“It’ll help you sleep. Tastes better if you add vanilla and cinnamon.” Doyle started toward the kitchen. “Think I have nutmeg too….”
“That’s not—” Larkin moved to cut Doyle off. “Thank you, but I’m fine. Go back to bed.”
Doyle stared down at Larkin, his face and bare chest striped with horizontal bars of pale light. Finally, he said, “You need to rest.”
And Larkin shook his head, saying just above a whisper, “It’s all connected. Regmore wasn’t merely a catalyst and these murders didn’t begin in the subways with Niederman. Earl Wagner shot Charlie Stolle in cold blood, as he was telling me of his involvement in the Niederman case. We can tie Wagner to the Dirty Dollhouse, which first opened in 1976. Ira, these killings areall connected. And they span literal decades.” Larkin’s voice rose, and he made a quick, agitated, back-and-forth motion between them as he added, “Some of these murders have been unsolved—never even seen the light of day—longer than we’ve been alive.”
Doyle ran a hand through his hair, asking, “But you mean, connected through the sender, right?”
“Yes, but more than him simply being in a position to pick up on criminal gossip and use it to his advantage,” Larkin explained. “This is bribery, blackmail, corruption, extortion—have you heard of Tetragnatha guatemalensis.”
“Tetra-what?”
“The long-jawed orb weaver. It’s a spider. The male and female lock jaws when they mate so that she can’t eat him—”
Doyle held his hand up. “Evie, no. It’s 3:00 a.m.”
Larkin glanced at his watch. “It’s 4:02. My point is—spiders are solitary creatures. They hunt alone, and yet, when very particular conditions align in the state of Texas—such as extensive rain bringing an excess of midges or mosquitoes—long-jawed spiders have been seen working together by the thousands to create megawebs that span the length of several trees in order to take advantage of the influx in the biomass. Serial killers are solitary creatures, too, in the sense that theyalsohunt alone. But what if a unique set of circumstances took place in their own environment that forced them into a sort of mutual dependency in order to thrive.”
Doyle’s thick brows were scrunched together. “Like a symbiotic relationship?”
“Yes, exactly.”
“Okay, it’s been a long time since I was in a biology class,” Doyle said thoughtfully. “But there’s… mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism.”
“Correct.”
“So which is it?”
Larkin frowned. “If we consider that Charlie Stolle was blackmailed and murdered—”
“You think the sender was behind that?”
“I do. And if that’s truly the case, the sender might also have something on Earl Wagner, which would explain his sudden and public violence, when Wagner has a history that suggestsifhe were a bloodthirsty man, he’s smart enough to have never gotten caught for it. Ants and aphids have a true, mutualistic relationship. Aphids produce honeydew, which the ants feed on, and in return they safeguard the aphids. However, there are some aphids that have adapted to exploit this relationship by masking themselves as ant larvae, so when the ants return them to their chamber, the aphids feed off the real ant larvae.”
Doyle crossed his arms and stated, “For the record, if I ever do something wrong in the future, please remember the night I willingly stood in a dark room, in my underwear, no less, listening to you talk about spiders and ants when youknowI hate bugs.”
“Technically, neither of those are bugs,” Larkin answered. “And it’s impossible for me to forget this moment, so don’t worry.”
“Great.”
“What if it began as a mutualistic relationship between the sender and these various murderers and then adapted, straddling the line between mutualism and parasitism. And like the ants, these killers don’t know any better, don’t realize they’re being duped until it’s too late.”
There weren’t a lot of breakfast choices around One Police Plaza at quarter to five on a Friday morning, but therewasa 24-7 diner on St. James Place called All the Time and on a Dime. The menu was generic, low-quality American grub, and while they offered eggs and they offered bagels, they did not offer eggsona bagel. Larkin was puzzled, but not surprised, when Doyle nonetheless asked for, and received, exactly that.
“There’s a bodega around the corner that makes a way better egg and cheese,” Doyle explained as they walked down the quiet but never-empty halls of the fifth floor. “But the Dime will do if you’re working odd hours.”
“I have to wonder what is it you did in order to be one of those customers with secret-menu privileges.”
Doyle stopped outside his office, switched his coffee from his right to left hand, pulled a ring of keys from his pocket, and said, “Evie, come on.” He unlocked the door before giving Larkin his patent, sexy smile. “I just smiled and asked.”
Larkin grunted before following Doyle inside.
The office looked as it did the last few times Larkin had visited—the drafting table to the left of the room, Doyle’s portfolio bag left propped against one leg from yesterday, and shelving heavy with art supplies, reference books, and six-pack binders lining the wall behind the chair. The corkboard overhead was still full of the fanciful artwork done by children—a sort of penniless payment for the time Doyle had sat with them at their most vulnerable and made them feel safe when perhaps every other adult in their young lives had let them down. Children’s brains weren’t developed enough to comprehend the complex psychology of what made Doyle a lighthouse amid their hurricane, but they did possess a sort of intuition that, for all the big emotions they grappled with, at ages where they were still learning to utilize empathy, Doyle was just like them. They didn’t have the vocabulary in which to identify that insight—but they knew. On a gut level, they knew Doyle understood everything that had been so immense and scary, because he had once been scared too.
The beginnings of the facial reconstruction still sat on the work table to the right, although it looked like Doyle had wrapped cotton rags or towels around it before slipping a plastic bag overhead—to keep the clay from drying out, Larkin realized. There were still several sculpting utensils sitting out that Doyle hadn’t bothered to put away after receiving Larkin’s call from the hospital: wire clay cutters, sponges, metal tools with sharp tips for minute detailing perhaps, and a few wooden tools of very vague shapes that Larkin honestly couldn’t deduce as to their purpose.
Larkin walked across the room and set the bag of breakfast sandwiches on the table as Doyle closed the door. He pulled the still-warm, wrapped bagels out and used the paper bag as a sort of impromptu place mat. “Thank you for humoring me,” Larkin began, turning sideways to address Doyle as he joined him.
