yelled.
But it was too late. Gaunt’s body went sideways toward the elevator shaft. He screamed as his arms windmilled and he tried to regain his balance but failed.
His body fell out of view.
A feral howl of despair echoed. Grew fainter. Then, from far below…a thud.
Branden slowly walked toward the elevator shaft and peered down, jumping when he felt a touch on his shoulder.
It was Cara, her face drained of color. “Back up. Please back up.”
He did, dragging her with him and pulling her into his arms. She buried her face in his neck.
“Thank God,” he breathed. “Thank God you’re okay.”
She nodded. Looked up at him almost dazed. “You saved me, Branden.” She looked over his shoulder. “Please. Can we go inside?”
Branden remembered Howe. “We need to call an ambulance.”
Cara clutched his hand. “Yes! Your head is bleeding. You may need to go to the ER.”
He lifted her hand and kissed it. “I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
Chapter 27
“They found something interesting in Mike Gaunt’s office,” Deena said to Branden a week after Gaunt’s death. “Come and look. It’s all set out on his desk.”
Branden glanced at the clock and cursed. It was past four o’clock and all he wanted was to head home to Cara. The only reason he’d even come into work today was because Cara had insisted, saying she needed their lives to get back to normal.
Only things weren’t normal.
She hadn’t been herself since Gaunt’s attack. In the past week, she’d only spoken briefly to Iris or her mother or Glenn. With Branden, she accepted his care. His affection. She didn’t reject him. But she wasn’t fully present either.
Thankfully, last night, something seemed to have shifted inside her, and she’d asked him to drive her to Windorne Home to see Glenn, then to Brooklyn to see her mom.
But she’d still come home that night and had curled up in bed, not reaching for him or welcoming him in. It was only in sleep that she stretched and relaxed in his embrace, giving sleepy little moans that took him back to their hottest encounters instantly.
Tough, he’d told himself. Tough fucking luck. You, Branden Duke, will live through this night and the next night and the next. However long it takes. Until she’s ready for that again. Ready for you.
And she would be. Together, they’d work through the shadow Mike Gaunt had cast. And in order to do that, to help her do that, he needed to know everything there was to know.
He sighed and nodded at Deena. “His desk, huh? He kept his office neat as a pin. I heard he emptied out his own wastebasket.”
“Really?”
Branden shrugged. “So what was there to find?”
“You’ll see.”
Branden had no trouble keeping up with Deena’s long-legged strides and they stopped at the open door to the small office.
A slender woman in her forties with brown bobbed hair was thumbing through two books set side by side, turning the pages of each at exactly the same moment, like an automaton. Her bifocals had slipped down her ski-jump nose but she didn’t stop to push them back up.
Deena knocked softly to get her attention.
She looked up and smiled in a very real way. “Come in,” she said. “I’m Louise Callahan, a forensic psychiatrist and investigator. You must be Branden Duke. Deena said she would bring you by.”
“Well, here I am. What’s going on?”
Louise got to the point. “We found Mike Gaunt’s journals in his black bag, which had a false bottom. These were concealed beneath it.” She nodded toward the bag, which now sat on a chair. It seemed to be completely empty. Branden was more interested in the thick journals, which weren’t printed but handwritten. Each held what seemed to be hundreds of pages between hard black covers, spiral bound.
“As you can see, these are actually artists’ sketchbooks, with high-quality paper suitable for watercolor paints and ink, no bleed-through.”
Each page was covered in tiny cursive script, on both sides. He could make out a few dates—the microscopic numerals were easier to read than the dense handwriting.
“He started these in the late 1990s. Yes, they go back that far,” she said to Branden’s surprised expression. “Each entry is quite short. He created a meticulous record of his descent into insanity, perhaps as an attempt to control it. Mike Gaunt was a deeply troubled man.”
Branden and Deena exchanged a look.
“What I find most fascinating is the parallel structures of the text,” she said. “One book mostly about men. One book for women. Notes for