Doyle gave Larkin the phone, saying, “Joe called you before we arrested Regmore.”
“Correct.”
“That suggests Worth knew about our investigation even earlier than suspected.”
Larkin nodded while pocketing his cell.He returned to the left side of the table, shrugging out of his suit coat and resting it beside the evidence box.
“Shit….”Doyle turned around and braced his hands on the table.“Do you think Worth is responsible for Joe’s murder?”
“I find it unlikely that Joe’s usefulness had already run its course.After all, he hadn’t yet written a story about me.I don’t expect to find much on his laptop beyond notes, either.What I think is more likely is his sleuthing went noticed by someone else who perhaps deemed him in the way or a danger to their operation.”
“Mr.Honda Civic,” Doyle concluded.
Larkin picked up the case file a second time and said, “May I update you on the original 1982 homicide.”
“Should I sit down?”
“You should remain standing.I like looking at you.”
That won Larkin a mile-wide smile.
“Detective Ralph Noonan of Homicide, whether through a general disregard for human life, gross incompetence, struggling against an underfunded department still reeling from the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, or all of the above, did a piss-poor job in the investigation of Barbara’s murder,” Larkin began.“He asked no clarifying details of the Hotel Cavalier staff.When overseeing the crime scene, he didn’t demand the collection of trace evidence.He didn’t second-guess the ME’s decision to not perform an autopsy.The Kitten Klub, where Barbara worked, was on the very same block as the hotel, but from his notes, there’s no indication he bothered checking the place out.He makes note of having questioned women working West Forty-Third that night—”
“They wouldn’t have said anything,” Doyle interjected.
“You’re correct.He did record the identity of two sex workers he spoke to: Sharon King, deceased since 1991, and Bridget Cohen—”
“Who?”
Larkin paused.“What.”
Doyle had such an…oddexpression just then.An amalgamation of so many juxtaposing emotions that Larkin couldn’t interpret his facial grammar.
Doyle repeated, “Who?Who did you say?”
A misplaced sensation of self-doubt made Larkin open the file and double-check what he already knew.“Bridget Cohen.She lives in—”
Doyle moved forward and snatched the folder from Larkin’s hands with uncharacteristic aggression.He quickly went through the yellowed reports and DD5s, coming to a brief stop at the first rap sheet, then lifted the page so vigorously to view the next that it tore.
Larkin had known Ira Oisín Doyle for one hundred and three days, had been steadily peeling away the layers of misinterpretation and self-preservation to see beyond the veil to who the manreallywas, only to conclude Doyle truly was everything he presented himself to be.
He was gentleness.
He was love.
He was hope.
He wasjubilant up to the heavens.
He wasdepression unto death.
He was fragile.
He was wounded.
And he was so,soangry inside.
For one hundred and three days, Larkin had been finding tiny shards of Doyle’s soul everywhere he went, had been collecting them, putting together those fragments to reveal unprecedented guilt and betrayal and shame, lacquering their edges together with gold because Larkin just wanted Doyle to see, tounderstand, that he was still beautiful, that he deserved to be whole, that he had done nothing to warrant being shattered into these millions of little pieces.
