“Please remember that I’m your partner. If you want to yell, do it to a brick wall.”
“Can you switch hands for a moment.”
Doyle did.
Larkin took Doyle’s right hand and rubbed the pad of his thumb over the big knuckles, warm skin, prominent veins. He kissed the backside once, as if it were penance for his sins. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
“I forgive you.”
“Believe me, I’m the lucky one.”
You have no idea how wrong you are, Larkin thought. He let go, cleared his throat, and tried again. “Okay. Hard evidence. We know Wagner was out of prison and working at the Dollhouse by ’81. He was an on-and-off employee right up until their closure on January 1, 1989. We have a credible story that our runaway, Mia Ramos, was working at the Dollhouse since ’86, using false identification. She would have been fourteen years old. Ms. Ward said she believed Mia’s child was six months old when she met the baby in May of ’88.”
“Is she correct?”
“No, but not far off. Baby Hope—Candace—was an estimated nine months when she was discovered on June 3, 1988. That makes her date of birth… about September 1987, and conception… forty weeks… sometime around December 1986.”
“If Wagner’s guilty of anything, make it statutory rape,” Doyle murmured.
“Our credible story continues with Ms. Ward having never seen or heard from Mia after her ’88 visit. And when we consider that Baby Candace was found dead June 3, it’s a reasonable assumption that Mia was murdered at relatively the same time. Six months later, the peep show is shuttered for good and she’s left inside to mummify.”
“With the remnants of Esther Haycox’s veil wrapped around her neck,” Doyle added.
“Esther Haycox, aka possibly Barbara Fuller, was reported as missing October 4, making her date of death likely the night of October 2, 1982.”
“Wagner was in Times Square then,” Doyle noted. “The Dirty Dollhouse was on West Fortieth. Frills was Forty-Second and the Kitten Forty-Third. All were along Broadway.”
“A perfect example of how place can satisfy the needs and goals of an individual,” Larkin said, before adding with a touch of exasperation, “This individual being…who?”
Doyle sped through the United Nations Tunnel and past the gray concrete Waterside Pier, with its view of the expansive East River and Queens just beyond. He had a certain grace and dexterity when driving, despite his refusal to correctly grip the wheel with two hands. But maybe it was this rebellious attitude that the Audi responded to. Because the way they seamlessly wove in and out of midday traffic, engine revving like a tiger’s roar, the car might as well have been alive.
“Who had reason to want Esther Haycox dead?” Doyle asked.
“Phyllis Clark.”
“You think so?”
“Yes. She was, and still is, disgusted by sex workers—specifically those who engage in intercourse for money. And I believe that if she truly wanted us to bring Esther’s killer to justice, she’d not have demanded a warrant for a few bits and bobs.”
“And who had reason to want Mia Ramos dead?”
“Niederman.”
“But you’ve been speculating two people were involved.”
“Wagner,” Larkin said. “He impregnated a child, promised to marry her, and when he didn’t, Mia didn’t go quietly into the night. She was a threat to his—no, that’s not possible.”
“What’s not?”
Larkin closed his eyes, spun his mental Rolodex to that morning, to the timeline he’d been writing while sitting across from Doyle at the worktable. “Wagner was in prison—April 15, 1988, to February 3, 1989. Mia was alive before he went in, and the Dollhouse was shuttered when he was released.”
“You asked Candace about Sal Costa’s drug use,” Doyle prompted.
“Nothis.”
“But Costa was pimping young women at the Dollhouse during the same period that Wagner was an on-and-off employee,” Doyle continued. “He got sex workers hooked on heroin. We have at least one victim with needle marks, despite family confirming she had a phobia.”
Larkin said, with a touch of disbelief in his tone, “Sal Costa as a mission-oriented killer and Earl Wagner as his handyman.”
