Page 20 of Her Last Refuge

The older one, a heavyset man with a gray mustache, stuck out his hand.

"I’m Clay," he said. "This is Dell."

Dell, wiry and young enough that Rachel wondered if he could legally buy a beer yet, gave a small nod but didn't offer his hand.

"Is it just the two of you on security here?" Rachel asked.

"Two of us during the day, like now,” Clay said. “Overnight it's just one guy, usually me or Dell, whoever pulled the short straw that week."

"Just one," Rachel said. "No overlap?"

"Little bit at shift change. Six, six-thirty in the morning, whoever's coming on relieves whoever's going off. Otherwise it's a solo gig at night."

"And the cameras cover the whole building?" Rachel asked. Of course, she already knew they didn’t, but she was curious to see if the stories differed at all between Miriam and people who weren’t officially on her payroll.

"Main hallway, dining room, parking lot, the two side entrances, and the common areas. Not the residents' rooms, obviously, that'd be a whole different problem. Or the residents’ hallways." Clay said it like he'd fielded the question before and had come to expect it.

“What about people getting in or out during nights?” Novak asked.

“Well, the front doors are badge access,” Clay said. “The side doors are keypad, and the code gets changed every month or so."

"Who has the code?"

"Staff. Us. Colt keeps a list, I think." He glanced at Dell and shrugged. "You'd know better than me, you're the one who has to text her every time it changes."

"Yeah, she emails it," Dell said. "The whole staff list gets it. Nurses, orderlies, kitchen, all of it."

Rachel nodded and let Novak ask about the badge system for the front doors, whether it logged times automatically or whether someone had to check it manually. Clay answered that too, and none of it told them anything new. She could feel the day slipping away from her, the sun already dropping lower over the parking lot, and she was starting to feel the conversations slipping away as Dell got overly talkative about how annoying some of the residents could be.

And then, as the conversation was winding down, Clay mentioned something almost as an afterthought. It was the sort of comment that seemed to literally just appear in his head out of nowhere.

"Oh! You know…you should probably ask Colt about Craig, if you're looking into anything weird," he said. "Craig Roberts. He used to be an orderly here."

"Used to be?" Rachel repeated.

"Yeah, he got let go a while back. Three or four months ago, maybe." Clay glanced at Dell, who shrugged like he didn't have much to add. "His mother was a resident here. She passed on his shift, and he kind of lost it afterward. He was working that shift even though Colt had advised him against it when his mom started taking that downturn. But Craig went around telling anybody who'd listen that the place was understaffed so he had to be here. That was his thinking, anyway. And then when his mom died, he said the lack of staff was the reason for it. He said somebody should've caught it sooner."

"Was he right?" Novak asked.

"No idea. I couldn't tell you. Not my department. But he made a stink about it for a few days, cornering families in the parking lot, that kind of thing. I had to sort of escort him away from a family one time. And in the midst of all that, Colt let him go. After that he just sort of disappeared. Haven't seen him around since, and I don't think anybody else has either."

Rachel kept her voice even. "You said he was an orderly. Did he work with Howard Pelham at all?"

Clay thought about it, scratching at his jaw. "I mean, probably. He worked general care, so he would've rotated through most of the residents at some point. Why?"

"Just trying to get a full picture," Rachel said, which was true enough. She already had a copy of Pelham's chart saved to her files, the one that noted his brief lucid episode two days before he died—as well as the nurse's note about the orderly he'd grabbed by the wrist and told, with more clarity than he'd shown in weeks, that no one could prove anything. The chart didn't name the orderly. It apparently hadn't occurred to anyone on staff to write it down, because at the time it had read like nothing more than the confused mutterings of a man whose mind had mostly left him.

"You think Roberts had something to do with what's going on here?" Dell asked. There was eagerness and suspicion in his voice that made him sound younger than he already looked.

"We're not thinking anything yet," Rachel said. "We're just talking to people."

The looks on both men’s faces told her that they weren’t buying it.

"Do you think either of you could get me an address for Roberts?" Novak asked.

Dell was already pulling his phone out. "I think I've still got the old shift schedule saved. Colt sends those out to everybody working the floor, in case somebody needs to be called in." He scrolled for a second, thumb moving fast. "Yeah, here. It's got his emergency contact info still attached from when he worked here."

"Anybody in particular listed?"