Larkin blinked and returned his attention to the technician, who’d clearly been talking the entire time.

“—And so he had to attend the scene for the body transport,” she was explaining.

Larkin glanced over his shoulder at Baxter’s office before saying, “Then can you provide me with the cast.”

Steam Whistle flashed a microexpression of contempt at the request.

Larkin said nothing more, just met her stare dead-on.

And like most who challenged him, she broke almost immediately under Larkin’s unrelenting gaze. With a huff, Steam Whistle got to her feet and went to the shelf lined with packages. She returned with a sealed box and extended it at arm’s length, as if Larkin were the bogeyman and he’d snatch her up if she got too close.

“Thank you,” he said brusquely.

Larkin left the way he’d come, stepping through the front doors of OCME and into a mostly concrete courtyard. The clink, clink, clink of a flag snapping against the pole in the brisk breeze sounded overhead. Two administrator-looking sorts stood a dozen feet away with cigarettes. They held an animated conversation, smoke curling and stirring into abstract shapes around their moving hands. A playground sat west of the building, and even Larkin, a man known in professional circles as Grim or Spooky, thought its vicinity to the morgue pushed the envelope of morbid humor a touch too far.

Larkin stepped around concrete barriers, which jutted up from the ground like monstrous teeth, and onto the sidewalk while pulling his phone from his pocket. He opened the list of recent outgoing calls, hesitated on the number he’d dialed at 9:07, then edited the details with Doyle’s name, title, and the inclusion of “office” so it was added in his address book. He placed the call and put the phone to his ear as he walked toward First Avenue on Twenty-Sixth, passing half a dozen white-and-blue medical examiner vehicles parked along the southside of the street. The call rang and rang and rang.

“Detective Ira Doyle, Forensic Artists. Please leave a message.”

Larkin made a tsk sound under his breath before the beep. “This is Everett Larkin.” Larkin held the phone between his ear and shoulder in order to check his watch. “It’s 4:46. I just collected the cast of John Doe’s skull from OCME and I’m on my way to 1PP to drop it off. Traffic is backed up on Second, so I’m taking the FDR.”

He should have ended the call then.

But he didn’t.

A child in the park, pumping their legs hard and fast on a swing set, screamed in delight as they reached maximum air.

—“We’re too old for swings.”

“Says who, Everett?”—