Shelter from the Storm

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The best cure for loneliness was hard work and she had never shied away from that. And perhaps she ought to stay away from Daniel, since spending any time at all with him only seemed to accentuate all the things missing in her life.

Her gray mood had blown away with the storm as she drove through the predawn darkness the next day through town. Her clinic hours started at nine but she figured if she left early enough, she could make it to see Rosa at the hospital in Salt Lake City and be back before the first patient walked through the door.

She felt energized for the day ahead as she listened to Morning Edition on NPR. The morning was cold and still, the snow of the night before muffling every sound. She waved at a few early-morning snow-shovelers trying to clear their driveways before heading to work.

Most of them waved back as she passed, but a few quite noticeably turned their backs on her. She sighed but decided not to let it ruin her good mood.

This area was settled by pioneer farmers and ranchers and for years they had made up the bedrock of the rural economy. But for the last decade or so Moose Springs had become more of a bedroom community to workers in Park City and Salt Lake City who were looking for a quiet, mostly safe place to raise their families.

She was glad to see newcomers in town and figured an infusion of fresh blood couldn’t hurt. Still, she hoped this area was able to hang on to all the small-town things she had always loved about it.

The interstate through the canyon was busy with morning commuters heading into the city, but the snow had been cleared in the night so the drive was pleasant.

As she had promised, she stopped at her favorite bakery not far from the hospital to pick up a dozen doughnuts and several cups of coffee for Kendall and the floor nurses.

Juggling the bag, the cup holder and her laptop, she hurried inside the hospital and went straight for the E.R., hoping she could catch the nurses who had helped with Rosa before their shift changed in a half hour. She had learned early in her career that nurses were the heart and soul of a hospital and she always tried to go out of her way to let them know how much she appreciated their hard work.

She found several nurses gathered at the station. They greeted her with friendly smiles.

“No sexy sheriff with you this morning?” Janie Carpenter, one of the nurses she had worked with before, asked her.

If only. She shook her head. “Sorry. I’m on my own. But I brought goodies, if that helps.”

“I don’t know.” A round, middle-aged nurse grinned. “Between doughnuts or a hottie like that, I’d choose the sheriff every time. I was thinking I just might have to drive to Moose Springs and rob a bank or something. I certainly wouldn’t mind that man putting me under arrest.”

“Or under anything else,” Janie purred. “Think he might use handcuffs?”

Lauren could feel herself blush. She wanted to tell them Daniel was far more than just chiseled features and strong, athletic shoulders. But maybe he enjoyed being drooled over. She pulled one of the doughnuts out and grabbed the last cup of coffee in the drink holder.

“I owe this to Dr. Fox. Is he around?”

Janie rolled her eyes. “Haven’t seen him for a while. He’s probably flirting with the nurses on the surgical floor. I’ll be happy to set it aside for him, though.”

She handed over the stash, not believing her for a second. Oh, well, she tried. It was Kendall’s own fault for being such a player.

She waved goodbye to the nurses and headed up to Rosa’s floor. Nobody was in sight at the nurse’s station on this floor except a dour-looking maintenance man haphazardly swirling a mop around.

Served her right for coming just as the nurses were giving report. She could hear them in the lounge as the night shift caught the fresh blood up on their caseload.

She smiled at the janitor but he still didn’t meet her eye so she gave up trying to be nice and began looking for Rosa’s chart. Probably in with the nurses, she realized, and went to the lounge to ask if they were done with it.

“Here it is. She had a very quiet night,” a tired-looking nurse said, handing over the chart. “No more contractions and I peeked in on her about an hour ago and she was sleeping soundly.”

“Thank you.”

When Lauren returned to the desk, the janitor was gone. She spent a moment flipping through the chart, pleased with what she saw there. Her vitals were stable and her pain level seemed to be under control. The few times she had awakened, she had seemed calm and at ease.

Lauren didn’t want to wake her patient, but she also didn’t want to leave after coming all this way without at least checking on her.

As she paused outside the door to her room, a strange whimpering noise sounded from inside and her heart sank. Despite what the night nurse had charted, maybe the mild painkillers Rosa had been treated with weren’t quite cutting it.

She pushed open the door to check on the girl, then gasped.

The horrific sight inside registered for only about half a second before Lauren started screaming for security and rushed inside to attack the man who was trying to smother her patient.

Chapter 4

After that first instant of disoriented, stunned panic, everything else seemed a blur. She rushed the man, almost tripping over the mop and bucket on her way toward him as she yelled for him to stop and for security at equal turns.

With no coherent plan, she slammed into him to knock him away from her patient. The force of her movement knocked them both off balance and they toppled against the rolling bedside table, sending it crashing to the floor and the two of them after it.

The man scrambled to his feet to get away and Lauren lunged after him, barely registering the coarse fabric of his janitor’s uniform as she grabbed hold of it. For some wild reason she was intent only on keeping him there until security arrived, but he was just as intent on escape.

He shoved her to get her away from him, hissing curses at her in Spanish as he fought her off. Finally he just swung his other beefy fist out and slugged her, the blow connecting to the cheekbone and knocking her to the ground.

White-hot pain exploded in her skull. In an instant he was gone. She couldn’t have stopped him, even if she hadn’t been forced to release him when she fell.

Lauren’s vision grayed and her stomach twisted and heaved from the pain. She wanted to curl up right there on the floor, but Rosa was clutching her throat and still gasping for air. Lauren forced herself to keep it together for her patient’s sake. Using the bed for support, she pulled herself to her feet and hurried as fast as possible to the terrified girl’s side.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Lauren urged, grabbing the oxygen mask from the wall above the bed and placing it as gently as possible over Rosa’s mouth at the same time she hit the emergency call button.

“Take deep breaths. That’s the way. You’re fine now. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

Though she forgot all about the language barrier and spoke in English, Rosa seemed to understand her. The shaken girl made a ragged, gravelly sound deep in her throat and Lauren handed her the water glass by the side of her bed just as the first nurses rushed in.

“What is it? What happened?” the first one asked. “Are you okay?”

Lauren was shaking, she realized, and her head throbbed like it had been crushed by a wrecking ball. “No. I’m not okay. A man just attacked my patient. Call security. Have them block all the exits and entrances. They need to look for a Latino male in his mid-twenties. He was wearing a maintenance worker’s uniform but it was too short for him so I’m guessing it wasn’t real.”

“You’re bleeding!” the nurse exclaimed.

“Forget about me,” she said harshly. “Just call security!”

The nurse rushed out and Rosa gave a strangled whimper. Lauren saw she was inches away from hysteria. She slid onto the bed and gathered the girl to her, as much to comfort her as to find a safe place to sit for a moment before her legs gave out.

“You’re okay. You’re safe now.”

“Mi bebé. Mi bebé.”

“Okay, okay. We’ll check everything out but I’m sure your baby is all right.”

As the adrenaline spike crested, Lauren had to fight to hold on to her meager breakfast. It wasn’t easy.

She had been physically attacked only once before in her life and finding herself in this situation again brought back all those long-dormant feelings of shock and invasion she thought she had worked through years ago.

She didn’t know what was stronger, the urge to vomit or the urge to crawl into a corner and sob.

“Rosa. Is that the same man who hurt you?”

The girl hesitated, though Lauren could tell she understood her fractured Spanish.

“The only way you can be safe is to report what happened so he can be arrested.”

The gross hypocrisy of her words struck her, but she couldn’t worry about that now. Not when her patient’s life was at stake.

“Rosa, you’re going to have to tell someone what happened. You have no choice anymore. Will you talk to Sheriff Galvez?”

Rosa let out a sob and curved both hands over her abdomen. After a moment, she gave a long, slow nod.

He was bone-tired, so tired all he wanted to do was pull over somewhere, put his hat over his face and doze off for a few decades.

A smart man would be home in bed right about now dreaming soft, pleasant dreams that had nothing to do with crimes or accident reports or people in need.

He, on the other hand, had decided on a wild hair to drive into the big city after his shift ended to check on their assault victim. He could only hope a night in the hospital had changed her mind about talking to him about what had happened to her.

He worked out the kinks in his neck as he parked his SUV and headed for the front entrance of the hospital. Four security guards and a Salt Lake City police officer stood just inside, a pretty heavy security force. Maybe they had beefed up security for some kind of high-profile patient. His guess was that some kind of A-list movie star from the film festival had broken a leg on the slopes or something.

He recognized the city cop as Eddie Marin, an old friend from police training. “Hey, Eddie. What’s going on?”

The officer greeted him with familiar back-slapping. “Galvez, long time no see.”

“What’s with all the uniforms?”

“Incident up on the medical unit. Some dude tried to off a patient. We’ve sealed off the entrances but the guy seems to be in the wind. We can’t find any trace of him.” He gave Daniel a considering look. “Not saying we don’t appreciate all the help we can get, but isn’t this one a little far out of your jurisdiction?”

“I’m off duty, just following up on an assault victim dumped in my neck of the woods. What does your suspect look like? I’ll keep an eye out for him on my way up.”

“We had an eyewitness who caught him in the attack and was hurt trying to fight him off. She was pretty shaken up but Dr. Maxwell described a Latino male in a janitor uniform, five feet eleven inches, one hundred ninety pounds, half his left eyebrow missing from a scar. Only problem is, we can’t find the bastard anywhere in the hospital.”

Daniel registered none of the description, too caught up in the words preceding it. “Did you say Dr. Maxwell? Lauren Maxwell?”

“I think that’s her name. You know her?”

“She was injured?”

Eddie blinked at his urgent tone. “Perp punched her and knocked her to the floor. She’s pretty banged up and needs a couple stitches but she won’t leave her patient.”

“What room?”

Eddie gave him a careful look. “You okay, man?”

“What the hell room are they in?”

The officer told him and Daniel didn’t bother waiting for the elevator, he just raced for the stairs, his heart pounding.

He wouldn’t say he was intimately familiar with the sprawling hospital but he had been here many times on other cases. He knew his way enough to find the room Eddie had indicated, and in moments he reached the medical wing.

Even if the officer hadn’t given him the room number, he would have known it instantly by the crowd of people milling around. His own uniform seemed to smooth the way as he fought his way through until he made it to the room.

He found Lauren just outside the doorway, gesturing to another Salt Lake police officer he didn’t recognize.

She was holding a blood-soaked bandage to her cheek and her face was pale and drawn. Rage burned through him at whatever bastard might have hurt her and he wanted to fold her against him and keep her safe from the world.

She cut off her words the moment she saw him.

“Daniel!” she exclaimed, shock and relief mingling in her voice. Before he quite knew how it happened, she seemed to slide into his arms, pressing her uninjured cheek against the fabric of his uniform and holding on tight.

She felt delicate and fragile against him and despite the layers of his coat, he could feel the tiny shudders that shook her frame.

She sagged against him for only a moment, just long enough for him to want to tighten his arms and hold on forever. After entirely too short a time, she pulled away, a rosy flush replacing the pale, washed-out look she had worn when he first saw her.

He wanted to pull her back into his arms but he knew they didn’t have that kind of relationship. The only reason she had turned to him in the first place was likely because he represented a familiar face, comfort and security amid her trauma.

Already, he could see her replacing the defenses between them and once more becoming the cool, controlled physician who could handle anything.

“What happened?” he asked.

She let out a breath. “It was terrible. Absolutely awful. I walked into the room to check on Rosa about half an hour ago and found a janitor with his hands around her neck, choking the life out of her. Only he obviously wasn’t really a janitor. She says he was the same one who attacked her.”

“How is she?”

Her eyes softened and he had the impression that had been exactly the right thing to say, though he wasn’t quite sure why.

“Petrified and shocked. She keeps saying mi bebé over and over. Physically, I don’t think she was injured by the latest attack but she’s severely traumatized by it.”