“I never said I was innocent, any more than you are innocent. We are fallen angels, you know. We’ve sinned, over and over, you and I. But yes, I am telling you that I did not kill those women. But clearly, I am responsible ultimately for their deaths, because in the last one hundred and fifty years, every woman I have had an intimate relationship with has been murdered.” He gave a short laugh. “It rather ruins the ardor.”
“You’re a crazy mother f**ker, Raphael. You’re killing these women and you know it.” Gabriel didn’t understand who it could be if it wasn’t Raphael and it wasn’t him. No one else had ties to both Anne Donovan and Jessie Michaels, and it clearly had to be an immortal.
It couldn’t just be a sick and weird coincidence. “Why did you send those pictures to Sara?”
“What pictures?”
“And the absinthe?”
“Absinthe? What are you talking about?” Raphael frowned. “I thought you stopped drinking that swill. Don’t tell me you’ve fallen off the wagon. I thought you were better than that these days.”
Gabriel stared at his fellow demon. Either Raphael had completely lost his grip on reality, or he was telling the truth. Unfolding the stack of papers Raphael had handed him, Gabriel glanced at the will, a quote toward the bottom of the page leaping out at him.
I live in sin, to kill myself I live; no longer my life my own, but sin’s; my good is given to me by heaven, my evil by myself, by my free will, of which I am deprived.—Michelangelo
“What’s with this sudden obsession with Michelangelo?” he asked as he stuffed Raphael’s will in his back pocket, angry that he couldn’t make sense of what was going on.
Raphael gave a slight smile. “Michelangelo saw angels. ‘I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free.’ Don’t you think it’s odd that these women, the women I cared about, the women I loved, the women I wanted to help, Gabriel, were carved? Carved until set free . . . sent to heaven.”
A cold sweat broke out over Gabriel’s flesh. That was the most appalling visual, the most horrific metaphor, he’d ever heard, and he almost choked on his disgust. Raphael had done it, had killed those women, and he was sitting there in his suburban doctor clothes with a stupid smile on his face.
Gabriel reached for his knife without hesitation. “Raphael, stand up so I can send you back to our Maker.”
Chapter Eighteen
Jocelyn pulled the door to her apartment open immediately. “You’re back early.”
“Rafe’s not home.”
“Good. Well, not good, but I’m glad you’re back, because I really want to talk to you about your samples, but I didn’t want to hold you up when you got here earlier. You seemed really eager to see Rafe.”
She had been. Not so much anymore. “So what did you find with the samples?”
“Well, your samples were tainted or mislabeled.”
“What do you mean?” Sara was still unnerved from the encounter with Rafe’s girlfriend, and the quasi-fight she’d had with Gabriel the night before when she’d left New Orleans. She wasn’t sure she could wrap her mind around deciphering how she could have screwed up the samples.
They sat down on Jocelyn’s sofa and Sara pulled her legs under her skirt. She was tired. Numb. Jocelyn, who was a six-foot-tall brunette with funky retro glasses and more energy in one minute than Sara had in an entire day, had a glass of red wine in her hand. “Do you want a drink? You look worn out, Sara.”
“No, I’m fine, thanks. I just had a weird thing happen. I’ll tell you about it after I hear the lab results. You’ve got me curious. I don’t see how I could have mislabeled those samples.” But then again, she had sent the samples overnight to Jocelyn when she had been distracted and irritated with Gabriel. She supposed anything was possible.
“Well, here’s the thing. I found the markers matching your blood sample to the sample you said came from your ancestor. So that made sense. There wasn’t a lot to work with, given the age and size of the sample, but I did a DNA comp to the first hair sample you gave me and there was no match. So whoever that hair belonged to, it wasn’t his blood on that knife. Which again, makes sense since you said it was a woman’s blood on the knife, the victim. But then I compared the two hair samples to each other, since you said the two men are related. Only they’re not related.”
“They’re not related?” But then why the hell had Gabriel said he was a descendent of John Thiroux if he wasn’t? Or did Gabriel just think he was, but he wasn’t?
“No.” Jocelyn gave her a shrug. “They’re better than related. They’re the same guy.”
“What?” That made absolutely no sense whatsoever. “That’s impossible.”
“Nope. There’s no doubt about it. Those two hairs came from the same dude, Sara.”
Sara wished she’d said yes to the wine. She sat back against the couch cushions, mind racing. How could she have wound up with two samples from Gabriel? That was just impossible because she was sure there had only been one hair on her pillow, and the other hair had come from Gabriel’s sample of John Thiroux. Unless the hair Gabriel had given her as John Thiroux’s was really Gabriel’s all along and he had known that. But why the hell would he lie about something like that?
“That’s just so weird . . . I don’t see how they could have gotten mixed up like that. Maybe he’s just a close match to his relative.” Even as she said the words, she knew that wasn’t possible. Jocelyn knew what she was doing and she would be able to tell the difference between mere markers and a match.
“DNA doesn’t lie, honey. For whatever reason, you wound up with two samples of the same guy. And I’m hoping after I’m done telling you the rest of my findings, you’re going to illuminate me as to who all these samples belong to, and what exactly it all means. I thought you were in New Orleans on sabbatical.”
That was a polite way to explain what she had been doing. “I’ll tell you everything, I promise.” God knew she needed to talk to someone. “But first tell me what else you found.” Not that it was going to matter if she had screwed all the samples up. Which infuriated her. She didn’t like to mess up, couldn’t explain how she could have done that.
“That patent print you sent me? I entered it in AFIS and got a list of four possible matches. Patricia ran through them last night for me, which means you owe her big time for doing that on a Saturday night, but anyway, she made a conclusive match. Twelve points.”