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 understandwhy.”
“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, understoodhim.
“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.”
—
The basement of Arkham felt narrower and more suffocating each time Bruce visited it.
When he next stood before her window, Madeleine was sitting up, staring off into space with her arms wrapped around her knees. He left his supplies in the corner of the corridor and walked up to her cell’s door, his hands in his pockets. As he reached the glass window, he pulled his hands out and held them both up for her tosee.
“I thought maybe they’d stopped sending you,” Madeleine said before he could speak. She turned her head slowly to meet his gaze. There were those deep, dark eyes again—and when he met them, she gave him a searching look, as if she were pickpocketing his thoughts. “No wires on you today,” she said.
“How can you be sure?”
She shrugged. “The detective was angrier than usual with me. She wouldn’t sound so frustrated if she knew she could still get information through you, which means she didn’t try wiring you up again.” Madeleine rested her chin against her knees in a gesture that made her seem eerily innocent. “She wanted to take you off the case, didn’t she?”
Bruce grimaced. It seemed like Madeleine could predict every single thought in his head. “Yes,” he acknowledged.
“Why are you back here?”
Don’t trust a word she says,Draccon had warned him repeatedly. But the final words Madeleine had said to him continued to echo in his mind. “I was thinking about what you said, the last time we talked,” he began. “How you said it.”
Madeleine gave him a mock innocent look. “What do you mean?”
