"What is it?"
"What's what?"
"Your face just changed. What did Adelaide say that I missed?"
Noah pressed the elevator button. The doors opened immediately, the car already waiting on the basement level. They stepped inside and he hit the button for the main floor.
"When I spoke with Lydia at her farm, she told me her son didn't work."
"Maybe she meant employed. Volunteering isn't the same thing." Callie watched him. "Why? You tracking something?"
The elevator climbed. Noah stared at the numbers above the door. "Not sure."
The doors opened onto the main floor. The lobby was busy with the mid-afternoon traffic of a small hospital, visitors signing in, a nurse pushing a wheelchair toward radiology, an orderly mopping near the vending machines. Noah glanced at the orderly as they passed. Not Paul.
They approached the front desk. A woman in her thirties with her hair clipped back and a lanyard around her neck looked up from her screen.
"Hi. Is there anyone on staff, nurses or doctors, who's been here for more than twenty years? We're trying to track down someone who might have known a former employee."
The woman frowned and looked at the colleague sitting beside her, a younger man sorting through a stack of intake forms. "Do you know who's been here over twenty years?"
He shook his head. "I've been here a year."
"Sorry," the woman said. "I don't really know off the top of my head. HR might be able to pull that for you but they're closed for the day."
"That's fine," Noah said. "What about Paul Holt? He volunteers here. Is he still around?"
The woman glanced at the sign-in sheet on the counter, running her finger down the column. "Paul signed out about an hour ago."
"Thanks."
They walked toward the exit. The automatic doors slid open and the afternoon air came in, cooler than the hospital's recycled warmth. The parking lot stretched out in front of them, half full, the mountains visible beyond the tree line at the far edge.
A light rain had begun to fall.
"I'm going to drive out to Lydia's farm. Follow up on Jessie Maddox. See if she remembers anyone Jessie was close to."
"You want me to come?"
"No. Do me a favor. Stay here and pull the volunteer records for Paul. Check the dates. Then pull the external camera logs for the night Hailey disappeared. I want to know if Paul was signed in that evening."
Callie studied him. "You think he might have something to do with this?"
"Anything is possible."
She held his gaze for a moment, reading whatever was behind his eyes. Then she nodded.
"I'll call you as soon as I have something," she said.
"Do that."
Noah got into the Bronco and pulled out of the hospital lot. He turned south toward Mountain Lane, where the pavement turned to gravel and the gravel turned to ruts and the cell signal dropped to nothing.
39
He had the phone to his ear before he reached the first intersection, while the signal was still strong.
Ray picked up on the second ring.
