What if she is innocent, too? She had been arrested at the scene of the last murder with the victim’s blood on her hands—but what if there were more to her story?
By the time Bruce reached Arkham’s gates, the downpour had lightened a bit, and he could see the asylum looming clearly behind his windshield. Yellow light dotted the windows. He passed through both clearance gates and then pulled up to the entrance and stepped out, wincing at the gust of wind that hit him. Quickly, he scanned his ID at the door and hurried inside when the double doors slid open.
“Early morning, Wayne?” the security guard said as Bruce signed in at the front desk. The guard had seen Bruce so often that he didn’t even bat an eye.
“Yeah,” Bruce replied. “I need to talk to Dr. James.”
“Urgent enough to drive through this storm?” The guard took another large bite out of his doughnut and went back to watching the weather tracker on the news. “Go ahead. She’s probably in the cafeteria.”
Bruce needed no second bidding as he hurried past the front desk and toward the elevator leading to the basement level.
He wasn’t supposed to be on duty down here anymore, but James wouldn’t notice for hours. Draccon might not show up at all, in fact, not with the mayor’s murder all over the news—she was probably at the Price estate right now. She wouldn’t be thinking about Bruce. He reached into his pocket and tightened his grip on the frequency device.
The two inmates who had broken out during the brief jailbreak were gone now, moved somewhere else. Replacing them were others, all similar, with haunted eyes and menacing faces. Bruce stopped at the front end of the hall, right before the first security cam on the ceiling, and then turned on the device.
It didn’t make a sound—at least, none that he could hear. Bruce let it run through every frequency it could. The seconds dragged on.
Then, a match; he heard a faint click from one of the cams. The others all followed in a domino effect of sound; the red light usually shining on each cam had now gone dark. Bruce waited. When a blue light blinked on, indicating a reset, he pressed the device again and set all of the cams on the wrong band so that they were not recording footage of the hall.
He headed for Madeleine’s cell.
She was awake and alert. Her face was turned up at the ceiling, as if pondering the security cameras once more, and Bruce wondered if she already knew what he’d done. Not only could their meeting be off the record, but if she really was using the cams as a rudimentary way to communicate with the outside world, then he’d temporarily shut that down, too.
She turned to look at him as he approached her cell window. “I thought you weren’t allowed down here anymore.”
“The Nightwalkers struck just a few hours ago.” Bruce rested a fist against the glass. “The mayor was killed. But you might already know that, don’t you?” He nodded up at the broken cams. “You have some sort of system in place to communicate?”
If Bruce weren’t so used to Madeleine’s enigmatically calm expression, he wouldn’t have thought much of her sharp blink, the subtlest gesture showing that she was surprised. “So early this morning, Bruce, and so upset,” she said. “You’ve been thinking about me.”
Her words were so similar to what she’d said to him in his dream that Bruce had to take a step away from the window, as if the extra distance might protect him from her. He hoped she couldn’t see his flush and guess instantly what his dream had been about—that even now he couldn’t help looking at her lips. It had all felt so real.
“Come on, Madeleine,” he said, lowering his voice. He couldn’t afford to be confrontational with her right now—he needed her to see him as vulnerable. To let down her own guard. “Haven’t we talked enough to skip all the games? Look…the mayor was my friend’s father.” He looked away for a moment, then stepped forward to put his hand on the glass again. “You’ve helped me once before, given me a clue that uncovered one of the Nightwalkers’ hideouts. If you know something, anything…please. Tell me.”
Madeleine sighed. For a brief second, she even appeared angry, as if the news Bruce was delivering to her was not what she’d expected. Then she got up and walked over to the window separating them. Her nearness reminded Bruce again of his dream—her arms around his neck, pulling him down, her lips moving against his—and he swallowed hard, trying to push it away.
“I don’t think you committed those murders,” he went on. “I think you’re involved—that you know who did, but that you’re not coming forward for some strange reason. You’re taking the fall. And I think you can help me stop the killing of more innocent people, if you would just let me in.”
His words seemed to surprise her again. She studied his face, thoughtful now, and for a moment, the glint in her eyes actually seemed to belong to a teenager.
“Bruce Wayne,” she said softly. Her eyes were strangely warm now, the hazel shining brightly through. “Two kinds of people come out of personal tragedy, you know? And you’re the kind that comes out brighter.”
“Which kind are you, then?” he asked.
Madeleine stared at him, not answering, and a chill passed through Bruce. Was he being a complete fool?
Then she stepped as close to the glass as she could, so that her breath fogged its surface. “Listen carefully,” she said, her voice so quiet he could barely hear her. He leaned toward the glass, too. “The Nightwalkers had originally planned to break into the mayor’s bank accounts weeks from now. They got a tip, some help from the inside.”
“The inside? Who?” Bruce said, his voice hushed and urgent.
Shaking her head, Madeleine continued. “That’s not important. If they’ve already attacked, then that means their whole schedule has been accelerated—which means the rest of their list has also sped up.”
Their list? Bruce held his breath; all this time, Madeleine had known what would come next, had held this information hostage from all of them. “You intentionally kept this upcoming attack a secret from the police? We could have saved him, had we known.”
“The mayor’s life was never supposed to be on the table.”
“So you are a member of the Nightwalkers?”
“I know enough to warn you.”
A vise clenched around his stomach. “Warn me about what?”
“About you. Be careful, Bruce. You’re on the list.”
“What list?” he whispered, afraid to hear it.
“The list of the Nightwalkers’ targets. Each one had been paying off the mayor to look the other way while they lined their pockets with government funds. You know what that means, don’t you? Millions that should have gone to helping the poor, paying for the sick, educating the youth, protecting the streets—all waved away with the mayor’s magic wand. The mayor’s time had simply run out.”