After the events of the Niederman case, theTimeshad written a glowing review of Larkin’s policework, including one assessment he hadn’t been particularly fond of:The NYPD’s been hiding their very own Sherlock Holmes within a small, forgotten team known as the Cold Case Squad.It’d been about his ego in the beginning—being compared to a fictional character when Larkin and his powers of deduction were very much real—but after Costa’s slip of the sender’s name….
Larkin stopped typing his report, looked at the books set neatly on the corner of his desk, then leaned to his right and grabbed the hefty tome of the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes.He’d been steadily re-reading the sometimes compelling, other times eye-rolling detective shorts whenever he remembered to take a lunch break, and just that afternoon had finishedThe Adventure of the Final Problem.Holmes, describing his nemesis to Watson—and thereby the reader—spoke gravely of an organization:Again and again in cases of the most varying sorts, and that he’d deduced Professor Moriarty to be at the center of a great spider web.He does little himself.He only plans.The central power is never caught—never so much as suspected.
Thumbing through the worn pages read by a thousand patrons before him, Larkin had to wonder if this entire game of cat and mouse had been orchestrated by the sender not because he had been bored, had been aroused by the thrill of the hunt, but because the sender had so easily gleaned the sort of manLarkinwas.The sender had understood how puzzles were a sort of pleasurable distraction from the atrocities of life, and he’d seen how Larkin yearned for mental stimulation of a certain caliber in the same way a dying man might thirst for water.Sherlock Holmes had realized, with a sort of somber glee, that he had at last met an antagonist who was his intellectual equal—but his fight with Moriarty was only a work of fiction, and Holmes’s obsessive desire to outsmart the professor hadn’t put a target on Watson’s back.Larkin understood the sender had chosen to reference Adam Worth for that very reason—to be an ever-constant reminder that this was the real world, with real consequences.
And unlike Holmes, if Larkin made the wrong move, he wasn’t coming back from Reichenbach Falls.
Larkin grabbed the receiver of his desk phone and dialed a number.
The line was picked up after three rings and a gruff, sleep-logged voice answered, “O’Halloran.”
“It’s Everett Larkin.”
“Hang on.”Bedding rustled in the background, followed by a door clicking shut.O’Halloran grumbled, “This better be good, or I’m gonna wring your dapper little neck.”
“We have a tentative ID on the Hudson River body.”
Amid a yawn, O’Halloran asked, “Jimmy Hoffa?”
“What.No.Matilde Wagner.”
“Sonofabitch.”O’Halloran was awake now.“Are you sure?”
“As sure as I can be with DNA results pending,” Larkin said.
O’Halloran swore under his breath before saying, “Did you know a man experiences unbridled joy only three times in his life?”
Larkin leaned back in his chair and rested his free hand against the back of his head.“Cite your source.”
But O’Halloran continued, “When he gets married, when his first child is born, and when he sees the look on Matilde Wagner’s face as the judge hands down a verdict of half a dozen consecutive life sentences.”
Larkin rolled his eyes to the ceiling.
Since his near-fatal brawl in the shabby apartment on East Third, Larkin had been actively searching the thousands of unsolved cold cases for records that would be possible matches to Wagner’s twenty-two alleged victims.But without names, faces, bodies, without knowing if any of those women had been reported as missing by friends or family, if their deaths had been investigated or deemed NHI by original responding officers, it’d been an exercise in futility for the last twenty-seven days.While Larkin had been lost in the past, O’Halloran had been presiding in the here and now—leading the search for Wagner, who was wanted not only for the premeditated murder of her husband, Earl, but also for conspiracy to commit murder—specifically that of law enforcement officer Ira Doyle.It wasn’t anything personal.O’Halloran barely tolerated Larkin and, frankly, didn’t even know Doyle, but he stood by the code of: You attack one of us, you attack all of us.O’Halloran had been determined to make the conspiracy charge stick, so his target winding up dead threw a serious wrench into the works.
Larkin was accustomed to the disappointment of being unable to see perpetrators stand trial; so often they were already dead themselves by the time their victim’s case reached his desk—but Wagner was different.She’d been the cipher to understanding, to discovering who the sender was.She’d been the first person Larkin could confirm had been in direct communication with the mysterious Adam Worth, and losing the opportunity to question that relationship—never mind holding her accountable for the Broadway killings or for planning to take the life of a man who meanteverythingto him—it was absolutely criminal.
As for O’Halloran, who was very quietly cussing up a storm because it was clear his family was asleep and perhaps he’d disturbed them once already when he’d returned home less than an hour ago—Larkin suspected he wasn’t nearly as familiar with the injustice that dominated these occasions.
Larkin asked, “Is there anything you can tell me about your search for Wagner.”
“Like where she’s been hiding out?If I knew that, I’d have had her ass in the cell across from her shithead brother already.”
“No.”
“What do you mean,no?”
Larkin explained, “The ME says her body underwent saponification inside the refrigerator, which, from my understanding, takes a minimum of three weeks to develop after being placed in an ideal environment.”
“She poisons Earl right under my fuckin’ nose,” O’Halloran began, “gives ol’ Sally-Boy the go-ahead to off your buddy, hightails it to Queens or Jersey orwherever, and then it turns out she’s been dead for almost as long as she’s been MIA?”
“That is most likely the case, yes.”
O’Halloran blew out a breath, which briefly distorted over the phone line.“Look, I’ll see if I can sit down with Costa in the next day or so—have a little chat.With his sister out of the picture, he’s got no secrets worth protecting.”
“Please call me when you have an update.”
“Sure.Hey, Grim?”
