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 To
help her friend Zack Kelton meet a potential girlfriend, Heather
Donnelly organizes, with Scott Clark, a double dinner with a pediatric
colleague from the hospital, Dr. Diane Bentley. Unfortunately, the
evening goes badly, as Heather and Scott fail to handle little Samantha
Capwell, whom they temporarily have in their care, and who cries
throughout the entire meal.
Nevertheless,
Diane still wants to see Zack again, and the very next day he invites
himself over to her place for dinner. But the evening is abruptly
interrupted by a terrifying phone call : the video rapist,
who has been haunting Santa Barbara for several weeks, calls Diane to
tell her he is watching her. From her window, she sees a man on the
street. Zack rushes out of the apartment and returns a few minutes later
with a black hood in his hand, claiming he tore it off the rapist and
even managed to see his face. Diane is terrified, but feels reassured by
Zack's presence.
She
continues to date him several times, eventually inviting him again to
dinner. As she begins to kiss him, Zack pulls back, explaining that he
does not want to rush their relationship. He suggests spending the night
with her, but chastely. Diane is surprised, yet accepts. She does not
seem too alarmed when she later catches Zack in the middle of the night,
half-dressed in her living room. In reality, he had just returned from
the hospital, where he quickly went to kill Jack, the homeless man he
claimed was the one he had taken the hood from a few nights earlier.
Diane
invites Zack to spend the night again, this time determined to finally
become intimate with him. But the moment turns into a fiasco : Zack
proves to be impotent. Diane tries to comfort him, but already
understands their relationship will not go any further.
Shortly
after, she experiences what is likely the most terrifying moment of her
life : coming home one evening, Diane finds a tripod camera set up in
the middle of her living room. As she tries to escape, the video
rapist forces his way in and rapes her. Injured and in shock,
she manages to reach the hospital, where Heather and Zack receive her.
A few
days later, when Adriana, Eden and Cruz Castillo's baby, is abducted
from the hospital by the video rapist, Diane is questioned
by Cruz. She does not know what information could possibly help him
track the criminal, until she notices on Zack the smell of medical
disinfectant soap that she had recognized from her rapist. She tells
Cruz and recounts the fiasco of her night with Zack, the eve of her rape.
Without realizing it, she sets Cruz on the right path.
Sadly,
Diane's key role in solving the case is never acknowledged, as she
disappears from the show right afterward. We never get to see her
reaction to the revelation that the video rapist all along
was Zack...
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