Third Grave Dead Ahead

Chapter 16

When I finally got home to my slightly-bigger-than-a-bread-box apartment, I realized how untidy I’d been keeping it. Garrett’s replacement had been outside the apartment building, waiting for us when we pulled up, and Garrett took off to catch some Z’s. Wuss.

But I was thankful he’d left when I stepped inside my humble abode. Either Mardi Gras had been celebrated really early and in my apartment, or my apartment had been ransacked. Big time. Apparently, the slashing of the tires was more than just a gut reaction to the big fat liar comment. It was meant to keep me busy while someone hightailed it to Albuquerque to check out my digs. And tear them apart. So uncalled for, in my opinion.

“Mr. Wong, what did I say about letting strangers in?” I glared at his bony shoulders, then glanced at the girl with the knife behind me and shook my head. “That man never listens.”

I scanned my living room. Papers and books cluttered the floor. Drawers sat open in different states of undress. Cabinet doors stood ajar, as though they’d been trying to fly.

Armed and ready with coffee carafe in hand, I crept to each closet — I only had two in the whole place — and peeked in. I would’ve had my gun, but it was in one of the closets, making the point moot. They’d been hit as well, their belongings strewn across the floor to mingle with underwear and shoes and hair scrunchies. People magazine mixed with The New Yorker. A crystal chess set mixed with my SpongeBob SquarePants edition of Monopoly. Utter chaos.

Still, it wasn’t vandalism for the sake of vandalism. It was more deliberate than it looked at first glance. Cabinets and drawers had been scoured for information, while anything inconsequential had been tossed aside, including my emergency stash of chocolate. Clearly my intruder had no taste.

My computer had been turned on as well, so unless Mr. Wong had discovered Internet porn, someone was trying to figure out what I’d been researching. And that someone seemed a tad nervous.

In a moment of horror, I realized my mouse was gone. Just … gone. Who would take a poor, defenseless mouse? I looked back at his wireless USB connector — he loved that connector — and let myself grieve the loss of the mouse I’d taken for granted far too often. Then I picked up my phone and called a semi-friend, a cop named Taft, to file a quick report. The cops can do nothing without reports, so I wanted them to have one on file.

“I can stop by if you need me to,” he said.

“No, whoever did this — and I have a good idea who it was — is long gone.” I gave Taft my statement over the phone.

“So, have you seen my sister?” Taft’s sister had died when they were kids and had been following him around his whole life.

“I think she’s playing with Rocket’s little sister at the asylum.”

I’d recently introduced the two girls, in a roundabout way, and they’d been inseparable ever since. A good thing, ’cause it got her out of my hair. But I suspected Taft missed her, even though he couldn’t see her and didn’t even know she’d existed until I told him a few weeks ago.

“Good,” he said, putting up a brave front. “I’m glad she has a friend.”

“Me, too. I’m going over to the office real quick to check on things there, just in case. I’ll call you back if anything’s askew.”

“Alone?”

“I can dial a phone all by myself, Taft.”

“No, are you going over alone? Maybe you should just call your dad and have him check it out.”

I glanced toward the girl at my side. “I won’t be alone. Not exactly. There’s a tiny dead girl with a knife following me at the moment.”

“TMI.”

“And the bar’s open. I doubt an intruder would go there with a dozen off-duty cops right below him.”

“Okay. Can I call your uncle to let him know?”

“No, he already knows it’s a cop hangout. And he’s probably already snoring like a buzz saw. I’ll call him tomorrow.”

Avoiding another lecture from Dad, I trudged over to the office and took the outside stairs to the front entrance instead of cutting through the bar. After a quick scan of the area to make sure Big Fat Liar was nowhere about, I unlocked the door and peeked inside. Everything looked fine and dandy. Which meant I had nothing left to do but clean my apartment. The only thing I hated worse than cleaning my apartment was torture, though the two were a hairsbreadth away from neck-and-neck.

I walked along the sidewalk back to the Causeway, regret eating at me at not having bought the golf cart, when I realized I had company. I could feel someone to my left in the shadows, but before I could get a good look, a car slowed in the street behind me. It kept pace without passing. I slowed my stride as the car followed. Garrett’s guy was parked across the street, but I couldn’t tell if he was awake or not. Awake would have been nice. As I rounded the building and cut across the parking lot, the car eased to a stop next to me.

The streetlight cast a soft reflection on the tinted glass as I took in the blue Nissan hatchback. The window slid down, so I figured I’d give the driver a moment of my time. It was probably too much to hope he just wanted directions.

“Charley?” a woman said from the inside. “Charley Davidson?” A head with curly brown hair leaned into the light, a supermodel smile on her face.

“Yolanda?” I asked. I hadn’t seen her since high school, and we’d never really been friends. I took a microstep closer as she nodded. She hadn’t changed a bit. In high school, she was more the cheerleader type, hung out with my sister’s crowd. I was more the annoying type that made fun of my sister’s crowd from a safe distance and hung out with losers, being a loser myself. Proud to say.

“I got the message your assistant left and tried your office, but you were already gone. And then I saw you walk up the stairs and figured I’d just catch you here.”

Two things struck me instantly: First, it was late to be visiting my office. Or any office, for that matter. Second, why not just call? Why drive all the way over at this hour? Her smile faltered for the barest instant, and a nuance of concern filtered its way toward me.

I plastered a smile on my face. “Thank you for coming. How have you been?” When her arms reached out the window toward me, I leaned in for a hug, awkward considering the limited space we had. “I’d invite you up to my place, but it’s kind of a mess right now.” I gestured over my shoulder with a nod.

“No problem. And I’ve been great. Three kids, two dogs, and one husband.” She laughed and I joined her. She seemed happy enough.

“Sounds busy. I just wanted to ask you some questions about a case I’m working on.”

“Your assistant told me.” The concern spiked again as her gaze did a quick perimeter check. “Do you want to just hop in? We can talk in the car.”

“Absolutely.” I cast a quick glance over my shoulder. Whoever was in the shadows looked on with interest. I could feel it. Maybe it was Garrett’s man. No one seemed to be in the car parked across the way. I headed around Yolanda’s Nissan as she unlocked the doors and raised her window. After I let myself in, I asked, “So everything’s been okay?”

“Wonderful,” she said, lowering the radio. She had yet to turn off the car. The heater was nice. “You’re working on a case that involves Nathan Yost?”

Right to the point. I liked that in an old acquaintance. “Yes. His wife is missing. You may have seen it on the news.”

“Along with other things.” She smiled sadly, and I realized she’d seen the report of the carjacking. “Are you okay?”

“Oh, that?” I waved a dismissive hand. “That was nothing. I’ve known the guy for ages. He was a perfect gentleman the whole time he held me at knife point.”

Suddenly her eyes sparkled with curiosity. “Will you tell me every single thing that happened? Were you scared? Did he threaten you?”

After a soft chuckle, I asked, “Watch a lot of crime shows?”

She nodded guiltily. “Sorry. I don’t get out much.”

“Not at all. Can you tell me what happened with Dr. Yost in college?”

Taking a deep breath, she said, “We dated for about a year. We were young and it all got serious pretty fast, but my parents refused to let us get married until after I’d graduated. It infuriated Nathan.” She shook her head, remembering back. “I mean infuriated him that they butted in to what he saw as none of their business. His reaction was so bizarre that it knocked me out of my trance. I started to open my eyes to what was really going on. In the year that we’d been dating, I’d lost almost all my friends, hardly ever saw my family, and rarely went anywhere without him. What I saw as charming at first became—” She struggled for the right word. “—well, suffocating.”

“I hate to say this, but you aren’t the first person to tell me that about him. Why did you press charges against him?”

“He used to tease me about what would happen to me if I ever left him. He would make it into a joke, and I would laugh.”

“Can you give me an example?” I had a hard time seeing a threat like that as something either of them would find comical.

“Well, once he said something like, ‘You know if you ever leave me, they’ll find your lifeless body at the bottom of Otero Canyon.’”

I offered her my best horrified smile, trying really hard to see the humorous side of that statement.

“I know,” she said, nodding in agreement, “I know it sounds horrible, but the way he’d say it, it was just funny. Then after my parents refused to let us get married, everything changed. He started pressuring me to elope, asked me over and over how I could let them interfere. And then the jokes became outright threats. He became unstable, and it dawned on me that he’d always been unstable, I’d just learned what to say and what not to say around him.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“Me?” she asked, surprised. “No. Not me. That’s not how he does things.”

My brows knitted in question.

“It took a lot of counseling for me to be able to say this, to come to this conclusion, but he was controlling me by controlling my environment. Who I hung out with. When I hung out with them. What I could talk about and what I couldn’t. He even monitored my phone calls.”

Classic domination.

“He never hurt me directly. He controlled me by hurting those around me.”

I had to wonder how he did it all. How he could be so controlling with a career like his, with the hours he must have kept. “But he did eventually threaten you?”

The sad smile she gave me made me realize I was wrong about that, too. She bowed her head and continued her story. “After my parents had put their foot down on the wedding plans, his animosity seemed to grow daily. And when I wouldn’t give in to his requests, he grew more and more furious until one day he just snapped out of it. Like a light switch had been turned off. He just, I don’t know, got happy again.”

“Sounds suspicious. Or drug induced.”

“It struck me that way as well, but I was just so relieved, that when he invited my parents to have dinner with us one evening, it never occurred to me that he could be up to something.”

“Let me guess. He made the dinner.”

“Yes. And it was wonderful until about halfway through, when my mother became violently ill. So much so, we had to take her to the emergency room.”

“Your mother?” I asked, surprised.

She nodded knowingly. “My mother. And while we waited out in the lobby, he leaned over to me and said, ‘It’s amazing how fragile the human body is.’ He looked at me then, practically confessing what he’d just done with a single, satisfied expression.” Her gaze turned desperate. “I was scared, Charley.”

I could imagine his face, his blue eyes cold and calculating. “Yolanda, anyone would have been scared.”

“No, I was terrified,” she said, shaking her head. “I could hardly breathe. When I got up to leave, he told me to sit back down. I refused, and he grabbed hold of my wrist, looked me square in the eye, and said, ‘She’ll be in the hospital all night. One stick is all it will take. Her heart will stop in seconds, and no one will be able to trace it back to me.’”

When Agent Carson had told me that over the phone, I’d just assumed he was talking about Yolanda. But he’d threatened her mother. “Yolanda, I’m so sorry.”

Nathan was beginning to sound like Earl Walker, and I wondered if the two were related. Earl would control Reyes by hurting his sister, Kim. Nathan would control his girlfriends and wives by hurting those around them as well. But neither Luther nor Monica had implied that he’d threatened them. They said he was controlling, manipulative, but he hadn’t harmed any of her family. Still, every sign did point in that direction. Teresa’s social activities had dropped to near nonexistent. She had to see her own sister in secret. Maybe he’d threatened them, but Teresa never admitted it, especially considering what Luther might do.

Yolanda’s fingers pressed to her mouth while she took control of her emotions. Sadness had permeated the interior of the car, saturating everything in it. “I sat back down and stayed by his side all night long, scared to death to leave him alone even for a minute. Then when they released my mother, I waited until he went to work, packed my stuff, moved back home, and filed charges against him.” She looked back at me. “But I think, as a way of getting revenge, he tried to hurt my niece.”

I blinked in surprise and angled to face her. “Why? What happened?”

She shook her head as though chastising herself. “It’s silly. I shouldn’t have said that.”

I decided not to push her, but my gut told me her gut was not far off the mark.

“He’s a monster, Charley,” she said, her voice breathy with suspicion, “and I would bet my life he had something to do with his wife’s disappearance.” She frowned hard. “If he couldn’t control her one way, he’d find another.”

Maybe he’d found out about Teresa seeing her sister every day and realized he couldn’t control her as well as he thought. Clearly, his answer to that was murder.

“Anyway,” she said, shaking off the sadness, “I knew I had to come talk to you, to warn you about him.”

“I appreciate this so much, Yolanda.”

“I think it’s so great what you’re doing.” She offered me an excited grin, apparently able to block pain and switch emotions in the blink of an eye. We were more alike than I’d ever imagined. “I mean, a private investigator? That’s like the epitome of cool.”

How sweet. Perhaps I shouldn’t have thrown spaghetti sauce in her hair that one night she was out with my sister and a group of their friends. “Thanks,” I said, all smiles.

“By the way, did you throw spaghetti sauce in my hair that one night I was out with your sister and a group of our friends?”

“What? No,” I said, feigning offense.

She snorted. “You’re not a very good liar.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. It was meant for Gemma. She’d stolen my sweater.”

“Then clearly she deserved a little marinara in her golden locks,” she said with a giggle.

“I know, right?”

I left Yolanda with a hug and a promise that I’d do everything I could to bring Dr. Nathan Yost to justice. But first, I simply had to find Teresa. Whatever he’d done with her, to her, it couldn’t be good.

As I walked back into the building, I looked again to my left, trying to figure out who had been in the shadows before. It couldn’t have been the intruder. I felt no resentment or desire to slit my throat with a big-ass hunting knife. Normally, I might have tried to discover the shadowy spy’s identity, but I was too tired and didn’t much care.

By the time I walked back up to my apartment, Cookie was standing smack-dab in the middle of it, her pajamas askew, her eyes wide in astonishment. She’d probably come over to discuss what happened in Corona and walked right into the war zone. I had no choice but to accuse her.

“Seriously, Cookie,” I said, walking up behind her. She jumped and turned toward me. “Was the cupcake remark really that offensive?”

“I didn’t even hear an intruder,” she said, gawking at the surroundings. “How did I miss this? What if Amber had come over to watch your TV?”

She had a point. “I’m sorry, Cookie.” I started picking up papers off the floor. “Being close to me is sometimes a very dangerous place to be.”

“What?” After my meaning sank in, she said, “Don’t be silly.”

I stood with an armful of notes and magazines. “Okay, but you’re raining on my parade. Being silly is kind of what I do.”

She bent to help me.

“Oh, no you don’t,” I said, scolding her. I took what she’d already gathered and led her out the door. “I’ll do this. You get some sleep.”

“Me?” she said, protesting. “You’re the one who’s taken up insomnia as a hobby.”

Since my arms were full, I nudged her out the door with my shoulder. “It’s not so much a hobby as a burning will to hold on to every ounce of self-respect I have left.” When she frowned, I added, “Admittedly, that’s not saying much. Oh, and tomorrow I want you to check out a Xander Pope.”

“Xander Pope. Got it,” she said without taking her eyes off the chaos. “Wait, why?”

“Because I think something very bad happened to his daughter, and I need to know what it was.” Yolanda only had one brother, so the niece she spoke of must be his. I wanted to know what happened.

“Ah,” she said, nodding. “Do you think Yost had something to do with it?”

“Yolanda does, and that’s good enough for me.”