Chapter Text
Lucifer had stilled, his hands clasped tightly atop his crossed knee. Across from him, Linda waited patiently, her head cocked slightly to the side as she considered her patient.
After a moment, it became clear that he wasn’t going to be any more forthcoming. His mouth was a thin line, his dark eyes piercing into hers and she could swear straight down into her soul, but that was another topic Lucifer had also not been forthcoming about.
He looked calm on the surface, but it was too calm. Too tightly coiled, like a serpent ready to strike.
Linda took in a breath and decided to change the topic. “So,” she began. “Any plans?”
“For?” he asked, the word clipped.
“For this weekend?” she tried, and he shook his head, not understanding. “For Valentine’s day.”
He loosened his hands, smoothing down the fabric at his knee. “Ah. Yes. Lux should be very busy. Speaking of,” he finished, standing.
Linda watched him approach the door. “So just Lux, then?”
He stood with his hand on the doorknob, but turned, his expression betraying impatience.
“What about Chloe?” she asked.
“What about the detective?” His brows furrowed slightly as he considered the question, especially given the doctor’s following silence.
“It might be a good idea to do something nice for your partner,” she suggested. “Especially given your… the nature of your relationship.”
He looked at her suspiciously, his eyes darting over her figure as he raised his chin, trying to suss out any ulterior motive. He opened the door, dragging his gaze away. “Doctor,” he said, in goodbye.
The door shut quietly behind him, leaving Linda in the empty space, shaking her head.
As good as she was, she did not catch the spike in Lucifer’s pulse as he left the room.
***
Lucifer tore out of the parking garage at Linda’s office, narrowly missing a pedestrian as he screeched onto the road. The woman yelped and jumped back, dropping her bag and hurling expletives after him, but he barely noticed.
The wind whipping his hair and the thrum of the Corvette’s engine soothed him as he drove. Really, he didn’t know why the doctor’s query about his weekend plans had riled him so much. His only real experiences of Valentine’s Day were of lonely souls seeking companionship at Lux--often rather desperately--but he watched enough television to know that humans in relationships expected certain romantic gestures, in the vein of flowers and chocolate and diamonds and sometimes (though this baffled him) cuddly stuffed animals.
But he and the detective weren’t in a relationship. Why would Linda suggest that he should be planning something special for her? The last thing he wanted was to remind her - or himself - of what had almost happened and couldn’t ever, ever be.
No, the doctor was wrong. There was no reason he and the detective should be doing anything in particular on Valentine’s Day - no reason they should see each other at all, even. Better to focus on Lux, and make himself available to any lonely souls who took his fancy.
It was the only charitable thing to do, and had nothing at all to do with his own loneliness.
He pulled into the parking garage beneath Lux with another screech of tires and took the lift up to the club. The decorations wouldn’t go up until Friday, but he’d been promised a preview of the dancers’ routine this afternoon--in costume--and had a guest DJ to audition, a favor to his regular DJ, who wanted to spend the weekend with his boyfriend. He’d been rather looking forward to the dancers, at least.
His phone rang just as the lift doors opened, the detective flashing on the screen. “Hey,” she said when he answered. “We’ve got a case.”
He stopped at the top of the stairs that curved down into the club, his pulse spiking again at the sound of her voice. “Now?” he asked. He cast a wistful glance toward the stage, where a cluster of women in red and white lingerie were talking in a tight group.
“Yes, now.” She rattled off an address.
He sighed. “Text it to me.”
Hanging up the phone, he leaned over the railing and called, “I’ll have to wait and see the real thing this weekend, darlings. Ladies, you all look lovely.” He grinned as the group parted to reveal two men standing in their midst. “And gentlemen,” he added, letting his eyes wander over their trim physiques. The pale redheaded one blushed, and Lucifer winked at him. He paused on his way out to see that the young man got an invitation to the penthouse that evening.
No reason to wait until Valentine’s Day to offer companionship. It was only charitable. At this rate, Lucifer would find himself well on his way to being a saint. Another charitable act of selfless benevolence, indeed.
Chloe texted him the address and soon enough he found himself parking in front of a somber-looking apartment building, a far cry from his standards and yet still somehow better than anything in Tarzana. The few buildings huddled around a currently tarp-covered pool like the homeless to a fire. The dumpster, complete with sofa sticking out of it, needed emptying, the street needed paving, and somewhere nearby a dog incessantly barked.
If the day had not been sunny and cheerful, he was sure the detective would have been calling him about a suicide, not a murder.
He shuddered at the thought, but abandoned the Corvette all the same and made his way past the police tape and several uneasy looking officers, milling about.
Jauntily he made his way up the outdoor stairwell, ready to tell the detective exactly what he thought about her making him leave what was sure to have been a very enjoyable performance (and possibly a much more naked encore) when he found her stepping out of the door in front of him, eyes downcast.
It was all very quiet.
More quiet than a crime scene ought to be, even with the humans’ bizarre respect for the dead.
Lucifer wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.
Her eyes lifted to his movement and she offered him a sad smile. “Hey,” she said.
Now he knew something was wrong.
“What is it, detective?” he asked, stepping past her and into the apartment, trying to move aside the door to open it further and surprised to find that he could not; he looked down only to find a stack of unopened mail jamming the doorway. Further down the hall, nothing else seemed amiss or hoarded. A few white bulbs the forensic team set up sharply illuminated the otherwise dark space.
She followed him inside as he walked down the hall, turning toward the source of commotion - the living room. A couch sectioned off the area, with a television parked in front of it. An unpleasant odor wafted in from the kitchen on the right, and he noticed a stack of blackened dishes in the sink.
“I may have called you a little early,” Chloe was explaining, “the team is going to have to take him back to the lab to determine cause of death.”
“Who?” asked Lucifer, coming around the side of the couch.
Chloe stopped him with a hand to the forearm. A forensics intern squatted, lifting a camera; the bulb flashing momentarily blinded Lucifer, but he saw.
A man, or what used to be a man, sitting on the floor, slumped against the couch. His legs were straight out in front of him, relaxed, and perhaps were crossed at the ankles at some point. At his fingertips lay scissors, as though he had just put them down, and a roll of clear tape; around the body sat a few, small wrapped Christmas presents.
“I knew the holiday had been a bad idea,” he remarked, gesturing to the brightly-colored wrapping paper. “See, it's even gone and killed someone.”
The joke fell flat.
The man - or, really, what Lucifer had guessed to be a man, judging by what was left of the short hair and tall height - was badly decomposed.
A few years’ worth, by the look of it, as though someone had dug up the body from a shallow grave and staged it.
Lucifer looked back out toward the kitchen. A small window over the sink offered a depressing overlook of the pool. A thin, white curtain flapped morosely in the light breeze, something his neighbors would have had to pass in and out of their apartments.
"Vincent Joyce," Chloe absently provided, gesturing downward. "Maybe."
“No one noticed?” asked Lucifer, unwilling to believe that someone could die - be killed, or perish of natural causes - and remain unfound, especially in such a place.
A home.
He turned at the detective’s silence.
Slowly, she slid her hand down his arm. He had forgotten it was there.
“I don’t know,” she said softly, shaking her head. “I don’t know.”
***
Chloe let her hand drop to Lucifer’s and laced her fingers through his. His hand curled around hers and he looked down at it, his expression dazed. His gaze flicked to hers, then back to the body, the kitchen, the body again.
“But - how?” he asked, his voice strangled.
“I don’t know,” Chloe said again. She hadn’t needed to call him, exactly. She didn’t even know if they were dealing with a homicide yet - but she didn’t want to deal with this alone. Not that she was alone, exactly, but it was Ella’s day off and she hadn’t worked closely with anyone else on the scene.
And she wanted, well, him. It was stupid, and it didn’t make any sense - the only reliable thing about Lucifer was that he wasn’t, especially lately - but she resolved not to scrutinize the feeling too closely. Lucifer was her partner, that was all, and on a case like this . . . well. She wanted her partner with her.
She glanced at the body again and suppressed a shudder. She wasn’t squeamish about death, not by a long shot, but this was something else entirely. This was a person, forgotten, left to rot.
Unnoticed.
For years.
“Didn’t he have family? Friends?” Lucifer asked. “Co-workers?”
Chloe shook her head. “I guess not.”
“Who found him?”
“The super. I was on my way out to talk to him when you got here.” Reluctantly, she let go of his hand and jerked her head toward the door. “Come on. He’s outside.”
It was a little easier to breathe outside the apartment. The air still felt heavy, but it was just the ordinary weight of everyday despair, without the smell of death. The superintendent was sitting with an officer at the bottom of the stairs, clutching a water bottle in both hands and a grayish tinge to his light brown skin. He stood up when they approached, the plastic cracking as his hands closed over the bottle. “Is - is he - ?”
“Dead?” Lucifer asked. He fixed the man with a contemptuous gaze, seeming to have regained some of his equanimity. “For quite some time, I would wager.”
“Lucifer.” Chloe shot him a quelling look. He subsided, but his jaw remained set, eyes sharp.
“...murdered?” the super finished his question with a tremble in his voice.
“We don’t know yet,” Chloe said. She took out her notebook and pen. “Can you tell us what happened?”
“The landlord asked me to check on the place. His last few rent payments didn’t go through, and he didn’t return any of their calls. There was no answer when I knocked, so I used my access key, and...” He trailed off.
“You never thought to check on his flat before that?” Lucifer demanded.
The super blanched. “There was no reason to! His rent was always paid, there were no complaints...”
“Not even about the smell?” Lucifer asked.
He shrugged, gesturing helplessly toward the dumpster. “We all assumed it was the trash.”
Chloe nodded, jotting down notes, not sure if she felt more pity or contempt for the man. “How long have you been the super here?”
He avoided her gaze. “Six years.”
“How often did you see Mr. Joyce?”
“He was around a lot more when I started--”
Lucifer snorted. “I’ll bet,” he muttered under his breath. Chloe glared at him.
“Go on.”
“About a year after I started working here, he got really - he stopped going out. I’d only see him occasionally, maybe once a month, even less. I knew he worked from home, and I think he got most things delivered.” He shrugged, looking at his feet. “It didn’t seem that odd not to see him.”
“Do you know what kind of work he did?”
“Some kind of IT work, I think.”
Chloe nodded. They’d find more when they went through his computer. “Thank you,” she said. “I think that’s all we need from you for now. We’re going to need you to come to the precinct and make a formal statement.” She felt a little better, focusing on the case - getting information, starting the task of finding out what had led no one to notice Vincent Joyce’s death until his rent stopped clearing.
She looked back up the stairs toward the half-open door to the apartment, still blocked by years worth of mail going through the slot. This one was going to haunt her.
“No,” Lucifer stated matter-of-factly, interrupting her thoughts. “No, no, no,” he continued, shoving his way up back the stairs, nearly pushing an intern off the railing in the process. He took them two at a time, making his way back to the apartment in seconds.
“Lucifer!” Chloe called out, to no avail - he pushed his way back into the apartment. She thanked the superintendent and hurried up the stairs after him, catching Lucifer as he lowered to his knees at the door, throwing his hands into the pile of mail.
“It’s not right, detective,” he explained, reading and tossing aside envelopes as he spoke.
“We have people for that,” she tried, but he didn’t stop. His eyes were wild as they glanced her way.
She’d had nearly thirty minutes to process the scene before Lucifer arrived. She could at least give him a couple of minutes.
“What’s not right?” she asked, probing. Lucifer's wild trains of thought had been leading them astray, lately, but she still trusted his process - whatever it was.
“It’s a sin, detective,” he started. “Sloth, and not his. Theirs. There is always someone - " he started, then shook his head, tossing another envelope over his shoulder. “Even in Hell, detective - even in the deepest recesses of the abyss, no one is forgotten. They may think they are, isolated and alone in the dark, but someone knows. Someone always knows. It’s not possible that someone here didn’t. The world is far too small for that.”
Suddenly, he thrust an envelope at her. The address was handwritten, but the return address was a sticker, betraying the name clear as day.
She took it reluctantly, reading the name at the top. “Greenwood City Church.”
Upon saying the name, Lucifer dug back into the pile, and soon Chloe found her hands full of envelopes with the same name. She stacked them neatly in her hand before passing them off to a passing forensic tech with a note to look into it first thing.
She returned her gaze downward, to find Lucifer still on his knees, silent. His hands were clenched tightly at his knees, and his dark eyes bore into hers, unblinking.
It was as though the darkness grew around him, untouched by the bright bulbs in the living room. His anger radiated off him, shimmering in the dark, and she suppressed a shiver, despite the sun at her back.
“Someone always knows,” he repeated.
She pulled out her phone, typing the name in the search bar as Lucifer stood, leaning against the doorframe and looking over her shoulder. The website was neat, if a little dated; several pictures of happily smiling groups of people could be found in a slideshow at the top. Chloe noted that the pictures appeared to be taken in exotic locales - the small print at the bottom read such places as Peru and Nigeria - and that all the people were Caucasian, not that that was such a strange occurrence.
Lucifer squeezed closer to her as a tech moved out the apartment, his body warm and solid against her shoulder. Steadying.
She continued to scroll, and the further she explored, the less she liked.
After a minute of searching and reading debatable bible verses, she clicked off the screen. Lucifer made a noise of protest.
“It’s a hate group,” she decided, tilting her face to look into his.
He was, perhaps, too close. She took a step out the door.
Commotion from behind them spurred Lucifer into movement, following her out. The unmistakable clink of a cart’s wheels followed him.
Together, they silently watched the body being wheeled out, the body bag holding more empty space than she was used to seeing. The techs spoke, working together as they maneuvered it down the stairs.
Chloe made to follow, then paused.
“I’ll let you know what the autopsy shows,” she told him. “You can go back to your…” she waved a hand in his general direction, “thing.”
His eyes were stuck past her, his face still hard, but he managed a curt nod.
Lucifer knew exactly where he was going.