Doyle picked up the photograph, motioned with a nod of his head for Larkin to follow, and walked to his drafting table. He took a seat, set the photo on the work surface, flicked on the attached desk lamp, and adjusted the magnifying head over the image. “If you had any doubt as to the decade this photo originated, your subject is wearing a polka-dotted shirt, floral-print vest, and acid-wash jeans while sporting perm bangs.”

“And these crimes against humanity continued to flourish well into our own childhoods,” Larkin replied. He leaned over Doyle’s shoulder to stare at the photo. Something about this girl—her expression? her posture?—puzzled him. It was as if she’d failed the uncanny valley test, in that she was human enough to provoke a negative reaction in Larkin. It was something in her half-hooded gaze, he decided. Something cold. Something almost lifeless. He stated abruptly, and without hesitation, “She’s dead.”

Doyle had said in the same breath, his comment overlapping Larkin’s, “I think she’s dead.”

CHAPTER THREE

Industrial disinfectant of an indeterminant citrus scent had been spilled in the women’s bathroom of Precinct 19. The door was propped open by a janitorial cart, and Larkin could hear Joseline inside expelling a world-weary sigh as she cleaned the mess. He took the stairs two at a time to the second floor, the bullpen a home away from home for the detectives of the Cold Case Squad. The early mornings and late nights, the twelve-hour shifts, the endless overtime—it could be seen in how ten overworked humans left pieces of themselves behind in a mass-produced American office: a framed photo of a five-year-old black boy wearing his kindergarten finest on Detective Baker’s desk, even though her son was now finishing seventh grade; Porter’s #1 Husband coffee mug, despite his divorce having settled the year Larkin joined the squad; Miyamoto’s Doc Martens that’d been sitting atop a box of files beside her chair for months, because she kept meaning to fix one of the soles with Krazy Glue but never found the time to run out on her lunch break to buy adhesive. It was the accumulation of umbrellas in the stand beside the stairs, the collection of full-sized condiment bottles in the breakroom fridge, the closet beside the copy room overcrowded with coats and sweaters suitable for every season because “it’s not like I wear it anywhere else but work” that suggested these unofficial roommates put in more facetime at Sixty-Seventh between Third and Lexington than they ever did in their actual homes.