Larkin closed his eyes and gave his mental Rolodex a hard spin.The faceless, the nameless, the lost and forgotten of New York City cascaded through his memory in a blur of colorless heartache at double,triplethe industry standard of twenty-four frames per second; otherwise, it’d take a full six and a half minutes to recall each and every case, and Larkin might have been a psychopomp, but his heart was flesh and blood—as vulnerable as Achilles’s heel—and he simply couldn’t bleed out for that long.
“I haven’t heard Andy’s name in a long time.”
“Marco will always be gone.”
“That’s my Mia.”
“When Essie vanished—”
Larkin’s eyes snapped open abruptly.“Barbara Fuller.Friday, June 12, when we interviewed Phyllis Clark—”
“She showed us Esther’s belongings,” Doyle hastily finished.“The IDs in the purse.”
“Yes, exactly.”Larkin stood.“This might be the circumstantial evidence that’ll finally get me the warrant to collect Esther’s belongings.”
“Good to see you aren’t holding a grudge about that.”
“Phyllis Clark is an uncooperative and combative woman, but that judge is a bigger idiot than she is.”
“You did include the phrasemise en abymein the paperwork,” Doyle reminded him.
“A lack of understanding of transmedial mirroring techniques is not sufficient reason to refuse a warrant to someone with my success rate.”
Doyle was doing his best—and failing, Larkin noted—to not smirk.He asked, “Are we thinking this jewelry belonged to Esther in the same way the clothing did?A family heirloom?”
Larkin said, “Earlier, my suggestion was that we look at Matilde Wagner’s early kills, but we needn’t go all the way back to the New York Infirmary.Esther, whose legal name is looking more and more likely to have been Barbara Fuller, was the first of Wagner’smission-orientedkills—the one who gave her a taste for cleansing the city of its undesirables.”
Doyle got to his feet as well.There was a glimmer in his eyes—like satisfaction at having finally solved a complex word problem.“Earl Wagner started working in the neighborhood in late ’81, and Esther was murdered the night of October 2, 1982.Her veil was taken as a trophy, but maybe Matilde took more than that because she was still working out her ritual with the body.”
“Something Phyllis said during our interview,” Larkin began, before repeating a portion of their past conversation with the precision of a tape recorder, “Essie was still carrying a gym bag to work—she kept a few different costume changes inside.… Either way, that bag never resurfaced after whatever happened to her.”
“That could explain why Esther would’ve had so much jewelry on hand at the time of her death,” Doyle answered.“It was part of her costumes.She carried the set in her bag.”More thoughtfully, he added, “I wonder if that bag never reappeared because Matilde and Earl did away with it, or if it’s simply lost in the office of the Property Clerk.”
“We won’t know without the original homicide casework,” Larkin said.“Which I have to presume was filed under Jane Doe, seeing as her missing person report was never connected to a known murder.”
“You’ve seen it?”
“Yes.Ulmer pulled it for me.It’s about all he’s done to help so far.”
“Is it ridiculous of me to ask how many Does are in the system that would have to be sorted through to find Esther?”
Larkin rubbed his chin absently.It felt like sandpaper—a reminder he hadn’t shaved that morning.He said, “A 2018 survey conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that from the 2,037 medical examiner and coroner offices within the United States who responded to their request for data collection, there were over 11,000 unidentified bodies on record with those agencies, of which, over 7,000 came from offices serving a population of more than 250,000 citizens.”
“So a lot,” Doyle concluded.
“Let’s not be hasty,” Larkin admonished.“The National Death Index breaks down their data into sets of five years—I need a calculator.”Larkin picked up his phone from the tabletop and tapped in a series of numbers on the calculator app.“The crude death rate for New York state is roughly 150,000 a year… that makes 750,000 in five.However, if I’m not mistaken, during the period of 1980 to 1984—when Esther was murdered—the state reported a total of 10,151homicides, which accounts for hardly more than one percent of the 750,000.However, roughly three-fourths of those homicides originated here in the city.
“Because I work Cold Cases, I’m privy to details the rest of the department outside of Homicide needn’t concern themselves with—namely, that one-third of those homicides from ’80 to ’84 remain unsolved to this day—for a total of… 2,537 cold case murders.And according to the National Institute of Justice, with research conducted in part with NamUs, roughly ten percent of missing or unidentified bodies are the victim of a violent end—meaning that of those 2,537 city homicides, we’re looking at about two hundred and fifty-three being cases of John and Jane Does.”
“All right, well, that’s not—”
Larkin held up a hand and said, “To bring us full circle, the Bureau of Justice Statistics further reports that, surprisingly, only twenty-four percent of all unidentified bodies are female.That gives us a working number of… sixty-one, rounded up.”Larkin turned his phone around so Doyle could see the screen.
“We only have to sort through sixty-one Jane Does to find Esther Haycox?”Doyle asked with noted optimism.
“In theory.We will have to do so manually, of course.”
“You’re brilliant, Evie.”
