Larkin picked up the box. It felt empty, but then something inside slid from one corner and thumped against the plastic. He held the box under one arm, wriggled the top free, and reached inside. He pulled out a disposable, Fujifilm camera, remaining photo count: zero.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

After the walkthrough of Gary Reynold’s apartment, Larkin returned to Precinct 19 to drop off his growing collection of death portraits, while Doyle picked up his own car and drove to 1PP. He’d not only needed to scan the composite sketch he’d worked on with Megan and submit it into evidence for Larkin’s file, but Doyle had wanted to speak with Senior Artist Bailey about utilizing the unit’s darkroom the next morning. Developing the photos on the Fujifilm disposable camera themselves would be a far quicker turnaround than sending it off to the lab to get around to in a few weeks, if not months, and Larkin wasn’t surprised to learn that Doyle possessed the know-how in which to get the job done.

In high school, Larkin had taken a photography class for his required art credit, his thought process being he couldn’t draw and he couldn’t sculpt and he couldn’t paint, but how difficult was it to point and click? But then the instructor had assigned the task of constructing a pinhole camera and developing their own snapshots. Larkin had taken the course with Patrick, when they’d still been just friends. They’d gone to the school’s green roof with their cameras. The memory was from before the attack, before the HSAM, and it didn’t resonate like his associations did now. In fact, Larkin wasn’t even able to recall what Patrick had taken a picture of. But afterward, the other boy had stretched out on the grass and closed his eyes and looked a bit like a work of art himself, so Larkin had sat cross-legged beside him, opened the shutter on his camera, and waited as the photo paper was exposed to light.

When he’d developed the picture, it’d come out completely black.

His instructor had explained the camera likely suffered from light seepage.

Larkin had gotten a C– on the project.

So no, he wasn’t surprised that someone who had two art degrees from renowned institutions, whose sketches could find missing people, whose sculptures could identify the nameless, whose paintings, Larkin had come to realize, were the very ones mounted to the walls of the apartment—the cityscapes he lost himself in, trying to count each and every pinprick of light illuminating the towers at night—he wasn’t surprised at all that someone like Doyle could develop cheap camera film too.