“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.
He didn’t want to be her demon.
And he needed to back off emotionally.
But not before reassuring her that he thought she was amazing.
“I think that’s great that you addressed the issue so quickly. It took me a long time to admit I had a problem, and even longer to actually do something about it. You should be proud of yourself for facing it head-on, and fixing it. I totally respect that.”
“Thanks. I feel better. I do. I’m kind of a control freak, and I didn’t like being out of control in my life.”
Gabriel knew that control was a fine line between screwing the lid so tight on your emotions you couldn’t breathe inside, and reckless, scattered explosion. “Do you have any idea as to who killed your mom? Or what went wrong in the investigation?” It was rude to ask, but lack of answers drove her, that was obvious. It had driven her right into the grip of sedatives, and right out of the state of Florida.
Sara pulled her skirt tighter over her legs, but she didn’t balk at the question. “I don’t know who could have done it, I really don’t. If it wasn’t Rafe, which I truly believe it wasn’t because, first of all, he loved my mom. And second of all, I saw him drive off in the opposite direction that night. We were at dinner, and we all parted ways. She was killed only an hour later. And I think the investigation stalled because from day one they thought they had it solved by turning to the obvious. They didn’t even look into any other possibilities as far as I’m concerned. So any other leads they might have had are dried up by now, I’m sure.”
That was probably true. Which showed a failing on the part of the justice system, but then again, there had probably been no other direction for them to investigate. “They had a lot of trace evidence. Did they test everything?”
“There’s the irritating part—they would never tell me exactly what they had and didn’t have. They couldn’t disclose that information . . . She was my mother and they wouldn’t give me any details. All I know is that hair and clothing fibers on her matched Rafe, which made sense since they were just together at dinner and he was in her house frequently. In her bed frequently, I’m sure. They had been dating for a year.”
“That must have been frustrating to you . . . being a forensic scientist yourself and not allowed access to the data.”
She nodded. “Oh, yeah. Very frustrating.”
Gabriel made a mental note to see if he could get the court records now that the trial was over. He was curious about that trace evidence, as well as a few other things. “Did Rafe frequently spout Bible quotes during the trial?”
“Bible quotes?” Sara looked confused. “Rafe? I don’t think so. Though I wasn’t there for the majority of the trial. Why?”
That was interesting. Too random to ultimately be random, given the complexity of the quote from Rafe Marino that Gabriel had read in the paper. “I just read an article where he was quoting the Bible, referring to living a righteous life.”
“Really?” She looked skeptical. “I never thought of Rafe as a religious kind of guy.”
Gabriel shrugged. “Maybe it was the stress of the trial. But Sara, I’m sorry, I really am, that the case has gone cold. But maybe there will be some new evidence, maybe they’ll solve it still. You never know.”
Her head tilted. “Come on. Do you really believe that?”
If they had taken a man to trial and he’d been acquitted, then no, he didn’t believe they would ever locate the killer. Maybe the man they’d tried really had done it. Maybe he hadn’t. But the odds were very much against the police and the prosecutor ever accumulating enough evidence to actually try someone else for the crime at that point. So he told Sara the truth. “No, I don’t really believe that. I think it’s done, and you’re left trying to figure out how to deal with the fact that there will never be justice for your mother.”
Sara stroked her cat’s head steadily, looking out the window behind him. “Yeah. That pretty much sums it up. And I appreciate your honesty. I get tired of people giving me ‘look on the bright side’ speeches. There is no fucking bright side. Even if they convicted someone, what does it matter? My mother is dead, and her last minutes on earth were torture. And yes, I have to figure out how to live with that, how to go forward.”
The curse from Sara surprised him, but he actually took it as a positive sign. She was venting, in a controlled way. She was letting it out, without losing it. That was a good thing. “Yes, you do.”
“Do you know that there’s no such thing as instant death? That if a person’s throat is slit, they are still conscious, unable to make a sound, as their arterial artery bleeds out enough volume of blood to cause death. So they’re aware, on some level, as the killer stabs them in the chest, the stomach, the face, and they can’t do anything about it. They’re helpless.”
“I know.” It was another layer of his guilt, that he could not die, but mortals did and could, painfully and slowly. That Anne had suffered that way while he had slept in a pleasure fog. “I know a lot about murder.”
Suddenly she laughed, rubbing her face with the palms of her hands. “God, we’re a pair, aren’t we? Call us Gloom and Doom.”
“Okay. I’ll be Doom, you can be Gloom. Though you’re going to have to ditch the kitten if you want people to believe you’re macabre.”
Her eyebrow went up. “What’s wrong with Angel?”
“That. You can’t be depressed and sour with a kitten named Angel. It’s an oxymoron. And I refuse to wear leather pants, by the way, so I think we’re going to have to give up our plan.”
“We’ll have to be happy?” Her mouth tilted up in the corner.
“I’m afraid so.”
“I guess there are worse fates.”
Indeed there were.
Sara’s cell phone rang. “Do you mind if I answer that?”
“Go right ahead.” He put his headphones on, classic rock blaring, so he wouldn’t hear her private conversation, and turned back to study the breakdown of the ingredients in absinthe. Ethanol—definitely psychoactive. Wormwood— arguably, though it was virtually impossible to determine how much might have built up in an absinthe abuser. Especially since it could be toxic at high levels, yet Gabriel had been immortal. So there was no telling how much had been in his bloodstream at the time of the murder. Nor had he been drinking quality absinthe at that point. He hadn’t cared enough to spend top dollar when a cheap substitute would get him drunk just as fast. It probably had been filled with lead and other filler metals.
It was disgusting to consider what he had put inside his body.
Gabriel reached for a spoon from his collection and tapped it on his desk.
Yet part of him would always crave the comfort, would always remember fondly the beauty of pouring water over the sugar-laden spoon and that moment of erotic anticipation as the absinthe turned from brilliant emerald to cloudy lime.
Part of him was still an addict, and until he conquered that once and for all, he was still cursed.
To be addicted to the addict. It was a terrible fate, and he would have to be careful he didn’t ensnare Sara into such a horrific ending.
Rafe’s name was on her cell phone screen, so Sara answered it. “Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me. How are you?”
His ears must have been burning. And for some reason, Sara felt guilty having discussed him with Gabriel, however vaguely. It still felt like she hadn’t been staunch enough in her support of Rafe during the latter part of the trial. It felt like she needed to make that up to him, over and over, by reminding people of his innocence.