Page 48 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

Micah. Who sleeps with one hand curled against his chest like a child holding something he’s not ready to let go of. Who bounces off to reveal bookcases that reveal cheesy romance books. Who said being attractive was a curse and then smiled like he’d said something ordinary. Who carved four names into four dead men because he knew exactly what those men had done and exactly whose names they deserved to carry.

I think, for the first time in twenty two years of believing murder is always wrong, full stop, no exceptions, that I would like to kill those men myself. Not only the ones who are already dead, but also the ones Greaves couldn’t touch. The one on the flight to Paraguay. The names nobody official ever knew because the only people who knew were boys who had every reason not to tell anyone, and a young man who decided that telling was less useful than something else entirely.

I want them dead. I’m sitting at my desk in a police station on a Tuesday afternoon and I want the remaining members of that ring to die badly, and I do not care at all, not even slightly, about how far I have fallen to arrive at that sentence.

Farah arrives at my desk with a coffee she’s made herself, which means she wants something. She only makes me coffee when she wants something and doesn’t quite know how to ask for it, which in eleven years of working together has always been the preamble to a conversation I’m not going to enjoy.

“How are you doing?” she says, sitting down.

“Fine.”

“You look tired.”

“I’m always tired.”

She wraps both hands around her own mug. “I’ve been looking at the timeline from scene four,” she says, not quite casually. “You arrived later than I expected, given you live in Brixton.”

There it is.

“Preparation,” I say. “I looked over the case files before leaving. Wanted it all fresh in my mind.”

She looks at me over her mug. The careful look. The one she uses when she’s decided not to say what she’s actually thinking and is giving me the opportunity to say it instead. I’ve seen her use it on suspects in interview rooms. I’ve admired it as a technique. I like it considerably less from this side of the conversation.

“Right,” she says, after a moment. “Preparation.”

“Is there something specific you needed?”

She’s quiet for a second. Something moves across her face, some combination of things she’s decided not to say, and then she takes a sip of her coffee and says, “Tyler Cooke. The overdose record.”

“I read it.”

“And.”

“And it’s consistent with what we know about the pattern,” I say. “A boy connected to the network who didn’t survive it.”

“Nothing connecting him to Holt officially.”

“No.”

“So the Vigilante knows things we don’t.” She says it quietly. Not a question.

“Yes. That’s been obvious from the start.”

She holds my gaze. “Lennox. If there’s anything you’re not telling me about scene four, I need you to know that I would rather hear it from you than find it another way.”

I look at her face. At eleven years of a person who has had my back at the cost of her own comfort, more than once, more than I’ve ever properly acknowledged. My partner, who was the only person in the whole department who stood by me when I turned a dirty cop in.

“I wish there was something,” I say.

She holds my gaze for three full seconds. Then she picks up her mug and goes back to her desk, and I watch her go, and I feel the weight of what I’ve just done settle between my shoulder blades where it’s going to live for a while.

I lied to Farah. Not an evasion. Not a strategic omission. A direct, unambiguous lie. She gave me the chance and I used it to lie to her face.

I add it to the tally. A scene report with a false timeline. A theory I’m keeping to myself. A lie told directly to the one person who deserved better. A suspect caught at the scene of a murder with blood on his hand, released without report. Every single one of these things is a crime or close enough that the distinction wouldn’t save me in a tribunal.

Hendricks wants a progress update at two.

I spend the hour before it working out what I can honestly tell her, which takes about seven minutes, and then working out what I can say that will sound like progress without technically being a lie, which takes the remaining fifty three. The distinction matters to me less than it used to. I notice that it matters less and add that to the tally too.