Larkin’s step was in-beat with the heart monitor as he reached the bed. He set his hands on the railing. “I thought perhaps Detective Doyle might have been joking,” he said, and his voice was like a gunshot in its own right. “But I see he visits the range for more than his twice-a-year recertification.” Larkin’s gaze shifted from Reynold’s heavily bandaged, postsurgery knee, to the man’s sunken face. “It’s almost a shame he’s so competent. It’d have been something else if he missed and shot your nuts off.”

Reynold swallowed and made a quiet, whimpering noise. “I-it’s you.”

“Where would you like to begin,” Larkin asked. “With Marco Garcia or Megan Flouride.”

“I—I’m sick in the head,” Reynold protested with a wheeze, causing his New York accent to distort a bit. “It’s not my fault that I’m like this.”

Larkin narrowed his eyes. “Marco Garcia, then.”

“I don’t remember—”

“Sure you do.”

Reynold swallowed so hard, he might as well have choked on his own tongue. “He was just a kid in my AP course. I never touched him.”

“No. You prefer fourteen-year-old girls,” Larkin answered. “Marco Garcia.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Marco Garcia.”

“What else do you want me to say?”

“Marco Garcia.”

“Stop it!” Reynold shouted, his voice rising, spittle wetting his bushy mustache.

Unperturbed, Larkin hunched forward to rest his forearms along the handrail. “Marco Garcia was murdered twenty-three years, one day, and—” Larkin consulted his watch. “—about twenty hours ago. But so long as I keep saying his name, Marco Garcia won’t actually die, because remembrance is the greatest act of love there is.” Leaning forward, unblinking, Larkin asked with a disturbing sense of aloofness, “Do you want to know why the force calls me the Grim Reaper.”

Reynold began sobbing. “You’re crazy, you know that? Oh God, don’t hurt me! I didn’t touch him. I swear, I swear, I swear.”

“I believe I missed the part of your plea that sounded convincing. You see, I think you know exactly what happened to Marco. I think you even had a hand in it. Because I found a photograph in his copy of Hamlet—he was writing his final paper on unreliable narrators, do you remember that?—and this picture looks remarkably similar to two I found hidden behind a snapshot of you holding up a largemouth bass.”

Reynold was gulping again, the doped-up glaze of his eyes burned off by fear and adrenaline. His heart monitor was beeping faster than when Larkin had first entered the room. “I just—just—the internet was different back then. The Wild West, you know? And in the forums, someone said the YEC had a contact. A friendly face.”

“Another molester, yes, I understand.”