Larkin turned as Millett offered him a second evidence bag. The cheap cardstock was more heavily damaged than the photograph—soggy and discolored from decomposition. But Larkin studied what print was still legible and made out: S UD M SSI N. Larkin gave his mental Rolodex another hard spin as he studied the fragmented words, but it only took a few seconds to place the organization. “St. Jude’s Mission.”

—in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, ’til death do us part.—

“I think you should give Wheel of Fortune a go,” Baxter said bemusedly.

Larkin blinked, shook his head, returned the card to Millett, and addressed both men. “Please email me the crime scene photos and autopsy report as soon as possible.” He stepped out of the utility room, tugged the N95 mask off, breathed in damp sour air.

It didn’t help.

Larkin was choking, gasping, as death, as expectation, as guilt crushed him, forcing his head under the black currents of the River Styx, and not even Charon crossed those waters without a ferry. Indeed, Larkin was a psychopomp. He knew the names of the now 9,019 victims that time had forgotten—abandoned—and one by one, he shuttled them toward justice—toward respite. The downtrodden, the nobodies, the wretches whose only misstep was to be murdered in a world too busy and too wary to respect their deaths—Larkin would never forget any of them. Every day was an anniversary of tragedy, his calendar a memento mori, and his weary soul a band of black to mark his mourning.

But Larkin was still a man.

His HSAM allowed him to never forget the forgotten, but he also never forgot the wounds inflicted on his own life. And there were so many arrows in his back, so much bleeding out because he couldn’t—literally couldn’t—let those memories fade into obscurity, some days he wondered how he was expected to go on, how he was expected to function when that footage and those soundbites ran on a broken loop set off by something as inconsequential as a date, a sound.