“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 theedge, 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?”
