Dale's fingers moved across the keyboard. The monitor flickered and rewound, the corridors of the hospital playing backward in jerky motion. Nurses walking in reverse. Patients being wheeled backward through doorways. He found the timestamp and let it play forward.
Callie watched the hallway outside Hailey Benton's room. A nurse passing. An orderly with a mop bucket. Then Paul Holt. He appeared from the direction of the elevator, pushing a cleaning cart. He stopped outside Hailey's room, knocked once, and entered. The cart stayed in the hallway.
"How long is he in there?" Callie asked.
Dale fast-forwarded. The timestamp ticked. Three minutes. Four. Five. Paul emerged carrying a garbage bag and set it on the cart. He continued down the corridor and out of frame.
"Five minutes to empty a garbage can?" Callie said.
Dale shrugged. "Maybe he was chatting."
Callie didn't respond. She watched the footage cycle forward. Paul appeared twice more on that floor over the next hour, each time near Hailey's room, each time pausing longer than a man emptying bins would need to.
"Now pull up the basement cameras. That same morning. After eight AM."
Dale typed. The screen changed. The basement corridor appeared, gray and empty, the fluorescent lights casting flat shadows. Then the image froze. Then static. Then black.
"Cameras went down," Dale said.
"Down how?"
"Looks like they just cut out. Power interruption on that circuit."
"So someone turned them off."
"Or a fuse tripped. It happens. This is an older hospital. We get circuit issues a couple times a month." He pulled up a maintenance log on the second monitor. "Yeah, here. Logged the same day as a tripped breaker. Maintenance reset it at 7:15 PM."
Callie stared at the black screen. "But someone would have had to be in the breaker panel area to trip it. Or it tripped on its own."
"Could go either way."
"Is there always someone in this room? Monitoring the feeds?"
"Most of the time."
"Most?"
Dale shifted in his chair. "We have to take a break. Shift changes. You know how it is."
"And that morning?”
"I'd have to check who was on. But yeah, there would have been a gap. There always is."
Callie leaned back. "Pull up the external cameras. Every exit. From seven AM to midnight that same day.”
Dale pulled up the feeds. Four cameras covering the main entrance, the emergency department entrance, the service entrance on the east side, and the loading dock at the rear. Callie watched them play side by side on the split screen, the timestamps synchronized, the four views showing the hospital's exits in the blue-gray wash of nighttime security footage.
Main entrance. Staff coming and going. Visitors leaving. Nothing unusual.
Emergency department. Ambulances. Patients. The regular traffic of a hospital after dark.
Service entrance. Empty for long stretches. A maintenance worker stepping out for a cigarette at 8:14 AM.
Callie leaned forward. 9:47 AM. A figure emerged from the loading dock pushing a large laundry trolley, a deep canvas bin on a metal frame with wheels, used to transport soiled linens and towels. The figure was a woman in scrubs. She pushed the trolley to a vehicle parked near the dock, opened the rear hatch, and transferred the contents of the trolley into the back. The motion was smooth. The movement that came from doing something hundreds of times before, or from knowing exactly how to make it look that way.
The woman's face was partially visible as she turned back toward the building. Callie recognized her.
Lydia Holt.
