Page 52 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

“No. I checked.”

“Are you sure?”

“I checked every room.” His voice is steady, which tells me he’s frightened. Micah’s voice only goes that steady when he’s frightened and is choosing not to be about it. “I thought they were from you. The concierge always calls up when I have a visitor, he always. I thought maybe he’d seen you enough times… how did someone get in?”

“I don’t know yet.” I’m already standing, already reaching for my coat. “Don’t touch the flowers. Don’t let anyone in. I’m coming.”

“Lennox, you don’t have to.”

“I’m coming,” I say, and hang up.

I look down at my basket. I put it on the nearest shelf, next to a stack of reduced baked beans, and walk out of Tesco without buying anything, which is the most decisive I’ve felt about anything all week.

In the car, I run through what I know, which is not enough. The building has a concierge desk staffed at all hours, a key fob entry system, a lift that opens directly into the loft. Three layers of security that someone got through without the concierge making a single call. Which means either the concierge is compromised, or someone got past him, or there’s a way into that building that isn’t through the front door. And whoever it is knows where Micah lives, knows what he likes, and wanted him to know they’d been inside. The flowers aren’t a threat. They’re a statement. I’ve seen this before, the specific language of someone who wants to be noticed, who wants the person they’re watching to understand they could have done more and chose not to. Yet.

I think, briefly and unproductively, that I should have bought him flowers. He deserves flowers. He deserves someone who thinks to do those things without needing a crisis to prompt it, and instead he has me, arriving in an unmarked car on a Tuesday afternoon because somebody else got there first.

I drive faster than I need to and tell myself it’s to beat the traffic.

I park badly outside the warehouse and I’m already moving before the engine has finished ticking.

The concierge looks up when I come through the door. His expression does something complicated, the particular look of a man who has been expecting someone and is not entirely glad that someone has arrived.

“Detective Inspector,” he says.

“Who came in today? “ Between ten this morning and half-past two.”

“I.” He stops. “My shift started at noon. There was nobody after noon, I would have called up.”

“Who was on before you?”

He gives me a name. I write it down. I tell him to call nobody, say nothing to nobody, and take the lift.

The lift takes long enough that I become unreasonably aware of it taking long enough.

Micah is on the other side of the door when it opens.

He’s still holding his phone, the one he called me from, and his hair is doing that thing it does when he’s been running his hands through it, which he only does when he’s unsettled, and he is so clearly and quietly relieved to see me that something in my chest does something I don’t have time for right now.

The flowers are on the kitchen counter. White roses, a dozen of them, arranged in a vase he clearly got out himself because it wouldn’t have come with them. They are, objectively, beautiful. They are also the most frightening thing in the room.

“Don’t touch them again,” I tell him. “I’ll have forensics here tomorrow.” Even though I’ll have to conjure up a whole heap of reasons why, while simultaneously covering up exactly how much time I’ve spent in this loft. With this suspect.

“You think there’ll be prints?”

“I think there won’t be, but we’ll check.” I look at him properly. The steadiness is still there in his face but it’s costing him something. “Pack a bag.”

He blinks. “What.”

“You’re not staying here tonight. Pack a bag, whatever you need for a few days, and you’re coming with me.”

He looks at me for a moment, and something in his expression does that thing it occasionally does, the charm and the composure and everything he uses to manage people dropping away all at once, leaving something younger and less certain in its place. He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t tell me he can handle this, or that he doesn’t need looking after, or any of the things I half expected, the performance of self-sufficiency he’s been putting on for the whole time I’ve known him.

He just says, “Okay,” quietly, and goes to pack.

I stand in his kitchen and look at the flowers and think about who got into this building and why, and I don’t come up with any answers that make me feel better. I think about the fan letter, and how I told him it was probably nothing. I think about the way the word probably is doing a great deal of work in retrospect. I should have taken it more seriously. I didn’t take it more seriously because it was an excuse to go to him and part of me knew that, and now there are white roses on his counter from someone who walked through three layers of security to leave them there, and I am going to have to sit with that.

He comes back with a bag, like someone who knew immediately what they needed, no fuss, no forgetting things and going back. He’s changed into a soft gray jumper, and he’s carrying his laptop and a charger coiled neatly around it and the whole picture of him, practical and quiet and ready to go, tightens something in my chest that has no useful outlet right now.