7. Chapter 7
Chapter seven
Lennox
I’ve sat across the table from a lot of people in my life.
Men who’d done things I can still see when I close my eyes.
Women who hadn’t done anything at all and still flinched like the room itself was accusing them.
I know how to do this. Too many years of knowing how to do this, and none of it is any use to me right now, because the person walking through the door with a uniformed officer at his elbow is the same person whose mouth was on mine eleven hours ago.
I made the call myself. I told myself it was procedure, the only responsible thing to do once Farah’s text landed, and I half believed it right up until I actually had to say his name out loud to the custody sergeant and felt my own voice betray me by going careful around the edges of it.
Micah sits down across from me like he’s settling into a restaurant booth, not an interview room with a recorder already running and Farah standing against the wall with her arms crossed, watching both of us with an expression I can’t read and don’t want to.
He’s dressed like he’s arriving for a photoshoot rather than a police interview, fitted black jeans and a soft cream sweater that’s definitely cashmere and definitely not high street, his hair styled in that careless, expensive way that takes far longer than it looks like it does.
He looks rested. Glowing, even, like whatever happened last night agreed with him completely, which feels deeply unfair given the state I dragged myself in here in.
There’s a faint bruise just visible above his collar, low on his throat, already purpling at the edges. My first thought, God help me, is wondering if I put it there. My second thought is that I have absolutely no business having a first thought like that in this room.
“Detective.” His eyes flick over the room, the camera in the corner, the recorder, and something delighted sparks behind them before he can stop it. “There must be easier ways to see me again.”
I don’t smile. I make myself not smile, which costs more effort than it should.
“This is a formal interview in connection with two murders,” I say. “You’re not under arrest. You’re free to leave at any point, and you’re entitled to legal representation if you want it.”
Something shifts behind his eyes, fast, like a light going out in a window two streets over.
The cheek drains out of his face in real time, and what’s left underneath it is small and frightened in a way that doesn’t look performed this time, or performed so well I genuinely cannot tell the difference anymore, which might be worse.
“Two murders,” he repeats, very quietly.
“Your DNA was recovered from the crime scene at the old hospital.”
“You know I was in the hospital.”
“Your DNA was found in the room with the dead body.”
His face pales and his eyes grow even wider. “I told you. I climbed in through the side gate, I never touched…”
“You told me a lot of things.” It comes out harder than I mean it to, and I watch it land, watch something in his face crumple and then immediately fight to put itself back together.
“I need you to walk me through exactly what you did inside that hospital, from the moment you arrived to the moment I found you.”
He does, and it’s the same story, urban exploring, the side gate, wandering up through the building toward the noise, except this time his voice shakes on the edges of it, and twice he has to stop and start a sentence over, and I cannot tell if that’s fear of being caught or fear of not being believed, and the fact that I cannot tell is its own kind of professional failure.
Farah asks the procedural questions, calm and precise, the ones I should be asking and can’t quite make myself ask first. Where exactly.
What time. Did you touch the window, did you open it, did you go near it at all.
Micah answers everything, fast, eager, the same easy cooperation he gave me in a derelict corridor with my badge in his hand, except now eager reads differently.
Now eager reads like a man who knows exactly how bad eager looks and can’t stop himself doing it anyway.
“I didn’t kill anyone.” He says it straight at me, ignoring Farah entirely, like the only verdict that matters in this room is mine. “You have to believe that.”
“I don’t have to do anything.” I hate how it sounds the second it’s out of my mouth. I hate it more because some part of me wants to take it back and say something gentler, and that wanting is exactly the problem.
His eyes go glassy, just for a second, and then he blinks it away and the cheek comes flooding back in, defensive and brittle. “Careful, Detective. You’re starting to sound like you actually suspect me.”
“I do suspect you.”
“No you don’t.” He leans forward, slow, deliberate, every line of him suddenly less frightened boy and more something else entirely, something with teeth. “You don’t actually believe it. I can see it on your face.”
He’s right, and the fact that he’s right, and that he knows it, and that he’s using it, is the most frightened I’ve been of him since I met him.
For one unsettling second, something flickers across his face that has nothing soft in it at all, something assessing and patient, the same quality I’ve seen in men who’ve spent a very long time getting away with things.
It’s gone as fast as it arrived, smoothed back over by the same easy charm, and I genuinely cannot tell if I imagined it or if I just watched a mask slip and reset itself in under a second.
“Where were you the night of the eleventh,” I ask, flat, no warning, the way you ask a question you actually want to see land.
Micah blinks. “I don’t know. I don’t really keep track of which nights I’m not murdering people.
” Then, almost instantly, his face folds into something stricken, like he’s heard the joke a half second after it left his mouth.
“That was a horrible thing to say. I’m sorry.
I don’t find any of this funny. I think I just cope with being frightened by saying stupid things at the worst possible time. ”
I don’t know which version of him just spoke. I’m starting to suspect that’s exactly the point.
Farah’s phone buzzes. She glances at it, glances at me, and steps out into the corridor to take the call, and the second the door clicks shut behind her the whole temperature of the room changes.
“Alone at last,” Micah says, and somehow manages to make it sound filthy and devastated in the same breath.
“This isn’t a joke.”
“I know.” His voice cracks on the second word, small and real, and whatever armor he was wearing thirty seconds ago is just gone. “I know it isn’t. I just don’t know how to do this with you.”
I should say something professional. I should say nothing at all. What I actually do is sit there in silence for three full seconds while my entire career quietly catches fire.
“Oh, I know!” Micah says suddenly, sitting up straighter in his chair where he’s been getting progressively smaller.
He reaches for his pocket. I flinch. Even though I know he would have been searched before being brought into this room.
He pauses, flashes me a grin that’s pure sin incarnate. “I’m reaching for my phone.”
He pulls it out, and even I know it’s the latest iPhone. His thumb moves over the screen deftly. Then he turns it to face me.
Footage of the examination room, empty, undisturbed, no body, no toy, no carved name, just rust and cracked vinyl and Micah’s own breathless narration about peeling paint and forgotten places.
“Show me the time stamp.”
He turns the phone away from me and his thumb dances quickly over the screen again. The phone is angled back towards me.
The same footage. Stilled. Time stamped two hours before uniform’s first call came through.
The relief that goes through me is so large and so immediate that I have to grip the edge of the table.
“You filmed this before the murder,” I say.
“I filmed everything. That’s the whole point of the channel.” He’s watching my face very closely. “Does this mean you believe me now?”
It means the DNA has an innocent explanation, that he was in that room hours before anyone died in it, narrating to a camera instead of carving a name into a stranger’s chest. It means, on paper, that I have absolutely nothing left to hold him on.
It should not feel like this. Like something uncoiling in my chest after a day of being wound too tight.
“It’s compelling,” I say, which is as much as I’ll let myself give him out loud.
I formally clear him forty minutes later, after Farah comes back in, after the recorder gets switched off, after a version of the same conversation happens twice more with slightly different words until everyone in the room is satisfied there’s nothing left to ask.
I walk him out myself, past the desk sergeant, past the doors, and he pauses on the front steps and looks back at me like he wants to say something and decides against it, and then he’s gone, melting into the ordinary churn of people who aren’t currently destroying my career.
Back in the incident room, I cross his name off the board.
It’s the only name that was ever on it.
I stand there looking at the blank space where a suspect should be, and the relief I felt twenty minutes ago curdles into something colder. We have two dead men, a missing boy, a ring CAIT spent years trying to crack, and not one single name left to chase.
I should feel like I just lost. I mostly feel like I just got to keep something I had no right to keep.
But it’s tainted now. Suspicion well and truly stirred. Trust shattered, even though it should be restored, but trust doesn’t work that way. Never has, never will.
I spent several hours today believing Micah was a serial killer. I don’t know how to recover from that. Don’t know how to get the bitter taste out of my mouth. But I think I want to.
I think about the tube this morning, the grin I couldn’t wipe off my own face in the window’s reflection, how bright and stupid and simple everything looked from inside that carriage.
I’d give a great deal to get that feeling back.
It’s astonishing how fast a person can go from the best morning in years to whatever this is.
I go home. Heat a microwave meal. Stare at the TV screen without really watching it because Micah is still on my mind. There were moments in that interview room where I was convinced he was sin incarnate. Other moments where I would have sworn he was as pure as driven snow.
Nobody has left me so unsure for a long time. If ever. I’m a detective, I’m good at reading people, it’s what I do.
Micah has left me feeling unsure of everything, even my own judgment.
He’s innocent. He’s shown me the proof. He’s off the board.
And I hate how much I want that to be true, to be the right call.
I don’t sleep well. I wake at half-past three with my heart going too fast for no reason I can immediately name, the room dark and unfamiliar feeling even though it’s my own, and it takes a full minute lying there in the dark before the thought finally surfaces, the one my brain apparently couldn’t wait until morning to hand me.
That hospital has forty rooms if it has one.
Wards, offices, store cupboards, an entire derelict maternity unit on the floor above.
A man filming abandoned buildings for clicks would wander, would climb stairs just to see where they lead, would film whatever looked good on camera in whatever order he happened to find it.
Micah showed me the footage of exactly one room. And it was the right room on the first try.
How did he know which exact one would paint him as innocent?
I lie there in the dark, turning the question over and getting nowhere, and somewhere underneath the dread there’s a small, exhausted, traitorous part of me that’s saying, I don’t need to tell anyone this. I can keep it to myself.
Keep it, and keep Micah.