Page 96 of Justice Delayed

“In that case, let me check.” The nurse typed for a few minutes. “It says she signed her release papers twenty minutes ago.” She glanced up from the screen. “She might have gone into the waiting room to make a phone call. We don’t allow cell usage in the treatment areas.”

Brogan took off toward the waiting area, Livingston right behind him. An initial sweep of the filled room didn’t turn up Melender. A slower perusal had the same results. She wasn’t there. Brogan stepped outside and scanned the sidewalk on either side of the sliding glass doors. No Melender.

His heart pounding, Brogan slipped back inside. Livingston stood in conversation with a doctor at the far end of the waiting area. The doctor left just as Brogan reached the detective.

“She’s not outside,” Brogan said.

“A doctor saw her go into one of the restrooms in the ER. I’m going to check the security cameras to see where she might have gone after that.” Livingston started down the hall.

Brogan followed him, relieved the detective was taking her disappearance seriously. His heart rate accelerated as his thoughts ping-ponged around to various scenarios, each more dire than the last.Please, God, keep her safe. Help us figure out where she went.He had no doubt she was in some kind of danger. No way would Melender simply vanish without telling anyone, not after all that had happened over the last couple of days.

Ten minutes later, Brogan and Livingston crammed into the small security office with Tavon Carstairs, head of security. Sasha Brown, a female technician on the security team, keyed up the ER cameras for the right time frame.

On a surprisingly clear recording, Melender exited cubicle C and went into the single-stall restroom on the far side of the busy ER. A few minutes later, she left the bathroom and paused. Then someone wearing a baseball cap and a hoodie bumped into her and touched her shoulder. A minute later, Melender and the person, who appeared to be a man by height and stature, walked to the stairway exit door and disappeared from view.

“I’d like a copy of that footage, please. Do the stairwells have cameras?” Livingston asked.

Brogan stared at the monitor. The stiffness of Melender’s posture attested that she hadn’t gone willingly with the man.

“Yep.” Carstairs motioned to Sasha to tap into that camera. Minutes later, Melender and the man appeared on the other side of the stairway door. The man kept his head down and his body turned away from the camera as he put something in his pocket, then grabbed Melender’s arm to hustle her down the stairs and out another door.

“Was that a gun he put in his pocket?” Brogan figured his guess was spot on, given Melender’s acquiescence in the ER.

“That’s what I think,” Livingston concurred. “Where does that door lead?”

“To the parking lot.” Carstairs didn’t have to ask the tech to move to the parking lot cameras. “Last year, we had a rash of parking lot thefts, with the thieves disabling our security cameras. So we beefed up our video coverage in all of our garages and installed hidden cameras in addition to the visible ones.”

On the bank of screens, multiple images of the area near the exit door Melender and the man used popped up. Sasha reversed the recording to reach the right time frame, and soon Melender and the man appeared again in the far-left screen. Cameras tracked them to a black SUV, where the man opened the back door and shoved Melender into the car face first.

The camera didn’t capture what the man did, but Brogan caught sight of a plastic zip tie in the man’s back pocket. “He’s tying her up.” The thought of Melender being trussed like a turkey made his blood pressure rise, but Brogan tamped down his anger. He needed to keep his cool to figure out where this man was taking her. He couldn’t ever remember getting this worked up over a story before, but then this wasn’t just the injustice over something happening to a source. It was a woman he cared about being manhandled.

“That’s what it looks like,” Livingston agreed.

The man got into the driver’s seat and backed the car out of the space. The license plate was missing from the front of the vehicle, but another camera showed the back plate, slightly smeared with mud but still readable.

“Pause it there, please. Can you zoom in on the plate?” Livingston waited until the tech enlarged the plate area, then he jotted down the number. “Thanks. Would you print that for me?”

“Sure.” Carstairs leaned over and moved the mouse to access another camera while the tech printed the blown-up license plate screen shot.

“Any way to tell which exit he took?” Brogan asked while Livingston made a phone call to request a check on the plates.

“There.” Carstairs pointed to a screen on the right. “He’s exiting onto Blue Road, which will take him straight to Gallows Road.”

“Stop it right there,” Livingston requested.

Carstairs complied. Through the SUV’s windshield, the camera captured a partial view of the driver’s face.

“Can you enhance that at all?” Brogan leaned closer. The man looked familiar. He had a good memory for faces, an asset in his line of work.

“Gonna take a while, since he’s in the shadows.” Sasha isolated the photo and clicked over to another screen. She glanced up at Carstairs. “I’ll text you when I have something.”

“Sounds good,” Carstairs said. “Let’s grab a cup of coffee.”

Brogan started to protest, but over Sasha’s head, Carstairs nodded toward the door. The trio departed, leaving the tech muttering to herself as she manipulated the photo.

Once outside, Carstairs led the way toward one of the hospital cafes. “Sasha’s my best tech. She’ll work much faster if we’re not looking over her shoulder. Detective, I hear you know Bob Knightman.”

“Yes, we go way back,” Livingston answered.

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