Notorious Nineteen (Stephanie Plum 19)

MORELLI AND I were halfway through the large pizza, extra cheese, extra pepperoni, when Grandma called me.

“I cracked the case,” she said. “I got it all figured out. Millie Debrowski and I went to the diner on Livingston for dinner tonight because Millie was hankering for their rice pudding. That’s the diner the old coots went to when it turned out they couldn’t rough up Geoffrey Cubbin. Well, we’re walking in and I notice they got business hours on the door and it says they close at one o’clock. That means the nurse fibbed about seeing Cubbin in his bed at two o’clock. Cubbin went missing a lot earlier.”

I was gobstruck. It was suddenly so clear why we didn’t see Cubbin leave. We were watching the wrong segment of video.

“You’re a genius,” I said to Grandma.

“Yep, I’m a regular Sherlock.”

I hung up with Grandma and told Morelli about the diner hours. “We watched the wrong part of the video,” I said. “We need to go back and watch from the beginning of the shift.”

I called Briggs and told him we’d meet him in his office in a half hour, and

that we wanted to see earlier video. He said he’d have everything ready to roll by the time we got there. Morelli gave the last piece of pizza to Bob, I gave a small chunk to Rex, and we took off for the hospital.

“I was going to ask for twenty-four hours of video to begin with,” Morelli said, “but I have a monster caseload, and after reviewing the nurses’ statements I was hoping it wasn’t necessary.”

My excuse wasn’t that legitimate. I hadn’t wanted to spend that much time with Randy Briggs.

We parked and walked through the lobby together. Visiting hours were coming to a close and Morelli badged his way past the reception desk. I’m used to working with Ranger but not so much with Morelli. I always feel like an illegitimate stepchild when I work with Morelli. He’s a Trenton cop and I’m someone with a badge I bought on the Internet.

Briggs was waiting in his office. Mickey Zigler was patrolling the floors.

“Holy crap,” Briggs said when he saw me. “What happened to your hair? It looks like you got too close to a barbecue.”

“Pretty close to the truth,” I said. “Are you set to go?”

“Yeah. I have all the cameras on the screen and backed up to eleven o’clock.”

Morelli and I pulled chairs around to face the monitor and Briggs got the video rolling at fast-forward. The time ticked off on the bottom of the picture. At 11:45 the Yeti stepped out of the service elevator, pushing a large laundry hamper.

“Stop!” I said. “It’s the Yeti.”

The picture was grainy and the light was low, but I was sure it was him. He was dressed in scrubs, like an orderly. He kept his head down and quickly moved down the hall and off camera.

“Are you sure?” Briggs asked. “How could it be the Yeti?”

“Pull just that camera up,” I said. “I want to see it again.”

Briggs went back to 11:45, the elevator doors opened, and the Yeti came on screen. We watched him disappear down the hall and we let the video keep running. At 11:53 the Yeti appeared again, pushing the laundry hamper. It was clear from the way he was pushing that the hamper was heavier than before. He rolled the hamper back to the service elevator and disappeared into it.

“That’s how Cubbin got off the floor,” I said. “In the laundry hamper.”

“There’s laundry pickups like that all day long,” Briggs said. “Nobody would even notice this guy.”

Morelli leaned forward. “Run the camera on the loading dock.”

“Give me a minute to find it,” Briggs said.

He scrolled through a series of cameras. He locked onto the loading dock and reset the time for 11:55. A white panel van was already backed up to the platform. At 11:59 the Yeti rolled the laundry hamper into the van, the van doors closed, and the van drove away.

“Damn,” Briggs said. “That’s how they did it.”

We looked at the video several more times. There was no writing on the side of the van and the license was obscured. The driver wasn’t visible.

“Dollars to donuts that van went to The Clinic,” Briggs said.

I looked over at Morelli. “Do you want to take another look?”