“It wasn’t only young girls who got involved with Forty-Second Street who lied about who they were.”
“But a girl said to me: find your niece and set her straight, because you either kill someone out here, or they kill you.”
“My adults were trying to find an Ira, not a Sam.”
Larkin abruptly stood, pulled his cell from his pocket, and quickly scrolled through all the stored photographs on his Cloud. He moved around the table to stand on Doyle’s left and turned the bust away from Bailey to really look at it for the first time that morning.
“Larkin—” Doyle began to protest.
But Larkin held out his free hand for quiet and placed the phone beside the reconstruction. He pinched the screen and zoomed in close on the photograph of Mia Ramos, dead on the subway bench.
Bailey shuffled around Doyle’s backside for a look at what Larkin was doing, then said approvingly, “Oh… would you look at that! Here in the Forensic Artists Unit, we call this ‘within the realm of possibility.’”
Larkin looked at Doyle and said gravely, “You’ve ID’d Mia Ramos.”
Chapter Fourteen
Rush-hour congestion on the FDR had Larkin and Doyle walking across the second-floor bullpen of Precinct 19 at 8:22 a.m.
Larkin made a beeline for Lieutenant Connor’s open office door, stepped inside, and said, “I need to speak with you.”
Connor said, “I’ll call you back,” into the phone against his ear, hung the receiver up, and stood. “Grim.Holy hell. I read O’Halloran’s—”
Larkin interrupted, “Everything is connected.”
“What is?” Connor asked warily.
“Every case, every clue, every criminal, since March 30. It’s likeThe Fall of the House of Usher.”
Connor’s expression shifted from that of concern to befuddlement.
Doyle shut the door behind himself, joined Larkin’s side in front of Connor’s desk, and asked, “Maybe you can clarify a little?”
Larkin said, “French novelist, André Gide, utilized the termmise en abymein his literary theories and criticisms. It translates to ‘placed into abyss,’ but Gide was exploring the concept of fictional sequences similar in subject or theme to the work which encloses it—think Hamlet’s play within a play. Hamlet hires a troupe of players to recreate a story of murder and betrayal closely resembling what he knows to have occurred between his uncle and father, as a means of proving his uncle’s guilt, seen in the king’s response: Give me some light.
“However, we can take themise en abymeconcept to a second degree, that of infinite duplication, and this is where Edgar Allan Poe’sThe Fall of the House of Usheris a primary example of a narrative connected to a subnarrative, connected to a subnarrative, so on and so forth. Poe manages this infinite loop by having both Roderick Usher and our unnamed narrator employ multiple storytelling techniques within the unfolding story that resemble the current gloom and ghastly fate the title already promises. And Poe’s exploration of duality goes beyond usingmise en abymein this manner, as it’s revealed that Roderick and Madeline Usher are twins and their simultaneous deaths bring about the end of their family line—the house of Usher—while the literal home—the house—collapses upon their untimely deaths.
“The sender has been operating under the guise ofmise en abyme: a murder within a murder. Duality within duality,” Larkin explained.
When Connor didn’t respond, Doyle said, “Think along the lines of Russian nesting dolls—”
“That’s not the same thing,” Larkin argued.
“Larkin,” Doyle quietly reprimanded before continuing to Connor. “It’s not quite so clean a visual as what Larkin just explained, but imagine the biggest doll is Alfred Niederman. Inside him is Harry Regmore, then Charlie Stolle, and now—most likely—Earl Wagner. They’re all related, all belong to the same doll set, so to speak. You can even take the same concept and use it for the victims,” Doyle continued. “The biggest doll is… who, Larkin?”
“Mia.”
“Mia Ramos,” Doyle said. “And then Esther Haycox, Natasha Smirnova….”
“Who the fuck is Esther Haycox?” Connor asked.
“The most likely false name—dual identity, if you will—of our mystery woman from the VHS tape,” Larkin said. “Public relations came back with a promising tip that we’ll be following up on this morning.”
Connor ran a freckled hand through his strawberry-blond hair, shook his head, and said, “I still don’t get this duality crap you’re talking about.”
Doyle said, “All of the known victims and killers from these three cases have used nicknames or assumed identities or even lived false narratives.”
“But not Gorman or the Garcia kid,” Connor said. “How do you explain them?”
