Larkin wedged a finger behind the knot of his tie, tugged it free from his neck, and turned right toward the open french doors of the room just big enough for a bed, dresser, and closet.

“Hey.”

Larkin looked over his shoulder.

Doyle held a fork in one hand and motioned toward the brick wall.

Larkin reached into his trouser pocket, removed the keyring, and hung it on the hook by the door. He was still getting used to new patterns and routines at Doyle’s apartment and didn’t mind the occasional prompt, mostly because the way in which Doyle went about it made him feel a little less like a dysfunctional and neurotic mess.

The bedroom was dark, but the reflective glimmer of the fairy lights on the glass doors was enough to see by, and Larkin put his wallet, phone, and cuff links on the nightstand already crowded with Doyle’s own wallet, phone, a book entitled Masterpiece or Master Forgery?: The Geniuses Behind the Lies, and a photo of his late daughter, Abigail. She was four in that snapshot, sitting on a stoop beside a much younger and clean-shaven Doyle, both of them blowing bubbles from little plastic wands. Larkin returned his tie to the rack in the closet, removed his pocket square, hung up his suit coat, then sat on the foot of the bed and let out a breath he felt like he’d been holding the entire drive home.

According to Marco’s scant file, twenty-three years ago, the last thing Camila Garcia ever said to her baby had been: Take the trash on your way out.

Larkin knew she regretted those words, was haunted by them. Because no one ever expected tragedy. That happened to other people—strangers, whose universes never overlapped with your own. For you, there would always be a tomorrow. There would always be another opportunity to say the important words, the meaningful words—a hundred more “have a good days” and a thousand more “I love yous.”

—woodsmoke in his hair, lips sticky from marshmallows, throat burning from too much whiskey, and that laugh, stuck in limbo between adolescence and adulthood, left behind as Larkin grew old without him, “You’re such a lightweight.”

“I won’t puke.”—

No one ever expected tragedy.

Larkin leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and closed his eyes. May 19 was the worst day of Camila Garcia’s life, and someone had made a mockery of her loss by presenting Larkin with this challenge, like death was some silly after-school game to be played. A photograph of an unknown dead girl, found on the body of a dead man discovered on the same date, and in the same location, as Marco Garcia’s gruesome murder in 1997….

This case was meant for Larkin all right.

—“I won’t puke.”—