Page 3 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

We’ve got another one. Very similar MO.

I lie there a moment longer than I should, staring at Farah’s text like staring at it is going to change what it says. Then I get up, because lying there isn’t going to change anything either, and Callum Doyle’s name has been sitting behind my eyes since the alley anyway. I haven’t slept properly in three days. What’s one more?

She sends the address a minute later. I read it twice because I’m sure I’ve got it wrong the first time.

I haven’t got it wrong. It’s the old hospital. The derelict one boarded up behind chain link two streets from my own front door, the one I walk past most mornings without giving it a second thought because a building can be a wreck for so long it stops registering as anything at all. I’ve lived a five-minute walk from it for six years. I don’t bother with the car. I just put my coat on and go.

The night is doing that thin, drizzling thing London nights do when they can’t commit to actual rain. I walk fast, hands in my pockets, and try not to think too hard about the fact that somebody chose to do this two streets from where I sleep. I fail. Of course I fail. My brain has never once let me have a thought without immediately following it with three worse ones.

Uniform have only just got there themselves when I arrive, torches sweeping through broken windows, one of them still wrestling with the rusted padlock on the side gate like it’s personally offended him. Farah’s car pulls up behind me a moment later, headlights cutting briefly across peeling paint and a faded sign that still says CASUALTY in letters someone painted thirty years ago.

“You walked,” she says, taking me in.

“It was quicker than driving.”

She doesn’t ask how much quicker. She doesn’t have to. I watch the thought cross her face and land somewhere she decides not to say out loud.

We duck through a gap in the fence somebody’s already widened for us and pick our way across a courtyard gone feral with buddleia and broken glass. The building swallows the torchlight whole. Every hospital I’ve ever been inside, the working kind, hums with something, machines and footsteps and the particular brightness of fluorescent light that never lets you forget you’re somewhere people get fixed or finished. This one just breathes cold air back at us and waits.

We find him in what used to be an examination room. The table is still there, miraculously, cracked vinyl and rusted stirrups, the kind of furniture nobody bothers stealing because nobody wants it. He’s strapped to it. Legs hauled up and spread into the position that table was built for, the lithotomy position. Medical, invasive, and someone has used it to leave a grown man on display in a way I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully scrub out of my head.

There’s a toy between his legs, obscene in scale, the kind of thing that exists purely to be a joke until somebody decides it isn’t one anymore. I’ve seen a lot in twenty-two years. I have never seen anything arranged with quite this much specific, deliberate cruelty.

Carved into his chest, the same neat, unhurried letters as before.

A name I don’t recognize.

I crouch and read it twice anyway, just in case six years of carrying Callum Doyle around has made me stupid enough to miss something obvious. It isn’t him. It isn’t anyone I know. Whoever this dead man wronged, it wasn’t on my desk, and for one ugly half-second I feel almost cheated by that, which is its own kind of horrifying thing to feel standing over a body.

“Similar MO,” Farah says quietly, crouched beside me. “Different victim profile, until forensics tells us otherwise. Different name.”

“Different name,” I agree. “Same message.”

Something slams above us, hard enough that we both flinch and go still. A window. Old wood hitting an old frame, the sound of it rolling away down empty corridors before the building swallows that too.

Farah’s hand goes to her radio. “Uniform are supposed to have cleared this place.”

“They’re supposed to have done a lot of things.” I’m already moving toward the sound, every nerve in my body lit up and humming. “Call it in. I want bodies on every exit before anyone else gets the bright idea to leave.”

She’s already talking into the radio as I head for the stairs.

The window that slammed is in the room next door, an old sash, the kind nobody’s made in decades, paint flaking off it in long curls. The sash cords have snapped clean through, both of them, and they don’t look like they’ve been hanging on by a thread for thirty years and finally gave up tonight. They look fresh. Like someone was easing this window open slowly and carefully, trying not to make a sound, right up until centuries-old rope decided it had had enough and let the whole thing come crashing down anyway.

Somebody was here. Somebody was trying very hard not to be noticed, and the building betrayed them anyway.

I lean out, scan the drop, the fire escape bolted to the wall below it, rusted but intact. Plenty of ways down. Plenty of ways gone, if whoever it was had the sense to run the second that window gave them away.

I turn back toward the corridor, torch beam swinging ahead of me, expecting empty space and broken tile and nothing else.

I get about three steps before I walk straight into someone solid and warm and very much alive.

The impact knocks my torch sideways, throws light skittering up the peeling wall, and for one disorienting second all I’ve got is an armful of someone smaller than me, gripping my forearms to keep us both upright, a warm puff of breath against my jaw. He smells faintly of clean sweat and something sweeter underneath it, the particular smell of being young and barely worried about anything in the world. My hand finds his waist on instinct, steadying him, steadying myself, and it takes a full beat longer than it should to remember I’m meant to let go.

We untangle. Sort of. He doesn’t step back as far as he should.

My first thought, before training, before suspicion, before anything resembling sense, is that he’s gorgeous.

He’s slight, all lean lines under a thin gray tank top that’s seen better days, dark hair falling messy across his forehead like he’s just rolled out of someone’s bed, or wants me to think he has. Sharp cheekbones. A soft mouth. The kind of pale skin that looks like it would bruise if anyone so much as breathed on it too hard. A shadow of stubble along his jaw that reads deliberate rather than lazy. He can’t be more than twenty-two, twenty-three at the absolute most. I am forty-four years old, standing in the middle of a murder scene, having an entirely inappropriate physical reaction to a stranger who has no business being here at all, and some small, horrified part of my brain is already trying to catalogue the exact color of his eyes, in the dim light, like it thinks there’s going to be a later worth remembering them for.