CHAPTER SIXTEEN #2
Doyle got to his feet. “Lucky shot, is all.” He stretched his arms overhead and cracked something in his back. “What’s the box? Did you find Barbara’s homicide case?”
Larkin picked up the old file. “Found it,” he confirmed.
“Really?”
“I’ve had a very productive afternoon. I also checked out Joe’s apartment with Hackett.”
“How’d that go?”
Larkin removed his cell, opened the images stored on the Cloud, and then offered it to Doyle. “I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty psychoanalysis: Joe despised his job as an entertainment reporter and was actively working on a story that would land him a position in big boy journalism—”
“What in the CSI: Miami is this?” Doyle interrupted. He swiped with his thumb, scrolling through photos taken of the murder wall found in the closet with the Murphy bed. “Am I supposed to think Joe is a serial killer?”
“No. But what if he was getting help from an aphid.”
Doyle’s thumb hovered over the screen. He glanced up, his tangled brown hair partially obscuring his eyes. “Joe was in touch with Worth?”
“I think so.”
Doyle set the phone on the tabletop. “Give it to me straight, Butch.”
“The best I can do is gay and marginally effeminate.” Larkin smiled when Doyle abruptly laughed. He watched the last of the tension ease from Doyle, and he took on that more relaxed, big cat posture. “This morning, we were in agreement that Worth doesn’t limit who he works with.”
“Right.”
“What if it were more than just the most vile of society.”
“Please, Mr. Worth, help me land a story that’ll put me on the staff of the Times , the Journal , the Tribune ?”
“Why not,” Larkin asked. “So long as Worth gets his dues.”
Doyle turned, leaned his backside against the table, and absently stroked the stubble along his jaw as he considered Larkin’s suggestion.
Larkin continued. “Joe’s been relentlessly working the queer officer angle for months. His obsession with this specific theme goes beyond having a kink for law enforcement. But for as persistent as he was, Joe was also terribly unfocused—almost like he didn’t know who the subject was.”
Doyle twisted, picked up Larkin’s phone again, and studied the photos of the murder wall.
There had been countless newspaper clippings and printed online articles about major crimes happening throughout the city over the last half a decade, which were connected by red strings to different photographed individuals, their likenesses sourced from either the internet or candid snapshots taken without their knowing.
In Larkin’s case, there were photos of him from years ago, still in uniform and featured in an article about diversity hiring, as well as more up-to-date images clipped from coverage of his recent cases.
It’d become clear where Joe’s energy had been redirected.
“These other people on the wall,” Doyle started. “Might they be the other officers Joe tried interviewing?”
“Based on the content of the pinned articles surrounding them, yes. Hackett is still with CSU at the apartment, and he’ll make sure they cross-check identities.
” Larkin moved around to Doyle’s side, leaned close, and swiped through a few of the pictures before stopping on a cluster of Post-its scribbled in what was probably Joe’s hand. “He was tracking my case history.”
Larkin swiped to the next picture—that of a sheet of unlined white paper, creased vertically and horizontally, unremarkable penmanship reading: There’s a legacy in queers-in-blue .
He explained, “During the subway incident, Noel Hernandez received an anonymous tip with just enough information for him to make a choice regarding the man who’d murdered his childhood best friend.
I think this is the same thing—a suggested starting point for a down-and-out reporter looking to make a lasting name for himself.
” Larkin met Doyle’s gaze and added, “It just took Joe a while to figure out which queer in blue he was supposed to write about.”
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… odd expression 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 man really was, only to conclude Doyle truly was everything he presented himself to be.
He was gentleness.
He was love.
He was hope.
He was jubilant up to the heavens .
He was depression unto death .
He was fragile.
He was wounded.
And he was so, so angry 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, to understand , 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.
Larkin wanted his partner to know only love.
Yet he had somehow, inadvertently, just broken Doyle’s heart.
“Ira?”
Doyle looked up from the folder. He was the epitome of picturesque despair. “I think I have to recuse myself from this case.”
“What?”
And like a man drowning, Doyle said, “Bridget Cohen is my mother.”