Paint the town blue

Chapter XXXIX

Alex's POV

Getting the original clinic visit log turned out to be easier than I expected. Yes, I had to visit Frederic again and outline the whole situation to him, spice up everything with concrete facts and that's it - the request was sent directly from the station and I didn't have to go there again. However, processing the request and, in fact, receiving the log itself took a couple of days. Bureaucracy, damn it. But in the end, the log was received and sent for examination.

The only thing I had to do myself was personally go to the laboratory on the other side of the city to personally talk to the graphologist and explain to him the examination of which records I need to conduct. Mr. Wolff, a rather stern-looking man in his fifties, turned out to be not at all as scary as his colleagues described him. He calmly listened to what I needed, wrote down certain details in his leather notebook, and then he told me the approximate deadlines for the examination, and that was it.

At the station, Logan quickly conducted an examination of the videos and took both screenshots and cut out fragments of the video from those dates and timecodes that coincided with suspicious entries in the log. As I thought, there is a completely different person in the video, only vaguely resembling Ricciardo. And then, probably, it seemed so to us only because at that time many still wore masks, and they, as you know, cover most of the face. And because of this mask, it wasn't possible to immediately see the face of an unknown man. Fortunately, Sargeant managed to capture the frame before the man covered his face, so that his appearance became known to us.

Logan didn't send me his report by mail, but asked me to go to his office in a message to discuss everything, because "it takes a long time to type a letter with a bunch of details." So I went to see him as soon as I got his message.

"Well, what did you find there?"

"You probably already suspected this, so I'll just say: You were right. Look at this."

He pressed the keys and made a couple of mouse clicks, and the screenshots with timestamps from the cameras opened on the screen. And it's true, there's a completely different person in the screenshots, and they have in common with Ricciardo only that they are both dark-haired, and that they both have a bit wavy hair. So they're both Australians, as Logan said, while telling me about both suspects. That's it. Neither their height, nor their complexion, nor even the shape of their face match. And, funnily enough, the administrators were different during all these three visits. Maybe that's why no one was confused that two completely different people came to them under the name "Daniel Ricciardo"?

"I tried to run through his data, but I didn't find much."

"Is there a first name, last name?"

"Yeap, I just found this."

Logan grinned and took out a sheet of printed data from the man with the video from his desk drawer. "Mark Alan Webber. Date of birth: 08/27/1976. Place of birth: Queanbeyan, Australia. Place of residence: not specified. Education: medical, specialty - psychiatry. Place of work: not specified. Marital status: not specified." There is really little information, very little. I don't even have anything to cling to, except that he has a higher education, which allowed him to get to Max in his place of detention. But why would he help Max? And how does he even know him? What is the connection between them?

Logan must have noticed my thoughtfulness, because he coughed a couple of times, drawing my attention to himself.

"I've been looking, but I haven't found any connection between him and Max, or between him and Charles. So I don't understand at all how he got in here."

"That's what I'm thinking about. Charles never even mentioned his name, and in general didn't talk about psychiatrists he knew."

"And Max didn't have any too."