Larkin met Doyle’s gaze and asked, “Why did you get dressed up.”
But Doyle didn’t answer, merely smiled again and returned to his seat. He sipped the coffee, finished the donut, then pulled forward the bust he’d been working on by its base. “I’m not quite done yet,” he explained. “I started last night—”
“I didn’t mean to imply that I expected—”
Doyle waved the comment off. “I don’t get to work with clay very often. It’s a nice way to decompress. The ME left a copy of the autopsy report in the package. You read it, I’m sure.”
For a second time, Larkin felt his cheeks heat. “I… didn’t, no. I had an appointment last night.”
“No problem.” And that was all Doyle said before launching into an abridged narrative. “Male, twenty to twenty-five years of age, five ten in height, average in build. I’m using Caucasian tissue markers, by the way. That was an intelligent guess, based on the orbital sockets and nasal cavity. I didn’t want to base this reconstruction on the death mask.”
“Make the details fit,” Larkin murmured.
“Exactly. Anyway, the ME noted that the bones lacked any sort of wear and tear common to manual labor or extreme sports, but he did have numerous fractures in the phalanges of both hands, as well as his left radius. A deviated septum too.” Doyle touched his index finger to the half-molded shape of a broken nose he was constructing. The tip of one tissue marker stuck out from among the clay. “An old break, but a pretty bad one. It’d be an obvious facial feature. You can’t help but notice that particular detail aligns with the mask.”
Larkin pulled out his cell, opened the email app, and found the autopsy report from last night. He quickly scrolled through the attachment while asking, “Anything on the bones that would indicate cause of death?”
“Cervical fracture.”
Larkin looked up. “He died from a broken neck?”
Doyle nodded. “Extreme force from behind with a blunt object. Your pitch has risen twice, by the way.”
“Unfortunately that happens when I’m interested.”
“I’m honored.”
Larkin ignored that comment and studied his phone again. “The nonfatal fractures were only a few years old, so we can likely rule out childhood abuse. Theycouldbe run-of-the-mill, although….”
“Intimate Partner Violence predominately affects females,” Doyle began. “And I can’t say how much the CDC has studied this among LGBT people, but I’ve worked with enough victims of violence to know the visual differences between random and domestic assault. There’s been papers written about an abuser’s tendency to avoid areas like the spine or neck until late stages, which can and has resulted in death.”
“You think John Doe was LGBT.”
“Not necessarily. Over ninety percent of men who report being victims of IPV say they’ve only had female partners. But that does leave a small percentage who have male partners, and in comparison, nearly ninety percent of men who report rape had a male perpetrator. I’m just saying, with male victims, it can be a bit trickier to narrow down assailant likelihood.”
Doyle was doing it again: exhibiting that lazy physical posture—he’d fall off the stool if he wasn’t careful—while his pyrite eyes sparkled like every stone had been overturned and what was found underneath was a deep pool of intelligence, that sunshine skittering across its surface.
“I’m going to read the ME’s report in full before I hypothesize further.”
Doyle pointed to the empty seat at the drafting table. “Make yourself at home.”
Larkin collected his breakfast and sat on the other side of the office. He sipped coffee and read a sentence or two at a time on his phone, but found himself, more often than not, watching Doyle resume work on the bust. He’d put those earbuds on again, and while he didn’t sing along outright, Doyle’s deep voice created an almost subaudible hum that seemed to vibrate the very air around them.
It was a bit like readingHamletthrough Alice’s looking glass.
An upside down and inverted evaluation of the Gravedigger by the Prince of Denmark.
Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?
Except Doyle wasn’t digging a grave, was he? He had found Yorick and was bringing him back to life, if only for a moment, so as to kiss those lips a final time.
Larkin swiveled in the chair, putting his back to Doyle so that he might read without interruption. And the report, it turned out, had little to offer that Doyle hadn’t already covered in their discussion. John Doe was in his twenties at the time of death, suffered from multiple instances of violence in his past—the ME noted that while he had no soft tissue damage to go off of, the number of breaks would have been enough for a mindful nurse or physician to suspect something was happening at home—and that John Doe had indeed died by extreme blunt-force trauma to the back of his neck.
Blunt-force trauma.
Larkin frowned as he considered. The weapon could have been anything, really. And while that thought wasn’t even remotely helpful, the fact that it was an up-close-and-personal assault lent credence to his developing theory that John Doe wasn’t a stranger or randomly chosen victim to the killer. It was too personal, especially with the suggestion of domestic abuse on his bones. Of course, the violence inflicted on John Doe could have been accidental—highlyunlikely—or by an abuser prior to whomever might have killed John—unlikely but not out of the realm of probabilities. People are creatures of habit. Without building a new pattern of behavior, victims were often sucked into the same cycle of suffering over and over.
Now the question Larkin had to ask, as caffeine worked through his system: was John Doe the only one? In any other situation, Larkin wouldn’t have been scratching at that question as if he were trying to remove adhesive residue from a poorly placed sticker. It was the death mask that turned this on its head. The unnecessary step. The clue that brought this beyond a probable fatal domestic. And if John Doewasn’tthe only one, was he the first or the last? His personal, likely intimate, connection to the killer would have either been what pushed him to kill, or who the perpetrator was building up the courageto kill.
