“How did Ronald die?” he asked finally.
One of the few positive aspects of the Gray case was that the primary crime scene had been the deserted warehouse: his body had not been photographed huddled in a corner by casual passersby with cell phones, and the specifics of his murder were still, at least for the moment, not in the public domain.
Madison wanted to say quickly, he died quickly and painlessly, because Dr. Peterson seemed a kind man who already felt guilty for not taking Gray’s fears seriously. Even so, a lie was a lie, and in a double homicide investigation, the weight words might carry could be measured in tons.
“We’re still gathering all the facts,” she replied.
“I understand,” Peterson said.
“What color was it?” Kelly asked the doctor.
Madison and Peterson both turned.
“What color was what?” Peterson asked.
Madison snapped to the idea and kicked herself for not thinking of it before. Or not thinking about it first. “His staff ID. What color was the plastic volunteer staff ID Gray had?”
Kelly nodded.
Peterson held up with a thumb and forefinger the plastic sleeve that hung from his neck on a strap. It contained a card—on it a photograph, his name, and a barcode; it was barely bigger than a driver’s license.
“It was like this one.”
It was a piece of black plastic, nothing more than that, and yet what Madison saw was Ronald Gray rushing through his apartment, grabbing clothes and packing them in his wheeled suitcase. The police had combed through the apartment and the suitcase, through drawers and cupboards and the desk, and not one single item would have led them to Vincent Foley. They wouldn’t even have known about him if Peterson hadn’t called, because, as he was running for his life, Gray had likely dug out every letter he’d ever received from the Institute, every medical report, every scrap of paper, and every picture taken in the last however many years and had turned them into ashes, including his own volunteer staff card, now a melted plastic lump in the bottom of a saucepan on a table in the lab.
Ronald Gray’s body had been found as life had left him, cowering in a corner of a desolate building, and yet his last act had been to shield and protect another human being.
“If you want to meet Vincent, I should first check how he’s doing today. I haven’t seen him yet. I’ll be right back.”
They were left alone in the office. Kelly stretched his legs, rested his head on the back of the leather chair, and stared at the ceiling. Madison went to the window; beyond the trees and Lake Washington, Kirkland would be getting itself ready for the evening.
The heavy clouds had finally let go, and the rain fell in sheets. Madison’s gaze followed the line of trees. This must be the worst time of day for Foley. It was possible that he actually knew something, but the man had been inside these walls for a very long time, and the only thing he might conceivably know something about was what had happened to him before he was admitted. Maybe there had been more to it than a mugging of a vulnerable individual? Still, the paint flakes linked Ronald Gray to Warren Lee, and whatever threat had panicked Gray into leaving town also connected Lee and Vincent Foley.
She turned; Kelly was still staring at the ceiling, without any apparent inclination to share his thoughts.
“We need a time line,” she said.
“We have it,” he replied without looking at her. “It still starts with the Lee home invasion.”
“If Foley is connected, and he’s been here this long, it must start way before then.”
Chances were that it was the news of Lee’s murder that had scared Gray.
“If Foley has been here this long,” Kelly said, “and he wasn’t that bright to start with—after all the meds, his brain’ll be mush, and you’ll get more out of talking to a lampshade.”
Madison wanted very badly to disagree, and yet, however crudely put, Kelly had a point.
“Maybe so,” she said. “All the same, Gray is dead, and there’s a significant chance that Foley is in danger, too.”
“Right now, he’s nice and snug in his white straitjacket. I wouldn’t worry about him.”
“What would you worry about?”
Kelly didn’t get a chance to reply.
“Vincent is okay; not his best day but not his worst, either,” Dr. Peterson said, standing in the doorway. “If you want to meet him, I have to ask you not to say anything about Ronald’s death or anything that might upset him in any way.”
“Would he even understand it if we told him?” Kelly said.
Madison hoped that the doctor had not heard Kelly’s earlier comments.
“We don’t know exactly how much he understands or how much his mind is able to process. Vincent understands about fear, about pain. That’s all you need to know.”
Dr. Peterson’s eyes measured Kelly and clearly found him lacking, and Madison knew then for sure that he had heard him.
Kelly stood up.
“And you’re going to have to check your weapons,” Eli Peterson said as he turned away.
Madison wrapped the leather strap around the holster, its weight so familiar in her hand, placed it in the locker, and turned the small key in the lock. Kelly was doing the same. The visitors’ room had rows of cubbyholes; most of them stood empty, the doors open.
“Doctor, when was the last time Ronald Gray visited? The last time you saw him?” Madison asked as Peterson led them down a corridor.
“I saw him a couple of weeks ago, but I don’t know if it was the last time he was here. I’ll have to check.”
“Do you remember anything unusual about that visit?”
“No, I’m sorry. We might have exchanged a couple of words, but I can’t remember anything strange or different about that day. I thought about it after I heard the news.”
“How many patients are here full-time?”
“Thirty-nine.”
The doctor took his ID card out of its sleeve and swiped it through the side of the elevator’s call box.
“Without one of these you can’t go anywhere,” he said.
“How do visitors get in?”
“They’re brought in by a nurse or a nurse’s assistant.”
“Each one?” Kelly asked.
“Each one. Visitors have to call before coming, as the patient might not be well enough to see them that day.”
The elevator’s doors slid shut, and a slight lurch told them they were moving. Madison felt a tiny spike of adrenaline.
“What kind of security do you have here?” she asked.
“A couple of people monitoring the grounds, a couple near reception and the back exit. We don’t need guards. Our staff members are more than capable of dealing with any situation.”
Madison wasn’t thinking about somebody who wanted out; she was thinking about somebody who wanted in, and how easy it would be to get to the floor where Vincent lived.
“What kind of meds is he taking?” she asked. Would he be too out of it to defend himself if someone came at him? Not that being drug-free had helped Warren Lee or Ronald Gray.
“Sertraline. It helps with the post-traumatic stress disorder episodes. The problem is that there haven’t been many studies on PTSD in people with learning disabilities.”
Kelly stood stiffly with his back against the elevator’s rear wall. Madison believed in that moment he could not possibly care less about studies of post-traumatic stress disorder in people with learning disabilities: he just wanted to be elsewhere, out of that building, away from the faint scent of hospital disinfectant that seemed to wrap itself around you and squeeze. She was glad it was not chloroform.
They walked out into a windowless landing with another heavy-duty door and a swipe box. Madison took mental note of each security measure. A small camera on a high bracket followed them as they went through.
“This way,” Peterson said. “Vincent is in the day lounge.”
They walked down a long, bright corridor with patie
nts’ rooms on both sides, most of the doors open, though Madison did not even glance inside; a few staffers who were going about their business nodded at Dr. Peterson.
They reached the end of the corridor; a nurse in blue scrubs stood by the door to the day room, keeping an eye on its sole occupant.
“Thank you, Thomas,” Dr. Peterson said. “I’ll take it from here.”
Vincent Foley didn’t stir as they approached. He stood framed by the tall window, looking out. Lines of rain streaked the thick glass, what was beyond it made invisible by the light inside.
“Vincent . . .” Dr, Peterson said gently.
Vincent Foley turned.
Madison didn’t gasp, and her face didn’t change; it took all she had not to react. The man before her, impossibly pale and as slight as a boy, didn’t look a day over twenty. Livid shadows under his eyes spoke of sleepless nights; his short hair, baby soft, stuck out in straw-colored clumps with some gray in it, the only sign that Vincent Foley was forty-eight years old. He couldn’t defend himself if a third-grader swatted him, Madison thought.
“Hello, Vincent,” she said.
Vincent’s eyes were piercing blue and wide; they focused on Madison for the first time, and she noted that while he seemed still, he was, in fact, vibrating with tiny tremors that coursed through his whole body. He blinked twice.
“Somebody’s coming,” he said.
A long, cold shiver unfurled down her back; his voice, reedy and frail, fit so well with the rest of him that she sensed Kelly recoil a little.
“Somebody’s coming; it’s getting dark,” Vincent murmured. “We should go; we shouldn’t stay here.” The shaking was getting worse.
“It’s okay, Vincent,” Dr. Peterson said, in the tone of a loving father with a scared child. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’re safe here.”
“No, I’m not safe. Nobody’s safe.”
Madison overcame her first response and examined Foley objectively as the only living, breathing part of their investigation. How in the name of all that was holy were they going to have a conversation with him about anything?
“Why are we not safe?” she asked, aware that the doctor was ready to interrupt this little get-together any time he wanted.
Vincent looked at Eli Peterson for reassurance.
“Go on,” the doctor said.
Vincent shook his head. “It’s not safe after dark, and it’s not personal, it’s business.”
“What is not personal?” Madison asked him, her voice matching Dr. Peterson’s, glad that Kelly had held back, his bulk like a boulder behind her.
Slowly Vincent held out one hand between them, then lifted the other and ran his index finger over the back, tracing the strained tendons, over and over again. His hands, smooth and delicate, were scrubbed clean, even though a line of grime had settled under the nails.
“What does that mean, Vincent?” she asked.
But he had turned away to face the window.
“Vincent?”
He didn’t turn back.
Eli Peterson motioned with his head, and they left the room; the nurse was waiting in the corridor.
“He’s all yours,” the doctor said to him.
Madison wasn’t entirely sure of her own feet as she followed Dr. Peterson down the corridor, as if part of her had stayed in the day lounge.
“Here,” Peterson said. “This is his room.”
“What . . .”
Every inch of the white walls was covered in meandering gray crayon lines, over and behind the bed, around the dresser, and as far up as his arm could reach.
“May I . . . ?”
“You can go in. It’ll take Thomas a few minutes to persuade Vincent it’s time to get ready for bed.”
Madison stepped inside, and her eyes tried to read a pattern in the chaos of intersecting marks; they weaved and tangled and came apart. This was what he saw every night when he closed his eyes and every morning when he awoke.
If there was a part of Madison that had hoped against hope that it would be possible to get any kind of information from Vincent Foley, standing in this room surrounded by this madness made visible put an end to that pretty quickly.
“It’s one of his compulsions,” the doctor said. “At the beginning we attempted to stop him, but it just made the episodes worse. The hand movements he just did—that’s another of his regular gestures.”
“What he said . . .”
“He says that every day, Detective, every time the sun sets. For him, no place is ever safe.”
They ran through the rain to the car, and by the time they got in, their shoulders were damp. Madison turned on the heater and the windshield wipers as the engine warmed up. The Walters Institute loomed through the rain in the headlights, altogether less pretty now. In the visitors’ room they had strapped on their holsters without a word.
“Don’t tell me that he didn’t creep you out,” Kelly said finally as he buckled his seat belt. “Say what you want, just don’t pretend that you weren’t creeped out.”
“I don’t know what I was,” Madison replied. “There’s something about him that’s unnerving, and—”
“He looks like a child. He’s my age, and he looks barely older than a boy. The lights are on, but there’s nobody home. He’s a weird little creep, and, frankly, he’s no good to us or to the investigation.”
Kelly was angry because Vincent Foley had unsettled him, and that was rare; Madison let him vent. Not weird, she thought, but eerie. Foley was eerie, like the relic of some Grimms’ fairy tale that didn’t want to get back into the book it had come from.
“Is he in danger?” Eli Peterson had asked as they were leaving.
“I don’t know,” Madison had replied, because she didn’t want to lie to him one way or the other.
Back in the precinct, Madison dug out the relevant records and learned that Ronald Gray and Vincent Foley had been fostered by the same family—Mark and Vivienne Bell, who had four decades of fostering children in King County—since they were twelve and thirteen years old respectively. She could hardly imagine what Vincent would have been like as a boy, but she’d bet that other children might have been less than kind to him in school. Maybe Ronald had become his protector then. Neither had a juvenile record or anything to do with the law; that they had ended up being fostered together meant they had no one else but each other.
Madison wondered what Vincent had been like before that day, that moment when reality had ceased to make sense and his mind had splintered, and whether the haze of fear and damage that cloaked him like a shroud was a remnant of that day or had always been there.
Her hand hovered next to the phone: it had to be Brown’s decision to go to the shooting range with her, and calling him with the pretext of talking about the case looked just like what it was, a pretext. Even if she’d rather talk to him about it than anyone else.
The phone rang; Madison almost jumped. It was Sorensen.
“I have a few more goodies for you. They’ll be in the report, but I wanted to give you a heads-up.”
“We always welcome goodies here,” Madison replied.
“Well, you’ll like these for sure: we have a footprint from the warehouse, recovered near the body. Working boot, size eleven. Also a small amount of powdered detergent that matches the mess on the floor in Warren Lee’s kitchen. And we have fibers from what looks like car upholstery, enough to match it to a car if you ever find one . . .”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Honestly, the warehouse was dusty and dirty and full of what will probably turn out to be useless trace evidence; however, I’m told that Lauren and Joyce hit the jackpot with the bus-station restroom.”
“I hope they found something worth their time in that hell.”
“Another footprint—same boot as before.”
“Excellent.”
“And a smudged handprint . . .”
“Don’t toy with me, Sorensen.”
“Do I ever?
”
“A handprint . . . with fingers?”
“Yes, palm and fingers. It was low, about a foot from the ground, on the tiled wall. Someone tried to wipe it off, but we might find enough points for comparison on it. I have no idea why it was there, and it might be unrelated. Judging from the muck around it, though, it could be quite recent.”
“They swapped coats.”
“What?”
“The two guys who went into the restroom after Gray and grabbed him. One of them swapped his coat with him. He must have taken his gloves off at some point to put it on Gray.”
“It was a pretty small restroom . . .”
“You bet. Easy to lose your balance, and then you put your hand out on the tiles to steady yourself. He realized what he’d done and attempted to wipe it off. Are you running it?”
“Yes, it’s going through every system known to man. Just don’t hold your breath—we still don’t know for certain that it’s relevant.”
“With what I have, I’ll take every grain of detergent you’ve got.”
Madison briefed Fynn and Spencer on the day’s developments and then turned off her desk lamp. She wanted to go to Alki Beach and run. In a day that had given her more questions than answers she longed for the simple, straightforward joy of pounding her feet on the sand and letting everything go. The forest might come back unbidden and, with it, the scent of blood, but she could deal with those; she could run through those.
In her car, though, the rain still falling heavily over the windshield, Madison decided to go home, cook and eat, and think things over. Maybe not think too much, maybe not think at all. Vincent Foley’s presence was like a bitter scent in her cold, damp car. Somebody’s coming.
Chapter 23
Vincent Foley, twenty-three, stood by the door of Ronald Gray’s bedroom. He was quiet, and yet his misery was evident. Ronald ignored him; he knew what was coming and wanted none of it.
“I don’t want to go,” Vincent said.
Sweet Jesus, his voice could be so annoying. Ronald continued dressing, buttoning up the cotton shirt, which would no doubt become a sweat-fest as soon as he set foot outside the house.
The Dark Page 14
