Page 6 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

“Don’t.” He points a thick finger at me, the coffee cup still clutched in his other fist. “Three years. Three years of careful work, Lennox, watching, waiting, building something that was finally about to be worth something, and now I’ve got journalists outside my superintendent’s office asking about a body posed like something off the internet, and every single name in that ring is going to go quiet and scatter the second this hits the news properly.”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“No.” Greaves’s mouth twists like the word tastes bad. “But you’re the one stomping round with sirens and tape and SOCO vans, aren’t you. Might as well have put up a sign.”

“There’s two dead men with one dead boy and one missing boy’s names carved into them. I’m not sitting on homicides so your op stays tidy.”

“Your homicides aren’t the only thing at stake here, and you bloody know it.” He steps further into the room, close enough that I catch the smell of stale cigarettes under cheap deodorant, the particular fug of a man who’s been awake since whenever the first call came through and hasn’t stopped moving since. “We had patience. We had years invested. We were maybe eight months from being able to put names to every single face in that ring, and Pell was the only one of them stupid or desperate enough to talk if we ever got him cornered properly. You wouldn’t know patience if it bit you, would you. Never did. Straight in, badge first, consequences for everyone else later. Worked out so well for Foster, didn’t it?”

The room goes very still.

Farah’s eyes flick to me, and I keep my face exactly as flat as I can manage, because giving Malcolm Greaves the reaction he’s fishing for would be handing him something I’m not willing to part with in front of half the floor.

“That has nothing to do with this,” I say.

“Doesn’t it?” He looks at me a moment longer, and there’s something underneath the anger that almost looks like grief, quickly buried back under bluster before I can be sure of it. “You’ll get your homicide solved, I’m sure. You always do, eventually. Just don’t act surprised when there’s nobody left standing in that ring by the time you get there. And don’t come crying to me when it turns out the only person who actually walks away clean from this is whoever’s doing the carving.”

He leaves the same way he arrived, taking up the whole doorway on the way out, coffee still untouched, and the room exhales once he’s gone.

“He’s not wrong about the timing,” Farah says carefully, after a moment. “Even if he’s an arsehole about delivering it.”

“No,” I agree. “He’s not.”

I don’t ask her what Foster has to do with any of this. She already knows I’m not going to, and I already know she’s not going to bring it up either, which is its own kind of mercy I don’t examine too closely.

By the time she’s gone to chase the original misper officers for a proper statement, I’ve got the file I actually want to be looking at open instead, the one I’ve been putting off all morning out of something that feels suspiciously like cowardice for a man my age.

Micah Vee exists on the system, just barely. One entry, four years old, a caution for soliciting, the kind of thing that earns a young man a stern word and a swab kit rather than a night in a cell. Nothing before it. Nothing after. No pattern, no escalation, nothing that reads like a man building toward anything worse. The phone number checks out as registered to him, current, no red flags. Everything else about him on paper is so clean it almost reads suspicious in itself, the way a spotless kitchen sometimes does.

What he does have is a YouTube channel with a respectable subscriber count, mostly footage of him picking his way through derelict buildings in that same gray tank top, talking softly to camera about peeling paint and abandoned beauty like he actually means it. And an Instagram with several hundred thousand followers, every single photo absurdly tasteful, soft lighting, careful angles, the kind of effortless beauty that clearly takes a great deal of effort.

I scroll further than is professionally defensible.

There’s a photo of him on some rooftop at golden hour, hair doing that artfully careless thing it does, a half smile aimed at the camera like he knows exactly what it’s going to do to whoever’s looking at it. There’s another of him laughing at something off-frame, genuinely laughing, not performing it, and I find myself wondering what he was laughing at and immediately hating myself a little for wondering. There’s one of him asleep on a train, which should not be attractive and somehow still is, captioned with a single sleeping emoji and forty thousand comments, most of which I have no business reading and read anyway.

He comments back on a worrying number of them. Replies to strangers like they matter to him individually, little hearts and exclamation marks scattered through a comment section like confetti. Either the most generous public figure on the internet or the most skilled at appearing to be, and I genuinely cannot decide which possibility unsettles me more.

And then there’s the OnlyFans link, sitting right there in his bio like it’s nothing, like it isn’t currently doing something to my pulse that no man my age standing in a police station has any business letting it do.

I do not click it.

I think about clicking it for several long, undignified seconds, weighing the various ways my career would not survive that particular bit of browser history showing up on a force laptop, and then I close the laptop entirely, like putting actual distance between my hand and the mouse is going to undo the last ten minutes of my life. It doesn’t. I still know it’s there. I suspect I’m going to know it’s there for the rest of the day, sitting at the back of my skull like a held breath.

Farah reappears just as I’m closing it, like she’s got some sixth sense for catching me at my most undignified.

“You look like a man with a guilty conscience,” she says, dropping back into the chair across from me.

“I haven’t done anything.”

“Yet.” She nods at the laptop. “You’ve been checking up on our urban explorer.”

“It’s due diligence.” I say coldly, even as my guts twist. I’m not going to ask how she knows. This is Farah. She just knows things. I’ve given up trying to understand it.

“Mm.” She doesn’t believe me, which is fair, because I don’t entirely believe myself either. “Are you going to bring him in?”

“Not yet.”

“Any particular reason?”