Page 80 of Silent Threat
A whole insurgent brigade could be out there with machine guns, coming for Annie, and he would never have known it.Shit.What had he been thinking setting himself up as her protector? Who was he kidding?
He scowled as he went to yank the door open, with more force than necessary, but not all the way. He didn’t want people in the hallway to see Annie in a towel.
About half a dozen patients were milling around, shock on their faces. Everybody was talking at once, but at the wrong angle for Cole to read lips.
“What happened?” he asked, loudly enough to be heard.
Isak, a twentysomething beanpole from Arkansas, responded, and Cole’s hand clenched on the doorknob, the words hitting his chest like bullets.
“He’s ... They just found him,” Isak said, pale and shaky. Then he realized he’d left out a crucial piece of information, and added, “Trevor committed suicide. He’s dead.”
Chapter Nineteen
Sunday
ANNIE SAT INthe emergency staff meeting, numb. Last night’s car crash was nothing compared to this morning’s terrible news. She’d be willing to roll off the road all over again to have Trevor back.
Her phone pinged with a weather update. Hurricane Rupert was moving up the East Coast, but staying out at sea. She flipped the phone facedown. She didn’t care.
Dan Ambrose reached for her hand on the conference table and gave it a gentle squeeze before pulling back. “You shouldn’t be here. You’re not well. Go lie down.”
“I want to be here.” She couldn’t sleep if someone offered her $1 million for ten minutes’ rest.
Trevor was dead.
She looked around the table. They all had failed him.Shehad failed him. She felt the crushing weight of personal responsibility.
“We are going to offer emergency counseling, free of charge, to everyone who needs it, for as long as they need it,” Murphy Dolan, the program director, said. “Staff and patients alike. The police are coming to interview everyone before they officially rule it a suicide. I’m going to request that if a patient asks, the officers let a therapist sit with that patient through the interview session for support. I hope they’ll let us do that much, at least. Detective Chase Meritt is lead on the case.”
Dan began to rise, then sat back down. “This is going to be devastating for our patients. Hope Hill is supposed to be their safe space. I hate to say this, but Trevor’s suicide may trigger other suicide attempts. Statistically speaking.”
Annie nodded. Dan was only saying what they were all thinking.
“Let’s head that off at the pass,” Murph told them. “That’s our number one priority. Number two priority is to figure out how Trevor got his hands on enough meds for a fatal dose.”
“Do we know what he took?” Libby, the reflexologist, asked. The young black woman had the most amazing intuition of anyone Annie had ever met. Somehow, Libby always knew exactly what to say to a patient. People at Hope Hill loved her, and she loved them back. The news of Trevor’s death had hit her hard. Her eyes were red from crying. She looked heartbroken.
Murph’s response was tight with tension. “Not until the autopsy comes back.”
Annie squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of sweet Trevor on a cold stainless-steel table at the morgue, but she couldn’t shut out the image.
Murph cleared his throat. “There’s something else. I found out something last night that I was going to share with staff and patients today, but now I’m not sure if we shouldn’t wait telling the patients.”
The people around the table fell silent.
“I do a one-week follow-up with patients postdischarge,” he said.
They nodded. They all knew that. Part of the Hope Hill aftercare.
“I haven’t been able to reach Mitch Moritz. I finally caught up with his wife. Mitch was in a fatal car accident on his way home from here. Apparently, he fell asleep and drove into oncoming traffic.”
Annie gasped.
Libby clutched a hand to her chest. “Where?”
“Maryland. Maybe half an hour after he left here.”
For a moment, everyone was too shocked to speak.
