A nurse checked her over and cleaned the nick on her cheekbone from the broken glass.
Madison woke up with a start. She had taken a ten-minute break from going over Conway’s cabin with local officers, sat down with her eyes closed in the pickup’s driver’s seat, and had slept for an hour. The clock on the dashboard said it was almost one in the morning.
The stars were out in full, and she wondered whether celestial navigation might lead her in the direction of the man who had hired Peter Conway, whether some cosmic residue of a man’s actions might be visible to one of Sorensen’s devices and lead her to him. It was easy to think such thoughts away from the city lights, where it seemed that every single astral body was present and accounted for and there was no black left between the dots of light. Madison shook her head: she was tired, she was hungry, and she was away from home.
She pulled her gloves back on and returned to the chaos of the cabin. When she looked up from the floor a while later, Spencer and Dunne were standing in the doorway.
Chapter 64
Vincent Foley woke up early, and the tips of his fingers caressed the texture of the wall, still so unfamiliar. He saw his work of the past few days all around him and felt sure Ronald would approve of it. He hadn’t seen Ronald for a while. Weeks, it felt like, but he had trouble keeping track of time. When Ronald came to visit him next time, they would find windows like the ones in the Walters Institute, and Ronald would tell him things as he always did.
Vincent was not sure what it was they talked about, but he felt better afterward, and those nights his fear was not as bad. He reached under the cot and picked up the crayon; it was exactly where he had left it the previous night. He cradled the green crayon in his hand and fell back into sleep.
A nurse found him three hours later. After a brief and unsuccessful effort to resuscitate him, they called Dr. Eli Peterson to make the necessary arrangements, as he was his next of kin and they needed Vincent’s room cleared as soon as possible.
Chapter 65
The main lab of the Crime Scene Unit clicked and whirred like a living thing. Amy Sorensen and her team hustled around the tables and the instruments, analyzing and connecting different items of evidence. In one corner of the room, ignored by all, a monitor showed a three-dimensional perspective of what at first looked like a shapeless lump in varying shades of gray. The algorithm that had created it marked each second with a green tick, and each tick went toward creating an individual fingerprint, separating it from the gray block.
It was time-consuming, and there were no guarantees of success; nevertheless, one tick at a time, the software was separating the overlapping fingerprints on the scrap of photocopy paper with David Quinn’s school picture. Sorensen lifted her eyes from the piece of glass she was examining and glanced at the monitor: it got on with its job, like every other member of her team, and she couldn’t really ask for more.
Madison gripped the baseball bat and looked around the room. It was her Friday Harbor bedroom on San Juan Island, the last address she had shared with her father, the last place in this world that held memories of her mother. She caught herself in the mirror: she was not twelve, and she wore a heavy ballistic vest with ceramic plates in it. The moon was high in the window, and she knew her father had stolen her mother’s things. She also knew that she was dreaming, but somehow that did not seem to matter, because her grief was real, and her rage was like a wave about to hit. It was about to break, and she hunkered down, ready for it. The first swing of the bat found her bookshelf, and the second struck the mirror. One part of her mind—the part that recognized she was asleep—was glad that her father was not home, and still, even deep in her dream, Madison was aware that she had shot and killed a human being. She swung the bat, and the shattering glass woke her with a start. She was lying in the back of Spencer’s car; they were crossing the West Seattle Bridge, and the sky was bright in the window.
Madison stood under the shower for a long time and let the cut on her cheekbone sting in the heat. She had called the hospital in Bellingham twice. The attending doctor in charge of John Cameron would not speak with her at first, and it took a call from the local sheriff to get him to tell her what was going on. Conway had injected Cameron with a number of tranquilizers, and, quite frankly, he said, they didn’t exactly know how he had been able to walk or talk. The syringes had contained Ketamine, which Conway had not yet used. The gunshot wound had been cleaned and bandaged, and if the patient didn’t plan to be lifting elephants anytime soon, he would heal very well. Madison smiled a little. The doctor apologized for not taking her call at first, but they’d had reporters camping outside the hospital. A private ambulance had been booked to fly Cameron back to Seattle in a few hours, once they had washed the drugs out of his system.