“Perhaps I’ve caught you at a bad time,” Joe suggested.

“You haven’t, I assure you. And regarding the investigation, no comment.” Larkin hung up the phone, turned, and shouted over the banister, “Stop patching the press through to my goddamn phone!”

The phone rang again.

Doyle held a hand up and said, “I’ll get this one.” He grabbed the receiver before Larkin could. “Detective Larkin’s desk.” He listened, looked at Larkin, and repeated the message, “There’s been a body dump at Madison Square Park.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Traffic was backed up on Fifth Avenue due to the morning commute, and Larkin and Doyle didn’t reach Madison until 8:49 a.m. It was still raining, but nothing like the storm on Monday that’d uprooted the crabapple tree and put Larkin on this head-first collision with Noah, with Doyle, with the ghost of Andrew Gorman. He parked the Audi on Twenty-Third Street, popped the trunk, and collected the spare umbrella for Doyle.

“I think it makes sense,” Doyle was saying.

“Yes?” Larkin did too, but his line of deduction often lost people, and it honestly felt good to be backed up by someone who perhaps came to conclusions in a different way, but was as equally intelligent as himself.

“Yes,” Doyle echoed, opening the borrowed umbrella before they started for the entrance of the park. “The city was already cracking down on the strip clubs in Times Square when I was a kid.” He cast Larkin a teasing, sideways look. “Daddy has a few years on you.”

“I hate you.”

Doyle chuckled. “Anyway. Times Square was the original den of prostitution, drugs, and decay. I think that’s how one of the papers put it. But by the late ’90s, most of those places were out of business. Something like three thousand performers were jobless.”

“They’d move into any club they could find. They couldn’t afford to be picky.”

“And that’s not to say there weren’t women in the industry at the time who weren’t content and empowered by their careers. Because there were. It just wasn’t the norm,” Doyle explained. “After all, if you’ve been giving lap dances for half a decade and suddenly find yourself unemployed, what’s going to happen? Realistically, you’re going to wind up giving more lap dances.”

They each removed their badges and flashed ID to the uniformed officer standing at the yellow crime scene tape that cordoned off the fountain.

Doyle was still talking. “Most of the clubs these days are in Midtown—prime tourist real estate.”

“I’m curious as to your extensive knowledge on the stripping industry.”