Since he didn’t want to deal with the crowd, he headed toward the emergency entrance located on the far side of the building. It, too, was being patrolled, a security guard posted inside, another bundled up outside and posted under the portico, making certain the lane for emergency vehicles was clear.
Tate hurried along the concrete pathway that rimmed the building. Though it had recently been cleared of snow, a thin film was already collecting over the path, piling thick on the surrounding shrubbery and stretches of grass separating the walking paths.
He knew this hospital all too well. Not only was this the place where his own father had been brought, dead before the emergency room doors had slid open, but Tate himself, due to his own injuries—a bike accident that screwed up his ankle, a broken arm from falling out of a tree and an emergency appendectomy—had landed here while growing up. But that wasn’t the reason he knew all the ins and outs of Whimstick General. Nope. Only later, when he’d returned to help out his mother, had he learned about the ins and outs of the hospital.
He’d not only pushed his mother’s wheelchair along the glossy floors shimmering under the florescent overhead lights of the hallways, but he’d spent hours within these halls. During Selma Tate’s lengthy stays and continual visits for tests and rehab appointments, Wesley had discovered about the shortcuts and tucked-away elevators, the back stairways and connecting rooms between the clinic, labs, cafeteria, locker rooms and rehabilitation areas. He’d even located the mechanical rooms and the morgue in the basement, along with restricted areas where equipment and supplies were kept under lock and key. He’d had hours to explore and he’d taken advantage of the free time, even once looking up the schematics for the plans of the hospital. The original building was eighty years old, the south wing added in the sixties and the north at the end of the eighties, which created a little bit of a hodgepodge and more than a few odd spaces and connections. Wesley Tate knew most of them, and now decided to use that knowledge to his advantage. Otherwise he would be shut out from Kara McIntyre and her brother. He knew it. And this—their tragedy—was his story. His. His father had died saving Kara. The way Tate figured it, she owed him. Big time.
As he knew the hospital like the back of his hand, he slipped into a side entrance that opened to the hallway connecting the wing housing clinics, then took a back hallway that converged with the surgical section of the hospital. Rounding another corridor, he made his way behind several operating rooms and ended up in a wing that housed a bank of elevators and beyond which was the cafeteria. One story below housed the morgue, the two stories above were dedicated to patient rooms. Somewhere on one of those floors was Kara McIntyre. And, he suspected, in a more isolated area, her half brother. He doubted it would be hard to find Jonas; there would probably be guards posted outside his door because, no doubt, he would be a prime suspect in Merritt Margrove’s murder, though that didn’t make much sense to Tate. Kara would be more difficult, but he figured he could handle it.
He went to the basement and found an unlocked closet wedged between the mechanical room and the morgue. He pulled a set of scrubs and a fake ID tag from the bag, changed quickly and emerged, careful to avoid the major hallways. As far as he knew there were cameras posted in the main corridors, near the elevators and at every major entrance to the building, but he didn’t think all were monitored 24/7, or that there was surveillance in the minor areas or any of the patient rooms due to budget concerns and privacy laws.
But he couldn’t be certain.
He strode confidently, as if he belonged inside the building, slipped through a doorway marked STAFF ONLY, then took a set of back stairs two at a time. At the third floor, he opened the door and peered down the hallway. As expected, he spied a uniformed deputy seated in a chair near the doorway of a room at the end of the hallway. The deputy was around twenty-five and doing a deep dive into his cell phone.
No way to get past him.
Tate slipped into the stairwell again and descended to the second level, where he suspected Kara might be housed. He stepped into the hallway, all too aware of the cameras mounted in the ceiling. He knew there was a good chance he’d be found out, but he hoped to put it off as long as possible, so he walked confidently, checking his clipboard, avoiding looking at the cameras or coming into contact with anyone. However, he couldn’t locate her room and so returned to the stairwell, made his way to an area off the cafeteria where he knew a lot of the staff convened, bought a soda and a sandwich from the deli counter, then took an empty table near a group of nurses. His back to them, and while pretending interest in his phone and a newspaper he’d grabbed from a table on the way in, he listened to their conversation.