Happy 4th of July everyone. Here's another chapter

Kayla's eyes were full of compassion, her jaw set and determined. It was the look she had had on her face from the moment Eve rushed out of Paige's room—before Kim could say more than her sister's name—screaming that her daughter was gasping for air. It was the same look that had always managed to give Kim some measure of comfort and calm. Even now, as fear for the girl she considered just as much her own granddaughter as Shane's crawled and twisted in the pit of her stomach. Not for the first time in her life, she was glad to have her sister with her in a crisis. Kim could only hope she projected half the confidence in a squeeze of Shane's hand, as she heard in Kayla's voice:
"Daniel, I need you in here, now!"
"A surgeon?" Eve spluttered. "My little girl needs surgery…what are you putting in her
IV?"
"General anesthesia," Kayla replied. "A tracheotomy's a simple procedure, but we will need you to sign some forms. Get the Lidocane," she instructed Daniel.
"Get the what?" Eve cried, as Shane pulled her from the room and closed the door behind Kim.
Maxine came around the nurses' desk. "Ms. Larson, you need to sign the highlighted areas."
Eve snatched the clipboard from her hands. "Will someone please give me a damn answer? What the hell is Lido—whatever?"
"Lidocane is a numbing agent," Marlena explained. "I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to overhear, but I can wait with you if you like."
"Please," whispered Shane.
"Thank you. Eve, I promise I will do anything I can to help you."
"You wanna help me, Marlena, tell me what's going on in there."
"All right. I expect Paige experienced some tracheal trauma from the strangulation. If I were Kayla and Daniel, I would insert a trach tube to help her breathe."
"Is it permanent?" Eve asked.
"No, but she will eventually need speech therapy."
Shane stood up.
"Daddy, where are you going?"
"I'm going to call Marcus Hunter at Hollywood Regional. See who he recommends in the field."

Ben pulled his surgical mask up higher so that no one would hear him laugh at the astonishingly stupid hospital staff. "And now you, 'Abigail Deveraux, Public Relations Assistant, you are going to get us exactly what we want." He held the ID card up to the scanner, and the locked door of the medicine room opened. "This is almost too easy…"

"I still don't like the idea of Paige being questioned," Eve sighed.
"No mama likes hearing what I'm about to say," Kimberly allowed, "but your baby's a woman now. A woman with plenty of birthdays ahead of her, because she's gonna make it out of this mess. Your father's using his connections to bring in some of the best specialists on both sides of the pond."
"You're right. I…I should focus on that."
"Yeah."
"Eve, what if I talked to her?" Marlena offered. "Nothing formal, just to see how she feels about all of this."
"I guess that would be all right. Would you, Marlena?"

Paige propped herself higher on the pillows as Marlena entered her hospital room. "I'm glad to see that your surgery went so well. May I sit?"
Paige gestured to the chair at her bedside. She reached for the dry erase board next to her: "What do you need, Dr. Evans?"
"Well, your mother asked me to have a chat with you. The Salem PD wants to send someone over to talk to you about the attack. Would you be all right with that?"
"'Do I have a choice?'" Marlena read. "There's always a choice. If you're uncomfortable I'll certainly make the recommendation that you do this some other time or not at all."
"I didn't his face."
"I understand that. Detective Hernandez has some recordings he'd like you to listen to. A voice line-up, but only if you're up to it."
"Okay."
"Okay?"
"Yeah. Send him in."
"I'll leave you two to it, then."

Paige had listened to four recordings and the man who attacked her; whose voice chased her through her dreams was still out there.
"That's not him," she wrote. "None of them are!"
Rafe knew now that they had been wrong to write Clyde Weston off as some redneck from Poplar Bluff, when it was clear he had a Houdini-like talent for escaping. Luckily, Hope had managed to send him a voice recording of Clyde from Florida where he was—surprise, surprise—a person of interest in a murder.
"All right," said Rafe. "Voice number five."
Paige grabbed the dry erase board, poised to ask if this would be the last one, but the gravelly-sounding voice of a man who'd had one too many cigarettes made her heart drop. Whatever he was really saying went over her head, as the echoes of her attack rang in her ears.
"Dead girls don't bite…dead girls don't bite…"
She burst out of the room feeling as unsteady as a baby colt. Kim caught her before she could fall, "I've got you, shhh, I've got you. You're safe now."
"Paige, I have to ask you one last thing."
"Haven't you done enough," Eve snapped, but Rafe ignored her.
"Paige, how do you know that man?" he asked. Without hesitation, Paige moved her hands toward her throat. "All right, we're gonna get him."
"Thank you, Rafe," Kim whispered. He nodded, speaking into his walkie-talkie as he walked away.
"This is Hernandez. I need someone to bring Weston in."

Ben froze as he finished picking the cabinet's emergency override lock. He hadn't counted on tripping a silent alarm. Maybe the people who worked here weren't as dumb as they'd seemed. His pulse quickening, he grabbed an indiscriminate handful of pill bottles and stuffed them into his briefcase. When he was sure that the dope of detective, Hernandez, was gone, he sidled through the emergency exit.