you give me dates, addresses, descriptions?”
She stared at Cole, taking a moment to register his question. “I’d have to pull out my reports.”
“Are they handy?”
She rolled her eyes.
“Okay, we’ll worry about that later.”
No, there couldn’t be any later. With Eddie’s attack, her boss’s innuendoes and Cole’s unexpected charge back into her life, she was scarcely handling now. She pushed to her feet. “Just a second and I’ll grab them.” As she tugged the coil-bound book from the top shelf of her locker, her Bible toppled to the floor, spilling a month’s worth of church bulletins and inserts at her feet.
She quickly stuffed all but one back into her locker and rejoined Cole in her boss’s office. Handing Cole the pamphlet for Teen Challenge, a faith-based residential program that helped young men and women overcome addictions, she said, “I found this while I was grabbing my call journal and thought it might be something you’d want to look into for Eddie. Some of the men that are in the program spoke at our church last week. It’s turned their lives around. If you could convince Eddie to go—”
“I don’t want to send him away,” Cole said gruffly. He glanced at the pamphlet then slipped it into the back of his notebook. “I appreciate the suggestion,” he added, his tone gentler this time. “Helping him is the reason I came back to Stalwart.”
Of course it was. Sherri glanced away, focused on the world outside, blurred by the rain streaming down the window. In the months after he’d left, her imagination had read too much into his surprise parting gift, let alone the gratitude that had been in his eyes after that world-tilting hug. But when months turned into years, the truth eventually had sunk in. Not that it would matter anymore now. She couldn’t afford to let anyone get close.
“If I’d been here for Eddie in the first place...” Cole continued, but then shook his head and motioned to her call journal. “Tell me about the other incidents.”
She skimmed the entries and offered several examples, a few of which she had to admit that even she couldn’t see the guys pulling. She closed her journal. A lot of them may have been purely random occurrences.
Cole looked up from his notepad. “Is that all of them? Your partner mentioned your ambulance being hit.”
She frowned. “That couldn’t have been deliberate.”
“Where your safety is concerned, I don’t want to take any chances.”
She gulped at the determination blazing in his eyes. Did he mean her safety in particular?
Bothered that she cared one way or the other, she glanced away. She just wasn’t used to having an ally in her corner, at least not at work. Her family was great, but between the veteran firefighters and deputy-sheriff cousins and uncles, she preferred not to talk shop around them.
“Tell me about the accident,” Cole prodded.
“Oh, right. Um, it happened last week. A pickup sideswiped our ambulance as we turned on to County Road 15. There’s a police report on that one.”
“Did they arrest the driver?”
“No. The pickup was stolen. They found it abandoned down the road.”
“Did you get a look at the driver?”
For the first time she realized what Cole was really asking, had been trying to get at all along—could this guy have been his brother? This wasn’t about her at all. Not really.
“Sherri?”
“No, I didn’t.” She squinted at the window, picturing that night. “He was wearing a hoodie. That’s all I remember.” Was it any wonder the driver hadn’t seen her turning off the side road with his hood up like that? The collision couldn’t have been deliberate.
“Were you hurt?”
Cole’s anxious tone didn’t help her churning stomach, but she managed to shrug as if it was all in a day’s work.
He looked over his notes, his eyes as stormy as the sky. “Can you think of any reason why someone would target you?”
I let my partner die. She didn’t say it, just shrugged again.
“A patient or maybe a family member of a patient who blames you for a death?”
She gasped.
“I take it you’ve thought of someone?”
“Rolph Reinhart has demanded an inquest into his wife’s death due to delay in treatment. But he’s over eighty years old. I can’t see him doing any of—” she motioned to the notebook he was writing in “—those things.”
“I’ll talk to him. Can you think of anyone else?”
She racked her brain, flipped through her call journal. “No, no one.” For the most part she’d been fortunate with outcomes. Not like Luke who’d been threatened by a shooting victim’s fellow gang members when the victim hadn’t survived. They’d claimed Luke was tight with their rival gang and had deliberately let their man die.
“How about a jealous ex-boyfriend?”
She snorted. “No.” She’d broken up with a guy or two over the years, but none had ever caused trouble.
“A rival then? Maybe a woman who—?”
“No.”
He squinted at her, clearly perturbed by her certainty. “Your fellow paramedics are not behind these incidents, Sherri. Your partner was the one who urged me to investigate.”
“Could’ve been to throw off suspicions.”
“You obviously didn’t see his face as he treated that cut on your cheek.” Cole grazed his fingers across the hair she’d nudged over the bandage.
She inhaled reflexively.
Big mistake. With him so close, she could smell the spicy scent that instantly transported her back to her sophomore year—and the dreamy guy living next door.
“Why are you so convinced your coworkers are behind these incidents?”
She sprang from her chair and walked to the window, regretting that she’d said anything. Out on the street a woman fought to right her umbrella, turned inside out by the wind. Sherri could so relate. Dan’s protective outburst had been out of character, but maybe the guys had merely opted to try another tactic to derail her. “Do you think Dan would’ve asked the police to investigate if these incidents had happened to him or one of the other guys?”
Cole didn’t respond for a long time.
She sneaked a peek over her shoulder at him.
He, too, was watching the woman wrestling with her umbrella. “You think it’s because you’re a woman that they’re trying to scare you into quitting?”
