“Hmm. Well, like I said, the system could use some management. My best guess is that Mr. Sadowski was given the former director’s old card as well as a new one, but the old one was never officially transferred into his name? Mr. Draper might have more information on that. He lives in Hyde Park. I have his address right here actually.” She moved a few papers aside and found the sticky note she’d written his address on that she’d gotten from the admin department. “I sent him flowers several months back. There was a death in his family,” she said, sadness creeping into her voice.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Reed said. “Sure, I’ll take his address.”
Liza read it off to him and then Reed paused again. Liza felt the weight of the silence through the phone. She gripped it tighter, closing her eyes, somehow knowing that he was wearing that half-worried, half-thoughtful expression on his face, the one that made her want to take her finger and smooth the worry line from between his eyes. You carry the weight of the world on your shoulders, Reed Davies, and something makes me think you’re happy to do it. “Can you think of any reason the old director might have wanted to harm Mr. Sadowski?”
Liza laughed softly. “No. And if you do chat with him in person, I think you’ll understand why that’s not possible.”
“Okay.” She heard a smile in his voice. That heavy pause again, something weighty between them that defied distance. “How are you? After what happened?”
She sat back. She could give him a stock answer where she tried to convince everyone around her that she was fine, per usual. But she wasn’t . . . and she . . . trusted Reed. Surprising, really, because another man she’d trusted had just tried to manipulate her with a shared truth. “Okay. Rattled. A little scared maybe.”
“I’m going to do everything in my power to find answers so you don’t have to be afraid anymore.”
And Liza believed him. “Thank you, Detective.”
“Have a good day, Doctor.” She heard that smile in his voice again and when she hung up the phone, realized she was wearing one of her own.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Take a look at this,” Ransom said. “This is the footage from the exterior staff door.” He rewound the video and pressed play. “There’s nothing until six fifty-four a.m. and then Dr. Nolan can be seen approaching the door.” Reed set down two paper coffee cups he’d just filled in the staff room as his more tech-savvy partner went through the files the hospital had provided, and leaned closer, watching Liza walk up to the door, reach into her briefcase, look up as if something—or someone—had caught her attention, hesitate, and then turn around.
“What’s she doing?” Reed murmured, mostly to himself. They’d received the video they’d requested from Lakeside Hospital and had been going through it in the hopes of catching the killer, face tilted to the camera, walking through the halls with Steven Sadowski’s limp, dead body. Of course, no such luck, and there were hours and hours to sift through. Despite that they had his key card being used that morning, there was nothing on surveillance to correspond to its usage. It seemed as if the killer—and the body for that matter—had materialized out of thin air.
They’d first looked at Steven Sadowski’s movements from the night before to ascertain that he’d left the building.
After that, they’d watched footage from the camera in the hallway where the body was found, but it was, unfortunately, focused in the wrong direction with only a view of the door several feet away. The corner where Steven Sadowski’s body had been discovered couldn’t be seen at all.
They were now beginning to look at the video of Liza Nolan discovering the body. Something had to have been caught on camera. Somewhere. Perhaps from some random angle. They just needed to find it.
Ransom picked up his coffee and took a sip. At six fifty-seven, the video showed Liza return to the door, pull out her key card, and enter the building.
“Pull up the footage of her exiting the stairwell and finding the body,” Reed said. Ransom clicked through the other files, and it only took a minute until they were both looking at a picture of the hallway door, waiting for Liza to emerge.
The clock at the bottom of the screen ticked by. One minute past seven, two . . . “How slow does she climb stairs?”