Larkin squared his shoulders and took a step back in time. The floorpopped under his steps, and it smelled a bit closed-up. There was a bed, desk, and dresser—a matching set in pine—their design clunky and overwhelming in the small bedroom. The comforter was a floral pastel pattern, something Camila had likely purchased from a department store as far back as the ’90s, with a matching dust ruffle. It looked recently made—an impression of a hand still lingered near the foot where Camila would have leaned over to tuck a corner in.
Childhood keepsakes and relics of a bygone era littered the top of the dresser: an unplugged lava lamp, two Trolls—green and blue hair, respectively—a handheld Tiger-brandBatmanvideo game, a plastic character cup likely from a fast-food restaurant half-full of loose change, four AA batteries, half a dozen home VHS tapes with penned titles such as:Dragon Ball Z,Super Mario Bros., andA Nightmare on Elm Street, the last of which had been crossed out and looked to have been recorded over withThe Last Unicorn.
“Marco liked cartoons,” Camila stated. “The other boys all watched those horror movies where the psycho kills a bunch of teenagers.”
Larkin nodded, moving to the opposite side of the room toward the desk.
No computer, but then again, this room was a time capsule. Less than 40 percent of American households owned a computer in the late ’90s, and most kids weren’t so lucky as to horde those behemoth towers and monitors in their rooms. Instead, there was a stack of books:To Kill a Mockingbird,The Great Gatsby,Go Ask Alice. Assigned reading, Larkin concluded. He drew his gloved finger along the spines. Laminated stickers marked them as library editions. Only twenty-three years past due. There was a two-inch, three-ring binder that looked like Marco had had friends doodle all over, based on the differing penmanship. Larkin lifted the top. A half-finished report on the unreliability of Hamlet as a narrator for Mr. Reynold’s fourth-period World Literature class. It was the go-to topic for any high school senior hellbent on wrapping their English class with a passing grade. A desktop lamp and a stuffed bear with texture like the Velveteen Rabbit completed Marco’s setup.
Larkin turned to Camila in the doorway. “May I take a more thorough look.”
She hesitated, glancing from one side of the room to the other, as if searching for a reason to deny the request.
“I’ll return everything to its rightful place,” Larkin promised.
Reluctantly, Camila said, “I suppose.” She took a step back into the hall, told Larkin she would be in the kitchen, then departed.
Larkin removed his suit coat, folded it, and set it on the seat of the desk chair. He began his search in the desk drawers, confirming that highlighters were nothing but dried-out nibs and not impromptu storage devices for something else. Detective Kent had bet all his money on a horse named Drugs, but Camila had been adamant Marco wasn’t involved in the stuff. While parents could often be blind to the reality, Larkin agreed with her. Marco’s story, as he understood it, didn’t lend itself to the theory of a drug deal gone wrong, but still, he was obligated to be as thorough as possible. And because Larkin had once been a teenager—albeit he’d coveted copies ofXYandBlueboymagazines, back when he’d been straddling that line of wanting to understand what it meant to be a queer boy at the turn of the century and simply wanting to see an absolutelyhungman—he understood the necessity to hide secrets.
In the bottom drawer, which seemed to have been relegated to mostly junk, Larkin found a few well-read manga volumes of titles that had seen a surge in popularity outside of Japan in the ’90s and had been undergoing translation into English. Larkin shut the drawer, put his hands on his hips, and gave the desktop a second once-over. Then, clear as day, the discrepancy made itself known.
“Hamlet,” he murmured.
Marco had been writing a report onHamlet, but there was no copy of the play in his stack of books. So where was it? Larkin scanned his surroundings, turning in a slow circle as he did. The room was limited in both furniture and hideaway options, but there’d been one place Larkin had used with relative success as a boy, considering his parents had been positively sidelined when he’d come out to them, and that was under the bed. Specifically, in between the slats and mattress—where a magazine or two could fit—because even the eyes of prying parents rarely remembered to lookupwhile lookingunder. He pulled out his phone as he got on his knees, turned the flashlight app on, and belly to the floor, Larkin crawled partially under the bed. There were some dust bunnies that had avoided Camila’s cleaning habits, as well as plastic storage bags of what looked like linens, but otherwise, it was empty. Larkin shifted enough that he could crane his neck, and there in the far right corner at the front of the bed against the wall—where you’d never feel a lump because who laid their head on the edge—was a paperback wedged into the slats. Larkin slid along the floor sideways until he could reach the book, carefully tugged it from its hiding place, and then pushed himself free.
Larkin sat on his knees and studied the 9x11 book, far thinner than the mass market editions more often purchased by public schools. It was the right size to hide, since anything thicker would have caused an obvious lump in the mattress. He noted the library sticker on the spine, checked the pocket glued to the inside front cover, and the due date card still inside, stamped in a cracked black ink: MAY 23 1997. Larkin opened the book and let the pages fall where they wanted. Something slipped from Act II and dropped into his lap. He picked it up, recognized the printed string of gibberish on the backside, and held his breath as he prepared himself for the kind of photograph a teenage boy wanted to hide.
Larkin turned it around. The snapshot was a medium wide angle on a black boy, maybe junior-high age or maybe a late bloomer, slouched to one side on a subway bench, his head lolled back against the tile wall.
The boy was unequivocally dead.
Larkin raised his head and looked around the bedroom—a shrine to an only child who loved his mother, did his schoolwork, and enjoyed mediocre cartoons enough to tape them off television. There were absolutely zero indicators that Marco had sadistic, psychopathic, or God forbid, necrophilic tendencies.
And yet, the photo….
Larkin reached into his suit coat and removed the evidence bag with the first photograph. He’d stopped by his precinct that morning to pick it up with the intention of asking Camila if she recognized the girl, and he held the two side-by-side. The odds of two separate individuals taking photos of dead teenagers in the subway were so astronomically slim that Larkin didn’t even entertain the probability. But it wasn’t a statistical likelihood that brought him to the conclusion that this was the same artist—for lack of better description. It was the—how did Doyle put it?—the geometry of the space. The storytelling of the image.
It was a fingerprint. A signature.
Larkin grabbed his phone from beside him on the floor and chose a name in his contacts.
On the third ring, Doyle picked up and said, “Hey,” in his smoky baritone.
“Hi. Are you busy.”
“Busy is relative. What’s up?”
“How would you feel if I were to speak with Lieutenant Connor and request you be brought onto this case in an official capacity.”
“Which case are you referring to—yesterday’s subway murder or the twenty-year-old subway murder?”
“Twenty-three years,” Larkin corrected. “And both. I now have tangible evidence the two deaths are related, and I believe your unique expertise would be beneficial to my investigation.” In the background of the call, Larkin could hear the legs of a chair scrape the floor, and then pages in a book, binder—no, planner—being turned.
“The way you flirt with me….”
“You’re very funny,” Larkin said.
Doyle chuckled before saying, “I don’t have any composite sketches on the schedule today, so I could be in your neck of the woods… in about an hour?”
