Larkin moved to the banister behind his desk, set his hands on the railing, and studied the ground floor. Officer Miller was pretending to draft another incident report for Mr. Cunningham, a man of eighty-seven years who’d been coming to the precinct at least twice a week for the last three months to file grievances against his neighbor, who in fact, did not exist. Multiple units in his apartment building were undergoing renovation, and Mr. Cunningham continuously mistook the sound of hammers, electric drills, and saws as some kind of “midnight disco party,” despite the construction taking place well within the confines of 7:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. He was the elderly sort who’d immediately jumped to phoning the police instead of his landlord, and simply did not understand why his calls were being ignored, so here he was, making his complaint in person. Larkin heard Doyle take a seat in the computer chair, heard the squeak of the casters, the shift and slide of Doyle’s shoes against the linoleum.

Larkin turned to face Doyle before saying, “We have two murders separated by twenty-three years, with Victim Two discovered on the anniversary of Victim One’s death.” He watched Doyle draw a line down the middle of the paper. “We’ve connected the victims via the possession of photographs depicting suspicious deaths of two children—”

“Janie and Johnny Doe,” Doyle interrupted. “For convenience’s sake.”

“That’s adequate.”

“Have you gotten an ID on IKEA-John Doe?”

Larkin stepped forward, reached over Doyle’s shoulder, and pressed the power button on the small computer tower that sat on the lefthand side of his desk. He turned the monitor on next, then returned to his position against the banister as he answered, “I haven’t checked my email yet.”

Doyle nodded and scribbled in each column on his notepad. “In the meantime, causes of death were different, but both vics died at the Fifty-Seventh Street station.”

“Presumably,” Larkin said. “It is highly unlikely that IKEA-John was killed elsewhere, carried down two flights of stairs, across an island platform, and then discarded in a utility room without at least one person noticing, but I should have a more definitive answer once I get the autopsy report from the ME and scene report from CSU.”

Doyle was smiling to himself as he drew a little asterisk beside the note in the second column. “We’ll circle back on that. Janie and Johnny were both photographed relatively soon after their deaths—”

“Rigor mortis would have made it impossible to pose them.”