Page 85 of No Quarter

“It’s hard to see in this light,” Doctor Whitmore said. “But it does seem that something bad has happened to Valerie. Are we safe out here?”

Charlie considered the doctor for a moment. It seemed awfully coincidental that he should have found Valerie’s phone just as he was about to apply for a trace on it.

Almost as if someone threw it away...

Something snapped nearby. A branch breaking in two under foot.

“A deer?” Doctor Whitmore asked.

“I hope so,” Charlie answered. He drew his gun and peered into the darkness of the woods.

“I don’t think it’s safe out here,” the doctor said. “Maybe we should head back inside and wait for the police to come.”

“We have to keep looking,” Charlie said, desperately. “She could be out here somewhere, hurt.”

“I just remembered,” he said. “I have to oversee an important medication prescription for one of my patients.”

“And you need to do that, now?” Charlie said, angrily.

“The patient is suicidal,” said Doctor Whitmore. “It will only take a few minutes to sign off on it, and then I’ll come straight back and help, okay?”

“No, it’s not okay!” Charlie fumed. “Valerie could be out here bleeding to death for all we know ...”

“Charlie,” Will interjected in a soft voice. “If the patient is in a moment of crisis, then the doctor is correct. He’ll have to sign off on the medication so that the nurses can administer them. We’ll see you shortly, Doctor Whitmore.”

The doctor nodded and then rushed off back toward the main building.

“I can’t believe you sided with him!” Charlie said.

Will stepped closer. “I didn’t. Even in this dim light, I saw his reaction to your suggestion about the phone. He let out two large sighs. A classic anxiety defense when under pressure. And he then crossed his arms as if hugging himself. He feels under threat, as if we’re close to finding out something. I’m not saying he knows what happened to Valerie, but he’s definitely under strain.”

Charlie looked back at Elmwood, now caught in a quandary. Should he follow Doctor Whitmore to see what he was hiding, or keep searching in the dark near where Valerie’s phone had been found?

CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

Valerie felt the darkness of her conscious mind struggling through a fog. A tiny part of her will was pushing, telling her from the pitch-black to get up, to wake up. If she didn’t, she would die a horrible death.

Slowly, her eyes opened. The world was dim. She started to remember.

Doctor Whitmore was the killer. She’d first suspected that he wasn’t what he seemed when he blatantly withheld the information about D tunnel.

I bet he used that to move into the patient building without being seen, she thought.

But it wasn’t just that. The file she had found in storage showed that his entire history had been redacted.

That meant his past was being hidden. Valerie had then thought back to Doctor Whitmore’s conversation with Saldana at the cemetery. He had worded his questions so very carefully, almost with the precision of an FBI profiler.

Saldana was ill, but he was innocent. Whitmore was just using him as a smokescreen to get away with the murders.

I ... I can’t feel anything, she thought as she stared at the darkness.Where am I?

But her head was at a slight angle, and when she trained her eyes to the side, she saw several thin slits that let in a paltry amount of light. To her horror, she could see that she was inside a wall in one of the corridors of the main building at Elmwood.

She heard something. Footsteps.

Two figures appeared and stopped in the hallway. She recognized them immediately. It was her two friends, her partners, Will and Charlie.

“Where did he go?” Will asked.

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