“Thank… you,” Doyle said gracelessly.
Larkin rolled his eyes, muttered, “Jesus Christ,” and walked across the bullpen to Connor’s open office door. He knocked on the frame, and when his lieutenant looked up from his computer screen, Larkin said, “Good morning, sir.”
“Oh, good, you’re here.” Connor wasted no time on preamble as he picked up an evidence bag from his desktop and held it out. “Fresh from Queens.”
Larkin took a few steps into the office, moved in between the two chairs situated before Connor’s imposing desk, and accepted the clear bag with the VHS inside.
Connor continued, “Not so much as a stray hair or partial print.”
“That’s not surprising,” Larkin answered, studying the cassette briefly. “There were no fingerprints on either of the anonymous letters, and the handwriting on both pieces of evidence is an intentional disguise. This perpetrator isn’t looking to be caught anytime soon.”
“Yeah, well, nothing to show for trace evidence doesn’t change the fact that I now owe half a dozen blowjobs for pushing to get that overnighted. For both our sakes, there better be something compelling on the tape and not some fuckin’ home video of a five-year-old’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.”
“I’ll set up the VCR,” Larkin concluded. He walked out of the office, with Connor on his heels. He met Doyle’s waiting expression from across the open expanse, his partner having deposited his bag and suit coat at Larkin’s chair in the interim, and made a quick gesture of pulling on gloves, then pointing to his desk in request, before heading for the Fuck It.
From behind, Larkin could hear Connor say, “I suppose you’re loitering in my precinct house for a reason, Warhol?”
He missed Doyle’s response as he pushed open the last door at the end of the long hall, but Doyle’s patent smokiness was met with a grumbling assent from Connor.
Larkin flicked the overheads on before entering the Fuck It. The room was jam-packed with an assortment of absolute shit that belonged in a dumpster, but due to the two most common reasons people hold on to what is no longer necessary—lack of permission and a sense of being overwhelmed—Larkin had to weave through a ridiculous collection of crap. There was a battered metal desk, banker’s boxes full of unknown documents stacked chest-high, a framed painting of a pickle propped against the wall, a Thank You Have A Nice Day plastic bag of tinsel wigs, and a partially squashed box brimming with furniture assembly directions, kitchen appliance manuals, and one-year warranty documents—including those of the breakroom’s former toaster that Byron Ulmer had killed when shoving a too-thick sesame-seed bagel in and then forgetting about it until the smoke alarm went off, after which their neighbors of Ladder 16 had couriered children’s fire safety activities to the detective every morning for a week straight.
Larkin made his way to the opposite end of the room where an AV cart with a strapped-down television had been shoved up against the window. He grabbed either side of the unit and maneuvered it to about the midpoint of the Fuck It before plugging the dated television into the nearest outlet. The screen flickered on—black-and-white snow with static accompaniment. He winced, pressed Volume Down until it was silent, set the evidence bag on the cart, then backtracked to the Uline shelves to the left of the doorway. He was elbows-deep in ’90s technology as both Connor and Doyle entered the room.
Doyle was saying, “Memento mori is Latin. It means ‘remember that you must die.’ In artwork, it uses very specific imagery—skulls, time pieces, candles, flowers—to imply the inevitability of death, to remind the viewer of their own mortality. The first letter Larkin received—I think we all mistakenly assumed the sender was referring to the subway tokens as mementos, when in fact, the suggestion of a ‘better memento’ was comparing Niederman’s death portraits to Regmore’s death masks.”
Connor shut the door. “So in the second letter from… when was that, Grim?”
“May 22,” Larkin answered as he pulled a JVC-brand VCR from a box and returned to the AV cart.
“May 22,” Connor repeated. “When he said that Grim ignored the memento?”
“We think this sender was referring to the first photograph in the Niederman case—Janie Doe,” Doyle replied.
“And we still don’t know who she was?” Connor asked, but the question had been directed at Larkin.
“No,” Larkin said as he busily connected the AV cables into the back of the television. He leaned around the unit to check the screen—now a solid blue—then accepted the pair of latex gloves Doyle had brought for him.
“Is her identity important?” Connor asked next.
Larkin shot him an irritated look. “Every victim is important.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t, actually.”
Connor clarified, “In regard to putting a name to your pen pal—is a dead runaway from the ’80s going to help us?”
Larkin put the gloves on, picked up the evidence bag, and removed the cassette. He studied the blocky, unfamiliar writing on the label, and said thoughtfully, “That case began and ended with Alfred Niederman, dead in an IKEA tote bag. I lost an important avenue of investigation by never having the opportunity to speak with him myself. But consider this—” Larkin looked up, meeting the steady gazes of Connor and Doyle. “Niederman was killed by a teenage girl luckier than Janie Doe had been. But Megan didn’t plant that photograph. She didn’t write that message on the back. She fought off a stranger in self-defense—a man whose only intention had been to brutalize her for sexual satisfaction. And Noel Hernandez—he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He chose to conceal a crime because he and Megan were kindred spirits: street kids trying to get by in a city—in a world—that doesn’t care. But he didn’t plant that photograph either. Why would he. He and Megan both just wanted the problem, the danger, the threat, to go away.”
Doyle said, “After he was arrested, Hernandez claimed to have known where to find Niederman because of an anonymously delivered letter to the church with all of that information.”
Larkin nodded. “He destroyed the letter, of course, but said the sender had told him, and I quote, do with this information what you will.”
“I know all this, Grim,” Connor answered. “What’s your point?”
“Niederman’s death was orchestrated,” Larkin replied. “The sender egged Hernandez into killing the man who murdered his childhood best friend, and while there was no way the sender could have anticipated what would happen in the subway with Megan, Niederman still died. Mission accomplished.
“It was only after learning of my involvement in the Death Mask Murders that the sender has become, I don’t want to use the word, butobsessedwith me. I have a reputation for being well-versed at my job, and seeing as I’m not modest—yes, I am exceptionally gifted—I believe my intelligence is what’s attracted this individual. He or she sees themselves as smart as me, if not more so, and they have a deep-seated necessity to prove it. Of course, I can’t attest to their IQ at this point in time, but the senderisclever—too theatrical for my tastes, but clever nonetheless.
