Chapter 36
They left Dr. Takemoto with Vincent Foley and returned to the precinct. Sorensen at the lab had been alerted to the possibility of a match to Peter Conway’s DNA from the samples recovered at the Lee and Gray crime scenes, and Lieutenant Fynn had been briefed.
Madison read the Conway file at her desk. It was a catalog of brutality that had begun eleven years earlier and swept its way across both coasts and the mainland. Fred Kamen had been right: Conway and his crew had been involved—allegedly involved—in every kind of violent felony, bar very few, and they were good at their jobs.
Madison had printed out Kamen’s notes and, with the tip of her index finger, ran down the long list. Murder of a witness in a racketeering case, murder of a local boss, kidnap/murder of a drug dealer, suspected murder of a journalist (victim never recovered/probably deceased), suspected murder of a made man in Jersey (victim never recovered/probably deceased). And on and on.
It wasn’t difficult to imagine those men breaking into Warren Lee’s home, torturing him with whatever they had found in his kitchen, and then leaving him under the water towers. Madison checked the list of alleged felonies: bodies had been recovered in some cases, not recovered in others. These creeps had wanted the police to find Lee and Gray just as they were, and Wallace . . . Madison hoped that there was another explanation for the disappearance of Jerry Wallace, though she held out little hope. He had been the equivalent of a walking, talking Wikipedia of West Coast crime. No wonder they wanted him gone. They. Nathan Quinn’s appeal had sent out a question; these men were the answer.
I hope to God you know what you’re doing, Quinn.
Her cell started vibrating. It was Dr. Takemoto.
“Detective, I just wanted to let you know that we’re done for the day here. I’ve kept it pretty light and breezy for Vincent, but Dr. Peterson stopped the session when he thought his patient was getting tired.”
“What do you think? Can you recover anything from his memories?”
“Are we talking about Vincent’s mind as if it were a hard drive?”
“In a way, yes. A fabulously complex and unspeakably damaged hard drive.”
“I see. The only person he had any meaningful interaction with was his brother. Everybody else here, kind as they are, didn’t really make a dent. I think Vincent’s memories have been corrupted, to follow your metaphor, by the trauma, but they are there, even though he might not know the meaning of what happened. But maybe the only person who could have accessed those memories was his brother.”
“What did you learn about his relationship with Ronald?”
“Mr. Gray was very loyal; he visited him frequently and spoke to him all the time. Apparently he could keep him calm without recourse to drugs. It will take me some time to be able to get through to Vincent, if I ever do . . .”
Time was what they did not have. Madison closed her eyes—the brightness of the Anglepoise lamp still shone through her lids.
“Doctor, assuming that Vincent knows something, anything that comes out of his mouth we have to treat as gold. Dr. Peterson said his mind is locked inside a day long gone, frozen during certain traumatic hours. We are going to need a complete account of every single word he utters, because we should assume that everything is related to that day.”
“I’ll e-mail you a transcript after each session.”
“Thank you very much.”
There was a pretty black iron railing around the Walters Institute, two security guards who patrolled the grounds, and a couple inside to keep an eye on things; there were well-meaning and well-trained nurses who made sure the patients didn’t harm themselves or one another, and there were doors with magnetic locks and swipe cards. And all these measures would count for nothing if Peter Conway wanted in.
Madison closed the file, her palm flat on the cover that contained such horrors. There were things that they could do—must do: information to sift through, traffic cameras’ footage, trace evidence that had been recovered and might perhaps be matched to this crew from hell. And yet all Madison could think about was an empty house at the end of a long, narrow lane and the darkness pushing in through the windows.
Madison’s cell started vibrating as she was going through the traffic footage from the bus-station abduction. She recognized the number.
“Detective.” Nathan Quinn’s voice was soft.
“Mr. Quinn.”
“I thought you might like to know that my house was broken into last night, and the burglars didn’t take anything; they just had a good snoop around.”
“How . . . what happened?”