CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Larkin stepped off the elevator at the fifth floor of One Police Plaza with a box in both hands and a case file balanced atop.
He strode down the long hall toward the most western end, sidestepping two detectives who’d decided the middle of the corridor was an ideal place for a conversation.
Their voices went from full volume to a sudden hush, one whispering, “That’s the Grim Reaper,” and the other answering, “I heard he’s playing patty-cake with the doodle squad. ” Larkin stopped, turned, and stared.
Abbott and Costello scurried into their respective offices.
Larkin rolled his eyes and continued down the hall, only to be stopped a second time when he was less than six feet from Doyle’s closed door.
“Hey! Larkin!”
Larkin backtracked a few steps and peered through the partially open door of Senior Artist Bailey’s office. “Good afternoon.”
Bailey motioned him inside with a friendly wave.
Larkin glanced a final time in the direction of Doyle’s office.
“Don’t worry, he’s not going anywhere,” Bailey said.
Larkin used the box to push open the door the rest of the way before parking himself in the threshold, not so subtly suggesting he had other places to be and couldn’t stay. “It wasn’t my intention to interrupt Doyle during an interview—”
“Oh, he’s not working on a composite sketch,” Bailey answered.
He sat behind his desk, hands on the back of his head, and a smile somewhere under that bushy Selleck mustache.
He wore a wide polyester tie of muddy greens, sickly yellows, and rusty reds that’d been the height of men’s fashion sometime in the ’80s.
“Do you know what vein pattern recognition is?”
“I understand it as a concept,” Larkin answered.
“It’s the practice of matching veins in an extremity to their corresponding individual,” Bailey answered. “They’re as unique as a fingerprint, did you know that? When it comes to child exploitation, sometimes it’s all we’ve got to work with.”
“A… vein ?” Larkin asked, now confused.
Bailey lowered his hands. He drummed his messy desktop idly.
“Like in a forearm or the back of the hand—something that might be in a video or photograph. Scumbags like that, they’re not big on showing their faces.
We don’t have a federal budget or access to more state-of-the-art methods, but we’ve got Doyle.
He’s been tinkering with image-enhancement techniques for the last year. ”
“How does it work,” Larkin asked.
Bailey pursed his lips, and his mustache wriggled like it was alive.
“I know you put an RGB image into grayscale and finagle the contrast levels to such a degree that veins usually invisible to the camera will become visible. It’s not foolproof, and it’s pretty technical, but Doyle understands all those doodads a lot more than me or Loving does. ”
“That’s fascinating,” Larkin answered, realizing now the method Doyle had used for making “Charlotte Laura Fuller” once again visible on their brooch had been repurposed from his trial and error at combating a far more insidious crime.
Bailey smiled, a combination of both pride and indulgence. “Yeah, and you know him… always taking the cases with kids. I don’t know how he stomachs it, to be honest. But they trust him and SVU likes him. I don’t get in the way of that relationship.”
“Yes. Well….” Larkin allowed his gaze to briefly wander as he considered his choice of words.
He’d been inside Bailey’s office only once before—on March 30, when he’d been dropping off Andrew Gorman’s skull casting for a facial reconstruction—and the room hadn’t changed much.
It was smaller than Doyle’s, with no supply closet, and instead of a flat work surface like where Doyle did his sculpting, Bailey had a large office desk laden with paperwork.
He did have a drafting desk, though, and that entire section of the room looked a bit like a bomb had gone off in an art supply store.
Sketchpads lay open, loose papers with half-finished composites and warm-up exercises were scattered about, heaps of expensive pencils and messy charcoal bits appeared to have no permanent home, and by the looks of paintbrushes sticking out from among piles of tracing paper and micron pens mixed in with plastic bags of clay, had never once been organized.
A diploma was hung crookedly on the wall behind Bailey’s desk—Parsons School of Design—with a massive corkboard taking up the rest of the available real estate.
Unlike Doyle’s, which displayed drawings given by the child victims he worked with, Bailey’s board was burdened with newspaper clippings going back a decade, if not more, praising the successful arrests based on the work of the Forensic Artists Unit.
Looking at Bailey again, Larkin concluded simply, “Doyle is a very good man.”
“He sure sets the standard, doesn’t he?” Bailey pointed at the box in Larkin’s arms. “That your refrigerated lady case?”
“No.” But then Larkin added more tactfully, “It’s related.”
“Did you want to leave it here?”
“I’d rather drop it off with Doyle. I won’t stay.”
Bailey waved a hand. “He’s been at it nearly… what… three hours? I’m sure he’s close to finishing. But hey, thanks for sending him back downtown for this. I know it’s not ideal—”
“Crime never is.”
Bailey chuckled. He shifted forward in his chair and rested his elbows on the desk, papers crinkling under the weight. He said, voice low, “Try not to get him killed, hmm? I still plan to be living la vida loca when I hit sixty, and Doyle’s going to be promoted to Senior Artist when I tap out.”
Larkin raised both brows. “Does he know.”
“Not yet. Let’s keep it that way for a while longer, okay?”
“I understand.”
Bailey winked and gave Larkin a finger-gun salute.
Larkin took a step backward, more than ready to make himself scarce before Bailey could meander on to another topic, but his eye caught the corkboard a second time, and he stared at a muddy photograph of a young skinny cop with a familiar mustache, who smiled awkwardly for the camera while holding up a piece of paper—its details lost in the poor quality of the newsprint.
Larkin inclined his head and asked, “Is that you.”
Bailey spun in his chair. He pointed and said, “Oh, that? What gave it away?” He grinned at Larkin while stroking his mustache. “Yeah, that was about a thousand years ago. Look at me. I was still in uniform.”
“What’re you displaying.”
“My very first composite sketch. Back then, the detectives, they’d just ask around, ‘Hey! Can any of you guys draw?’ Well, I was fresh outta art school, dead broke—go figure—and joined the ranks for the steady paycheck.
One night, they came around saying, ‘We need a composite!’ and drawing a suspect was a hell of a lot more up my alley than responding to domestics at 2:00 a.m., so I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it.
’ Next thing you know, my fate’s been sealed. ”
“Are you wearing a hip holster.”
Bailey laughed. “Sure am. My trusty six-shooter.”
Larkin’s gaze darted to Bailey with renewed interest. “You used a revolver.”
“Standard issue back then. When did we transition to 9mm… ’93? ’94? Something like that. All us old-timers had to go to the range and get recertified.” Bailey waved a hand and concluded, “I don’t miss it. I mean, I’ve got a service weapon, but I prefer not having to wear it, thank you very much.”
“Doyle too,” Larkin commented, almost automatically.
“Smart man.”
Larkin looked down at his box, offered Bailey a curt goodbye, and left the threshold. He went to Doyle’s office, the last door on the left, and opened it. He stepped partially inside and looked toward the worktable.
Doyle sat perched on a stool with his back to the door, his left hand raised up and balled into a fist, temple leaning against it. His laptop was open, tablet out, and stylus working in his right hand. Loud and angry music bled from his cheap earbuds.
Larkin slipped inside, crossed the room, and approached Doyle from the left side.
He noted several discarded candy wrappers on the tabletop and a Post-it stuck to a section of the computer screen, which didn’t make sense for about three seconds, and then Larkin realized what Doyle was doing—understood that he was offering a modicum of respect for the underage victim by covering their young body while he worked on identifying the adult who had violated them in this image they shared.
Doyle must have sensed he was no longer alone. He raised his head, glanced to his left, then quickly tugged his earbuds free. “Evie?”
“Sorry.” Larkin watched Doyle instinctively close the laptop, the viewing of such abuse an atonement he’d been conditioned to believe—like so many victims were—was his alone to make. Larkin slid the box onto the table. “I didn’t intend to drop in unannounced, but I was just downstairs.”
Doyle nudged the box to one side, revealing an ancient case number. He asked, “Were you harassing the property clerk?”
“I called in advance,” Larkin clarified.
Doyle’s infectious smile didn’t quite reach his eyes just then.
Larkin wanted to ask why—why do you insist on working the cases no one can, the cases that break hearts and blacken souls and destroy careers, why, Ira, won’t you believe me when I say it wasn’t your fault, but you use those very words to comfort the children who come through this office like a revolving door’s been installed, why do you freely give so much of yourself that you leave nothing for you ?
But he couldn’t ask any of that.
Because he already knew the answer.
And acknowledging Doyle’s shame, calling it out, dragging it into the light before he was ready, would only put a distance between them that Larkin wasn’t sure they’d be able to recover from.
So he said, “Bailey told me you’re working on vein pattern recognition techniques.”
Doyle instinctively looked at the laptop.
“He explained the process—tried to, anyway—but I understand how you got the idea for restoring the engraving in the brooch, now.”