Chapter 18 #2
“I think Gabriel is right, it looks like a wheelchair went through here,” Matthew notes, showing us marks from the wheelchair in the freshly washed floor. The floor is no longer wet, but the marks left a small smudge.
“Why take the empty wheelchair?” I ask. “Doesn’t it become more noticeable if you’re pushing an empty wheelchair instead of simply walking out?”
“What if it wasn’t empty?” Liam asks thoughtfully. “What if they were pushing the killer out?”
“You think there were two of them?” Matthew questions.
Liam scans the keycard and steps out before hesitating when two nurses behind a nurse’s station immediately look over at him, confused why anyone would be coming through here at this time of night.
Liam brushes past me as he rushes back to the operating room. When we reach it, Michaels looks up at the door suddenly being flung open. It hits Donna, who’d been squatting down, and she goes tumbling.
A part of me questions if Liam is smiling inside over finally taking out Donna, but he’s too focused on the people in the room to even notice the glorious—for him—moment.
“You okay?” I ask while I help her up.
“He’s out to kill me, isn’t he?” Donna complains.
“Sorry, he just has an idea in his head, and you know how he gets when he fixates on something.”
“Sure do,” she grumbles as I hurry over to Liam, who is questioning one of the security staff.
“You’re talking about Breanna? She’s around here somewhere. I think she went off to see how they were coming along in the security room. I can call her,” a young man whose name tag reads “Richard” offers.
“Before you call her, how long has she worked here?” Liam asks Richard as he’s about to leave the room.
“Five or six years, maybe, why?”
He ignores that question, and the young man steps out. Liam turns to Matthew. “I want someone to find her.”
Matthew gives him a nod, and almost immediately Richard comes back. “I… asked over the radio if anyone has seen her… and umm… the guy at the front said she was directed to go outside to check the parking lot…”
“How long ago did he let her go?” I ask.
“He said it was only a few minutes ago. The radios sometimes don’t work as well in the far parking lot; it’s probably why she hasn’t replied, but I can call her.”
“Don’t call her. Do you know what she drives?” Liam asks.
Richard nods. “Yeah. Come with me… but I really don’t think she had anything to do with any of this. It must be a huge misunderstanding.”
Liam turns to the others. “Just the two of us will go. Can a couple of you see if you can find a change of clothes in any of the rooms we went through? Just in case the killer had to desert their clothes somewhere.”
“Yeah, of course,” Matthew says.
After taking the elevator down, the security guard heads toward a rear door and pushes through it and out into the night.
With us close behind him, he hurries through the employee lot toward the row of cars in the back.
“She parks back here,” Richard says. “That should be her car there in the corner. The red one. She must still be on the premises somewhere.”
Liam asks, “Gabriel, can you run back and tell them that her car is still here? That she is either on foot, somewhere on the premises, or has gotten into a different vehicle.”
“Of course,” I say as I notice the way his eyes watch me. It’s well-lit in the front parking lot, but out here with the employee cars? Not so much.
I slip between two SUVs, using it as a shortcut toward the hospital, but I only get a couple of feet before I hesitate and lean against one of them.
I can hear Richard talking, but I can’t hear Liam, he’s speaking too quietly.
The second I hear a loud noise, I immediately move back around the side of the vehicle just in time to see the security guard drive a knife toward Liam’s chest.
Hastily, I reach for my gun, but I don’t even get it drawn before Liam flips the knife with ease so that as Richard rushes forward to plunge it into Liam’s heart, the man slams into it instead.
It’s done so quickly that even I’m in awe as I watch the man look down at the knife stuck in his side with equal shock.
“That wasn’t very nice, now was it?” Liam asks while he follows the man down to the ground. “I wouldn’t pull that out if I were you. Thankfully, you’re at a hospital. Now tell me who killed Nadine.”
“You’re going to fucking die,” Richard says with a strained smirk. “You’re going to die.”
“Oddly enough, I’m not too scared of you and your threats as you crab-crawl away from me.
Where are you going? You think he’s out there to help you?
You’re a pawn. A puppet. A sacrifice. He doesn’t care what happens to you,” Liam says as he stands up and stalks after the guy.
“Tell me something, and maybe I’ll be nice.
” Liam’s voice is toying while the man backs into a car tire.
He looks left and right, a bit frantic about where to go, before Liam kneels down and presses his hand against the knife.
Richard screams and tries kicking Liam off, but he avoids it with ease.
I hear a noise and step forward to alert Liam. He gives me a nod, telling me he understands, but he seems to think he still has time to whisper something into the man’s ear that makes him struggle even harder.
“Liam,” I whisper.
“Tell me about your puppet master,” he says.
“I-I’ll never tell you a-anything,” Richard chokes out.
I pull out my gun and point it at the man just as Matthew comes jogging around the corner and freezes.
“What happened?” he asks.
“I led him to believe that I was convinced that Breanna was the accomplice before having him lead me out here to see if I could get him to fess up when he was alone. Instead, he attacked me,” Liam says. “When he threw himself at me, he ran into his own knife.”
“Sounds…” Matthew appears to weigh his words for a moment. “Foolish of him to do such a thing.”
“Right?” Liam asks before he starts reading Richard his rights, acting like the dedicated detective he’s pretending to be. The man lying on the ground knows differently as he bleeds from the knife still embedded in his side. He won’t stop staring at Liam, as though he knows what he is.
Michaels comes running and Liam raises an eyebrow.
“Michaels, I didn’t know you could run. I thought if you ran too much, the top of your head would get too cold.”
“Please focus on something other than my lack of hair,” Michaels snaps as he hurries over. “What happened?”
“Well, at first, I thought Breanna might have been involved—after all, her keycard had the slightest fleck of blood under the edge, but I remembered that she’d switched keycards because hers wasn’t working.
I’ll need to check to know for sure, but I'm certain there’s a program in place that records whose card opens doors and at what time.
If that’s the case, the cards were likely swapped at some point prior to the death.
“So I simply had to look at who she acquired the keycard from. And then when he stabbed himself, I took note that the knife had to go through two shirts,” Liam says as he pulls up the edge of the man’s shirt and reveals the scrubs hidden beneath.
“This tells me that he was likely wearing the scrubs in case any blood got on his body. And what better way to make sure the clothes aren’t found than wearing them out of the building? ”
“But you didn’t know that before he was, uh… stabbed?” Michaels asks.
“Correct.”
Michaels stares at Liam, probably wondering again why he doesn’t make him wear a body cam at all times. I’m sure he’s aware that the reason he doesn’t is because while Liam can be rather… unorthodox, he knows how to get things done in a way that always ends up looking perfectly legal.
I’m still not sure how.
“I don’t believe he actually killed Nadine. I believe he is an accomplice. He has a partner, someone he pushed out in a wheelchair,” Liam says. “That’s the killer.”
Richard seems to realize that Liam knows too much because he hesitates before laughing. “I killed the stupid bitch. Because of her, Zach is dead. I killed her because that’s what she deserves.”
“Michaels, do you have a body cam on?” Liam asks.
Michaels narrows his eyes in a very clear “Don’t say it” way.
I even go a step beyond and say, “Don’t say it.”
“We could… get the information out of him out here,” Liam suggests.
“And he still said it,” Michaels mutters.
“She’s the reason Zach’s dead. She deserves this,” the man repeats.
Liam leans down and whispers something to him that I can’t hear and Michaels doesn’t see.
Richard growls and lunges at Liam, but because he’s handcuffed, all he can do is slam into Liam’s legs.
Liam doesn’t budge, merely observes as the man wallows around before he flips forward and lands on the knife still in his side.
He screams, and instead of helping to flip him back over, Liam just watches him while I hurry forward and flip him over.
“You are not to move again or we will have to use force to restrain you,” I threaten.
The man seems to care very little; he just wants at Liam and is prepared to do anything it takes to get him there.
We get a medical team out here to deal with him, and then it’s just me and Liam again.
“Why put yourself in danger?” I ask, a little annoyed about it.
“He wasn’t going to risk stabbing me with two of us. I gave you the very explicitly clear ‘This man is a bad guy and I’m going to send you away so he can try to attack me and then we will deal with him’ look. I assumed you got it.”
I stare at him, not wanting to let him know that I did understand some part of that look because he’ll be using it to jump into something else wildly dangerous and assume I understand because of a simple eye flick. “Nope.”
He smiles at me. “You did too. You did good.”
My eyes narrow as I try to comprehend this. “Which… part? I literally stood there and watched you force a man to plunge his own knife into his side.”