Page 44 of Subway Slayings
“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, Iswear.”
“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 ofHamlet—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.”
Reynold’s complexion was steadily going waxy. “I only suggested it to Marco. He was looking for part-time opportunities and—and he could have been my way in.”
Larkin asked, “You mean, a foot in the door for you to make contact with this other individual.”
Reynold weakly nodded.
“Then what.”
“Marco got the job. After school, mostly. He told me how it was going now and then.”
“And did you meet your new friend,” Larkin asked.
“I mean, not—not really.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I didn’t,” Reynold said in another half-sob, half-wheeze. “We never met in-person. None of us in the forums did. Marco’s presence was what helped…facilitateour business relationship.”
“How did you conduct business, if not in person.”
“I, um… I mailed cash and then he mailed my… artwork.”
Larkin straightened his posture and asked, “You participated in the shipping and receiving of underage, necrophilic pornography through the United States Postal Service.”
Reynold barely whispered, “Y-yes….”
“Jesus Christ. What’s your pen pal’s address.”
“It’s a ghost address. Totally anonymous. Like a P.O. Box, but you pay in cash and there’s no legal information on file.”
“Where is it located.”
Shriveling under Larkin’s unrelenting gray stare, Reynold reluctantly gave him the address of a commercial facility in Bushwick that he mailed payments to, and one in East Harlem where he retrieved his packages. “He went by Archie Bunker.”
