“They sure are,” Baxter said, his smile only widening.
Larkin rolled his eyes and looked over Doyle’s shoulder. Despite discoloration and dehydration, he could make out a few minute pockmarks—the possible signs of a user. He asked quietly, “Heroin.”
Doyle hummed in agreement, straightening his posture. “That’d be my first guess.”
Larkin asked Baxter, “How do we prove she overdosed.”
“Toxicology test.”
“On mummified remains.”
“It’s possible,” Baxter assured. “There’s new literature on toxicological analysis of dry bone. I took some bone marrow samples from her cranium, ribs, and femur, and those will be processed with ASE and then analyzed with a mass spectrometer. The current research has only provided accurate drug reports on skeletons fifteen years postmortem, so there is an element of the unknown here, since you think she’s been in that wall, what?”
“At minimum, thirty-one years,” Larkin corrected. “The peep show closed in 1989. I believe she was hidden away prior to its closure.”
“I think we’ll get something,” Baxter confirmed. “Whether it’ll be enough to prove she OD’d and wasn’t murdered, or that she simply had drugs in her system, we won’t know until those results come back.”
“When will that be.”
Baxter only said, “Her samples are in the queue. I’ll call you when I get the results.”
Larkin turned to face Doyle, took the sleeve of his suit coat, and pulled him away from the autopsy table to stand in the middle of the room. “This doesn’t make any sense to me,” he said, keeping his voice low. “The brutal murders committed by Regmore, Niederman, and then… drug overdoses?”
Doyle rubbed the stubble on his chin. “It does feel a bit like we’re investigating a murder that might not be a murder…. Maybe the drugs were laced with something lethal and it’s more a question of who she was buying from?”
“Fentanyl’s only been on the street for about fifteen years.”
“It could’ve been a lot of other things, Larkin. I’m just thinking out loud.”
“But it wouldn’t be something so mundane,” Larkin insisted. “No drug dealer would go through the pains of disrobing and hiding a woman who overdosed on his product. For that matter, we have to keep in mind the behavior and personality of the sender—someone who sees themselves as smarter, superior. Who prides themselves in having obtained knowledge of crimes and criminals the police are ignorant of.”
“Then we need to focus on the identities of both women,” Doyle concluded, raising the box he still held in one hand. “I don’t see any logical step forward without knowingwhythey were both victims.”
“And to know why, we first must know who,” Larkin said, a touch of irritation in his tone.
“So did you two want to hear the rest of my report?” Baxter asked from where he still stood at the table. “Because I’ve got a hot lunch date with an irritable scientist, and it kills me to keep him waiting.”
Larkin turned on his heel. “Yes, sorry. Please finish.”
Baxter put his hand to the lower belly of the mummy and said, “Miss Deuce was a mother. She has a C-section scar.”
Chapter Nine
It was 3:29 p.m. and Larkin sat in the Audi, engine idling, parked in front of 1PP.
Hetap,tap,tapped the wheel in rapid succession as he mentally reread the most important lines of the two cut-and-pasted letters he’d received from the sender so far:
I HAVE A BETTER MEMENTO FOR YOU
That memento being the postmortem photography—the dead and posed body of Mia Ramos.
Why had Alfred Niederman, a middle-aged white man living in Chinatown and holding down a menial job, crossed paths with Mia Ramos, a preteen Latina runaway from East Harlem? That answer was simple enough: Niederman had been a serial sexual murderer of children, with a particular fetish for necrophilia, and Mia had been one of his countless victims. And while these profoundly violent and disturbing fantasies had been shared with and reveled in by other likeminded men, the online community of pedophiles that Niederman had once been an active participant of—dare Larkin say, the leader of—didn’t include the sort of criminals who boasted or bragged publicly. Their continued success depended on a life in the shadows. Case in point, Niederman had gone completely undetected his entire killing career. He’d been a janitor, always there but never seen, blending in with his surroundings like a chameleon, able to vanish from sightjust like that. The only reason Niederman had been stopped at all was because one teenage girl had been absurdly lucky in her fight to remain alive.
The sender wanted Larkin to acknowledge something specific in Niederman’s interaction with Mia—something more, something beyond the brutality he’d inflicted upon her. And he’d been irritated enough by Larkin’s failure to see the clue that it’d been pointed out in the second letter.
SHAME ON YOU, LARKIN, TO IGNORE MY MEMENTO
Who was Mia Ramos?
