Dante’s fist slammed onto the desk in his den, right on top of the image of the suspect. It didn’t help. He needed to hear the satisfying crack of facial bones breaking as he pummeled the bastard to death. After what he’d done to Sarah, he deserved it.
Gut instinct was telling Dante that this was the perpetrator behind the destruction of Sarah’s house. It all fit: the rage behind the crime, the destruction of personal property, and the violent message left behind. The fucker who had nearly killed her still wanted her dead.
No wonder she avoids hospitals now.
She’d told him during one of her home visits that she was seeing outpatients only. He’d never really questioned why Sarah didn’t admit patients to the hospital here in Amesport, why she turned their care over to another physician if they needed to be hospitalized. She was relatively new to the area, and he’d thought that maybe she just hadn’t gotten her admitting privileges yet.
She doesn’t want to go back into a hospital.
“Dante?” Sarah’s hesitant voice sounded near the doorway of the den.
He looked up and saw Sarah standing there in just his white T-shirt. She looked exhausted, and her expression was troubled. He wanted to hold her on his lap and wrap himself around her until she felt safe again. Feral impulses made him clench his fists on the desk, and he had to suppress the need to reach for her immediately. She was approaching him, and he needed to let her talk. “I thought you were sleeping.”
She shook her head slowly. “I couldn’t. I think you need to know what happened. You’re helping me. I don’t want you to go into this blind. You need to know everything. I’m sorry. I guess I just didn’t want to consider that this could be connected to something that happened in Chicago. But that’s not rational. Chances are, it is connected. Things like this just don’t happen in Amesport.”
She’s coming to me. She trusts me.
Even though she didn’t want to talk about what happened, she was telling him about it to keep him from getting hurt because he didn’t have all of the information. For Dante, that was so much more meaningful than him having to confront her and finagle the story from her. He wanted to hear it from her, but he hadn’t wanted to push her. “Talk to me.”
He watched as she came into the room and settled herself in the comfortable leather chair in front of his desk, tucking her feet beneath her body before she took a big breath. “I was just ending my first year of practice in Chicago when I got a new patient, a nineteen-year-old boy. He’d been involved in a car accident, hit head-on by a drunk driver while his mother was driving. His mom died immediately, but Trey lived through it. He broke both of his legs, and he had other injuries, but he was young, and he slowly improved. He was in his first year of college and wanted to go to medical school. I ended up spending a lot of time with him. We had an orthopedic specialist on the case, but I was his admitting physician. I started making a habit of seeing him last on my hospital rounds so I could help him stay caught up on college work and help him with some of his biology studies. We became very fond of each other.”
“He developed a monstrous crush on you,” Dante told her quietly.
Sarah shook her head. “No. It wasn’t like that.”
“Sweetheart, it might not have been that way for you. But believe me, I was a nineteen-year-old kid once, and I know what’s primarily on the mind of a nineteen-year-old male.” Dante paused for a minute before adding, “You’re beautiful and kind, and were only a few years older than he was.”
Sarah shrugged. “He never acted inappropriately. He mostly talked about his ambitions to be a doctor.”
Dante could guarantee her the kid had his fantasies, but he prompted Sarah. “What happened?”
“I was helping him with some of his classwork one night about three weeks after the accident. His father was there, too. Trey wasn’t close to his dad, and he said he had a bad temper. Trey was closer to his mom, and he was still coping with losing her. That night, while I was there helping him with his biology, Trey died.” Sarah’s voice started to quiver with raw emotion, but she continued. “We coded him for over an hour, but he was gone. The postmortem showed a very large pulmonary embolism, even though we took all precautions because he was such high risk. The case was reviewed and all of the physicians on the case were cleared of any wrongdoing. It just . . . happened.” Her voice began to crack.
Dante looked at her tortured expression, his heart aching for her. How devastating must that experience have been when she knew the young patient so well, and was still in her first year of practice? She’d been so damn young. “His father blamed you,” Dante stated flatly.
“I don’t think he had anyone else to blame. His wife was dead, and the child who he thought was going to live after the accident ended up dying, too. I was there when it happened. I ran the whole code while we tried to resuscitate Trey and failed. The father had to be taken out of the room because he completely snapped. Telling him later that evening that his son was dead was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. He was angry.”
“Two days later, he tried to kill you. I saw the police reports, Sarah,” Dante confessed.
Sarah squirmed in her chair and nodded sharply, repositioning her body in the other direction. “Trey’s father knew I took the stairs to the ICU every single evening. He saw me coming in and out of the doorway to the stairs often enough. Two days later, he caught me in the stairwell, on the landing between the second and third floor. Everything else that happened is a blur. When he attacked me, he slammed my head against the stone wall in the stairwell. All I remember is him screaming that I killed all of his family and I needed to die. I tried to fight him off, but I didn’t have much of a chance. He already had me on the ground, and as soon as he started stabbing me, I got even weaker from blood loss. The note he put on the wall of the cottage is the one thing I can remember him screaming over and over. ‘Die, bitch.’”