Something had unsettled her in a day rather crowded with unsettling things, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. She understood as she was washing her hands in the restroom by the food court: it was the pencil mark around David Quinn’s photograph. Someone had drawn that line to make sure the kidnappers abducted the right children, because the kidnappers did not know what they looked like and did not know them personally.
It’s not personal; it’s business. Vincent Foley’s reedy voice came back to her. The water ran cold on her hands, and she saw him, standing in the white day room in his scrubs, holding his hands out to her and running an index finger over the back of his other hand. And Madison knew then what she had seen. It’s not personal; it’s business. And why Vincent Foley was terrified of the sun setting each day. Somebody’s coming.
Damn right, Vincent, Madison thought as she hurried down the escalators and out of the building. She hailed a cab and got dropped off at the precinct—no time for pretty walks under the winter trees now. She found Fynn at his desk, a plastic container with a salad in front of him and the fork halfway up to his mouth.
“Gray left the medal in the Bible,” she said. “He left the medal and the picture in case someone came looking, in case the killers caught up with him. He knew Peterson would contact the police on behalf of Vincent, and we would go chasing after clues, and sooner or later the Bible would turn up. And if he made it out alive, nobody would ever find it. The Bible was insurance in case he didn’t make it.”
“How did he get the medal?” Fynn sat back in the chair, the fork abandoned among the salad leaves.
“It’s what we thought: three men plus Timothy Gilman. One down, three to go. Lee, Gray, and Foley.”
“We have the same evidence now as we did an hour ago.”
“Foley showed me the hands.”
“He what?”
“Let me call Dr. Peterson.”
“Go right ahead.”
Madison dialed from Fynn’s landline and put Eli Peterson on the speaker. She waved Spencer and Dunne into the office.
“Doctor.” Madison went straight to it. “Could you tell me the exact date Vincent Foley was admitted to the clinic?”
“Give me a second,” he replied, and they heard the tapping of computer keys.
Madison stared at a spot on the oatmeal-color carpeted floor: if it was before August 28, 1985, her theory was all the way dead.
“September 17, 1985,” Peterson’s voice came back.
Madison felt the spike of adrenaline hit and the coppery taste in her mouth. “Thank you, Doctor. One more question: you mentioned that Vincent has a repeating pattern of gestures and actions, like the hand movements he did when we were there. Are there others? Are there any other similar—what did you call them—compulsions that you could mention?”
“They have nothing to do with Ronald . . .”
“Are there any other similar compulsions?”
The line went quiet for a long moment, and Madison hoped to God that Eli Peterson wouldn’t suddenly decide to claim doctor-patient privilege.
“There is something else, yes,” Dr. Peterson said after a while. “He goes into the garden with the other patients—you know, it’s a positive environment for them to be in . . .”
Madison waited. She could almost hear Peterson thinking and trying to measure the weight of his words. “Doctor . . .”
“He digs, Detective. Vincent has to be supervised every time he’s outside in the grounds of the clinic, because he will run to the same spot and dig a hole in the dirt with his bare hands as deep as he can.”
Madison closed her eyes; she had seen that hole in the Hoh River forest. “The same spot?” She asked. Vincent’s hands scrubbed clean but with dirt under the nails.
“Yes.”
“Can you describe it to me?”
“I don’t understand . . .”
“Please, Doctor, could you describe to me the place Vincent keeps going back to?”
“Well, it’s right under a very tall fir. There’s a shrub just nearby. The first time Vincent saw it in bloom, he became so agitated, he needed to be sedated.”
“It’s called Bleeding Heart,” Madison said quietly.
“Detective . . .”
“I’ll call you back as soon as I can, Doctor. Is Vincent okay today? I mean . . .”
“He is how he always is.”
“Thank you, Dr. Peterson.”
After she replaced the receiver, Madison took a deep breath. “Vincent Foley has an IQ of sixty-nine; that is, that was the score when he was tested as a young man. When he was admitted to the Walters Institute, Ronald Gray said that months earlier Vincent had likely been the victim of some kind of assault—the details were unclear, because Vincent could not explain. In essence, though, something dreadful had happened to him, and his mind had shut down. He suffered episodes of PTSD and still does to this day. I don’t think an assault on Vincent is what happened.”