Larkin and Doyle both turned toward Millett and stared.

A hint of a smirk flitted across Millett’s expression as he pulled out a handful of belts from the closet, asking, “You found out who the human soup used to be?” He dropped the belts into a paper bag, crouched beside his kit, and began to fill out an evidence label.

Larkin answered stiffly, “Possibly.”

In the brief silence, filled only by the scratch of Millett’s pen and the radio of the officer just outside the front door, Larkin took in the bedroom again, now that he wasn’t standing in the midst of a hostage situation. The mattress was still on the floor. The sheets were still mismatched. No headboard. No rugs. The nightstand held a thrift store lamp with a big, out-of-date lampshade and a single framed photo. There was a painted particleboard dresser in off-white to the left, with what appeared to be on its top, from afar, scratch-off tickets and a flashlight caddy with three AAA batteries still secured inside. Beside those was a black plastic box with no obvious door, handle, or lock so as to suggest its purpose.

“Where’s the flashlight,” Larkin asked.

Millett stood and looked in the direction Larkin was staring. “I haven’t gotten to that side of—yeah sure, just come right in.”

Larkin opened the top drawer of the dresser, carefully lifted several pairs of cheap tube socks, then found the small handheld flashlight. He unscrewed the back and dropped the contents into his hand.

“What is it?” Doyle asked, still standing in the doorway, like a man who knew how to follow simple requests.

“Heroin.” Larkin set the small, plastic-wrapped capsules on the dresser alongside the flashlight.

“I’ve never seen a cop so disappointed in finding illegal drugs in a suspect’s home,” Millett said before returning to his investigation of the closet.

“So Reynold told the truth about intending to pay Dicky with drugs. That doesn’t help me.” Larkin pushed his suit coat back, set his hands on his hips, and stared at the framed photo across the room. “The CDC developed a ten-item scale in which to measure Adverse Childhood Experiences, and a recent study concluded that male sexual offenders are three times more likely to have been sexually abused as children, twice as likely to have experienced physical abuse, and up to thirteen times more likely to have endured verbal abuse, when compared to the nonoffending male population. It was reported that in guilty offenders who claimed multiple victims who were one, strangers, and two, of a prepubescent age, they had ACE scores that mirrored those CDC statistics.”

Millett was pushing clothes hangers along the rod as he said, mostly to himself, “I like to relax with a beer and campy horror films, myself, but I guess reading public health surveys is one way to induce sleep.”

“Commentary is not necessary,” Larkin remarked.