She stopped in front of him. “Are you accusing me of something, Deleon?”
He snorted. “Please. I’ve seen your record.” He stood, forcing her to back up. “All I’m saying is, it looks suspicious. You need to understand, there could be an official inquiry.”
“Great.” She whirled around and started pacing again.
“Of course, it all hinges on my report.”
She turned to him. Slowly. Methodically. “And what are you putting in your report?”
“The truth, but I could sugarcoat the hell out of it if I were offered something in return.”
Quincy didn’t bat a lash when she looked at him, his face buried in his phone, but she knew he was listening to every word. “And what would that be?”
One corner of Deleon’s mouth lifted playfully. “If I thought I had a snowball’s chance in hell, I’d make you have dinner with me.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “That is wrong on so many levels. Not to mention illegal.”
“Thus my abstinence,” he said, holding up his hands in surrender. “We could just agree that you owe me one.”
That was easy. “Okay.”
“But, and I say this with the utmost respect, I’d sure put my house in order if I were you. Just in case the higher-ups catch wind of this and the proverbial shit hits the fan.”
“I will. But, and I say this with the utmost respect, you need to find Wynn before I do.”
He laughed softly. “And why is that?”
“Because if I find him first, I’m going to kill him.”
Before he could respond, a man in a suit walked up to them. “Marshal,” he said with a nod to Deleon. He turned to Sun. “Sheriff, I found the footage if you’d like to follow me to my office.”
“What did you see?” Sun asked as she, Quincy, and Deleon followed the hospital’s head of security to their control room.
“In a word,” he said over his shoulder, “he had help.”
Of course he did. Wynn was too much like his nephew, Levi. Or vice versa. Either way, he probably did nothing without a plan. And sure enough, five minutes later, Sun stood in absolute awe as they watched the footage in the control room a second time.
“Could he have faked a heart attack?” the state police captain asked as he leaned closer to the grainy feed. The large man with graying black hair and a clean-shaven jaw had joined them in the cramped space a few moments earlier, his presence depleting the oxygen supply even faster, so Sun tried to take shallow breaths.
Deleon shrugged. “Heart attacks can absolutely be faked.”
“But he had that enzyme,” Sun argued, probably sounding like an idiot. She should have paid more attention when the doctor was talking to her about Wynn’s cardiac event. “That enzyme that shows up when you have a heart attack. A real one.”
The head of security, a man named Johnston if his ID was to be believed, had come in on his day off just for this. He explained. “There are drugs that can induce a heart attack.”
It was Quincy’s turn to be astonished. “You mean, he took a drug that brought on a real heart attack?”
“Looks like it.” Deleon handed him a chart with the readings on it. Because that would help.
Sun and Quince glanced at the test results and decided to take his word for it. If only she’d gone to medical school in her free time.
“Okay, here,” Johnston said. He pointed to one of the monitors. “A nurse closes the curtains around his bed in the ER and then nothing. Not until another nurse walks up and realizes he’s gone.”
“With the curtain closed like that, you can hardly see the other beds.” Like most emergency rooms, the area housed a row of beds separated only by curtains, but the angle of the camera didn’t allow a clear shot of the other beds, especially with the curtains partially closed. “Go back a little farther.” Johnston rewound the feed until she said, “Stop. There.” She pointed at the top corner of the screen. “It’s the same nurse a few minutes earlier. She’s closing the curtains, purposely blocking the camera.”
“Son of a bitch,” Deleon said. “That was before Wynn Ravinder even arrived. This whole thing was planned.”
“Sure looks that way,” the captain said.
“That’s how they got past the corrections officers,” Quincy said. “They could have skirted around the other beds and gone out a side door.”
“Exactly.” Sun squinted as she studied the screen.
The guard sped up the tape until after the nurse had closed the curtain, then focused on cameras out in the hallway.
“Is that you?” Deleon asked.
Sun froze, humiliation surging through her. Just as she’d feared, Wynn and his accomplice had walked right past her and Quincy as they were talking to the doctor, seconds before the cops started running up and down the halls. “How did I not recognize him?” she asked with a groan, swearing off tequila right then and there. She leaned in for another look and eyed the screen suspiciously. “Would you say that nurse is more of a dirty blond or a strawberry?”
Quincy gave her a knowing look. “You know who that is.”
“I have an inkling.” And she was going to kill her. If Sun wasn’t mistaken, her best friend in Santa Fe, Nancy Danforth, just broke a convicted killer out of prison.
“Care to share your inkling with the rest of the class?” Deleon asked nonchalantly, while the captain looked on expectantly. But what if she was wrong? This was a barrel she wanted to get to the bottom of herself before spilling its contents to the rest of the world.
“I have an inkling. I’ll check it out and get back to you.”
The captain glared at her. “Sheriff, if you know something, you—”
Her phone rang before he could finish. When she held up a finger to put him on pause, he turned the funniest shade of purple she’d ever seen. “Hey, Dad,” she said, throwing as much perk into her inflection as possible just to fuck with the captain. She’d had enough of the boy’s-club mentality when she was with Santa Fe PD.
“How’s it going?” her dad asked.
“Great. My victim is still unconscious, Doug got stabbed in the neck with a knitting needle, and a prisoner I had transferred to the state pen from Arizona just escaped right under our noses. What’s up?”
“Well, not to add fuel to the fire, but someone was outside your house. Scared the bejesus out of your daughter and Sybil.”
“A creeping tom?” she asked in alarm. “Did you see anyone?”
“I did not.”
“Are the girls okay?”
“Yeah. A little shaken.”
“Not stirred?” she teased. It was the way of her people.
“Mom!” Auri said in the background. “We could’ve been killed.”
She was right. Especially with her track record of late. “I’ll be there in thirty.”
“You don’t have to rush home, hon.”
“I’m done here anyway. We can study the footage at the station.”
“Okay. Drive safe.”
She handed the security guard her card with her email address. “Can I get a copy of all of this? Even the parking lots? We’ll try to get a make on their vehicle.”