Page 84 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

And there’s a warmth against my hand that isn’t there anymore.

I know before I’ve even properly opened my eyes that someone was holding it. The shape of it is still there, the memory of fingers laced through mine, and when I turn my head the chair beside the bed is empty, blanket half slid off the seat, and for one long, ugly second my chest does something it has no business doing over an empty chair.

The door opens before I can do anything useful with the feeling.

“You’re awake.” Hendricks doesn’t knock. She’s never once knocked on anything in her life, as far as I can tell, she simply arrives, and Farah comes in a step behind her, quieter, a coffee cup in each hand that I suspect are for herself and Hendricks and not for me, which is fair, I’m probably not supposed to be having coffee.

“Apparently,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to.

“I’ve read the briefing you gave the uniforms at the scene.” Hendricks pulls the visitor’s chair round to face the bed properly, ignoring the blanket still half on the floor. “I know you haven’t written a report yet. I don’t expect you to, not until you’re fit for it. But I want to hear the rest of it from you directly, while it’s fresh.”

“I gave a statement.”

“You gave three sentences to a constable who had no idea what he was writing down.” She says it without heat, just fact. “I want to hear it from you.”

I sigh, and it pulls at something under the dressing, and I let it, because the ache is at least honest.

“The man who stabbed me,” I start, and then stop, because I realize, somewhere under the painkillers, that I never actually got a name. Nobody gave me one. I was too busy bleeding.

“David Smithson,” Hendricks says, filling the gap without being asked. “Forty six. No record beyond a caution in his twenties. Worked as a driver and general handler for Graham Pell’s operation for the better part of a decade, going by what we’re finding in the flat he was using.”

“David Smithson is the Vigilante,” I say, taking the name and using it, because it’s easier to build a story around a name than around a shape in the dark. “A low-level employee. He drove the boys to appointments. Watched them.” I look at the ceiling rather than at either of their faces, because it’s easier. “The murders weren’t about justice, not really, not the way it looked from the outside. They were personal. Jealousy. He wanted certain boys for himself, specifically, and the men he killed were men he believed had access to what he wanted.”

I don’t tell them how I know that. I don’t tell them that it came together with Micah’s hands pressed hard against a hole in my side and his voice going in and out of focus above me, panicked and babbling in a way I’d never heard from him before, saying Dave’s name over and over like he still couldn’t quite make it sit next to the memory of a man who used to bring him tea. I had no idea, he kept saying, I had no idea the flowers were from him, I don’t know how he found me, and I lay there going gray at the edges and losing more of myself by the minute, and some cold, functional part of my brain that apparently doesn’t switch off even while the rest of me is dying was already doing the only useful thing left to it, which was building the story that would keep Micah safe from what came next.

Jealousy. Obsession. A grunt with a grudge and a fixation, not a man seeking vengeance, not a case that could ever, under any version of events, be allowed to circle back to Micah as anything other than a victim.

“He was also attempting to frame Micah Vee for the murders,” I go on. “Another one of his obsessions. A former victim of the same ring. He planted his blood at the final scene and left DNA at two of the others, and I’d guess, once forensics finish going through that flat, they’ll find a great deal more that ties the two together going back years.”

Neither of them says anything for a moment. Farah’s gone very still with her coffee halfway to her mouth. Hendricks is watching me with an expression I can’t entirely read, which is unusual for her, she’s not normally a difficult read.

I look around the room again, at the empty chair, at the door, and I don’t find what I’m looking for.

“Vee is finally having his wrists seen to,” Hendricks says. “There’s a serious infection. He’s refusing to undress for a full medical exam.”

“He’s an abuse survivor.” I say it flatly, meeting her gaze and not looking away from it. “I’d imagine that’s relevant.”

Her eyes narrow, just slightly. “Who happened to be at scene one.”

“Smithson was stalking him. Followed him to the location when Vee first scoped it, and decided to use it.” I keep my voice level. “There’s nothing more to that than proximity and a man with an agenda.”

She studies me a moment longer, and I hold still under it the way I’ve learned to hold still under most things, and then, apparently satisfied, or at least deciding not to push it while I’m attached to a heart monitor, she lets it go.

“Are you going to give the press the real reason for the murders?” I ask, mostly to move us somewhere else. “The jealousy. The obsession.”

Hendricks’s mouth goes thin. “That’s a battle that cannot be won. Not now. Smithson’s already lapping up the attention from his cell, apparently, telling anyone who’ll listen he did it for justice.” She shakes her head once, like she’s physically putting it aside.

Her phone rings before I can reply to her. She glances at the screen, exhales through her nose in the specific way she does when whatever’s on it is going to ruin the next twenty minutes of her day, and stands. She walks out with the phone already at her ear.

The door swings shut behind her, and it’s just me and Farah, and the quiet stretches out long enough that I can feel it doing something.

“Very nice story,” Farah says eventually. She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the coffee in her hands like it’s said something interesting. “No loose ends.”

“And?”

She sets the cup down on the little table by the bed, careful, deliberate, the way she does everything when she’s working up to something. “You’re going to take medical retirement, aren’t you?”

It isn’t really a question. I look at her, at eleven years of a person who has never once had to cover for me before this case, who never needed to, because for the whole of those eleven years I was a good cop. Honest to a fault. A boring rule-stickler. One who didn’t make friends but got the job done, the correct way.