Could they have been wrong? Had the man who’d stalked Morgan at the office been Phillip Emerson, not Jacob? He must have known that it was Morgan who’d petitioned for Jacob’s DNA. And he must have been angry. Parents will do anything to protect their children. How far would Phillip go?

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Rage pulsed inside him. It grew and fed on itself until it had a will of its own.

Morgan Dane was going to ruin everything. Someone else had been arrested. The evidence he’d planted had been solid—until Ms. Dane stuck her nose into his business.

There was no question that she had to be stopped. But how? Her sidekick, the former cop, was always at her side, and he acted like her personal bodyguard.

He’d spent all night devising a plan to stop her investigation. Step number one: finish what the county jail had left undone. She couldn’t defend a dead client.

He entered the hospital through the main doors. This wasn’t the city. The medium-size community hospital had little need for security. There were only two people behind the reception desk in the lobby. An elderly woman sat at a computer, looking up patient room numbers and handing out visitor passes with a polite smile. Seated behind her, a security guard in his mid-fifties drank coffee and talked over the counter with a man in a suit wearing a hospital ID. Hospital administration?

He set his shopping bag at his feet, used the hand sanitizer, and collected a pass from the old lady. He headed for the elevator bank at an unhurried pace. No one asked what was in the bag. No one cared.

The security cameras tracked him as he stepped inside. But he had nothing to hide.

Yet.

On the third floor, he took care of his legitimate business. Then he needed to improvise. Nick Zabrowski had been transferred from the ICU to the fourth floor that morning.

He ducked behind a set of double doors that separated the more public hallways from the less-traveled ones. He passed signs for Radiation and the Cardiac Cath Lab and found the nearest restroom.

The day before, he’d bought green scrubs at a uniform supply store. He changed into them, folding his regular clothes and stuffing them into the shopping bag. His costume was authentic right down to his rubber shoes. The salt-and-pepper toupee covered his hair, and black-framed glasses concealed his eyes. He inserted rolls of cotton gauze in his mouth to disguise the shape of his face. When he was satisfied that no one would recognize him, he went back out into the hallway.

He walked down the hall, scrolling on his phone to discourage attention. He paused as an orderly rolled a patient on a gurney out of a doorway labeled Magnetic Resonance Imaging. There was an outer room that appeared to exist for prepping patients before their test. This outer room was empty. A desk was pushed against the wall, a white lab coat tossed carelessly over the chair. With a glance in each direction down the hall, he ducked inside long enough to grab the lab coat. The ID badge clipped to the pocket showed the photo of a young man. Not a problem. He merely turned the ID over to hide the picture. Then he transferred his knife from his bag to the pocket of the lab coat.

Continuing on, he took the elevator to the fourth floor.

In a patient room on the right side of the hall, he spotted an elderly man sleeping heavily. The room was marked with a yellow card that called for Contact Precautions. A cart loaded with gloves, masks, and gowns sat next to the doorway. He stuffed his shopping bag into the bin labeled Medical Waste and helped himself to a face mask. He tied it around his face and tugged it down past his mouth, as if he’d just come from the operating room.

The nurses bustled at the station down the hall. No guard stood at the doorway. Perhaps there was a sheriff’s deputy inside the room.

He glanced through the doorway. No guard.

Convenient.

Also lazy.

Who was he to judge? The lack of a guard made his job easier.

But he’d better hurry. Someone could come into the room at any moment. He entered the room, picking up the chart at the foot of the bed in case he was interrupted.

Nick Zabrowski slept peacefully. His eyes didn’t even flutter. His chest rose and fell in a deep and even rhythm that suggested sedation or exhaustion. Maybe both.

An IV line ran into one arm. No handcuffs. Interesting. Not that it mattered. Nick wasn’t in any condition to get out of bed.

Or fight back.

He wasn’t hooked up to any heart monitors, so no alarms would ring when his own heart ceased to beat. He wouldn’t even need the knife he’d brought. No. He could make Nick’s death quiet and neat.

This was going to be easier than he’d expected. And when he was finished here, Morgan Dane was next. That bitch had ruined everything, and she was going to pay.

He grabbed the pillow from the empty bed.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Consciousness tugged at Nick.

He resisted. The last thing he wanted to do was wake up. He’d done that earlier, and pain had slammed into him with the force of a bus.

On one hand, the pain had assured him that he was alive when he’d been certain he wasn’t. On the other, the agony had been so intense, he’d considered the advantages of being dead.

As he floated from the heavy depths of drugged slumber, the fire in his belly encouraged him to stay asleep. He was flat on his back, tethered to the bed by wire and tubes. Why be awake when he couldn’t move anyway?

Sure, the nurse had told him earlier that movement would aid his recovery, but really, what was his motivation to get better? The sooner he healed, the faster they put him back in jail.

What was the point?

Even if Morgan managed to convince a jury that the prosecution hadn’t proven his guilt, the whole town had already tried and convicted him. He would never be innocent in their eyes unless Tessa’s real killer was caught. Even then, he suspected some people would be forever convinced he’d committed the crime.

An image of Tessa formed in his mind, and physical pain took a backseat. The knife he’d taken in the belly couldn’t compare to the invisible one twisting in his heart.

Tessa.

Dead.

Really, why bother waking up? Why had they saved him? They should have let him bleed to death.

He let his mind sink, welcoming the utter blackness and wishing it smothered him.

A rubber sole squeaked on the floor. He’d been in the hospital a few years before, for an emergency appendectomy. The nurses had been in and out of his room constantly. But this time, they entered his room only when absolutely necessary, and usually their entrance meant something painful was going to happen. He sensed resentment from the hospital staff, but then who would want to take care of a man arrested for a brutal rape and murder?

Thinking of how Tessa had died amplified his grief. How dare he feel sorry for himself when she’d suffered far worse.

He stirred, stretching a leg out. The small movement tensed his severed abdominal muscles and red-hot agony sang through him in a fresh burst of pain. His next breath hurt so much, he tried not to repeat it.

But his stupid body had other ideas. He couldn’t simply stop breathing. He opened his mouth, and his lungs sucked in air. The deeper-than-usual breath causing enough pain that he nearly blacked out.

Unfortunately, he didn’t.

Shit that hurt.

He concentrated on slow and shallow breathing, his focus completely absorbed by minimizing movement and the resulting pain. A few breaths later, he gave up on being unconscious and opened his eyes. Daylight from the window blinded him. He squinted at a blurred figure clad in green scrubs moving around his room.

Nothing unique about that.