Marco did no drugs.
No drugs.
The mother, after being fed this line of bullshit for over twenty years, no longer wanted anything to do with the police. So when Larkin had reopened the case and reached out to her, she had refused to return his calls. He’d driven to her home last week—he heard the television, heard the clatter of pots on a stovetop, heardlife, but she wouldn’t answer his knocks—so Larkin called through the door that he understood his presence wasn’t welcome, but he needed her to know that her son’s case was now his, he knew there were no drugs involved, and he’d bring Marco some justice, no matter how long it took. He slipped his card under the door and left.
Sometimes people like Marco’s mother eventually called back.
And sometimes they’d rather not open a blistering wound again. Those were the cases that Larkin chased away with pharmaceuticals. Because when people like Marco’s mother, a shell of who they once were, looked him in the eye and asked, “What’s it matter? It won’t bring my baby back,” Larkin struggled not to agree. Struggled not to say, “At best, it’ll break your heart again. At best, the trial will haunt you. At best, the justice will taste like ash in your mouth. And for what. He’ll still be dead.”
It won’t rewind life to a more innocent time.
It won’t fix what’s wrong with your brain.
It won’t bring him back.
—the sun-bleached dock, rivulets of cold water running down every vertebrae, their entwined fingers hot with the fires of first love—
But it was Larkin’s job.
He reread the Garcia file, even though the details had already imprinted themselves on his bones, placed some calls, left some messages, and was reworking the timeline of Marco’s final days when an email popped in his inbox. Larkin raised his eyes at the quietdingand saw L. Baxter, MD, in the sender column and John Doe’s case number in the subject. He closed the Garcia file and clicked the email. Attached was the autopsy report and one sentence:Come by the office before 5:00 for your cast. -Baxter
Larkin checked his watch, returned Garcia’s records to their accordion file, adjusted the neat stack on his desk, then stood and gathered his suit coat from the back of the chair in one fluid motion. He pulled his arms through the sleeves, collected his library book, and walked to the staircase, but then Connor shouted, “Grim!”—the open door of his office providing a perfect view of who came and went in the bullpen.
Larkin looked over his shoulder.
“Where you going?” he called.
“OCME.”
“For John Doe?”
“Yes.”
Connor nodded after a beat, then added, “Doyle’s all yours, by the way.”
“Great,” Larkin heard himself say, but his tone was so tempered, he wasn’t certain if he intended for it to come across positively or sarcastically. His gut wasn’t so sure either.
Porter shuffled his feet across the floor as he lazily spun in his chair to look at Larkin. “That kid’s gonna be shadowing you now?”
“I’m fairly certain Detective Doyle is older than me,” Larkin corrected before he started down the steps.
“Age is a state of mind.”
“How very zen of you, Porter,” Larkin called back.
“He can draw you some funny cartoons while you do the actual detective work!”
“Goodbye.”
The forty blocks downtown to the Office of Chief Medical Examiner would have been an easy straight shot at any time but the start of rush hour on a Monday. It took exactly thirty-two minutes, with Larkin flashing his badge to the front desk at 4:34. He inquired after Dr. Baxter’s whereabouts—the basement, Larkin had presumed—but was instead directed to take the elevator to the second floor. Except when Larkin reached the office door with the nameplate L. Baxter, Medical Examiner, it was locked and no light showed at the floor.
“Dr. Baxter isn’t here.”
Larkin turned to an office that mirrored the good doctor’s on the right side of the hallway. The door was open and a middle-aged woman with thick glasses and closely cropped brown hair was staring at him from where she sat at a desk. The workspace was cluttered with files and a government-assigned laptop, but there were no tchotchkes or family photographs that’d indicate the office was specifically hers. Larkin glanced over her shoulder, taking an automatic inventory of the space. Two other desks had been shoved into the cramped quarters, both currently unoccupied but with the same buildup of impersonal items. A squat bookcase on the far wall of the windowless room had several packages stacked on the shelves, as well as binders, loose sheafs of paper, and a tabletop microscope, like the sort Larkin used in biology class in high school when they had dissected a goat’s eye and his partner, Susan Anderson, had projectile vomited and was sent home for the day. Larkin sniffed. The circulated air smelled a bit stale, a bit like someone’s hours-old lunch of instant ramen noodles, and a bit like harsh cleaning chemicals.
Larkin decided the office was likely used by the rotating staff of mortuary technicians and that this woman, with the steam whistle voice, was the same he’d spoken to on the phone that morning. He removed his badge and showed her, saying, “Everett Larkin. I called about—”
“The skull casting,” she said in a clipped tone.
