Ulmer snapped, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“It’s a simple yes-or-no question.”
Ulmer snorted loudly and shook his head in disgust. “You think you can just waltz back in here, throwing your dick around like the goddamn commissioner? Fuck you, Grim.”
Larkin took several steps forward, breaking through Ulmer’s boundary of personal space that was considered, by Americans, to be a suitable distance in which to keep professional relationships, and pressed right into Ulmer’s intimate circle, the eighteen inches or fewer reserved specifically for romantic partners, family, and only the closest of friends. It caused Ulmer to visibly recoil, his upper body bending away from Larkin in an attempt to recover the security inherent in distance, while simultaneously maintaining his ground against a threat.
“Get away from me, faggot,” Ulmer growled.
Looking up at Ulmer, his face a careful expression of indifference, Larkin said, “In this context, ‘yes’ is a function word used to express assent or agreement. It’s very simple. Only three letters. So when I ask if I have made myself clear, you reply—”
“Fuck you, you pompous dickbag,” Ulmer all but shouted before he turned on one heel and stomped toward the opposite end of the bullpen.
Unperturbed, Larkin offered Doyle the notepad. “Would you mind taking notes.”
“You should report him,” Doyle said.
“It’s not worth dealing with HR.”
Larkin moved to the banister behind his desk, set his hands on the railing, and studied the ground floor. Officer Miller was pretending to draft another incident report for Mr. Cunningham, a man of eighty-seven years who’d been coming to the precinct at least twice a week for the last three months to file grievances against his neighbor, who in fact, did not exist. Multiple units in his apartment building were undergoing renovation, and Mr. Cunningham continuously mistook the sound of hammers, electric drills, and saws as some kind of “midnight disco party,” despite the construction taking place well within the confines of 7:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. He was the elderly sort who’d immediately jumped to phoning the police instead of his landlord, and simply did not understand why his calls were being ignored, so here he was, making his complaint in person. Larkin heard Doyle take a seat in the computer chair, heard the squeak of the casters, the shift and slide of Doyle’s shoes against the linoleum.
Larkin turned to face Doyle before saying, “We have two murders separated by twenty-three years, with Victim Two discovered on the anniversary of Victim One’s death.” He watched Doyle draw a line down the middle of the paper. “We’ve connected the victims via the possession of photographs depicting suspicious deaths of two children—”
“Janie and Johnny Doe,” Doyle interrupted. “For convenience’s sake.”
“That’s adequate.”
“Have you gotten an ID on IKEA-John Doe?”
Larkin stepped forward, reached over Doyle’s shoulder, and pressed the power button on the small computer tower that sat on the lefthand side of his desk. He turned the monitor on next, then returned to his position against the banister as he answered, “I haven’t checked my email yet.”
Doyle nodded and scribbled in each column on his notepad. “In the meantime, causes of death were different, but both vics died at the Fifty-Seventh Street station.”
“Presumably,” Larkin said. “It is highly unlikely that IKEA-John was killed elsewhere, carried down two flights of stairs, across an island platform, and then discarded in a utility room without at least one person noticing, but I should have a more definitive answer once I get the autopsy report from the ME and scene report from CSU.”
Doyle was smiling to himself as he drew a little asterisk beside the note in the second column. “We’ll circle back on that. Janie and Johnny were both photographed relatively soon after their deaths—”
“Rigor mortis would have made it impossible to pose them.”
Doyle hummed in agreement. “Exactly. So no later than six hours after death, but it’s far more likely the photographing took place within the first hour, not only to avoid rigor in the face, but time would have been of the essence.” He looked up and pointed his pen at Larkin. “It would be impossible to say when IKEA-John came into possession of Janie’s photo, prior to obtaining an ID on him and understanding where he fits in this story, but can we estimate when Marco may have come into custody of Johnny’s?”
“Marco was writing a report onHamlet,” Larkin answered. “The play was checked out from his high school library with a due date of May 23, 1997. This date is before my time, of course, so no party trick.”
Doyle leaned to one side, removed his cell from his pocket, tapped the screen a few times, then said, “Friday.”
Larkin nodded and continued. “High school libraries typically have a two-week checkout period. So that would mean the earliest date was… twenty-three… sixteen… May 9. Marco could have had the photograph in his safekeeping for longer, of course, but it’s far more likely he grabbed the first thing he had on-hand in order to hide it. The report was half-finished and probably due the same week.”
Doyle quickly jotted down a few bullet points before asking, “And Marco was killed Monday the 19th, right?”
“Correct. He had a part-time job as a mentor and teaching assistant at the now-defunct New York Youth Empowerment Center. It was an after-school program for—”
“At-risk kids?” Doyle asked, but he was nodding knowingly. “Yeah. I spent more than a few summer vacations enrolled in those programs.”
Larkin cocked his head to one side. “Really?”
Doyle leaned back in the computer chair, now rolling the pen between his thumb and index finger. “I was a bit of a hellraiser.”
“I find that difficult to believe.”
