Madison Square Park had once been the apple of Midtown’s eye. Built before the Civil War (Larkin would have to look up the exact date), it’d fallen into a state of extreme neglect and disrepair, like so much had when New York teetered on the edge of financial collapse in the 1970s. The six blocks had become an epicenter of drug dealing, of prostitution, of murder—all the elements that made up what the NYPD had called the city once upon a time: Fear City. So it was possible, probable even, that John Doe was an unfortunate casualty of the violence during that decade. After all, homicides had skyrocketed by 1970—1,117—and kept rising for twenty years. When the crabapple had gone into the ground, homicides were at their lowest since 1965, with only 633 murders, due to the much-needed and aggressive crackdown on crime throughout the ’90s.

But even with the reality of these statistics, the likelihood John Doe had been killed over a rock or fifty cents or just for the sadistic pleasure of hurting another human being—it didn’t sit right in Larkin’s gut.

Because of the death mask.

How exactly that piece of evidence fit into the puzzle, Larkin couldn’t be certain yet. But the murder of John Doe had been methodically planned and orchestrated. Whoever had taken the man’s life, stuffed his body into a crate, and seen him buried nearly four feet in the ground in the middle of the biggest and busiest city in the country, Larkin was certain they never intended for John Doe to be found.

So what did that say about the perpetrator?

Larkin had laid to rest plenty of cases that involved premeditated murder. The victim had been chosen because they were weak, they were blonde, they were wearing a baseball cap—whatever had scratched the itch of the killer. But what was the same in all those instances was that their relationship had been that of strangers. And while a certain attempt had been made by the perpetrator to cover their tracks by disposing of the victim in locations unrelated to the scene of the crime—in a dumpster behind a Midtown Whole Foods, left in the overgrown vegetation overlooking the Rockaways out in Queens, floating in the waters along the East River Greenway—the victim was still found and the breadcrumb trail of clues led all the way to an eventual arrest.

John Doe was different.

There was no indication he had ever died until today. Whoever knew him, remembered him, missed him—what had they been thinking for, at minimum, the last twenty-two years? That John had run away? Had been kidnapped? Taken a walk for a pack of smokes? If not for the morning’s disastrous storm, how many more years would those who John had left behind keep wondering where he was, what he was doing, what sky he woke to every morning?

John Doe was never meant to be found.