“Doctor.”
Baxter sighed. “The samples were too degraded to confirm the actual quantity of drugs that would have been in her system at the time of death, but I can at least tell you what was there. Whether it killed her is another story….” He rummaged through what sounded like loose papers. “Here it is…huh. Digoxin. Do you know if your vic had a heart condition?”
“Anything else.”
“Nope. Just the—I can’t tell if you’re surprised or not by this news.”
“Thank you,” Larkin said before hanging up.
Doyle turned left off Avenue D and onto East Third before saying, “Care to tell me what’s going on?”
This case was built upon the blatant disregard for human life—the belief that sex workers not only belonged to the bottom rung of society, but that they deserved whatever befell them, because they were just prostitutes, hookers, whores.
No human involved.
Times Square was a place for the psychopath to walk freely, to gorge himself at all-you-can-eat buffets. He would never stop, would never be caught.
Because they were just prostitutes, hookers, whores.
Because there was no human involved.
“The vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral.”
And you had asked yourself, could they be saved?
You don’t see yourself as wrong, as a serial killer.
You’re an angel.
Avenging and saving their souls through pragmatic and ritualist deaths.
“Matilde Wagner is pharisaic.”
The pharisaic do not practice what they preach.
By day you are pious.
By night you are murderous.
“I let the Lord work through me.”
You live a life of duality, made possible by your Machiavellian relationship with a troubled and exploited mind. You’d cried fake tears because you do not feel love for your husband.
He was your means of access to those prostitutes.
Those hookers.
Those whores.
Your husband was the bait, the lure, the client—just another john signing in under a fake name to a now-razed hotel.
Because“Earl’s position was God’s will.”
So you joined them in that hotel room, with the digoxin from the hospital you nursed at. Earl had told you how he’d stolen it—only you were better, smarter, and didn’t get caught.
And then you saved those poor souls.
One after another.
