Larkin turned as Millett offered him a second evidence bag. The cheap cardstock was more heavily damaged than the photograph—soggy and discolored from decomposition. But Larkin studied what print was still legible and made out:SUDMSSIN. Larkin gave his mental Rolodex another hard spin as he studied the fragmented words, but it only took a few seconds to place the organization. “St. Jude’s Mission.”
—in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, ’til death do us part.—
“I think you should giveWheel of Fortunea go,” Baxter said bemusedly.
Larkin blinked, shook his head, returned the card to Millett, and addressed both men. “Please email me the crime scene photos and autopsy report as soon as possible.” He stepped out of the utility room, tugged the N95 mask off, breathed in damp sour air.
It didn’t help.
Larkin was choking, gasping, as death, as expectation, as guilt crushed him, forcing his head under the black currents of the River Styx, and not even Charon crossed those waters without a ferry. Indeed, Larkin was a psychopomp. He knew the names of the now 9,019 victims that time had forgotten—abandoned—and one by one, he shuttled them toward justice—towardrespite. The downtrodden, the nobodies, the wretches whose only misstep was to be murdered in a world too busy and too wary to respect their deaths—Larkin would never forget any of them. Every day was an anniversary of tragedy, his calendar a memento mori, and his weary soul a band of black to mark his mourning.
But Larkin was still a man.
His HSAM allowed him to never forget the forgotten, but he also never forgot the wounds inflicted on his own life. And there were so many arrows in his back, so much bleeding out because he couldn’t—literally couldn’t—let those memories fade into obscurity, some days he wondered how he was expected to go on, how he was expected to function when that footage and those soundbites ran on a broken loop set off by something as inconsequential as a date, a sound.
Larkin pushed through the mingling cops and MTA employees still on the platform, shot up the stairs two at a time, and rushed through the recently renovated entrance, with its tiled floors and mediocre art on the walls, before climbing the next set of stairs to the street. Larkin waited at the curb until there was a break in traffic before crossing Sixth Avenue. His black Audi was parked behind an HVAC repair truck and soccer-mom minivan alongside the bike lane. Circling around the front, Larkin tapped his key fob, opened the driver’s door, and got inside. It was too closed up, but the discomfort barely registered as Larkin tossed the evidence bag onto the passenger seat, yanked open the center console, dug out a small, 2x3 hidden envelope, and shook out two Xanax into the palm of his hand. Larkin dry-swallowed the pills before leaning back in the seat.
He counted to sixty before putting the key in the ignition, turning on the engine, and tapping the AC button. The initial gust of warm air quickly cooled, and the sweat slicking his skin began to dry. Larkin rubbed his palms against his thighs and let out a slow breath as the sick sensation that warned of imminent heaves gradually dissipated.
After another sixty count, Larkin glanced at the sodden photograph in its plastic bag. He shifted, pulled his cell from his pocket, and tapped a name in his contacts. On the third ring, the call picked up, and Larkin said, “Hi. Are you busy.”
CHAPTER TWO
At 6:32 p.m.,Larkin was walking down the fifth-floor hallway of One Police Plaza, the hideous turd of Brutalism architecture that was the new headquarters of the NYPD. Nestled among the Civic Center neighborhood, with Chinatown to the north and the Financial District to the south, 1PP (as it was colloquially known) was home to not only the police commissioner, but detectives considered to be the “big guns” on the force: Major Cases and Real Time Crime. Hardly anyone—civilian administrator, beat cop, or detective alike—was aware that the three-man Forensic Artists Unit was also on location.
Larkin came to a stop outside a partially closed office door. He’d been inside before, on March 31, but it felt wrong to assume he could invite himself in after only a single visit forty-nine days ago. So he knocked. It was quiet around him. Not empty; Larkin could hear life from behind other closed doors on either side of the hall—a desk phone that wouldn’t stop ringing, the mechanical whine of a personal printer on its last leg, a muffled, one-sided conversation made up of no less than a dozen incredibly unique variations onfuck. The tired overhead lights that never saw rest had an almost subaudible hum to them in the evening hours, and the AC-cooled air was still circulating the scent of someone’s late lunch—microwaved ramen and boiled eggs, Larkin suspected.
The door opened and Detective Ira Doyle stood in the threshold. He was lean and slender, with a build similar to Larkin’s, if not for the extra half a foot in height. His appearance tended to run the gamut of disheveled, unkempt, and lax, with his five-o’clock shadow at any time of day, the loosened tie, rolled-back sleeves, and more often than not, an absent suit coat. His chocolate-brown hair was constantly a mess, not because it was done on purpose, but because Doyle was a habitual finger-comber.
For all the visual cues that’d led to Doyle’s professionalism being called into question, though, Larkin had been the first to admit how wrong he’d been in his initial assessment. Doyle was a gifted artist and a skilled investigator, with seemingly unlimited patience, and a heart no one was good enough for, Larkin included. But when Doyle smiled with his entire body, when those flecks of pyrite in his brown eyes caught the light just right, when he still smelled of neroli and sandalwood and cardamon after a long day, when he said, “Evie,” in that smoky voice, that was when Larkin began wishing he was something more.
Somethingbetter.
Larkin raised the jug of water he held in one hand. “Distilled.”
“Perfect.” Doyle stepped back, holding the door. “Come in.”
Larkin moved into the office. A closed 11x24 sketch pad sat atop the white drafting table on the left side of the room. A steel mesh trash can held several crumpled pages of the thick, high-quality paper and a scattering of candy wrappings—lemon drops. Larkin recognized the Clancy’s Candy Counter brand these days, even from afar. The shelves behind Doyle’s chair were still crowded with a ridiculous amount of art supplies, tools, and binders of six-packs. Opposite was the worktable Doyle had sat at March 31, hunched over the bust of the person who they’d come to know as Andrew Gorman. Today, the table was clear but for two plastic trays that looked like those used for photo development, a roll of paper towels, a few brushes, and a squat bottle of an unknown substance with a dropper applicator.
Doyle had accepted the gallon jug from Larkin and said while closing the door, “Don’t trust the lab to do this?”
“New York has one of the top-performing forensic crime labs in the country,” Larkin answered. “They’d do a perfectly adequate job at collecting any trace evidence. Scientists want facts, after all. But artists want stories.” Larkin watched Doyle set the jug on the table before pulling on an apron in a midnight-blue hue. “When it comes to understanding the human element in a murder, your skill set far outweighs the lab’s.”
Doyle was smiling as he crossed the ties once around his front before tying them at the back. “So I guess the check-up with your orthopedist went well.”
“Yes. I return to active duty tomorrow,” Larkin said dryly. He gave the mesh trash can a second consideration before stating, “You had a bad day.”
Doyle wasn’t messy, per se. He was one of those people who dispersed belongings as he went—a suit coat shoved onto the ladder rung instead of being hung up in the closet, because the ladder was closer, for example—but he was mindful of actual trash and probably didn’t realize that the crumpled mess was atypical of his character and, therefore, credible evidence as to the limit his patience had been pushed that day. He corrected in that usual warm baritone, “A little tedious, is all.”
Moving toward Larkin, Doyle stopped to stand before him.Close.Always so close. Separated by a baby’s breath. But Doyle was acutely aware of the fact that Larkin shied away from, was even repulsed by, physicality from the wrong person or when he might not have been in a good headspace.
So they’d developed a workaround. Something unique to them. A nonverbal approach to checking in, to asking permission, because Larkin had been hurt for too long by meaningless platitudes and guilted too long into speaking a love language profoundly foreign to him.
“People don’t want to know. But I do.”
“On August 2, 2002, I was struck in the head with a baseball bat.”
Doyle reached down, his hands big and capable, and gave the black hair tie around Larkin’s left wrist a tug.
