It wasn’t a warrant for her arrest or anything like that. They didn’t mail something like that to you. They just showed up and slapped cuffs on you.

“Have a great day.” He waved and jogged down the path to the parking lot.

“Yeah. You too,” she murmured absently, fixing her phone so she could talk. “Hey, it’s just a delivery guy. He gave me a package.”

“Oh, okay. Good. So what were we talking about?”

Sara turned, saw that the guy had gotten into his car and was pulling away, and then opened her apartment door. Locking it behind her, she told Gabriel honestly, “I have no idea. And I think I should go. I think this package is from my lawyer and I should probably check it out.”

Glancing around her apartment, she spotted Angel reclining on the sofa arm, sound asleep. Tossing her purse down, she tore open the envelope, not even wanting to wait until she was off the phone. She needed to see it was just house or banking documents. Something to do with probate court. Boring. Nothing more, nothing less.

“Your lawyer? What do you have a lawyer for?”

“For settling my mom’s estate and stuff . . .” Sara frowned. The papers she was pulling out didn’t feel like forms or documents. They felt glossy, like . . .

Pictures. She gasped as she saw the image of her mother, dead, blood everywhere—on the wall, the bed, her mother’s neck, shoulders, chest, stomach, arms.

“Oh, God,” she said, flipping through the stack in her hand. “Jesus Christ.”

“What?”

Sara struggled to take deep breaths, to not throw up. To not give in to the fear and shock that were crawling up her throat and cutting off her air.

“Sara. What is in the package?” Gabriel’s voice was calm and commanding.

“Pictures. Of my mother. Dead.” She got to the last one, taken at a downward trajectory through her mother’s bedroom window. It showed the wounds on her mother’s chest in brutal, gory detail, her naked flesh ravaged by the knife and her killer.

Sara rammed it back into the envelope. “I’m going to be sick.”

Her stomach heaved and she choked on the heels of a gag. She had seen the crime scene photos in court, but that had been brief, a quick flashing in front of her as the prosecutor had tried to unnerve her. She’d never had time to study them, to take in their full glossy gore.

“Sara, listen to me. Put the pictures back in the envelope and close it. Do you understand?”

“I already did,” she said, voice trembling, tears in her eyes, as she swallowed hard, the urge to vomit thankfully dissipating. “Did you request these pictures for the book?”