“And why did one end up on the floor and not the other?”
“I’m sure he knocked it to the floor when he stood up to look at Anne.”
Sara was touching each spoon, making them swing back and forth. She was clearly thinking, their disagreement or burst of anger or whatever it had been clearly passed, forgotten. Suddenly she grabbed the one she’d been swinging and whirled around. “Wait a minute.”
“What?”
“If the crime was a crime of passion, not planned on the part of John Thiroux, why would he be carrying a bowie knife? Who carries a bowie knife in their pocket for no reason? Did John Thiroux hunt or fish?”
Gabriel almost snorted. Hardly. The extent of his sportsmanship had been driving, riding, and boxing. He had never had an interest in wildlife. “I don’t think so. He was an artist. Records indicate that drinking was his hobby, not gutting his catch of the day.”
“Then seriously, why would he be carrying a knife?”
“He said in court it wasn’t his knife. That he never carried a weapon. But the prosecutor maintained that he could be lying, since it was a dangerous part of town. It would have made sense to carry a weapon.”
“But a bowie knife?”
“I agree, it’s illogical. A bowie is meant to gut or kill and it’s big, cumbersome.”
Sara shook her head. “He wouldn’t have carried that unless he had intended to murder her. And I don’t think he would have drunk himself into a stupor or stuck around after the fact if he had intended to kill her. If it was a spontaneous crime, you would think he would pick up the nearest weapon—the absinthe bottle, a glass, the absinthe spoon, or even his bare hands—and kill her. Hell, he could have strangled her with her hair ribbons or smothered her with the bedsheets or beaten her to death with his fists. Do you think the knife could have belonged to her?”
“It’s possible.” Actually, Gabriel was almost certain it hadn’t been Anne’s, but damn it, he couldn’t share what he truly knew with Sara. He couldn’t tell her that he knew the knife didn’t belong to John Thiroux, knew Anne wasn’t street-wise or hard enough to carry a weapon of that power. That it would have scared her. “What about in your mother’s case? Who would have had access to that type of knife?”
“I don’t know,” she said, biting her lip and leaning back against his desk. “Rafe isn’t the outdoors type. And he wasn’t carrying a knife in his shorts and golf shirt when I saw him at dinner.” She gave a short, disbelieving laugh. “God, the idea of Rafe with a knife like that is just insane. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“We should see if we can find out who sent those pictures to you. There’s got to be a tracking number or something.” That bothered him. There didn’t seem to be a logical reason for those pictures to be sent to her, especially without any explanation or instructions. And it had taken effort to locate her temporary address in Louisiana.
Sara shuddered. “I know. But I’m almost afraid to find out who sent them. Or to find out we can’t find out who sent them, you know what I mean?”
“I know.”
She threw her hands up in the air. “Arrgh. I just want to solve all of this. I want it to go away. I want murder to go away. I’m so goddamn afraid and I hate it, I hate this.”
And Gabriel wasn’t afraid at all. Not of what Sara feared, which was death. Gabriel would embrace death, would welcome a return to the other world, but that was not his choice, not an option open to a sinner like himself, and he wasn’t stupid enough to wish for Hell. He had to stay on earth, mortal, alive, until he paid for his sins. It made him weary, exhausted from the strain of living day in, day out, with no goal, no meaningful friendships, no sense of purpose other than making it through, one step at a time. He was worn out, f**king tired, and he wanted it to either end or he wanted to find a future.
What he feared was that neither one would ever happen, and he was destined to stagnate, to fester indefinitely in his own personal hell.
The more Sara thought about it, the more she was convinced that John Thiroux was a psychopath, an attractive, charming killer, who may have murdered other women before Anne Donovan, and possibly after. In the twenty-four hours since she’d packed her bag and battened down in Gabriel’s apartment—determined to find something, anything, that smacked of an answer to any of her thousands of questions— she had tried to find information on John Thiroux before and after his murder trial and had drawn a complete blank.
Gabriel had dropped her off at the library for several hours while he went to track down where the pictures of her mother had been sent from. As Sara sat at the computer, stiff from immobility and cold from the overzealous air-conditioning, she suspected he wasn’t having any more luck than she was. John Thiroux appeared in the society pages of the New Orleans Bee for the first time in 1847, at a large party hosted by a congressman, then disappeared without a trace after early 1851, when she’d found record of his selling his property on Royal Street.
A search of Ellis Island and Port of Orleans records showed no evidence of his arrival in the United States, though she did discover that one Anne Donovan, age thirteen, had arrived in New Orleans in 1839 in the company of her mother, Mary Donovan, age thirty-four. Sara wasn’t sure if it was the same Mary Donovan, but she did find a death certificate for the same name, same age, a mere three years later. Which might explain how Anne Donovan had wound up a prostitute, if she had no family and no income at the age of sixteen.
But John Thiroux was a mystery, and Sara’s research skills weren’t up to the task of ferreting him out. Maybe he was innocent, maybe he had just moved a lot, and historical records were spotty, but it still seemed more and more likely to her that John Thiroux had killed Anne, and that it had been planned. He had brought his bowie knife and slashed Anne to death intentionally, counting on his position in society and his remaining in the room to guarantee he wouldn’t be charged with the crime.
Nothing else made sense to her.
Unless he really had been passed out and someone else had come in and murdered Anne. But why?
No answers, only questions.
Hungry and tired, Sara left the archives room with her notebook crammed with harried notes, and went outside. The sun felt warm on her chilled arms and she sat on the steps, pulling out her cell phone. It was hard to feel afraid when there were people rushing around downtown in every direction, the sun was shining, and she had the comfort of knowing she didn’t have to go home to an empty apartment. Gabriel would be there, and God, she liked that.