“All of it.” Doyle glanced around the bullpen, at the other Cold Case detectives going about their morning, and motioned Larkin and Connor back into the office. After Connor shut the door, Doyle said to Larkin, “Tell us about the relevancy of place in the instances of Mia and Esther.”
Larkin blinked a few times. “In regard to… their murders?”
“Yes. I think you’re on the cusp of the answer. Come at it from a think-aloud strategy. You know this stuff like the back of your hand.”
“The compliment isn’t necessary.”
“It’s a statement of fact,” Doyle corrected.
The corner of Larkin’s mouth threatened to tug into a smile. He quickly said, “Much like Regmore with his parks and Niederman with the subway, this individual was versed with and comfortable in Times Square. And because the neighborhood in the ’70s and ’80s had adopted an attitude of ‘anyone can be bought, girls must do what I want because I paid for it, I can’t get in trouble because everyone else is doing it,’ it emboldened the wrong kind of personalities. It gave immunity to sociopaths, psychopaths—the sort of individual who gets a thrill out of the control and domination and punishment of women.”
“Were Mia and Esther controlled?” Doyle asked.
The question caught Larkin off guard. After a thoughtful pause, he said, “No.”
“Whaddya mean?” Connor protested. “They’re both dead. I’d say that’s pretty fucking controlling.”
“A significant portion of serial killers are motivated by the thrill of the hunt and the sexual abuse and torture that ensues. Take for instance the Torso Killer. He was a sexual sadist, apprehended in 1980 after the murder of several sex workers in Times Square. At his peak, he wasdismemberingbodies. But we’re not seeing that sort of violence here.” Larkin frowned, tapped his chin a few times, then said, “In fact, we’re not seeing IPV either. Domestic abuse is anger and power, but from what the ME has gathered regarding Mia, and what we saw in the video of Esther—”
“And who’s to say she didn’t die of an OD? So many of those girls worked the sex industry just to afford their habits.”
“The violence is subdued. Efficient.” Larkin jabbed his thumb into the corner of his left eye as the steady throb of a headache began to make itself known. “There’s no sexual gratification or domination,” he continued, his eyes closed. “During the fiscal crisis, New York City reduced its police force by over twenty percent, including the elimination of the Organized Crime Squad and a thirty-three percent budget reduction to the Narcotics Squad—the latter taking effect during the crack and heroin epidemics.”
“Relevancy?” Doyle asked, and it wasn’t in the tone of someone who didn’t understand, or who thought Larkin was deviating too far from the original point, but more in encouragement to further explore the thought.
Larkin raised his head, blinked a few times, and watched the black spots dissipate. “In the 1970s alone, there was an estimated 40,000 sex workers in the city and over 200,000 citizens abusing heroin, with considerable crossover between these two subjects. When Vice made prostitution arrests in Times Square, they only ever rounded up women, never the clients or pimps, which set a standard within society to view these women as… less than. This can be further seen in the thankfully now outdated police lingo, NHI—no human involved—which was the standard description for finding a dead sex worker, regardless if their death was an accident or homicide. And with the police department layoffs, rampant corruption, and low morale, even if a detectiveknewone of these women didn’t OD but was instead murdered, they wouldn’t have had the means or department backing in which to investigate.”
Doyle asked, “Our perp is… what, making his murders look like something else?”
“It does feel a bit like we’re investigating a murder that might not be a murder.”
“Lying is a developmentally normal trait in children,” Larkin segued. “My ex-husband teaches first grade, and he and other teachers have to be on the lookout for degrees of lying—is this a child simply testing the concept of morality, seeking a boost in self-esteem, or is this an indication of something more serious, like trauma or abuse. But occasionally he’ll have a student in class who hasn’t fully distinguished the difference between fantasy and reality. Teachers must take care with these children and help them to understand that difference without treating their imagination as a lie, as it can be detrimental to the child’s development.
“I bring this up because serial killers are seventeen percent more likely to plead not guilty by reason of insanity than any other criminal, and yet the FBI confirms nearly all are found competent to stand trial. This includes some of the worst visionary, controlling, and hedonistic offenders—killers who make up incredible lies to get out of what they’ve done. There’s a fourth type, however, who rarely lies, who believes in anddefendstheir rationality for killing: the mission-oriented. These individuals are often highly organized and stable residents who kill quickly and efficiently, without any of the grotesquery serial killers are infamous for. And do you know who they target,” Larkin asked, staring unblinkingly at Doyle and Connor. “Undesirables as deemed by society. LGBT, minorities, women,sex workers.”
Doyle swore under his breath. “Okay, so if the sender is replicating his previous method of dispensing clues, Esther is this killer’s first victim, in the way that he introduced Mia Ramos as Niederman’s first. We have video evidence of Esther’s veil being removed from her body in 1982, and then some handful of months before the Dollhouse closes on New Year’s in 1989, it’s left on Mia’s body.”
“Like bookends,” Connor spoke up. “Now the question is, how many other sex workers did this fucker murder in that seven-year span?”
“This perp’slastvictim was Niederman’sfirst,” Larkin said, almost thoughtfully.
“What do you mean?” Doyle asked.
“That’s the connection,” Larkin said, glancing up. “The murder within a murder. The symbiotic relationship these criminals all share. Mia’s murder was taken advantage of by Niederman. He had to have met our current killer at the time of her death, in the subway, because you can’t move a body alone—especially in New York City—without being noticed. Ever since, he took advantage of the homeless youth in the tunnels, yes, but those photos were always taken in the subway because the first victim sets the pattern. I need to make a call.” Larkin opened the door and left again.
“Hang on,” Connor called. “How the fuck did you deduce all of this?”
“I never forget anything,” Larkin said over his shoulder. He grabbed the receiver of his desk phone, dialed a number, and waited. The line was picked up on the third ring, and he said, “Good morning, Ms. Ramos. This is Detective Everett Larkin with the Cold Case Squad. I’d like to ask you a follow-up question about your niece, if that’s okay.”
“Ah, good morning, Detective. How can I help?” Manuela sounded bone-weary, like a woman who’d slept but not rested in over thirty years, now facing the truth—staring down the barrel of a gun—that all this time, it was for naught.
“How was Mia with needles.”
“Needles?”
“Yes. Such as, at doctor appointments.”
“Oh.” And Manuela laughed. It was a spasmodic reaction that Larkin had seen time and again in the bereaved when provoked into recalling a moment so seemingly out of place in their grief. “Miahatedneedles. She once screamed so hard, she threw up on a doctor’s shoes. I’ll never forget that. We even got into trouble one year because she was missing her MMR vaccine—you need that for public school. Baby girl was terrified of them.”
