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She’d assumed that because all three codes were the same.
“Who does that correspond to?” she asked, with her heart in her mouth.
The administrator tapped around on her computer screen. With the angle she had it turned at, Laura could just make out her opening a spreadsheet and scrolling through it. “Let’s see… Here we are. That staff code belongs to a dispatcher called Earl Regis.”
“And where can I find Earl?” Laura asked, already getting up from her chair.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
The dispatch headquarters was easy to find. Laura strode inside on a mission, well aware that time was ticking down. She hadn’t heard from Nate all morning since they’d split; she had no idea whether that meant he’d found nothing and was still looking or had found something and was looking into it. Either way, she needed to keep going. She fired him a quick text explaining what she’d found and where she was as she waited at the reception desk for someone to take her inside. Let him do with the information what he would.
“Hi.” An older woman with dreadlocks tied back behind her head emerged from the doorway into the main center of the dispatch unit, letting out a stream of conversations before the door closed behind her again. “I’m told you’re looking for Earl?”
Laura nodded, lifting her badge to show it. “That’s right. I need to speak with him regarding an open investigation.”
“I’m afraid he’s not working today,” the woman said. She had a badge pinned to the front of her shirt that marked her out as a supervisor. “Can I help you in any way?”
Laura hesitated. She wanted to get moving on as quickly as possible, go and find Earl and drag him into the precinct. But if he wasn’t home, she would be right back to square one, trying to find him somewhere across the whole city. And given that it was past noon now, she had a feeling there was a good chance he wouldn’t be home.
“Yes,” she said, decisively. “Is there somewhere we can talk privately?”
The supervisor nodded, leading Laura through another doorway into a quiet and cozy room set up with a soft armchair and a small coffee table. There wasn’t much room for anything else, but as soon as the door closed, Laura felt like they might have been out on the moon for how isolated it was. There was no sound from outside at all, and with the door closed and a small window only showing the briefest glimpse of the leaves of a tree outside, there was no way you would imagine you were inside a dispatch center.
“We use this as a little booth for when things get too overwhelming,” the supervisor explained. “Somewhere for the staff to retreat to and process things. No one will disturb us while we’re in here.”
Laura nodded gratefully. “How long have you worked with Earl?” she asked, getting right to the point.
“Oh,” the supervisor said, her eyes going to the ceiling. “Wow, let me think. Probably… six or seven years, I’d guess. I don’t know exactly when he joined, but it was before my promotion.”
“So, would you say that you know him quite well?”
The supervisor shifted, moving her arms and then settling again like she wished she had a cup of coffee she could pick up. “I think so. Why?”
“What’s he like?” Laura asked, avoiding the question. “His character, personality? What can you tell me about him?”
“Um, he’s a good guy,” the supervisor said. “Very detail-driven.”
“How so?”
“He gets things worked out very precisely,” the supervisor replied, making a loose shrugging gesture. “I don’t know how to explain it. Well, for example, he can tell you exactly how long the average response time would be from any given hospital or precinct to any given location in the city. He’s really good with data and working things out like that.”
The word time seemed to chime in Laura’s head. A red flag going up, an alarm bell sounding. “He’s interested in time?”
“Oh, yeah, definitely,” the supervisor nodded. “He likes to review each of the calls after the fact to make sure that things are as efficient as they can be. He’s even called up the hospital before and suggested new routes for the ambulances to help them get there quicker. I’d be lying if I said they appreciated it, but he’s got a good heart. He’s just trying to help.”
Laura thought for a second. “Does he keep his own records of this kind of thing? It sounds like it requires a lot of working out.”
“Yeah, he keeps a journal on his desk where he records everything,” the supervisor said. “I think he does it all in his head, and on the paper. You know? No calculators. He’s super smart.”
“Can I see that journal?”
The supervisor hesitated, obviously reluctant to break the trust of a coworker by showing someone else his private notes.
“It’s extremely important,” Laura said. “Like I said, this case is currently ongoing.”
The supervisor bit her lip. “It’s not…” She glanced down at
her hands before continuing, like she was unsure she wanted to finish. “It’s not the clock killer case, is it?”
