Larkin took another bite of his sandwich, nodded, and said after swallowing, “Edith Stanislaus was raped and strangled in the bedroom she and her younger sister rented on Twenty-Third Street. This was 1945. Police took plenty of evidence from the home—the most important being her stockings, which were used to choke her. They had interviewed four men they considered persons of interest. Despite this, they couldn’t poke a big enough hole in any of the men’s alibis, and of course, there was no DNA testing to be done at the time. The case went cold. I took it over when I was transferred into the squad. Of the three boxes of hard evidence stored with the Property Clerk, I was only able to recover one—not the stockings, but the bedsheet was second-best. Of course, I still had no one to test it against and no one was still alive from then except Edith’s sister, Leona, who was nearly ninety.

“So I returned to the scene, as Leona still lived there—seventy years later and she still lived in that little studio. There had been a few cosmetic updates, but for the most part, it was a tomb to her sister. The same bed frame, Edith’s suitcase and a few hat boxes were stored underneath, her moth-eaten clothes still hung in the closet. Leona had bought a couch. She slept on that. Didn’t want to disturb what was once Edith’s. I was standing inside a time capsule. So I did a search. I didn’t know what for, but maybe—maybe—the detectives before me, now dead and gone, missed something.”

Doyle’s crow’s feet were back as he cast a thoughtful expression. “Something was under the bed.”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“You said her suitcase and boxes were still there. Makes me think no one had any reason to look. Or clean.”

“I found a gold tooth among a dust bunny the size of a dog. Leona cried. Their stepbrother, Matthew, had a gold tooth he’d lost the same time Edith was killed. He’d told Leona he’d gotten into a fistfight at a bar. She never had reason to doubt his story. I won’t bore you with the details, but Matthew was already dead, so I had him exhumed. A forensic odontologist confirmed it was his lateral incisor. The samples from the bedsheets were enough, barely, due to degradation, to run a test. Matthew had raped and murdered his stepsister and hadn’t been a person of interest because the police never even considered a family member could have been responsible for brutalizing her in that manner.”

“Leona had closure?”