CHAPTER NINE #2
“The smell was stronger in the vestibule,” Larkin replied.
He motioned for Doyle, and with his pistol held at low ready, he returned to the front door before slowly descending the steps to the basement, following the smell of decay like a bloodhound.
At the landing stood a door partially ajar, the interior within completely dark.
Larkin nudged the door open farther with his shoulder.
Behind him, Doyle sucked in a breath of air as the stench intensified.
Larkin reached inside, felt along the wall, and switched on a light.
The space appeared to double as both a studio and storage.
There was a wooden easel—a larger version of the exact one Doyle kept stored at home—and easily a dozen vertically stacked canvases along the left wall.
There was a drop cloth on the floor, a table strewn with containers of well-loved brushes and palettes of paint, but also stacked boxes labeled as seasonal décor, a stationary bike, deflated yoga ball, industrial floor fan, an Igloo cooler that had the color trappings of the early ’90s, and two cases of Pepsi Zero stacked beside a discarded pile of what looked to be salad dressing bottles and removeable refrigerator shelves.
Right smack in the middle of the room was a decomposing body slumped in a foldable camping chair.
The remains were in the stage of active decay, with blackish liquid seeping from skin breaks caused by the bloating and putrefaction of internal organs.
Skin sloughed from the hands hanging limp over the armrests, and long dark hair had slipped free from the scalp.
The victim’s head was tilted far back with their jaw hanging wide open.
They wore a pair of stained and soiled overalls and were covered in so many wriggling maggots that the body gave off the illusion of movement.
“Sonofabitch…,” Larkin whispered.
Doyle took a step closer, reaching over Larkin’s shoulder to push the door back enough so that he could peer inside. “Holy — hang on, Larkin .”
But Larkin stepped into the room so Doyle didn’t have to.
He cleared the corners, made certain there was no one lurking behind the New Year’s resolutions and impulse buys, then approached the rotting corpse.
Adult flies buzzed erratically around the body.
Larkin put his free hand to his face, covering his mouth and nose while leaning in to inspect what remained of any defining characteristics.
“It’s not Phyllis,” he announced around his cupped hand.
“How can you even tell?”
“The long hair,” Larkin said, pointing his weapon at the goopy clumps of hair littering the floor.
“Could it be Stephanie Sato?” Doyle suggested, still hovering in the doorway.
“I don’t know what she looks like.” A writhing mass of maggots plopped to the floor like a splatter of paint, and Larkin took a few steps backward. “But it looks as if this woman was struck on the back of the head. There’s an open gash on the scalp.”
Doyle said, “If it is Stephanie, how has Phyllis not noticed her own wife is missing?”
“How has she not noticed the smell,” Larkin corrected. He started toward the door when he heard a muffled tap , tap , tap . He stopped, looked up.
“What?”
Tap , tap , tap .
Larkin ducked out of the room and slipped around Doyle.
Pistol still in hand and back pressed to the handrail, he slowly started up the stairs.
He’d made it about halfway up when someone—a man—crept out of the living room and back into the vestibule.
The stranger was dressed in khakis and a baby blue polo shirt, the sleeves bulging around his big biceps.
He had an undercut and the kind of beard that belonged on either an Alaskan frontiersman or a barista from Williamsburg.
The strap of a leather satchel was taut across his muscular chest, the bag resting on his backside, and he held an expensive-looking digital camera in one hand.
The stranger looked down, clicked a few buttons on the camera, then turned toward the basement steps, almost as if instinct had told him he wasn’t alone. The man’s gaze locked with Larkin’s, and he immediately all but flung himself out the still-open front door.
Larkin charged up the stairs, shouting, “NYPD!”
The intruder was already across the driveway and onto the sidewalk by the time Larkin reached the threshold.
Doyle was calling for Larkin, but he didn’t stop.
He raced out the door, back into the muggy aftermath of the storm, following the stranger along Carroll and west toward Clinton.
Even in a suit and dress shoes, Larkin was fast. Gripping his SIG in his left hand, Larkin pumped his arms, pounded the sidewalk, and closed the distance.
At the corner, the stranger nearly plowed into two men carrying an ornamental sideboard from a funeral home toward a parked moving van, their angry voices filling the air like the drone of wasps.
The man stumbled like a newborn foal into the crosswalk while keeping a desperate hold on his camera.
A truck coming up Clinton laid on its horn.
Larkin flew past the two still-shouting movers, into the road, and slammed into the suspect with all of his forward momentum—the two crashing to the pavement on the opposite side of the street and narrowly missing being flattened by an oversized pickup.
The camera skittered and scraped loudly across the sidewalk, just out of reach.
“Get off of me!” the intruder shouted.
Larkin grabbed the man’s right arm and yanked it back and up behind him, causing him to let out a high-pitched yelp. “Which letter in NY-goddamn-PD did you not understand?”
“This is police brutality!”
“The hell it is. Stop moving !”
Larkin’s one-handed grip wasn’t enough to hold the bigger man down, and he was able to yank free and awkwardly roll onto his back.
Larkin clamped his thighs tight, straddling the intruder’s hips, and by the way the stranger’s face had taken on a sudden, almost waxy appearance, Larkin’s look of rage was far outweighing any embarrassment regarding their physicality.
“Who are you,” Larkin demanded.
“J-Joe Sinclair.”
Larkin cocked his head as his Rolodex memory automatically spun. He knew this name. He knew this man—the reporter who’d endeavored for an interview during the Death Mask Murders. Unprompted, Larkin said, “ Out in NYC .”
Joe’s eyebrows rose. “Y-yeah. Wow, you remember—”
“What were you doing in that home.”
“Following a story.”
“You were following me,” Larkin corrected.
“You’re like no one I’ve ever met before,” Joe said in a rush.
“Flattery will get you nowhere.”
“I mean it,” he protested. “It—it’s not just that you’re open in a conservative work environment, or that you’re handsome and highly decorated—”
“Get to the fucking point,” Larkin snapped.
“I’ve heard you’re a genius—a literal genius. And that you’re hunting your fourth serial killer in as many months.”
“Were you at Pier 34 last night.”
Joe swallowed and then nodded.
Larkin grabbed a fistful of Joe’s polo and yanked him up. “Have you been following my ex-husband.”
Joe was taken aback as he repeated, “ Ex -husband?”
The sudden and profound relief that Doyle had been wrong nearly had Larkin as giddy as a schoolboy.
It wasn’t two or more stalkers, and the Honda Civic wasn’t connected to Adam Worth.
It was just a journalist—the same fucking journalist from earlier in the year—who’d clearly been lucky in his bit of online snooping to have discovered Noah, but not enough to have learned of the pending divorce.
Joe had been hanging out around Larkin’s former residence because the bastard thought Larkin still lived there.
Connor was going to have a stroke when he found out how close the media had inadvertently gotten to this case.
“Fourth degree stalking is a misdemeanor,” Larkin said. “Do you want to spend the next three months on Rikers.”
“Larkin!”
Larkin glanced to his right. Doyle was running toward them, coming up on the movers outside the funeral home across the street.
Joe’s objections grew louder and more frantic. “It’s not like that. Everyone wants you, Mr. Larkin, from the rags to the Times , but I can tell your real story without all the pandering Sherlockian bullshit. Consent to an interview—”
From the corner of his eye, Larkin saw a car slow at the intersection.
He glanced sideways at… a blue Honda Civic.
The passenger window rolled down, a sharp, cigarette scent wafted out; then there was a flash of a muzzle, a deafening boom—and Larkin’s face and chest were splattered with blood as Joe slumped out of his hold and collapsed dead on the pavement.
Larkin looked down.
Joe’s mouth was agape, his eyes wide as if surprised. A small entry wound glistened from the middle of his forehead. Taken out execution-style. The exit wound behind his right ear pumped a steady stream of wine-red blood into the gutter.
—rain and whiskey and blood like ahell-brothboilandbubble—
Larkin raised his head, and the pistol was leveled at him.
—“Since the day we met—I knew I was in love.”—