“I looked for it,” Larkin answered.
Millett shot him an irritated glare.
“Tuesday, May 19, you provided me with a picture reminiscent of nineteenth-century mourning photography with the phrase, ‘Deliver me to Detective Larkin,’ written on the back side,” Larkin explained.“Then on Wednesday, June 10, after unknowingly recovering fabric that was once used in a period mourning costume, I was supplied a VHS tape with another handwritten note reading, ‘Watch me, Detective Larkin.’
“Now we’re at a scene featuring a much more blatant attempt at communication—from whom I have to presume is the same unknown sender—‘Pin me to Detective Larkin.’And since at-home electric refrigerators weren’t popularized until after the first World War, and as far as I’m aware, have no connection to outdated mourning practices, I simply suspected there was some other item needing to be found.”
Millett lowered his camera.“I didn’t know there was a VHS tape on the last case.”
“It was delivered to my home.”
“That’s brazen.”Millett reached into the fridge and carefully tilted the head back to rest face up, revealing a bullet hole in the middle of the woman’s forehead.“Found the cause of death,” he stated.
Larkin’s eyes widened.“I know her,” he said on impulse.
“What?”
Despite the bloating, decomposition, adipocere, and third eye, Larkin would always recognize those pinched features, that Machiavellianism complex.He said, “Matilde Wagner.”
“The Angel of Death?”Millett asked.And when Larkin narrowed his eyes, he protested, “Hey, I didn’t name her.I just read the papers.”
“Wagner was the mastermind behind the deaths of Broadway sex workers.Her husband, Earl, was present—was the bait—and an accomplice to over forty years of killings,” Larkin explained.“But on June 12, Matilde murdered Earl.”
Millett observed with a touch of detachment, “Dead men tell no secrets.”
“The dead always speak.You just have to be willing to listen.”
“I guess that’s why O’Halloran calls you the Grim Reaper,” Millett said before tugging his mask down and shouting toward the street where Baxter stood speaking with OCME staff, “Doc!Come back—we got a probable ID!”He shoved his mask back onto his nose and then reached into Matilde Wagner’s mouth to remove the protruding object.
Larkin said, “She outsourced an attempt on Detective Doyle’s life to her brother, Sal Costa, before going on the lam.”
“Precinct gossip was—shit, hang on, it’s got a pin pierced through her tongue… there we go—the gossip was that Costa almost killedyou.”
“That’s correct.”
Millett glanced sideways.“That was stupid.”
“And I’d do it again.”
The item popped free from Wagner’s mouth, and Millett straightened his posture while extending a gloved hand.Despite the viscous body fluids, Larkin could easily make out a brooch with an antiquated clasp.It was made of black stone, seed pearls, and cut glass that housed delicate strands of braided human hair.
“You say she’s been on the lam the past month?”Millett asked, shifting the brooch this way and that in the pier light.“Looks like the wrong person found her.”
CHAPTER TWO
The second-floor bullpen of Precinct 19—the home away from home of the Cold Case Squad members—was empty at 12:34 a.m.Rows of industrial desks meant to withstand heavy use and abuse were all of the same faux wood surface and battered metal frame, like the department had done a single bulk purchase of office furniture when Larkin was still in grade school and called it done.It was in the desktop bric-a-brac where personalities became apparent: Baker’s cluttered mess of pilfered office supplies and outdated photos of her son; Porter’s collection of unwashed coffee mugs and half-empty clamshell containers of generic grocery store cookies; Miyamoto’s stress balls and desk plate reading: Assistant to the Regional Manager; Ulmer’s deluge of Post-it reminders; even Larkin’s cup of Lisa Frank pencils and the recent addition of a small succulent—these mementos spoke of who the ten elite detectives were in the precious hours they spent elsewhere, away from the banks of fluorescent overheads, citrus-scented bathrooms, and pragmatic discussions of the city’s forgotten dead.
Pulling out his computer chair, Larkin draped his suit coat over the back, adjusted the shoulder holster strapped to his right side, then took a seat.He typed up an initial report on the recovered body—an official ID would need to wait on fingerprints and a DNA test to legally confirm what Larkin already knew: the victim was Matilde Wagner and she’d been murdered to protect the secrets of the sender’s decades-old criminal enterprise.
Larkin had theorized that his and Doyle’s last three cases hadn’t been isolated events of brutality, overlooked throughout the years due to the cleverness of a perpetrator and incompetence of law enforcement, but instead they’d been part of a tangle, a snarl, a literal spider’s web of bribery, blackmail, corruption, extortion, rape, and murder—all of it connected via a once-mutualistic relationship with a single person.
The sender.
Adam Worth.
During an interview at the Tombs, Sal Costa had fearfully whispered this name, as if the walls might be listening—and maybe they were.Larkin had investigated the moniker, borrowing a book from the New York Public Library entitledBefore Moriarty: The Life of Adam Worth.Now little more than a footnote in history, Worth had been a class of criminal so renowned throughout the nineteenth century that he’d garnered the respect of not only some of New York’s greatest crooks and fences, such as Sophie Lyons and Marm Mandelbaum, but also the country’s most renowned detective agency: the Pinkertons.
Worth had been born to a poor immigrant family, grown to be a man of slight stature who’d served in the Civil War, and became known for his aversion to violence just as much as his obsession with wealth and status.He’d built an organization that was so much more than the territorial disputes, bloodshed, and hierarchies of gangs seen both then and now in the twenty-first century.Worth had built a business out of stealing, and as its sole proprietor, he’d organized and funded the jobs committed by others, thereby keeping his hands clean and pockets full.The American thief had lived a prosperous double life as a British gentleman, all while evading the law and pulling the puppet strings of his underlings from New York to London, Paris to South Africa.He was the Napoleon of Crime, the inspiration for the machinations of Professor James Moriarty, archenemy of virtuoso detective, Sherlock Holmes.
