint tech and she’s been doing this for fifteen years. She found twelve f**king points of comp, Sara.”

“That’s why it doesn’t make any sense!” Sara rubbed her temples. Nothing made sense. “Who did the match come up as? Just some random petty criminal?”

“No. It’s a woman who was arrested in Louisiana in 2003 for running a prostitution ring. Her name is Marguerite Charles. Does that ring any bells?”

It did. Sara sat straight up. That’s what the woman outside Rafe’s had said her name was. Marguerite. But she hadn’t told her a last name, so why did the whole name Marguerite Charles sound familiar?

“I don’t know . . . maybe. I went over to Rafe’s before I came here and some woman was there getting his mail. He had obviously moved out of his condo. This woman said she was his girlfriend . . . and that her name was Marguerite.” She had also mentioned Gabriel. Say hi to Gabriel.

Oh my God. Sara suddenly remembered where she had seen the name Marguerite Charles. In the court records of the trial of Jonathon Thiroux. Marguerite was the congressman’s wife who had posed nude for him.

“Since when does Rafe have a girlfriend?” Jocelyn looked as offended as Sara had felt. “It’s a little soon to be moving in with another woman. It’s been three weeks since his acquittal. God, that’s tacky.”

“Thank you.” Sara couldn’t agree more. “That is exactly what I thought, but I figured I was totally biased.” She either had to be wrong or it was some kind of monstrous and weird coincidence that a woman arrested for prostitution in Louisiana could be the same woman Rafe was dating. And it was flat-out impossible that she could be the same Marguerite in the court records, or that she could have been physically present at the scene of Anne Donovan’s death.

But now she was curious to know if Gabriel knew a Marguerite, and how.

“Well, I guess that’s typical for a man,” Jocelyn said. “But it’s still rude.”

“She invited me to dinner with the two of them.”

“Eew.” Jocelyn wrinkled her nose. “I hope you told her to go f**k herself.”

Sara laughed. God, she loved Jocelyn, and she had missed her. “Not exactly, but I doubt she was serious. She was just trying to be territorial and prove a point.” And in light of everything else, Sara no longer really gave a damn that Rafe had a girlfriend. What concerned her was who the girlfriend was, and what relevance she had to Gabriel or herself.

Everything was too strange, too circular, too oddly familiar and overlapping, and it was disturbing, unnerving.

“I think I’d like that glass of wine. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to give Gabriel a quick call.”

Jocelyn’s eyebrows went up. “Who the hell is Gabriel and why did your eyes go soft when you said his name?”

“Oh. Didn’t I mention him?” Sara felt a burn race up her neck to her cheeks. “Let me call him really quick and then I swear, I’ll tell you everything.”

But first she had to find out what he knew about a curvy and seemingly wealthy brunette named Marguerite.

Raphael just shook his head at him. “I don’t think so. If I’m going to die, it will be my own hand.” He frowned. “Besides, I thought we were friends. We used to go to dinner at the club together. I did my best to steer the jury to a not guilty verdict in your trial. Why would you want to kill me?”

Gabriel couldn’t imagine what was so hard to grasp about the concept. “You’ve killed what . . . four women? The first of whom was under my protection. It’s my responsibility, fallen or not, to vanquish you.”

“I told you, I didn’t kill them.” Raphael fell backward onto the bed and stared up at the ceiling. “Don’t you understand what I’m saying? This has been my punishment . . . that if I care for a woman, if I have sexual intimacies with her, she is killed.”

“But . . .” Gabriel lowered the knife in his hand. That didn’t sound like a legitimate punishment. Death to a mortal wasn’t something even a Grigori demon would condone. “Why so long into your relationship with them? And why wasn’t there evidence of intercourse with either Anne or Jessie?” It was crude, but he felt like he had to ask.

Raphael stayed on his back, expression rueful. “I don’t know why it happens when it happens. And there was no evidence of intercourse with Anne because I was the coroner. I lied, thinking it would help your case. I didn’t want to see you rotting in prison. As for Jessie, the reason is because we didn’t have sex that night. Doesn’t mean we didn’t plenty of times before that.”

He put his hand out, not wanting details. “Okay, I got it. But if I believe you, which I’m not sure I do, then who killed them?”

“I don’t know. I wish I knew.”

Pacing back and forth in the narrow room, Gabriel felt the humid heat, the small space, the lack of answers, pressing in on him. The floors were the original wood planks, dusty and nicked, but there was no evidence of where Anne’s blood had been in front of the bed. The stain had been sanded away. But Gabriel couldn’t make it disappear as easily. He wanted, needed, to know who would have done such a thing. If it was punishment for him, for Raphael, or a horrible sick quest that had nothing to do with either of them.