The Rookie: TrueCrimeJunkie (Patreon)

Tim Bradford had a clear policy on forbidden fruit: Don’t eat it. Don’t look at it. Don’t touch it. Forget the forbidden fruit existed and it won’t be a problem.

Then that goddamn interviewer had to bring up that Lucy was some kind of internet sleuth.

Was he worried about her? A little. It seemed to him that there could be a fine line between internet crime-solving and an off-the-books investigation. As Lucy’s superior, as her former training officer, didn’t he owe it to her to be sure she wasn’t even close to crossing the line?

Not that he worried about her over much. He was rightfully concerned with the health, mental and otherwise, of a woman who’d been kidnapped by a serial killer and buried alive not so long ago. Tim knew Lucy wasn’t fragile, but… it was strange. Sometimes she seemed so delicate it was impossible to believe how much strength was there.

But he wasn’t interested in her. They were friends. God knew she already shared way too much of her life with him, even if it wasn’t exactly a chore for him to comfort her with her daddy issues or her mommy issues or her boyfriend issues… okay, that was a chore. You’d think a girl as smart as that could find someone worth her time. Lopez had and she was a mess.

Then again, he was a lawyer. Then again, so was Chris.

The point was, Tim was convinced there was nothing wrong with checking what Lucy was doing online. Cops got their social media presence vetted every day. It was part of the job now. And he didn’t trust someone else—someone who might not get Lucy—not that he got her half the time—to figure out what she was going on about.

There were surprisingly few TrueCrimeJunkie(s) on Reddit. It was pretty easy to tell which was Lucy. She posted voraciously on a subreddit about Asian mothers, rarely complaining about her own, but frequently commiserating with others. The true crime stuff was like a school of fish. She seemed to watch whatever documentary series premiered on Netflix, debate theories, join in watch parties—nothing the LAPD would frown upon, besides the fact that this was how a woman barely out of her twenties was spending her weekends.

She had even… only Lucy Chen, Tim thought with a shake of her head… recused herself from discussing a series about that Jeremy Hawke mess. Someone had pinged her or @’d her or whatever they called it on Reddit, asking why she hadn’t shown up for any of the watch parties, and Lucy had dropped a reply saying “Not watching this one, hits too close to home :|”

Tim could appreciate the sentiment, if not the emoticon.

He felt pretty weird now: he’d gone back two weeks in Lucy’s history and was starting to feel like a creep, like he was reading someone’s diary or rummaging through their underwear drawer.

Still, these were things she’d posted willingly, publicly, online for countless millions to see. She wouldn’t care if he saw them, surely. It wasn’t like he would care if she monitored what he did online: played Google Solitaire and argued about the Dodgers. Why shouldn’t that be reciprocal? Hell, why shouldn’t it be in favor of him—he was her sergeant. He literally outranked her.

Three weeks ago a new expansion pack had come out for Destiny 2 and Lucy had gotten pretty into it. Four weeks ago Lucy’d had very strong opinions about a celebrity saying the usual stupid celebrity things. Five weeks ago Lucy… God only knew why… had gone to a subreddit devoted to people popping pimples and gotten into a heated debate over a growth on someone’s elbow being infected, telling them they should get it checked out by a doctor.

Jesus. This was too much. Knowing the ins and outs of someone’s innermost… and most shallow… thoughts, as posted to the masses with gifs and emojis, was an intimacy Tim didn’t care for. Even when he’d been married to Isabel, he hadn’t known how she felt about brands of hair dye for RWBY cosplayers and he was glad of it.

He was about to shut down the idiot box… his computer had done way more to earn the epithet than any television made in the last ten years… when he noticed Lucy had posted to something called r/crushobjects.

“Finally, some good taste,” he muttered. Videos of things being crushed: that was what people should go on the internet for. Not political debates, not for opinions on Marvel movies… something that wasn’t meant to be crushed being put into a hydraulic press so you could see what happened to it. (Spoiler: it was crushed.)

Tim clicked without any idea that his life was about to change.

The first post he saw was in a format he didn’t recognize. It was all about someone or something called ‘Y/N’, who was using the shower while ‘Austin Gries’ shaved at the sink.

(Austin Gries, why did that sound familiar? Tim placed it—main character of that Rocker Patrol show, about a cop who walked a beat by day and played in a rock band at night. As if anyone would be able to handle both a patrolman’s hours and band practice. The last time he’ checked, the band on gone on tour. But then, what’d you expect from the CW, other than the characters having great hair and chiseled abs?)

Tim read on, not sure how whoever this person was could write about what was manifestly the same character as the CW show without being hit by a copyright suit. ‘Austin’ cut himself shaving and whoever Y/N was, she got out of the shower to lick the wound, which soon turned into a vampiric, yet consensual imbibition…

Oh, Tim realized. This is porn.

Tim knew the stereotype about men and porn, and he’d been as into it as the next guy… in high school. But then he’d gotten out there, had his first handjob, and his interest in the Pamela Andersons of the world had faded.

Whatever appeal it held soured even further when he started driving a shop; learning the hard way that the women in skin mags did not spend their spare time lounging around the Playboy Mansion in lingerie. And they didn’t pay for pizza with sex, either, much less their plastic surgeries.

Women, he knew, were more about that Harlequin, Fabio crap. Fine by him, as far as it went, but didn’t they realize that stuff wasn’t written by Don Juan or any sort of sex goddess? No, most of it had to come from middle-aged suburban moms, writing on the can.

He didn’t put Lucy on a pedestal. He was sure she had urges. But she was young, smart, outgoing. She could have any guy she wanted. Why resort to a fantasy about a CW show, much less someone else’s fantasy? It boggled the mind. And set off one of those landmines Lucy tended to plant in his subconscious.

***

“You broke things off with Ashley?” Lucy asked, and for someone trying to be sympathetic, she packed miles of well-meant, passive-aggressive judgment into those words.

“You said don’t settle,” Tim reminded her.

“You think you were settling for her? Who are you, Henry the Eighth?”

Tim gave her a look, very grateful that a red light allowed him to take his eyes off the road.

“He was the one with the six wives, cut off Anne Boleyn’s head.”

“I handled it a bit more smoothly than that,” Tim assured her.

“Yeah, I’ll bet.” Lucy lowered her voice to a bass-rich impression of his. “’Ashley, I know you’re smart and beautiful and you’re a cop’s daughter, so you understand what a schmuck I have to be sometimes…’”

“I wasn’t self-deprecating,” Tim said. “That’s something insecure people do to fish for compliments. And I don’t say schmuck either.”

Lucy sighed. “You could have any woman you want, but it’s like you’re determined to be alone.”

“I could not have any woman I wanted.”

“You’re being self-deprecating right now. Next you’re going to say schmuck.”

“I would never say schmuck.” Tim tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He didn’t know how he could be so frustrated and so close to laughing at the same time. “I’m being realistic, okay? There’s a difference between picking up a badge bunny for a seed—“

“Nut,” Lucy corrected him. “Also, ewww.”

“There’s a difference,” Tim reiterated, “between that and an actual relationship.”

“Like you had with Ashley.”

“We didn’t have a relationship. We had dates. The dates were to see if we liked each other. We didn’t like each other that much. End of dating.”

“You couldn’t—make it work?”

“It’s a relationship, not a… green dress,” Tim said.

“You just said it wasn’t a relationship.”

“Barely a relationship.”

“Still a relationship.”

Tim gritted his teeth. It was embarrassing—a few months shy of being a boot and yet she could get under his skin like nothing else. Maybe that was why he lost his cool. “You and I have more of a relationship than—“

He broke off, trailed off, didn’t look at Lucy because he was afraid of what he’d see, and then Dispatch was telling them about a naked man with a tiki torch on Hollywood Boulevard.

Tim took the call without thinking of it. But he was not thinking even harder about what he’d almost—just about—mostly said.

***

Tim settled back in his chair. It wasn’t very comfortable, just a folding chair with a bit of a cushion. He didn’t spend anywhere near as much time in front of his laptop as he did at the TV or the kitchen table.

He didn’t consider himself a lothario, but he could do alright on the meat market. Ashley wasn’t hard to look at. Neither was Rachel. Nell was at least good-looking enough that he kinda regretted nothing developing there. And he knew from Isabel that he could do the work. Be the boyfriend, kill the spider, open the pickle jar.

So why didn’t it ever work? Why did he always find himself at that place where he was putting too much into a relationship for what he got back? Why couldn’t things just be easy? It wasn’t like he was a barbarian or anything. He and Lucy got along just fine. She annoyed him, sure, but in a way where he didn’t mind being annoyed—which made no sense, he knew, but…

Tim shut his laptop, quieting its droning hard drive to better hear that little voice that told him when a perp was about to pull a gun, make a break for it, vomit in the backseat of his shop. Pop quiz: Tim Bradford, are you actually thinking about Lucy Chen, badge number 28537, as… someone who knows what you look like naked?

No. He wasn’t. He was sure he wasn’t. He had, once, that time after the wedding, but she hadn’t done anything and he hadn’t done anything and neither of them had talked about it since. And if Lucy Chen didn’t talk about something, there was truly nothing to talk about.

Tim opened his laptop back up, the light from its screen illuminating the dim room once more, whatever motor powered it starting up again and landing a gentle whine on his ears. What’d he been doing? Oh, yeah, discovering Lucy’s taste in erotica. That was truly enough internet for the day. At least she hadn’t written it…

No. She’d commented on it. That was why it was in her user history. She’d left a comment on some juvenile fantasy. Probably telling the writer about all the spelling errors he or she or Y/N had made. Tim automatically hit the PAGEDOWN button, dropping down to see what she’d written, and found her by-now-familiar avatar hanging next to her comment.

OMG, you’ve ruined me. I am usually so not into bloodplay, but I saw my crush with a little Band-Aid right under his chin where he cut himself shaving and all I could think about was giving him the Austin Gries treatment, you damn monster! :D Not that he’d ever let me do all that, even fresh out of the shower, but a girl can dream :P

Tim sat and stared, long enough for his laptop to assume no one was going to use it and to put down. Finally, he rubbed his chin—the small scar left under his chin where he’d put off buying a new razor for too long, trusting his old one not to betray him, and getting a nasty cut for his trouble.

A cut Lucy had been so, so quiet about…