Larkin shrugged. He created a pile on the floor of Natasha’s belongings that the perpetrator seemed to have no interest in keeping for himself and tossed with the body when he was done using her face as his mask model. Dress, shoes, purse—everything was covered in maggots. It was difficult to tell without a black light on the dress, but he was pretty sure the crusted surface was old, old blood, and the poor storage, damp floor, and water damage had attracted insects. Larkin didn’t have the heart to tell Doyle this wasn’t the first barrel of old evidence he’d gone through that had… creepy-crawly friends inside. He half listened to Doyle work his interpersonal magic on O’Halloran while he paced a safe distance away, but otherwise, didn’t stop digging through the barrel until he’d found a plastic evidence bag with what appeared to be blood-stained blue and orange threads wrapped around a broken fingernail.

“Appreciate it,” Doyle was saying to O’Halloran. “What’s that? Oh… I’ll tell him.” Doyle hung up.

“What’d he say.”

“He told me to tell you, fuck you.”

“And what about the autopsy report.”

Doyle warily returned to Larkin and the barrel. “I can’t tell if you’re unaware of people’s general dislike, or if you truly don’t care.”

“I don’t care.” Larkin lowered the evidence bag and stared expectantly.

“Blunt-force trauma,” Doyle recited. “Broke her neck. The ME back in ’92 had specified the weapon had a curved surface.”

“Curved,” Larkin repeated. “A bar, a pipe—”

“A hammer?” Doyle suggested. “You use those in working with metal. Rounding hammers, as the name suggests, has a rounded head.” He glanced down as Larkin’s phone buzzed. “Your—ah, Noah is calling.”

“Hang up.”

“Larkin.”

“Hang up. I’m working.”

Doyle obediently tapped the screen.

“Rounding hammers are the same length as a typical hammer.”

“Are you asking?”

“Yes.”

“I think they come in varying handle lengths and pounds, but to a layman, it’s a hammer,” Doyle answered.

“Concealable, then.”

Doyle nodded.

Larkin frowned, studied the evidence in his hand, then walked a few feet away before returning. “Something isn’t adding up.”

“I’d say a lot of things aren’t adding up,” Doyle commented wryly. “Do you know that the build methods of death masks is a relatively undiscussed subject in art history? Besides the book you borrowed from the library, the only other author I know of who wrote extensively on the matter was Laurence Hutton. He began preserving death masks when a small collection was found in the 1860s in a trash bin in—and we’re coming full circle here—the neighborhood of Tompkins Square.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really. He spent the rest of his life hunting down masks in curiosity shops, plaster shops, and studios across America and Europe. He wrote the book on death masks because no one else had and it irritated him.”