“That’s my fault.”
Doyle shook his head adamantly. “No, it’s not.” He stared at the pocket square for a minute, like he was working out a complex equation in his head. Then Doyle laughed to himself, pinched the center of the silk, and drew it up partway before tucking the bottom and carefully slipping it back into Larkin’s breast pocket. “I only know the puff fold.”
“Are you okay,” Larkin asked.
“I’m on cloud nine.” Doyle gave the hair tie on Larkin’s wrist a tug.
And Larkin smiled, saying, “Me too.”
Chapter Thirteen
Natasha Smirnova’s arrest record read like a Shakespearean tragedy without the supernatural twist. She’d been charged a dozen times for prostitution and drug-dealing at hotspots between Broadway and Eighth Avenue throughout the ’80s, before her murder on April 23, 1992. Charlie Stolle had been her arresting officer for four of those instances, and of those, one was the 1987 raid on the Dirty Dollhouse, where Earl Wagner had also been hauled in.
Larkin tapped his pen irritably against a blank sheet of printing paper on the tabletop, leaving a smattering of blue pockmarks.
He didn’t typically waste time taking notes. A quick spin of his mental Rolodex, and he could recall a report from an investigation or statement from a witness or suspect with near word-for-word accuracy. Transcribing what was already stored into his long-term memory only slowed his thought process down. But on both the Regmore and Niederman cases, Larkin had watched Doyle diligently take down pertinent details, even going so far as to draft quick-and-dirty timelines so as to better comprehend the chain of very old and very cold events.
—digging through Doyle’s bookshelf becausehowbooks were cared for told more about an individual than they likely realized, and Larkin had been trying so hard to not brute force his way into Doyle’s firmly maintained privacy, but he needed to know, to learn, who his partner was, and that’s when Larkin had realized Doyle was an annotator, leaving observations in the margins of absolutely everything he read—
Larkin had felt that, given the growing complexity of their case, Doyle’s method likely held some degree of water and studying the details from a fresh angle would be beneficial.
If only he could pinpoint where to begin.
“What’s wrong?”
Larkin glanced up. Doyle was staring at him, holding one of his earbuds, his fingers discolored from the last two hours he’d spent realizing a face in the bones of Jane Doe and writing her identity in clay. A subgenre of punk that Larkin had only recently learned was calledqueercorebled from the earbud in hand. Doyle had decidedly… eclectic music tastes.
“Nothing,” Larkin answered.
Doyle said, “Start in the middle.”
“What.”
“Draw a spiral.”
“I don’t think you know what I’m working on.”
“You’re trying to establish a timeline.”
“How did you know that.”
Doyle smiled and said, as he tapped his phone’s screen to pause the music, “Everyone’s got tells. Even you.”
Larkin stared skeptically, but Doyle only motioned to the pen, so he set the tip to paper, made several circular motions, then held it up. “I don’t see what this has helped to establish.”
“Did you start drawing the spiral from the middle or the end?”
“Spirals are infinite. You can’t start at the end, because there is no end.”
Doyle raised both brows in response.
Larkin slowly lowered the paper. “Ah.”
“Timelines are just as infinite,” Doyle explained. “So start in the middle and work your way out either direction.”
Larkin turned the paper over, drew a horizontal line, and said, “Okay… we know, with certainty, that the Dollhouse was in business from 1976 to 1989, and that both Natasha and Wagner were arrested by Stolle in a 1987 raid.” He marked the three dates accordingly.
“So Natashadidwork there?” Doyle asked, tugging his other earbud free and setting it aside.
