CHAPTER ONE
It was Tuesday,May 19, 4:57 p.m., and there was a body in a blue IKEA tote bag.
A uniformed officer lifted the crime scene tape cordoning off the stairs to the Fifty-Seventh Street platform, and Detective Everett Larkin ducked underneath. The subway system was over a century old, carved into the ancient bedrock that Manhattan sat upon long before climate control was ever a factor, and the passive ventilation offered little reprieve after an abnormally hot stint for early summer. Coupled with the heat thrown off by 85,000 pounds of steel speeding into the station nearly 200 times a day, and the platform was about as comfortable as a moist blanket.
Larkin had left his gray, glen plaid suit coat in the Audi, a verdict he’d gone back and forth on exactly five times, because the gold pocket square was what really brought the burgundy tie and mint-green derbies together, and without it, Larkin felt his aesthetic was markedly lacking. But the prickle of perspiration already starting under his arms was confirmation he’d made the right decision. After all, he’d just had his dry cleaning done over the weekend in preparation of being given the go-ahead to return to active duty once he’d followed up with his orthopedist that morning, and Larkin had been extremely dissatisfied with the services provided by Carol’s Wash and Tailor. He’d need time to properly research other cleaners in the Village—price not being a factor so much as quality of care. Because if Larkin was going to drop a grand on custom-tailored slim-cut suits due to unabashed vanity and a distinct lack of hobbies in which to otherwise invest in, he certainly didn’t expect some sort of rust stain on the lapels when they returned from the cleaner. He tugged his phone free, opened the calendar, and quickly added a personal reminder about the dry-cleaning situation before returning the cell to his pocket.
Larkin walked along the stretch of platform devoid of evening rush-hour straphangers, crossed the digital information center, which readService Alert: Uptown and downtown F trains bypass 57 St. due to police activity, and approached the throng of officers and MTA employees hovering around a pair of open double doors slapped with a too-thick and glossy black paint at the opposite end from where he entered. An uptown F train thundered into the station, brakes screeching as it turned too sharply, the faces of overcrowded passengers a kaleidoscopic blur of color as the train didn’t slow, didn’t stop. Hot air gusted toward Larkin in its wake, and with it the summer aromas of garbage and body odor, and along with those, the unmistakable stench of decomp.
He paused midstride.
August 28, 2011, a wellness check on Herbert Langston found him five days dead from a massive heart attack, naked in his recliner, the television on an adult pay-per-view channel. Herbert still had his dick in his hand. Larkin had been a rookie officer, only one year under his belt of walking the beat, and he’d thrown up in the apartment stairwell.
July 2, 2015, Larissa Brown and her two baby daughters were discovered stuffed inside an oil drum out in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey almost two months after they’d been reported missing. Her husband had wanted a divorce and didn’t want to be stuck paying child support. Larkin had cried in the shower until the water ran cold, because he couldn’t seem to scrub the stink of their death from his skin. His tenacity and persistence on that case, one Larkin’s own sergeant had told him to set aside numerous times, had garnered the interest of Lieutenant Connor and earned him a promotion into the elite Cold Case Squad.
April 1, 2020, Beatrice Regmore had been found beaten to death by her son and left to rot in the bathtub for two days. Her skull had been caved in, blood crusted her paisley nightgown; her fingers were curled from arthritis, skin like wrinkled tissue paper. And then there’d been an animalistic roar, the collision of bodies, and Harry Regmore had raised a baseball bat in both hands—
“Grim!”
The disparaging moniker shook the associations, the memories, like a house of cards falling apart and every face was the ace of spades.
Larkin took a breath. He could taste death on the back of his throat, like fermented green meat and rotten eggs, shit and stale piss, trash left to bake in the heat and humidity.
He reached the end of the platform where Ray O’Halloran stood, a Homicide detective Larkin had had more than his fair share of interactions with throughout the years. It’d been O’Halloran’s own reluctance to be saddled with the “loser” case of Andrew Gorman that’d slingshotted Larkin into this holding pattern, this void, this drug-induced composure that wore off every eight to twelve hours and tore his stitching apart so thatemptiness, thathollownessin his chest, wept like a fatal wound.
In Nietzsche’s preface toOn the Genealogy of Morals, he stated:We are strangers to ourselves, we perceivers. We have never sought for ourselves—how, then, could it happen, that some day weshould findourselves?
Everett Larkin had incredible perception. He never forgot a face; could recite any conversation upon request. He read nonverbal cues with textbook precision and broke down the psychology of place without a roadmap. But when he turned that incredible skill—that incredible guilt—unto himself, there was nothing to see. Nothing to find.
Because Everett Larkin was a nobody.
And nothings and nobodies were gray, and no matter how much color was added, once mixed together, italwaysturned gray. Like summer thunderstorms. Like stainless steel mortuary tables. Like the faces of the forgotten.
Rightly has it been said: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
But it was impossible to see, to perceive, what that treasure may be when it lay beyond the veil.
O’Halloran wore an N95 mask. He slapped one against Larkin’s chest and said, “Welcome back. You’ll need this. If you have to puke, puke on the tracks.”
Larkin caught the mask. He glanced toward the double doors a second time and watched two individuals in full PPE and respirators move about in what he surmised was some kind of utility closet. “My lieutenant said this was a matter for Cold Cases.”
O’Halloran nodded.
Larkin put the N95 on, adjusted the nose piece, then said, “Human bodies begin the decomposition process roughly four minutes after the time of death, and in an ideal setting, the timeline is consistent from rigor mortis to bloat to active decay. But in a hot and humid environment, the progression is often accelerated. In summer of 2018, the Regional Plan Association took the temperature in sixteen of New York’s busiest subway stations. They confirmed that twelve of the sixteen reached over ninety degrees by late morning, making these platforms hotter than the ambient temperature outside, which was eighty-six degrees. And while Fifty-Seventh Street was not among the record breakers—the 4, 5, 6 at Union Square was one-hundred-four, and the uptown 1 at Columbus Circle was one-hundred-one—I cite these examples to emphasize how heat down here will compromise time of death estimations, and that what smells like human soup served up in a large-size, polypropylene IKEA shopping bag, available for ninety-nine cents and owned by just about every New Yorker, making it untraceable, has likely been deceased a week or less. Therefore, this murder—I assume murder, as the individual likely did not lock themselves in a utility closet, crawl into a reusable Swedish tote, and expire of their own volition—is firmly Camp Homicide, not Cold Cases.”
After a moment, O’Halloran shook his head, muttered, “Jesus Christ,” then walked toward the double doors.
Larkin reluctantly followed, the stench permeating his mask the closer they got, and he was forced to take shallow breaths through his mouth instead of his nose. Both detectives stood in the doorway, watching as one of the techs collected maggot samples from the mass writhing on the bloated and partially melted body.
“You fuckers done playing with bugs yet?” O’Halloran asked.
“All bugs are insects,” the tech answered as he screwed a cap onto the vial in his hand. “But not all insects are bugs.”
The dry and sardonic delivery, the upward lilt in his voice—Larkin’s mental Rolodex spun to March 30, to the morning thunderstorm, the uprooted crabapple, the crate, the CSU detective waist-deep in mud as he’d suggested, “Thatis a death mask.”—Neil Millett.
Larkin inclined his head politely, saying, “Millett.”
“We meet again, Everett Larkin,” Millett answered, voice slightly muffled by the respirator mask. “Sorry it’s under such conditions.”
