Lethal Exposure (9 page)

“Oh?”

“You’re getting a new patient.” Maxine slapped the patient notification summary on the desk in front of her, then lowered her voice. “It’s the actor Colin Cruz. He was in town filming a movie and apparently there’s a juicy scandal to go with it, but I don’t have the details. Maybe you’ll get it out of him in group.”

“And if I do, you’ll never know about it,” Julie replied. “We are called Confidential Rejuvenations for a good reason.”

“You’re so bad at gossip,” Maxine teased.

Any other day she might have gotten flustered at the thought of having Colin Cruz, one of the most handsome young movie stars in the business, as her patient, but today the only one who flustered her mind was Sebastian.

“Cruz is going by the name Joe Anderson,” Maxine continued. “He’s down in admitting right now. Dr. Carpenter’s already added him to this evening’s group session.”

“Thanks for the information.” Julie scooped up the notification summary and headed down the corridor to get ready for her illustrious new patient.

Fifteen minutes later Colin Cruz arrived on the floor, dressed all in black, wearing designer sunglasses and flanked by bodyguards. A thin, well-dressed gray-haired woman hurried along beside him. Heads swiveled as he went by and whispers rippled in his wake.

Julie escorted him to his room and recited the hospital rules and regulations. The actor never spoke a word. Instead, he stretched out on the bed with his shoes on and flipped on the television set. The gray-haired woman turned out to be his executive assistant, and she answered all of Julie’s questions about Colin’s medical history.

“Your first group session starts at six o’clock this evening,” Julie told Colin.

He grunted. He still had the sunglasses on so she couldn’t see if he was looking at her or not.

“You’re expected to be there,” she said firmly. The people who were admitted to the sexual dysfunction unit were almost always in crisis. Most often, they had hit bottom and were forced to admit their sexual behavior was out of control.

Julie thought about last night and swallowed. Was she on the verge of some kind of sexual addiction herself? Was that why she couldn’t stop thinking about Sebastian?

It was a disturbing thought. She’d seen firsthand how out-of-control sexual addictions and deviant sexual behavior could mess up promising lives.

Come on, you’re not a sex addict, nor are you a sexual deviant. Not according to the wild stories she heard in group. In fact, she was the opposite. Tame and dull and…

Oh, yeah? Who’s been having wild romps in the stable hayloft and a park by the lake at midnight?

Julie batted back the thoughts and finished getting the uncooperative Mr. Cruz ensconced in his room. Then she went to get a look at the physician’s admission orders that Maxine was in the process of inputting into the computer.

“By the way,” Maxine said, as Julie stood reading the orders over her shoulder. “Devi Parker is running late. She said you should start the six o’clock session without her.”

“She’s letting me start the session?” Julie asked, feeling excited. She’d never run a session without a supervisor in the room. This was her chance to show her mentor she could handle the group on her own.

“She’s only going to be five or ten minutes late, don’t get your hopes up,” Maxine said. “You won’t be getting your own group until you pass that exam.”

“Thanks for reminding me,” she mumbled.

Maxine smirked. “Hey, what are colleagues for?”

At six o’clock, Julie assembled the group in the meeting room, which had no windows to ensure complete privacy. The door also locked from the inside so no one could walk in on a session in progress. A red light over the door signaled to the staff when a session was taking place.

There were usually six to ten members in a group and the chairs were arranged in a circle without a table to interrupt the flow of conversation.

With the addition of Colin Cruz, this group was full. Julie sat in the circle with them, an empty chair to her left for Devi when she arrived. “The therapist is going to be a bit late today but she told me to go ahead and start the session. She’ll be joining us shortly. Everyone, as you can see we have a new patient in group today. Please welcome Joe Anderson.”

“He looks like Colin Cruz to me,” one of the male patients muttered. He was a sullen nineteen-year-old dressed in Goth attire with multiple piercings in odd places.

“It’s Confidential Rejuvenations’ policy never to violate anyone’s privacy. This is Joe Anderson, just like you’re Mike Brown,” Julie said. She turned to the young woman on her right. The girl had been at Confidential Rejuvenations for a couple of weeks and was making great progress in conquering her sexual need to dress like a bunny rabbit and rub up against people in a lewd manner. “Amanda, would you like to start?”

“So what’d you do, Joe?” Mike asked Colin Cruz with an upward jerk of his pierced chin. “Banged the wrong starlet? Is she some producer’s underage daughter or something? And now you’re off his movie set if you don’t go to sex rehab?”

“Mike,” Julie admonished the young man whose own father was a country-and-western chart-topping multimillionaire musician. Mike had been sent to Confidential Rejuvenations after being caught making and distributing tapes on the Internet of himself having sex with sixteen-year-old triplets. “You’re way out of line.”

Before Julie had time to react, Colin Cruz jerked his foot underneath the leg of Mike’s chair and tipped it over to upend the young man on his butt.

Colin leapt to his feet, put a boot to Mike’s throat and stared down at him. “You wanna know what I did?”

Mike’s eyes widened and he shook his head.

The pulse in Julie’s throat jumped. “Joe,” she said as sternly as she could. “Please take your seat.”

Colin ignored her. “I screwed a mobster’s wife while he was in the next room taking a nap. See, I got a thing for danger. It freakin’ turns me on.”

Mike was making choking noises.

“Joe!” Julie demanded. “Sit down now or I’ll call security.”

Hit the panic button, her instincts cried and she shot a glance at the red alarm button on the wall by the door.

But she didn’t want to do that. It was her first time leading the group alone. She’d be the laughingstock of the floor if she couldn’t handle a simple altercation between the patients.

“Dude,” one of the other group members, a lanky professional skateboarder said. “We’re being broadcast on the Web.”

Colin’s head jerked up and his eyes narrowed to slits at the skateboarder. “What are you talking about?”

The skateboarder held up his cell phone. “My friend just texted me. We’re live, dude. There’s a camera in this room.”

Slowly, Colin lifted his boot from Mike’s throat and stalked toward Julie.

He’s going to kill me.

Julie sprang to her feet, headed for the panic button.

“Where is it?” he demanded, placing himself between her and the panic button. “Where’s the camera”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You set me up.”

“I didn’t,” she denied.

That’s when she saw the switchblade in his hand.

AFTER HIS LATE-NIGHT tryst in the park with Julie, everything changed for Sebastian. He tackled the campaign with new vigor, determined to put in place the approved public relations plan so that it couldn’t fail to pull Confidential Rejuvenations’ reputation out of the skids.

That morning he’d gotten up earlier and had Julie’s car towed. He’d lavishly tipped the mechanic to put a rush on it and then he’d driven it to her condo, parked in the driveway and taken a cab to his hotel. He’d spent the rest of the day working on the computer, putting together a spreadsheet timeline of all the odd occurrences that had been attributed to the saboteur.

Part of him had hoped Julie would call when she got the little card he’d left her, but she hadn’t. It was okay. He’d give her space, let her come to him in her own time.

Finally, after hours of work, he stopped to take a break and order room service. He’d just bitten into a French-dip sandwich when his cell phone rang. He swallowed, dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Black?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, coming to attention at the sound of Dr. Jarrod Butler’s voice.

“We’ve got a problem.”

Tucking the phone against his chin, he scrambled to his feet. “What is it?”

“There’s been an incident here at the hospital and the place is crawling with media. We need a spokesman to deal with the upheaval.”

Sebastian jammed his feet into his shoes and rolled down the sleeves of his dress shirt. “Could you be a bit more specific?”

“I’ll explain everything when you get here.”

“I’m on my way,” he said, but Butler had already hung up, leaving him talking to a dial tone.

Sebastian’s mind conjured up a hundred different possibilities as he zoomed through the Saturday-evening traffic in his rented red Mercedes. What could have happened to cause such tension in Dr. Butler’s voice?

Ten minutes later, he reached the security gates of Confidential Rejuvenations to witness a cadre of media vans parked along the sides of the road. Camera crews hung about and he spied a couple of intrepid reporters trying to scale the eight-foot-high privacy fence erected around the grounds. Armed security guards with their hands on the butts of their gun holsters were shouting at them to get down or they’d be arrested for criminal trespassing.

The security guard at the gate recognized Sebastian and let him through while two other security guards held the surge of paparazzi at bay.

The parking lot was a hodgepodge of haphazardly parked cars. He quickly spied Butler and Covey and Senator Robert Garcia, along with Tanner Doyle and a fortysomething woman in a white lab coat that he’d never met before, conferring outside the doctors’ entrance to the hospital.

Sebastian trotted over.

“Thank God you’re here,” William Covey said and clapped him on the back.

Jarrod Butler shoved his hands through his thinning hair. “This is a PR nightmare.”

“What’s going down?” Sebastian asked, his body strumming with adrenaline. These were the moments he lived for. Swooping in, saving the day.

“Colin Cruz has taken a roomful of sex addicts hostage,” Robert Garcia supplied.

Sebastian swung his gaze to the senator. It wasn’t a statement he ever thought he’d hear. It sounded so comical that he almost smiled. But from the looks on their faces this wasn’t the time or place for levity.

“Colin Cruz, the actor?”

“Yes, you know. Four Guns of Calderone, Minnie and Steve, Last Train to Pittsburgh. He won an Oscar for his role as hit man Handy Andy in Last Train to Pittsburgh,” said Dr. Covey, who clearly kept abreast of movies.

Sebastian knew who Colin was. The studly young actor lived not far from his home in Beverly Hills. He’d even seen Colin in the organic foods market shopping for vegan fare. “How did this come about?”

“It’s my fault,” said the woman, who extended her hand to Sebastian. “I’m Devi Parker, the therapist in charge. I was late and I told the nurse who normally assists me to go ahead and begin the session. She’s very competent, even though she doesn’t yet have her certification. But I didn’t know Colin Cruz had just joined us or I never would have allowed her to start group with an unknown entity.”

Dr. Butler glanced over his shoulder and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Let’s talk in Tanner’s office.”

They trooped inside and reconvened in the security office, which was housed in the hospital basement safely out of earshot of the paparazzi.

“Have you notified the police?” Sebastian asked Tanner.

Tanner shook his head and shot a glance at Butler, Covey and Garcia. “They wanted me to wait, but I think we’re in over our heads and we need a hostage negotiator.”

Sebastian settled himself on the corner of Tanner’s desk. “That’s good that you didn’t call the authorities. If we can keep the cops out of it I might be able to turn this whole thing around.”

“Are you trained at hostage negotiation?” Tanner’s tone was sarcastic.

“If you let me do my job, there will be no need for hostage negotiation,” Sebastian said smoothly, a smile affixed to his face. He was accustomed to this sort of reaction. He didn’t take it personally. “Now tell me exactly what transpired.”

“Julie DeMarco was leading a group session for sex addicts. Colin Cruz was admitted this afternoon for treatment and it was his first time in group,” Dr. Butler explained. “We had no idea he was so volatile.”

“Julie.” Her name escaped Sebastian lips without him even being aware he’d spoken. At the mention of her name his stomach torqued and all the moisture drained from his mouth.

“That’s right. At some point during the first few minutes of the session, Colin took Julie and the nine other people in the room as hostages.”

Sebastian’s breath stilled in his lungs and he felt as if he’d just been kicked in the gut. “Does he have a gun?”

“He has a knife,” Tanner said.

Sebastian crossed his arms over his chest and tried to appear calm and fully in control, when he was feeling anything but calm and controlled. He wanted to wrap his hands around that son-of-a-bitch Cruz and throttle him. If he harmed one hair on Julie’s head…