Chapter 31
THIRTY-ONE
Time had slowed down for Sandra since watching the shooting. She kept superimposing her brother’s face on Maddox. But now wasn’t the time to get lost in memories or guilt. The phone at Gibson’s station rang. It didn’t stop Kreiger from making a case for breaching.
“The guy on the fourth is clearly coming undone,” Kreiger said.
“I don’t think this shooting was intentional.” She recalled the look on Mickey’s face after Maddox went down. How he seemed frozen in shock. She didn’t think it was just because he was disappointed to lose his insurance.
“I’m with Sandra,” Brice said. “We all saw that Maddox rushed him, and the gun went off in their struggle.”
“Intentional or not, that kid could bleed out right in front of us,” Kreiger argued. “Is that what we want?”
“You know it’s not.” Her tone was sharper than she intended.
She took pride in reining in her emotions, but she was scared for Maddox, Torres, and the Chapmans.
“If ERT goes in, Jordon Maddox might be saved, but at what cost? How many casualties will result? That gunman is going to start by shooting the people in that room.” Sandra pointed toward the screen, where Phoebe Chapman’s door was shut.
No one said anything. No one wanted an innocent little girl to become collateral damage.
“Ah, guys.” Gibson spun around in his chair.
“That was nine-one-one dispatch. I guess Gail Chapman was on the line after the gunman dragged Torres from the room. The operator was still on the line when the gunman reentered the room. Soon after, the connection was lost. She said there was a crunching noise before the call was dropped.”
“The gunman destroyed her phone,” Neal put out in a hushed voice.
“Give me that cell number, Gibson.” Sandra needed a break from the live feed of Jordon bleeding out anyhow.
She walked back to her workstation, sat down, and called Gail.
It rang directly to voicemail. She shook her head for the others.
“It is down. I’ll try the nurses’ station, see if he hears it and answers.
I’d like to see if I can lure him out of that room. ”
As she listened to the line at the nurses’ station continually ring, her stomach was in her throat.
Every second that went by lowered Jordon’s chance of survival.
After the line transferred to an automated voicemail, Sandra hung up.
“He’s not answering. Or he can’t hear. I have no choice but to call the room.
That number?” She turned to Luis, and he rattled it off.
There was no answer. Now what? “Do we have a number for Maria Torres, the nurse?”
Brice looked it up and passed it to her. Sandra landed in voicemail after several rings. “It could be on silent or not with her.”
“Employees are encouraged to leave their phones in their lockers,” Luis said. “It doesn’t mean they do.”
“Thanks, Luis,” she told him. Being told that a few seconds earlier might have been more useful, though she doubted it would have stopped her from trying.
She attempted to get through again. This time it went straight to voicemail.
“Well, I suspect Torres has her phone on her. But it’s off now.
” Sandra had another card to play with the shot caller.
It would be nice to get her reaction to Carmen’s name.
But before she did, she wanted more information on the shot caller herself.
“We have the archived video. Have we tried to see if we can spot the perps entering the hospital?”
“Nope.” Neal gestured to Luis.
Sandra viewed it as a shot in the dark, but they sometimes paid off.
Luis worked the mouse, the pointer flying around the screen as he clicked here and there. “Thinking we’ll start at nine thirty. I know the hospital’s system went down at ten.”
A view of the emergency room doors came up on Luis’s laptop. Soon after, Carmen Feeney was walking in with the man they knew as Mickey.
“Just the two of them,” Neal said. “But we know the other man was already upstairs at that time, being let into the server room. It doesn’t look like another woman is with them or in the immediate area, for that matter.”
Luis spanned out, placing several women in the frame, but they had no way of knowing who they were looking for.
“Can you bring up the video from the eighth floor, Luis? Say, around nine forty-five,” she asked him. “We might get a look at our shot caller.”
“One second…” Luis switched things over and brought up that footage.
The camera covered the elevator doors. At nine fifty-five, a few people walked off, including a woman in her late thirties, early forties. Plain, average height, brown shoulder-length hair. She was wearing a light jacket and sunglasses.
“Unless she just had eye surgery, that’s rather strange,” Neal said as the video continued to play.
No one responded, as it seemed his observation was a given. It was strange.
Luis seamlessly patched video footage from several cameras together to follow this woman down the hall. She walked up to a desk. There was a young woman sitting there.
“Who is that?” she asked Luis.
“Pamela, Dr. Beal’s assistant.”
Sandra made eye contact with Brice. “This has to be the shot caller, and she came for an audience with the CEO.”
“Yet if she knew she’d be in the board meeting, why not just go right for the room?” Brice countered.
Luis hit pause while they spoke.
“Pamela could have simply been a tool to get her inside,” Sandra suggested.
“A gun would do that,” Kreiger inserted.
“And she probably didn’t want the alarm raised too soon,” Sandra said.
“Luis, could I get your help?” Brice began.
“Whatever you need,” Luis said.
“Could you send the clippings of this video to the FBI’s Science and Technology Branch? We’ll see if they can enhance any images of this woman and run them through facial recognition databases.”
“Sure, just give me their info,” Luis said.
Brice rattled off Agent Lakisha Hester’s contact details.
“Well, I wouldn’t be holding my breath on this woman having a criminal past. The rest of them didn’t,” Kreiger said.
“But now that we have the earlier video, run back through it and find out when she came into the hospital. From there, we can track her backward through CCTV in the area. It might lead us to her origin point and her identity.”
“I’ll let Agent Hester at Tech know to expect an email from Luis and ask about this at the same time,” Brice volunteered.
“The MPD is fully capable of doing the same,” he said. “But knock yourself out.”
Sandra was on board with trying whatever they could to get this situation to end peacefully.
But speaking of something that was guaranteed not to end that way…
“If you will all excuse me, there’s a call I need to make.
” Assistant Director Rowe was going to lose his shit when he heard Maddox was shot.