You were there because you work for Parks & Recreation and knew how to get in and out of the park before opening hours. But then you saw the crabapple, your secret coming back to haunt you twenty-two years later, and that jogger—in this storm, the fuckin’ douche—he wouldn’t leave until you called police. You couldn’t remove Andrew from the crate. You couldn’t grab the death mask you’d had the compulsion to make but too much fear to keep.

You were there, wearing a retro Mets cap like a talisman. Wearing the cap Natasha Smirnova had clawed at, the blue and orange threads trapped under caked blood and a broken fingernail.

“Evie?” Doyle grabbed Larkin’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

Looking up, Larkin said, “I know who did it.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY

It was 4:49 p.m. when Larkin ran up the steep stairs of the Arsenal in Central Park to human resources on the second floor.

“Larkin, come on, slow down,” Doyle called.

Larkin reached the landing and turned to watch Doyle coming up from behind. “On Monday, you asked me, point-blank, if I believed the employee who called in Andrew Gorman’s body to be responsible. I said, of course not.”

Doyle was out of breath as he reached Larkin’s side. “You had absolutely no reason to be suspicious of a Parks Department employee being in a park.”

Larkin’s frustration, self-loathing, doubt—it was all peaking again. “If I had put the clues together—”

“What clues?” Doyle interrupted, his deep and smoky purr now barely suppressed exasperation. “You had nothing to work with. I had nothing to work with. We practically built this case out of thin air.”

“Danielle Moreno would still—”

“Stop it,” Doyle ordered, now crowding Larkin in the stairwell. “You know that’s not true. She was dead twenty-four to seventy-two hours before you were called to Andrew’s scene. Short of being psychic, nothing you could have done differently would have saved her life.”

“Jessica—”

Doyle grabbed Larkin’s shoulders and backed him up against the wall. “You are not responsible for the actions of a disturbed mind. Ricky Goulding had been her super since the ’90s. Why should you have suspected the man would panic and try to finish her off like one of the original victims before we had any of that evidence?”

“Someone has to take responsibility!” Larkin shouted.

“Harry Regmore will,” Doyle said. “He’ll rot behind bars for the rest of his miserable life.”

“But don’t you get it? They’re all still dead. I can’t stop thinking it—it’s compulsive. They’re dead, they’re dead, they’re dead.”

Doyle raised his hands to hold Larkin’s face. “What was it you said on the phone this morning—we have to be our own champions? You remember all of the downtrodden everyday people, right? All of them?”

“All of them,” Larkin agreed.

“Then they’re not dead, Evie.”