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“You mind starting again?” Gretchen asked the guy to her right.

With a nod, he started clicking away with his mouse. The image on the screen directly in front of them changed from a live view of the trauma bay to footage of a four-way corridor intersection. In each direction, the mouth of a hallway was visible but only for a short distance. Each one showed the start of rows of curtain cubicles. Patients were lined up along the walls opposite the cubicles. A nurses’ station was partially visible down the one hallway and another was obscured by a large linen cart.

“This is camera seven,” the security guard pointed to the hall with the linen cart. “That’s the hall where your cubicle was located.”

“Wait,” said Josie. “You don’t have footage of the entire hallway?”

He shook his head. “We’ve only got cameras at points of ingress—the entrance, ambulance bay, lobby, and staff entrances. Other than that, they’re installed at designated choke points—like where corridors intersect.”

“That doesn’t seem right,” said Noah.

The guard shrugged. “This is a small community hospital.”

Gretchen sighed. “He’s right. This place doesn’t need the kind of surveillance system that a large emergency department in a more urban area, like Philly, would have.”

“You have to try to find this guy with what you’ve got then,” said Chief Chitwood. “Is there another intersection at the other end of that hall?”

“Yeah,” the guard said.

“Start here.” Gretchen pointed at the timestamp, which read 12:52 a.m. “We’ll run through footage from both cameras from this time until Detective Turner called the Code Silver.”

He clicked play. They watched several people move through the intersecting halls, sometimes many of them crowding the area at once. EMTs transported patients on gurneys. Aides pushed patients in wheelchairs. Nurses and doctors raced around from hall to hall, some pushing their mobile workstations with them. Members of the housekeeping staff flitted from one direction to the other, dragging supply carts, wheeling buckets with mops in them, and carrying Wet Floor signs. Patients’ family members and loved ones walked from one corridor to another, searching for the right cubicle, sometimes carrying items from the lobby vending machines. Just like when Josie and Gretchen arrived to speak with Dr. Holmes, it was chaos.

“There she is.” Noah reached past Josie and pointed at a radiology tech steering a wheelchair through the intersection. Josie recognized herself. They disappeared down the hall where her cubicle had been located. He didn’t return. Later, they found him on footage from the camera at the other end of the hall.

They reviewed the hours after that, watching people come and go from the choke points at each end. Josie identified Dr. Holmes, Dr. Flowers and Noah. They knew what time she’d been given anesthesia because it was in her chart. The security officer fast-forwarded to that point. At least a dozen people traversed the areas beneath the cameras. They kept watching and watching. Gretchen asked for the footage to be sped up.

As the minutes on the screen sped by, Josie’s heart thumped painfully in her chest. They catalogued more than fifteen people who had entered the hall on one side and emerged from the other but no one looked particularly remarkable or even suspicious. Dr. Holmes entered and exited multiple times.

“There,” she said just as she was beginning to despair of ever finding the killer on camera. “That guy. Pushing the linen cart.”

The security guard paused the video. Sure enough, a tall man in maroon scrubs emerged from one end of the corridor with a linen cart that obscured almost all of his identifying features. All they could see was that he was Caucasian with dark hair.

“How do you know this is your guy?” asked the guard.

“I don’t,” said Josie. “But he’s the only person we’ve seen so far who’s made an effort to conceal himself.”

“A staff member?” the Chief said. “Turner’s already putting together a list of everyone on shift when this went down.”

“He could be posing as a staff member,” Noah suggested. “I’m sure it’s not that hard to get your hands on a pair of scrubs.”

“That requires a level of premeditation I’m not sure this guy is capable of right now,” said Gretchen.

“Keep going!” the Chief barked.

Soon after, another man ambled past the camera, pushing an IV pole. He wore a hospital gown and brown, non-skid socks. A white hospital-issue blanket was draped over his head, obscuring his face and hair.

“Shit,” Gretchen mumbled. “It could be this guy.”

The security guard sped through more of the footage, switching from camera to camera, trying to isolate the patient and pick him up on one of the other emergency department cameras, without success.

“It’s got to be him,” Josie said. “He must have changed.”

Noah squeezed Josie’s shoulder gently. “Him and the linen cart guy could be one and the same.”

“If he went to the trouble of hiding in the blind spots and changing his clothes, it will take hours to try to parse this all out,” said Gretchen.

“We’ve still got to interview and account for every staff member and patient,” said Noah.