Page 14 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

He reaches for his pocket. I flinch. Even though I know he would have been searched before being brought into this room.

He pauses, flashes me a grin that’s pure sin incarnate. “I’m reaching for my phone.”

He pulls it out, and even I know it’s the latest iPhone. His thumb moves over the screen deftly. Then he turns it to face me.

Footage of the examination room, empty, undisturbed, no body, no toy, no carved name, just rust and cracked vinyl and Micah’s own breathless narration about peeling paint and forgotten places.

“Show me the time stamp.”

He turns the phone away from me and his thumb dances quickly over the screen again. The phone is angled back towards me.

The same footage. Stilled. Time stamped two hours before uniform’s first call came through.

The relief that goes through me is so large and so immediate that I have to grip the edge of the table.

“You filmed this before the murder,” I say.

“I filmed everything. That’s the whole point of the channel.” He’s watching my face very closely. “Does this mean you believe me now?”

It means the DNA has an innocent explanation, that he was in that room hours before anyone died in it, narrating to a camera instead of carving a name into a stranger’s chest. It means, on paper, that I have absolutely nothing left to hold him on.

It should not feel like this. Like something uncoiling in my chest after a day of being wound too tight.

“It’s compelling,” I say, which is as much as I’ll let myself give him out loud.

I formally clear him forty minutes later, after Farah comes back in, after the recorder gets switched off, after a version of the same conversation happens twice more with slightly different words until everyone in the room is satisfied there’s nothing left to ask. I walk him out myself, past the desk sergeant, past the doors, and he pauses on the front steps and looks back at me like he wants to say something and decides against it, and then he’s gone, melting into the ordinary churn of people who aren’t currently destroying my career.

Back in the incident room, I cross his name off the board.

It’s the only name that was ever on it.

I stand there looking at the blank space where a suspect should be, and the relief I felt twenty minutes ago curdles into something colder. We have two dead men, a missing boy, a ring CAIT spent years trying to crack, and not one single name left to chase.

I should feel like I just lost. I mostly feel like I just got to keep something I had no right to keep.

But it’s tainted now. Suspicion well and truly stirred. Trust shattered, even though it should be restored, but trust doesn’t work that way. Never has, never will.

I spent several hours today believing Micah was a serial killer. I don’t know how to recover from that. Don’t know how to get the bitter taste out of my mouth. But I think I want to.

I think about the tube this morning, the grin I couldn’t wipe off my own face in the window’s reflection, how bright and stupid and simple everything looked from inside that carriage. I’d give a great deal to get that feeling back. It’s astonishing how fast a person can go from the best morning in years to whatever this is.

I go home. Heat a microwave meal. Stare at the TV screen without really watching it because Micah is still on my mind. There were moments in that interview room where I was convinced he was sin incarnate. Other moments where I would have sworn he was as pure as driven snow.

Nobody has left me so unsure for a long time. If ever. I’m a detective, I’m good at reading people, it’s what I do.

Micah has left me feeling unsure of everything, even my own judgment.

He’s innocent. He’s shown me the proof. He’s off the board.

And I hate how much I want that to be true, to be the right call.

I don’t sleep well. I wake at half-past three with my heart going too fast for no reason I can immediately name, the room dark and unfamiliar feeling even though it’s my own, and it takes a full minute lying there in the dark before the thought finally surfaces, the one my brain apparently couldn’t wait until morning to hand me.

That hospital has forty rooms if it has one. Wards, offices, store cupboards, an entire derelict maternity unit on the floor above. A man filming abandoned buildings for clicks would wander, would climb stairs just to see where they lead, would film whatever looked good on camera in whatever order he happened to find it.

Micah showed me the footage of exactly one room. And it was the right room on the first try.

How did he know which exact one would paint him as innocent?