“Since the moment Mia left the womb, she and my sister butted heads. Mia spent a lot of time at my home. It was a necessity at first. My sister… she’s had a difficult life. She wasn’t always…able, you know? So I took care of Mia. And as she got older, started school, she’d want to stay with me more and more. She always fought with my sister, she didn’t like the ‘stepfathers’ Silvia had around, so it was better she wasn’t there. But then I started taking care of my sick parents and was working a full-time job and I couldn’t always be home for Mia. The first time she ran away was in 1982. Everything was different then. She slept in the hallway of some building not far from here and no one paid her any mind. If that happened today? Forget it.”
“Did she always sleep in hallways.”
Manuela shook her head. “The second time she ran away, I went looking for her. I was out all night. I talked to a group of kids in Tompkins Square Park as the sun was coming up, and I can remember thinking how beautiful that sunrise was. Pink and gold. It didn’t even look real. And if Mia hadn’t run away, I’d have slept through it and missed it.”
“Why did you go all the way downtown to the park,” Larkin asked.
“There were a lot of homeless kids who stayed there, before the riots. They weren’t really Mia’s crowd, but I thought they might tell me about places runaways would stay the night—places adults didn’t know about.”
“Did they tell you.”
“No. But a girl said to me: find your niece and set her straight, because you either kill someone out here, or they kill you.” Manuela’s hold of Doyle’s hand tightened enough that it looked painful, but he didn’t say anything. “She came home herself a few days later. But in ’84….” And Manuela promptly burst into tears, like she had a little association of her very own. “My father was dying and I was working fifty hours a week and I couldn’t parent Mia too. I told Silvia sheneededto step up and be a mother. I couldn’t do her job for her. I was drowning!” Manuela let go of Doyle to wipe her face with the tissue once more. “That’s when I found out Mia had run away after Roberto had been hitting her. Silvia hadn’t seen her in two weeks and didn’t tell anyone.”
A breeze stirred the hot air and Larkin raised his gaze to the blue sky. There was a whisper ofdon’t forget meon the wind, tendrils grasping at him—Larkin’s body a sanctuary for the oppressed, a place of worship for the dead, a temple for their memories. But the sun was alive, so warm and bright, and its light held those restless spirits at bay, as if to say, give him space, our psychopomp of flesh and blood needs tobreathe.
—summer sun beating down overhead, shoulders pink with a burn, a path of gooseflesh down his arm where fingers touched, searing intention into skin, with lips brushing his, tentative because there was a later, a tonight, a tomorrow—
Larkin flinched. He looked down at the file still in his hand, opened it, and said, “I have a photograph of a teenage girl, perhaps two or three years older than the photograph of Mia that you provided Missing Persons in 1984. We don’t yet have a positive identification, but I believe there is a chance she might be your niece.” When Manuela reached a shaky hand out, Larkin held back and said, “I have to warn you, the photograph is disturbing. The young girl is not alive. And if you would prefer to not look at it, I will respect your wishes.”
“If it’s Mia,” Manuela said quietly, “who else will identify her but me?”
“I’ll find another way,” Larkin said simply.
Manuela contemplated this—seriously considered—but then with a steely reserve, she let go of Doyle’s hand, squared her shoulders, and said, “Let me see her.”
Larkin plucked the copy of Janie Doe’s photo and handed it over.
Manuela turned it around, studied the girl slumped on the subway bench, then whispered, “That’s my Mia.” She looked up at Larkin, fresh tears dripping down her cheeks. “I know it.”
Chapter Seven
By the time Larkin and Doyle had finished their interview with Manuela Ramos and fought the snarl of daytime traffic back to Precinct 19, it was quarter to one in the afternoon. The protein- and calorie-packed breakfast that Larkin had eaten that morning felt like a lifetime ago, but he ignored the rumble in his empty stomach as he shut the driver’s side door of the Audi, beeped the locks, and followed Doyle onto the sidewalk.
“A tentative identification of Mia Ramos by family is one thing, but it doesn’t change the fact that she was several years older in that photograph than of the last time her aunt saw her alive,” Larkin said. “And the only way to properly and legally give her closure would be to perform a DNA test with a sample from the mother.”
“Except we don’t have a body.” Doyle concluded.
“Right.” Larkin led the way past the open bay of FDNY’s Ladder 16. Several firefighters roamed around the parked engine in their summer T-shirts and shorts, looking as if they were preparing to shoot one of those Hunky Heroes calendars. “There is a very real possibility that, if our photograph is, in fact, Mia Ramos, she was found deceased and labeled as a Jane Doe in the ’80s before being laid to rest in Potter’s Field.”
“Would there be a way of confirming that?”
“Not without sifting through all the reported burials between roughly 1985 and 1990, based on your estimated age of the original photograph, and then praying the detectives and medical examiners at the time had the forethought to document the body before sending it to the island. Otherwise we’ve got nothing but numbers and skeletons.”
“So impossible.”
“It would be….” Larkin considered and then landed on, “Extremely unlikely to work in our favor.”
“What if she wasn’t labeled a Jane Doe, though?”
“If that were the case, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, Ira.”
“No, I mean, what if she lied? About her name, her age? What if the ID she had in her wallet or purse when her body was found after Niederman… what if she was laid to rest with a different name? It wasn’t only young girls who got involved with Forty-Second Street who lied about who they were.”
Larkin frowned and turned the thought around in his head like it was a Rubik’s Cube as they hiked the front steps to the stationhouse’s four stories of Romanesque and Renaissance Revival red brick and terra cotta trimmings. Precinct 19 was a designated landmark these days—a monumental piece of art from the nineteenth century that’d narrowly avoided demolition during the ’70s, when the city had been hellbent on razing its history and beauty to the ground.
“Hey, Spooky!”
Larkin stopped at the front door and turned to his right. A tyke of a firefighter—Larkin didn’t know his name, nor did he have any desire to—leaned against the side of the building. He crossed his arms over his chest and flexed what he had to display. “What.”
