Larkin all but rolled his eyes before taking another bite.
“Why don’t you two just get married while you’re at it?” Porter suggested.
“Oh, we already are,” Doyle answered.
“No, we’re not,” Larkin hastily said around the last bite of dough and cream.
“Work husbands for life,” Doyle concluded before winking at Porter.
Larkin turned in the chair, his knee knocking Doyle’s. He took Doyle by the tie and tugged forward. “I’m going to eat a second donut.”
“And what am I going to do?”
“You’re going to tell me everything that isn’t obvious about that photo,” Larkin said with a nod of his head at the Ziploc bag.
“You might want to let go of my tie before I develop a kink.” Doyle smiled when Larkin quickly released him. He patted Larkin’s thigh twice, the touch more than friends but less than lovers, then leaned back into a slouch. “What’s the book for?”
Larkin plucked the second donut from the box. “I found it wedged between the mattress and bed slats. The photo fell out of Act II, scene ii.”
“Is that a relevant detail?”
“Only ironically.”
Doyle hummed absently, held the bag up toward the awful fluorescent overheads, then said, “Ah… this boy appears to be deceased.”
“Yes, I gathered that much on my own.”
“Okay… well, track pants and a baggy hoodie would suggest death occurred at a cooler time of year, but I’m not comfortable with the way the pants have been tugged so low… almost like… for titillation purposes. There’s the oak bench and white tile wall, which would make this a subway, but with no other environmental details….”
Larkin turned his attention on Doyle and caught how his expression was in the midst of drifting from curiosity to thoughtfulness to recognition—so much character in those thick brows of his. “What is it?”
And Doyle must have heard the inflection in Larkin’s voice, because he looked up. “The boy is holding one of his shoes in his lap.”
Larkin set the half-eaten donut in the box, closed the lid, then pushed against the floor with his heels, directing the wheeled chair to bump up against Doyle’s so he could study the evidence too. “Yes. A dirty sneaker. Counterfeit Nikes, by the looks of it.”
“It’s not the shoe itself that’s important.”
“I don’t understand.”
Doyle lowered the bag. His face was stoic as he asked, “How much do you know about postmortem photography?”
Larkin blinked. “The nineteenth-century mourning phenomenon?”
Doyle nodded.
“Photographs were taken of family who’d passed away. It fell out of favor after the turn of the century.”
“By the 1920s,” Doyle confirmed. “As death was removed from the home in favor of mortuaries, society’s attitude toward mortality began taking a dramatic shift, until it’s become what it is today.”
“Taboo,” Larkin answered.
“Taboo,” Doyle echoed in agreement. “But in the mid to late 1800s, whether the photograph was of a loved one on their deathbed, someone who’d already passed, or an image of thoseinmourning, it was meant to be a token of remembrance. For some families, it was the only visual of who’d they’d lost.”
Larkin said, “A memento mori.”
“Come with me.”
Larkin got to his feet and followed Doyle across the bullpen, down the hall, and into the former-office-turned-junk-room—where everything broken or obsolete was left to die—fondly referred to by the squad as the Fuck It. Larkin shut the door behind himself, leaned back against it, and watched as Doyle turned, one hand still holding the bags, the other resting on his hip.
