The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(51)

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 . . .”