“You’re here on the wrong day. You’re speaking slightly louder to me than before, because you’re trying to make sure the mike you’re wearing is picking up your voice. Your posture is off from our last talk—you’re leaning forward to the left and craning your neck just a little toward the mike. You’re left-handed, aren’t you? And your mike is in your left shirt pocket, isn’t it? I figured as much, from the way you’ve been cleaning.”
His voice. His posture. His dominant hand. Bruce stood there for a moment, rendered speechless. She was right, of course, on every count.
Madeleine’s brow furrowed in disappointment at his expression. “Well. If I was unsure before, I’m definitely sure now. Everything about your face screams that I’m right. You’re like a goddamn open book.”
Bruce cast her a sidelong glare. “Maybe you’re too confident.”
She stretched lazily, looked away, and took a step toward her bed. “You’re boring me,” she said with a sigh.
Protect yourself. Draccon’s warning came back to him again, and this time it took on a new importance. He wondered what Draccon was thinking right now as she listened to the interrogation. I need to do something, and quick. If he didn’t, he might lose Madeleine’s trust entirely and put an end to his questioning.
On a whim, Bruce reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out the square wire. If Draccon could speak into his ear, she’d probably be yelling right now. Bruce held the square up to the window so that Madeleine could see, and then threw it far down the hall. He reached into his pants pocket, yanked out the recorder, and tossed that away, too.
“There,” he said, holding both of his hands up. “You caught me.”
Madeleine’s expression didn’t change—much. But her eyebrow lifted just enough to let Bruce know that she hadn’t expected him to blow his cover so readily. He’d surprised her. There’s no point in doing any of this if she doesn’t trust me.
“I think we’re done for today,” she said, but a smile still lingered at the corners of her lips. Then she sat on her bed and lay down sideways.
“Hey—” Bruce held up a hand. His irritation came spilling out with his words. “Wait a sec. You spoke to me first, long before I ever caught the attention of the police. I never initiated any of this. You always knew that if you spoke to me, the police would approach me and wire me up to come back and talk to you. And now you’re telling me that we’re done here. What was the point of all that?”
“I wanted to see if you were worth talking to,” Madeleine called out.
“And?”
But she didn’t reply again.
Bruce took a step closer to her window, so that he now stood barely a foot away. He’d withstood countless paparazzi cameras trained on him. He’d managed to persuade Draccon to involve him in an actual case. But somehow, here, he found himself having trouble thinking of what to say next to this girl, no longer sure of what she knew or how she knew it, whether she was figuring out new things about him even at this very moment, whether she was playing a game with him. Whether she was thinking of ways she could kill him, were she free. The photos of the three murders flashed through his mind.
What category did she belong to? He didn’t even know where to begin.
Maybe he really was done here. Draccon would have no use for him if Madeleine wouldn’t talk to him. Bruce stared at her for a moment longer, as if she might turn around to look at him again—but she just stayed where she was, her eyes now closed in some illusion of sleep, her hair spilling behind her like a dark ocean.
Right as he was about to leave, Madeleine shifted, tucking her hands behind her head on her pillow. “You’re not like the others,” she said.
He froze. Turned back around. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” she continued, “they interrogate me because it’s their job. Why do you do it? It’s not like you need the paycheck.”
Bruce thought of his late nights, listening to police scanners and obsessing over WayneTech’s security work. “I don’t like standing by, feeling helpless,” he replied. “I want to understand why.”
“Mmm,” Madeleine murmured, as if deep in thought. She turned so that he could partially see her face resting against her pillow, her eyes still closed. “You have a heavy heart, for someone with everything.”
Bruce could only look on. How did she know that? Had she heard it in his tone, his words? “What do you mean by that?” he asked her, but she was no longer paying attention to him. Her chest rose and fell evenly, as if she had decided to go to sleep.
A few minutes passed before he finally tore his eyes away from her and started heading back down the hall. In his mind, he could still see her slender form curled on her bed. Her last words had been said without amusement or sarcasm. They were serious.
They were the words of someone who, somehow, understood him.
“You’re a fool.”
“I wanted her to trust me.”
Draccon grimaced over her office desk as she dumped a sad-looking sandwich in front of Bruce. Several papers flew up from a stack at the edge of the desk. “So you tossed the entire setup? You couldn’t have even tried lying? We don’t have any of what she said next to you on record.”
“She already knew the truth,” Bruce replied. “I could see it in her eyes. You wanted me to earn her trust, didn’t you?”
“Don’t assume what I wanted you to do,” Draccon snapped at him.
“Don’t get mad at me for telling the truth.”
Draccon threw up her hands and then rubbed her face. “This is what I get for trusting a kid to find something useful for us.”
Bruce leaned forward and gave the detective a steady look. “Give me another chance to talk to her. She wouldn’t have ended with that comment if she had no interest in speaking to me again. She was curious. I could hear it in her voice.”
“Don’t trust a word she says.”
“You’ve never even talked with her before.”
“I’ve made a lot of prisoners talk in my time,” Draccon said. “Madeleine is feeding you strategic sentences, turning questions back around on you, wanting to know why you’re interested in her, luring you along with that last bit about you. She could have been trying to bait you into talking about your parents.”
“Don’t.”
Even Draccon hesitated for an instant, knowing that she had crossed a line. She sighed, a flash of guilt on her face. “I’m sorry, Bruce,” she said, softer this time. “What I mean to say is—don’t take her conversations at face value. If you keep letting her lead the conversation the way she wants it to go, then you’ll be playing into her hands, and not the other way around.”
Bruce opened his mouth to argue, but then thought better of it. Draccon was right. And if he wasn’t careful, she would kick him off the case altogether, probably take him off duty in the basement, and that meant returning to the normal terms of his probation, the endless days of work. He pictured Madeleine’s slender hands braiding her hair, the tilt of her head as she turned to him and smiled that unsettling smile. There was an ocean of mystery in her eyes, an unspoken grief behind her final, intimate words. He felt a need to uncover more, to hear her tell him the secrets she refused to hand to the police.
“I’ll be careful,” Bruce decided to say instead. “I promise. And I’ll follow your lead on what to say to her.”
—