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“Thanks, I’ll pass.” I slide my phone into my pocket and grab for the door. “You’ve given me enough information to keep me busy for a while. I’m going to get a start on that.”
Only when I get out to the lobby do I strip off the face mask, dumping it in a garbage can by the exit.
“And?”
Tessa has her eyes fixed on me when I sit down at my desk across from her.
“It’s Severin, and it’s murder.”
She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms over her chest.
“Want me to get on the horn with the aunt?”
“Not yet—the coroner’s office will let us know once notification has been made—plus…we have something more pressing to look into.”
“Which is?”
“A missing crime scene.”
She nods her understanding as I explain how that conclusion was reached.
“I know exactly where to start looking,” she indicates when I’m done. “I was just checking email this morning and both the hospital and the seniors’ residence next door sent links to their respective security feeds for last Thursday, as per your request.”
The hope is the video feed caught Severin as he was exiting the hospital, maybe get a lead on where he went. It would be a good first step.
“Great. Let’s have a look.”
I move my chair to her side so I can see her computer screen.
Police work is probably ninety-five-percent sifting through stuff we don’t need in hopes of getting some useful information. Watching the hospital security tapes is no different.
For one thing, the hospital has more than one exit, and although they all appear to have security cameras—even the door next to the loading dock—it takes forever to go through them all.
We focus on an approximate window between his last confirmed sighting, and the time he was discovered missing. Then we start with the most likely exits: the main lobby, the emergency room, and the walk out from the cafeteria. Even running the video at higher speed, it takes us almost two hours to discover he did not leave through those doors. At least not in that window of time.
Ultimately, we discover him slipping out the service door next to the loading dock. Of course, it’s the tape we reviewed last because he would’ve had to risk going through restricted operational staff-only areas of the hospital. Apparently, it had been a risk worth taking because, at five seventeen, we watch the service door open, and Severin sticking his head out, checking if the coast is clear before he exits and can be seen jogging up the loading ramp before disappearing from sight.
“I’m pretty sure the seniors’ home has a camera aimed at that side of the parking lot,” Tessa suggests as she clicks on a different link.
The hospital loading dock is located in an alley between the two buildings. The only access is a service road with the nursing home parking lot on one side and a hedge delineating the hospital parking lot on the other.
A different screen pops up, this camera is clearly aimed at the south side of the lot, where a good chunk of the service road is visible in the distance. Tessa fast-forwards through the feed until the time signature reads five fifteen before slowing it down and zooming in. The picture becomes a bit grainy, and it takes me a second to make out a person jogging along the hedge on the far side of the road. It’s impossible to recognize a face at this distance, but there’s no doubt it’s Severin, and he appears to be crossing onto the nursing home lot.
“Where is he going?” Tessa questions, as the figure appears to dart between parked vehicles, getting into better focus as he moves closer to the security camera’s view.
“I’ll be damned,” I mutter, when he approaches a dark-colored pickup truck and slows down.
He gets into the passenger side, and then we watch as the pickup drives out of the parking lot and pulls onto the road, turning right.
“He had someone waiting,” Tessa concludes.
“It would appear so,” I agree. “And it looks like they’re heading south.”
There’s not much south of the hospital, just a small residential area, the highway to Spokane, and Lizard Mountain, where Savvy found Severin’s body. It would’ve only been a ten-minute drive or so to get to Quarry Road.
Who was driving that truck? And where the hell were they going?
“What are you guys looking at?”
