July 2, 2015, Larissa Brown and her two baby daughters were discovered stuffed inside an oil drum out in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey almost two months after they’d been reported missing. Her husband had wanted a divorce and didn’t want to be stuck paying child support. Larkin had cried in the shower until the water ran cold, because he couldn’t seem to scrub the stink of their death from his skin. His tenacity and persistence on that case, one Larkin’s own sergeant had told him to set aside numerous times, had garnered the interest of Lieutenant Connor and earned him a promotion into the elite Cold Case Squad.

April 1, 2020, Beatrice Regmore had been found beaten to death by her son and left to rot in the bathtub for two days. Her skull had been caved in, blood crusted her paisley nightgown; her fingers were curled from arthritis, skin like wrinkled tissue paper. And then there’d been an animalistic roar, the collision of bodies, and Harry Regmore had raised a baseball bat in both hands—

“Grim!”

The disparaging moniker shook the associations, the memories, like a house of cards falling apart and every face was the ace of spades.

Larkin took a breath. He could taste death on the back of his throat, like fermented green meat and rotten eggs, shit and stale piss, trash left to bake in the heat and humidity.

He reached the end of the platform where Ray O’Halloran stood, a Homicide detective Larkin had had more than his fair share of interactions with throughout the years. It’d been O’Halloran’s own reluctance to be saddled with the “loser” case of Andrew Gorman that’d slingshotted Larkin into this holding pattern, this void, this drug-induced composure that wore off every eight to twelve hours and tore his stitching apart so that emptiness, that hollowness in his chest, wept like a fatal wound.

In Nietzsche’s preface to On the Genealogy of Morals, he stated: We are strangers to ourselves, we perceivers. We have never sought for ourselves—how, then, could it happen, that some day we should find ourselves?

Everett Larkin had incredible perception. He never forgot a face; could recite any conversation upon request. He read nonverbal cues with textbook precision and broke down the psychology of place without a roadmap. But when he turned that incredible skill—that incredible guilt—unto himself, there was nothing to see. Nothing to find.

Because Everett Larkin was a nobody.

And nothings and nobodies were gray, and no matter how much color was added, once mixed together, it always turned gray. Like summer thunderstorms. Like stainless steel mortuary tables. Like the faces of the forgotten.

Rightly has it been said: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

But it was impossible to see, to perceive, what that treasure may be when it lay beyond the veil.