Larkin glanced at him again. Doyle was still staring at his phone. “She’s purposefully going slow.”
“Itisa case from the ’90s. You know what a nightmare these offices were back then.”
“Malarkey.”
Doyle smiled at his phone. “It’s cute when you use dated lingo, especially since I’ve heard plenty of shits, damns, and fucks from you. Listen to this: Full-Flavored offers VIP business packages, bachelor parties, couples parties—which is interesting, I guess—and divorce parties—which I didn’t even know was a thing.”
“I’ll save my money for the contested divorce Noah’s undoubtedly going to drag to court.”
Doyle pocketed his cell and looked at Larkin.
Roz’s gravelly voice called from the other side of the plexiglass window, “Larkin.”
“Thank God.” Larkin strode to the window. “What’d you find.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing,” Larkin repeated as Doyle joined him. “What do you mean, nothing. It’s an open and active homicide case.”
“I understand, detective,” she said, her words dragging like a shovel on sidewalk. “But it’s a thirty-year-old—”
“Twenty-eight,” Larkin corrected in an almost absentminded manner.
“You can’t round up or down with him,” Doyle explained.
Roz did not find this amusing and reiterated in a voice that’d make a cat arch like it were a full moon on Halloween, “A thirty-year-old case. And sometimes things get moved, lost, destroyed—”
“In floods or fires,” Larkin finished for her. “Yes, we’ve heard these excuses before.”
“Sorry, detective.”
“You need to check again,” Larkin said. “You can’t lose the only bit of evidence that will bring this woman’s killer to justice and then shrug at me.”
Roz raised an eyebrow behind the thick cat-eye glasses. “You want to look yourself?” She hit a button out of sight and the lock on the door leading into the caverns of the long-term storage buzzed. “Be my guest.”
Larkin met Roz’s defiant expression, squared his shoulders, and marched to the door.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Each borough in the city of New York had its own Property Clerk. The warehouses were entrusted to catalogue, store, and safeguard all evidence in criminal investigations, which meant jewels, weapons, drugs, even vehicles, the exception being forensic evidence, such as blood, semen, or other bodily fluids that required special storage and testing. After the case was closed, property was either returned to its owners or disposed of by the department.
It was thedisposalpart that’d really stuck in the craw of Larkin and his fellow Cold Case detectives. Because sometimes the Clerk’s office threw illegal gambling machines into the river, and other times they nearly melted down a pair of precious and irreplaceable flintlock hunting pistols that’d once belonged to Empress Catherine the Great. After the various Property Clerks underwent much-needed overhauls in the 1990s, older evidence, as Cold Cases requested them, began turning up as missing. The clerks always cited the same unfortunate reason—floods and fires—but Larkin didn’t buy it for a minute. There was no documentation of any natural disasters having damaged evidence beyond salvation. He was certain it was a combination of stealing during the previous decades, disposing of evidence prematurely, and simply never logging those old, old murders into their new system, essentially losing a single envelope or box in the bowels of the building for all time. That last reason in particular was a sore spot for Larkin because he was about ninety percent certain he’d never successfully close his case from 1919 due to evidence still in existence that he literally couldn’tfindon a shelf.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Doyle said.
“No.”
They stood side by side, staring down a long aisle with cement floors, double-decker shelves on the right, crowded with reinforced cardboard barrels that stood four feet tall each and were spray painted with case numbers, rolling ladders erratically placed throughout the foreboding corridor, and along the left, a line of caged units with more boxes, envelopes, and barrels housed inside them, some elevated on wooden skids.
Larkin removed his cell, checked his calendar, and said, “We have to be in Williamsburg to speak with Roger Hunt no later than two o’clock, ideally. That gives us exactly three hours.”
“We can’t go through this warehouse in three hours.”
“We only need to check this aisle,” Larkin corrected. “She said if it were logged in their catalogue system, in theory, it’d be shelved here.” He shrugged out of his suit coat and draped it over the steps of the closest ladder.
“Evie….” Doyle said in a desperate tone.
Larkin turned, smiling just a little. “Yes, Ira?” And saying Doyle’s first name was… it felt right.
