Third Grave Dead Ahead

Chapter 23

“You had to shout it?” Cookie asked, literally bitching all the way out of the stupid mine. “At the top of your freaking lungs?”

We were covered from head to toe in dirt and some kind of root system. “Now is not the time, Cook,” I ground out as we struggled to get Teresa from the mine.

“This is where I get off,” Hardy said. I started to protest, but he tipped his helmet and with a soft, “Ma’am,” disappeared.

Then Uncle Bob rushed in, and a wave of relief washed over me. However, the look of shock on his face proved that either he had no faith in me whatsoever and was taken aback by my success in finding Teresa Yost, or I looked worse than I thought.

Agent Carson was there, too. Though I’d never seen her before, I recognized her instantly. Her looks matched her voice perfectly. Short dark bob, solid build, intelligent eyes. She hurried forward, and together with Uncle Bob took Teresa out of our arms. Before they’d gotten two feet, Luther Dean rushed in as well, ducking at the entrance and taking over for Agent Carson.

“Luther,” Teresa said, surprised he was there.

The smile that warmed his face was simply charming. “You never call. You never write.”

A soft laugh escaped her despite everything.

Carson turned back to me, and I tried to raise my hand to shake hers, but my muscles had completely given out. Though they did twitch occasionally. An officer helped Cookie outside while Agent Carson took my arm to help me, careful not to get too close. Dust still lingered in the air from the latest cave-in.

“I can’t believe you did it,” she said, shaking her head as daylight blanketed us.

“I get that a lot.” My hair was so caked with dirt and rocks, it actually hurt. Then again, I did get pummeled by a boulder the size of Long Island.

“I left the flashlight inside,” Cookie said over her shoulder, suddenly remembering.

“Well, you’d best go back and get it. It’s not like I can get another one at pretty much any store between here and Albuquerque.”

She snorted the likelihood of that happening. I couldn’t wait to tell her about Hardy. I’d have to come back someday, get to know him better — another cave-in sounded down the shaft, sending a wave of dirt billowing out the opening — or not.

I saw Rescue hustling up the trail carrying an aluminum litter, bags of medical supplies, and a flashlight I was certain I could talk them out of. And Rescue was built. All three of them, in fact. Tall. Nice tone. Good overall posture.

“Who’s the help?” I asked Carson.

“Your uncle brought them.”

“Nice of him.”

We stopped a moment to admire the view. “Sure was,” she said. “By the way, I couldn’t get a copy of the message the first Mrs. Yost left on the doctor’s answering machine before she mysteriously died in the Cayman Islands. Apparently, the investigator didn’t actually hear it for himself. Just took Yost’s word for it, since it wasn’t a suspicious death.”

“That’s odd,” I said, my eyes still glued to Search, Rescue, and Just Plain Hot. “I don’t think he had any intention of killing his wife this go-around. Somewhere in their relationship, she caught on. I think he was trying to kill somebody else entirely.”

“Mind if I ask who?”

“Can you give me half an hour to confirm my suspicions?”

She turned to me. “How about thirty minutes?”

I planted my best smile on her. “I’ll take it.”

Luther carefully helped Teresa onto the litter as his other sister, Monica, came running up the trail. My heart lurched at the sight of her. I wanted to run to her, explain what had been happening, but she was really busy.

“Teresa!” she shouted, tears streaming in rivulets down her face. “Oh, my god.” She rushed up to them, threw her arms around her brother for a quick hug, then took her sister’s hand as Rescue strapped Teresa in and started an IV drip. The emotion pouring out of Monica felt like cool water rushing over me, refreshing and pure.

Luther walked back to me then, amazed. My ego was taking quite the beating.

“You did it,” he said.

I grinned as Agent Carson nodded and stepped away. “So I’ve heard.”

He shook his head. “I owe you.”

“You’ll get a bill,” I promised.

He laughed out loud, too happy to care about much of anything other than his sister.

I turned to Cookie and gave her a thumbs-up. “We can totally eat this month.”

“Yes!” she said as Uncle Bob helped her onto a big boulder. “I’ve had my eye on a low-carb diet you’re going to love.”

“I said we could eat. I didn’t say anything about eating healthy.”

Uncle Bob walked up to me. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Did Yost do this?”

“In a roundabout way.” Yost may not have used the ATV and winch to sabotage the mine as I’d originally suspected, but he drove Teresa to desperation, in ways I doubted she was even aware of. I led Uncle Bob a little farther into the trees as everyone worked around us. Talking quietly, I said, “You have to keep an open mind.”

“My mind is always open,” he said, slightly offended. “Twenty-four/seven.” When I offered him my best glare of doubt, he waffled. “Okay, six/five, at the least. What’s up?”

I leaned into him. “I think, and this is a big think, Nathan Yost is doing what he does. He’s trying to control Teresa by controlling her environment.” I put my arm on Ubie’s, begging for an ounce of faith. “I think he’s trying to kill Teresa’s sister, Monica.”

Uncle Bob frowned, looked back toward the crowd before refocusing on me. “That could be hard to prove.”

After releasing the breath I’d been holding, I fought the urge to hug his neck. Displays of affection made him uncomfortable, which was exactly why I utilized them as often as I did. But I wanted him on my side on this.

“I have a plan, but we’re going to have to work fast,” I said as Dr. Nathan Yost hurried up the trail, still in his lab coat.

Angel was behind him, caught sight of me, offered a salute, then disappeared, his job apparently done. I could hardly blame him. He was a teenager, after all. Keeping confined to one place too long was tantamount to torture.

I glanced back at Yost. While the practiced look on his face was one of utter relief, the emotion in his heart was not happiness, nor was it disappointment, as might have been expected had he been responsible for the cave-in. It wasn’t anger or resentment or fear. It was … a whole lot of nothing. No emotion that I could feel whatsoever. At least until he caught sight of Luther and Monica. Then emotion reared within him. And it was most decidedly resentment in the worst way possible. I realized in that instant how he saw them. As enemies. Barriers. Obstacles he had to get past.

Still, if my suspicions were right, Teresa did all this to leave him, which put her in mortal danger. The statement he’d made to Yolanda Pope all those years ago when they were in college rose to the surface of my dirt-covered brain. One stick is all it will take. “She’s not out of the woods yet,” I said to Uncle Bob. “Keep someone on her.”

“Absolutely.” He eyed the doctor with that hard gaze of his I knew and loved so well. Unless it was directed at me.

“Oh, and I need you to gather a few things and meet me at the hospital, including a bottle of flavored sparkling water.”

He glanced back at me. “You doin’ healthy now?”

I grunted. “Not likely. When all this is said and done, I’m heading straight for Margaritaville.”

Since it took me over an hour to get back to Albuquerque, a little over half that to shower and change into clean clothes, then another forty-five minutes for Uncle Bob to get a warrant to search the Yosts’ house, I had to call Agent Carson and give her the bad news. It took me longer to figure out how to prove the doctor’s guilt than the thirty minutes we’d originally agreed upon, but considering travel time and the fact that cleanliness was next to godliness, she said we were still good. Which, whew.

Teresa Yost’s leg didn’t require surgery. They’d set it and wheeled her to a private room when she suddenly needed more tests, thanks to Uncle Bob and his wily ways with the women. Namely a nurse who looked at Ubie like he was a sugary morsel dipped in chocolate.

A couple of cops posing as orderlies wheeled Teresa into a labor and delivery room that contained some very interesting equipment. It made me only slightly less comfortable than that time I got to sit in an actual electric chair. You know, for giggles. As the men left, I stepped inside with a nod and closed the door. The lights had been turned low, and Teresa lay on the gurney half asleep as a result. She’d been covered in pale blue hospital gowns, and her leg, which had been propped up by pillows, had a temporary brace on it until the swelling went down enough for a cast.

“Teresa?” I said, inching toward her.

She blinked her eyes open and drew her brows together.

“I’m Charlotte Davidson. You might remember me from the mine?”

Her eyes registered recognition. “Yes. You found me.”

I nodded and stepped closer. “I’m not sure how much you can recall. I’m a private investigator. Luther and Monica hired me. Kind of.”

She smiled sleepily at the mention of their names.

I needed to hurry. Yost would know there was no reason for Teresa to be in a delivery room unless she was seriously holding out on him. Thankfully, he had rounds to make.

“We don’t have much time, Teresa, so I’m going to sum up what I know happened and what I think happened and see where we stand. Is that okay?”

Her mouth thinned with worry, but she nodded.

“First, I know you sabotaged the mine.” When she looked away without arguing, I continued. “You used the ATV and the winch to loosen the beams along the shaft. But I don’t think you meant to be in it when it collapsed.”

“I forgot to leave my cell phone,” she said weakly, embarrassment wafting off her. “I went back in to leave it with my stuff so they’d think I was still in there.”

“And that’s when it collapsed.”

With a hesitant nod, she confirmed what the miner had said. “The mines are so deep, they’d stop looking eventually.”

“But before you did all this, you took out a life insurance policy on yourself for your sister, so she could get medical help.”

She turned an astonished expression on me.

“Somehow,” I continued, “you found out about Nathan’s first wife. You found out he killed her when she tried to leave him.”

Her expression didn’t waver.

“He smothers you. Tries to control every aspect of your life.”

A hint of shame flitted across her face.

“And you wonder how it could have come to this. How it could have gone so far.”

“Yes,” she whispered, the shame evident in her crinkled chin.

“Teresa, your husband is very good at what he does. He’s a practiced surgeon in both the physical and the emotional realms. He knew what he was doing. He knew how to control you. That you wouldn’t tell your brother what was going on, because you were afraid of what Luther would do.”

A soft gasp echoed in the room, confirming everything I’d just said.

“Why should your brother have to pay for your mistakes, right? He would have hurt Nathan. Possibly killed him and then paid the price for the rest of his life.”

Her nod was so slight, I almost missed it.

“So you took out the insurance policy, planned your escape, and tried to disappear. But you would never have left your siblings completely. You would have gotten them word that you were okay somehow, and Nathan would have figured it out, hon. He would have come after you. Or Luther would have ended up killing him when he found out why you’d left. Either way, it would have ended badly.”

She pressed her mouth together and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to stop the tears that had gathered there.

“But what you did was so brave, Teresa. I admire you more than you will ever know.”

“It was stupid.”

“No.” I put a hand over hers. “It was selfless.”

She covered her mouth with the sheet and sobbed a full minute, and the sadness emanating from her was like a force field pushing against me. Taking deep breaths, I pushed back, fought to stay by her side.

“I was pregnant,” she said, her breath hitching in her chest. “I think … I think he gave me something. I got really sick one night and then lost the baby.”

My teeth slammed together. I didn’t know that part, and my heart ached for her loss. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.” Taking her hand into mine, I said, “Teresa, I have to tell you something, but you have to be very strong and know that I am working with the police and the FBI to stop it.”

Without looking at me, she nodded, still lost in her grief.

I hated to tell her now, but she had a right to know. “I think he’s been poisoning your sister.”

Her attention flew to me again, aghast.

“The sparkling water that you bring her every day. He would have known you weren’t drinking it. You weren’t getting sick. Your sister was.”

Both hands covered her mouth in horror.

“We had a warrant issued for your house,” I said, rushing to assure her we were taking care of it. “We’re having it tested now.”

“How can you possibly—?”

“Her fingernails. She has what’s called Aldrich-Mees’ lines.” When Teresa scanned the images in her memory and nodded absently, I continued. “Those are a symptom of heavy metal poisoning. It could be something like thallium or even arsenic.”

Before Teresa could react, we heard the nurse outside. “Dr. Yost,” she said, sounding surprised.

I hurried to the door and opened it a fraction of an inch.

“Have you seen my wife?” he said, looking around with a confused expression on his face. He frowned at the two orderlies who were standing around doing a whole lot of nothing.

One of them cleared his throat and pulled up his scrubs in discomfort.

“No,” the nurse said, pulling the doctor’s attention back to her. “Isn’t she in her room?”

“She was, but … never mind. I’ll check again.”

“Nice to see you,” she said with a smile. Then she turned to the door and rolled her eyes at me through the crack.

I waved her forward before rushing back to Teresa’s side. “I have to get you back.”

“How could I be so stupid?” she asked as the nurse unlocked the bed so the men could roll her out.

“Chin up, hon,” I said, scanning the area before we snuck her through the delivery waiting area. “He won’t ever do this again.”

The fact that he’d gone after Yolanda’s family summed it all up for me. Yost had done everything to keep Yolanda under his thumb. Same with his first wife, Ingrid. I had a sneaking suspicion he’d killed Ingrid’s mother, and when Ingrid found out, she ran. In turn, Yost took the only recourse he had left. He killed her. He might have done the same to Yolanda if she hadn’t been protected, insulated by a caring family.

Teresa had figured it out. What he’d done to his first wife. The consequences of her leaving. But she’d never dreamed he was trying to control her another way. He knew she was seeing her sister. He knew she was taking Monica the mineral water, so he laced it with just enough arsenic to make her sick, punishing Teresa for defying him and getting an obstacle out of the way at the same time. That was why the doctors couldn’t pinpoint the problem. She was being slowly and methodically poisoned.

I left Teresa in the capable hands of two officers in scrubs and scrambled to make sure the scene had been set. Thanks to Uncle Bob, it had. Half an hour later, I stood in a quiet corner of the Presbyterian hospital with a magazine covering half my face, conspicuously trying to seem inconspicuous as the blond-haired, blue-eyed devil walked toward me. He stopped at the nurse’s station to sign a chart, then continued my way.

“Ms. Davidson, I can’t tell you how much you’ve done for me,” Yost said.

I let a slow, calculating smile spread across my face. “Yeah, I bet. Can we talk?”

He frowned, then glanced around. “Is something—?”

“Look, Keith…,” I said, letting the name sink into him a moment before I slipped a manila envelope out of the magazine, held it up with raised brows, and waited. When his features smoothed from confusion to something akin to a used car salesman ready to bargain, I pointed to the supply closet and headed that way. “Coming?” I asked over my shoulder.

He followed.

After we stepped inside, he locked the door and glanced behind the shelves to make sure the room wasn’t occupied. Then he stepped toward me, his façade, his charming demeanor, all but gone, completely replaced with the calculated actions of a criminal.

“What’s this about?” he asked, clearly hoping I didn’t know everything. A fruitless endeavor, as my knowledge was definitely the fruity type.

“It’s about several things, Keith. Do you mind if I call you Keith?”

“Yes, actually, I do. What do you want?”

I let a lazy smile spread across my face. “Money.”

After he sized me up a long moment, he said, “Figures. You bitches are all alike.” He took hold of my jacket then and braced me against the metal shelves. I let him. I even placed my elbows on a shelf behind me while he felt me up.

He was nowhere near interested in me. His interests leaned toward self-preservation. But he opened my jacket and unbuttoned my shirt while keeping his eyes locked on to mine. When he got to the bottom button, he jerked the shirt out of my jeans and sent his hands behind me, feeling along the waistband of my jeans and the back of my bra. His hand brushed across the tender part of my back, and I bit back a gasp. He didn’t notice. Luckily he was a doctor and saw half-naked chicks regularly. Otherwise, this whole thing could have been embarrassing.

Satisfied I wasn’t wearing a wire, he took the manila envelope from my hand and opened it. It was all the research we’d done on him. Copies of the investigation on the man who’d forged papers for him with the name Keith Jacoby right beside his, a hotel receipt with the same name showing he was there on the day his first wife had died, a copy of a police report from this very hospital stating that several vials of a powerful muscle relaxant I couldn’t pronounce had gone missing on the day Yolanda Pope’s niece almost died. And so on, and so on.

I buttoned my shirt while he perused the papers. To say he was surprised would be an insult to the word. He was stunned, unable to believe I’d put it all together. Well, with the help of a lot of other people, but still.

He stuffed the contents back into the file, but his face showed no emotion, except of course those involuntary reflexes that poker players all over the world would pay big bucks to eliminate entirely.

“This has nothing to do with Teresa’s disappearance.”

“Oh, I think it does. It shows the lengths to which you’re willing to go to be the homicidal control freak we all know and love.”

He held up one of the printouts. It was a copy of the insurance policy Teresa had taken out. “I told Agent Carson. I didn’t take out this ridiculous policy on Teresa. She did. She took one out on me and one on herself. I had nothing to do with it.”

“Maybe you did,” I said with an indifferent shrug, doing my best to protect Teresa, “maybe you didn’t. But it sure looks bad, in my opinion.” If he knew she’d been planning to leave him, there was no telling what he’d do to her.

“How much do you want?” he asked.

I maneuvered myself so that when he faced me, the hidden camera would pick him up. It was in the wall clock. An old trick, but a good one. I walked to the wall and leaned against it just underneath the clock.

“Well, Keith,” I said — I couldn’t help myself, “you seem to be doing very well in the net-worth department. How about an even mil?”

He scoffed, then leveled a really angry glower on me. “You’ve got to be kidding.” He folded the envelope and stuffed it into the back of his pants. His light coloring made the emotion rushing through him turn his skin a ruddy shade of scarlet.

“I have another copy, don’t worry.”

A wave of anger and panic washed over him. “How can I get that one as well?”

“I told you,” I said with a smile, “by giving me lots and lots of money.”

He turned from me, his fury almost uncontrollable. Seems the charmer had a temper after all. “I don’t have that kind of money,” he said, dropping all pretense. “Why the fuck—?” He stopped before incriminating himself any further.

I needed to give him more incentive. Perhaps the threat of imminent death would do the trick. “Let me assure you,” I said, offering him my own poker face, “I have one and only one copy of that file you’re holding. I won’t make another. It goes to the highest bidder.”

Surprised, he stepped back, his gaze darting along the floor in thought before returning to me. “You’re bluffing. The cops won’t pay for this information.” A triumphant smile slid across his face. “They’ll arrest you for withholding evidence. It’ll be useless in court.”

With every ounce of my being, I wanted to snort. Useless? In his dreams. He was playing me, so I’d play him. “I have no intention of handing this information over to the police. I said the highest bidder, not the most desperate.” Uncle Bob was going to kill me for that statement.

He fixed a suspicious frown on me. “Then who are you talking about?”

“I have someone in mind who’d be willing to pay lots of money for that information.” I nodded, indicating the file he’d stashed. “A man with a vested interest in the health of your wife.”

The moment realization dawned, a stupefying kind of dread fired his synapses and flooded his nervous system. I could feel it weigh him down like cement blocks on the feet of a drowning man. But he decided to keep up the pretense. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

“Okay.” I shrugged and headed for the door, when he grabbed my arm none too gently and jerked me toward him.

“Who is it?” he asked, curious now, wondering if I really knew who’d pay good money for his life.

With a roll of my eyes, I said, “Luther, Dr. Yost. Luther Dean.”

The emotion that swept over him was hard to put into words, but if I had to, I’d say it was one part astonishment and two parts paralyzing terror. I realized in that moment that he’d had a run-in with Luther at some point. He was too afraid not to have. I found the idea fascinating. Clearly Luther had been holding out on me.

Left with no other choice, he ran back to what he knew. A curtain fell over the second act, and the third stepped through it into the spotlight. He pressed his mouth together, regret and shame saddening his features as he amped up the lost-puppy expression he’d used so successfully over the years. I tried not to giggle.

“Charlotte,” he said, his voice soft, hesitant, “I know you have no reason to trust me, but I felt a connection to you from the moment we met. I can explain everything, if you’ll just give me a chance.”

“Really?” With my best doe-eyed expression, I stepped closer. My breath quickened — mostly because I threw up a little in my mouth — and I bit my bottom lip in uncertainty before I said, “Because I’d have to be all kinds of stupid to trust you at this point, Keith.”

He clamped his jaw together and turned away from me.

“How many have you killed now? Let’s count,” I said, holding up my thumb. “Okay, there’s Ingrid, but that’s a given.”

“Shut up,” he said, a sharp edge to his voice.

“But I’ve just started. Ingrid’s mother,” I continued, holding up my index finger. “Yolanda’s niece.” When the stillness of utter shock came over him, I said, “Oops, never mind. She lived, thank goodness. No thanks to you. I wonder what that little girl’s father, Xander Pope, would pay for this information? Maybe he and Luther could go Dutch.” He took a menacing step closer, so I brought out the big gun, the one thing that would send him running for the hills. “Oh, and let’s not forget Teresa’s sister, Monica.”

He stopped, his eyes widening a split second before he caught himself.

“Arsenic in the sparkling water? Really, Nathan? That’s the best you could do?”

His jaw dropped a solid two inches as he gazed at me.

“Yep. I know it all. Along with all those receipts and reports and things you stuffed down the back of your pants — not that I would touch them now — I figure you’ll get a fairly long sentence if Luther doesn’t get to you first.”

He stood without moving, his mind racing a mile a minute.

“Now you’ve done harm to two of Luther’s sisters. I doubt he’ll see the bright side of any of this.”

“I … I can try to scrape something up,” he said at last.

“You’d best have a really sharp scraper, ’cause I ain’t cheap, Keith.”

He glanced around like a cornered animal before refocusing on me. “Will you meet me tonight? We can discuss this, make arrangements.”

That time I did snort. “So you can kill me and bury my lifeless body in a shallow grave?”

He closed his eyes and shook his head. “I would never do that to you.”

Oh, for the love of chocolate. I needed to throw a ticking bomb into the mix.

“Actually, I’m having dinner with Luther Dean tonight. Seems he was quite taken with me, or so his sister says.”

With a frustrated sigh, he scrubbed his fingers over his face. I could imagine the walls closing in on him as his options dwindled down to nonexistent.

“I can get you a hundred grand right now,” he said.

“Cash? Small, nonsequential bills?”

He nodded. “I can get you more later.”

“And I’m just supposed to trust you’re good for the rest? A man who kills wives for a living?”

He lowered his head. “If you had known my first wife. If you’d seen what kind of woman she was. Hateful and materialistic.”

“Like you?”

Fury reared inside him, but he stayed calm on the outside. “You have no idea what she was like.”

“You mean, besides alive?”

He turned from me for something like the tenth time, the melodramatic move losing its efficacy, but he had a decent-enough ass. “She was going to take everything from me. Everything I’d worked for. I couldn’t let that happen.”

Better. We were definitely getting there. “So, you killed her?” When he didn’t answer, I added, “Wouldn’t a good lawyer have sufficed?”

With a contemptuous sneer, he said, “So she could lie in court? Tell the judge I’d beat her or something?”

“Did you?”

He snarled, so I moved on.

“Fine,” I said, drawing in a deep breath, “let’s pretend for a moment I believe you, and you had no choice. What about Monica? What did she ever do to you?”

He visibly struggled to brace himself for what he was about to tell me. Either that or he had to go number two. “She was trying to steal Teresa away from me, telling her I wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t fit in.”

I gasped. “Then by all means, let’s poison her until her kidneys fail.”

That coaxed a smile out of him. “That’s going to be a bit tough to prove, don’t you think?”

I couldn’t argue with that. It would be hard to prove. With head bowed in defeat, I said, “You’re probably right.” Then I perked up. “Or I could just give the cops the bottles of sparkling water I found in your garage and watch you go up the river for thirty to life.”

He didn’t even try to defend himself. “Ever heard of the term chain of custody?”

“Ever heard of the term Luther Dean don’t give a shit?”

Yost studied me a long moment, probably trying to figure out how best to kill me without raising undue suspicion. It was time to raise the stakes.

“The way I see it, this all boils down to three options.”

“I told you, I can pay. You just have to give me time.”

“One, I sell all this to Luther Dean.”

“Are you even listening to me?”

“I’m listening,” I said with an annoyed nod. “You’re option two.”

He frowned. “Then what’s three?”

“I turn all this over to Agent Carson and see what she thinks.”

He decided to call. “Fine. Turn it over to her. You can’t prove anything.”

Damn. Any lawyer worth his weight could explain away everything he’d said so far. I needed something solid. Something irrefutable. Maybe I’d gone about this wrong. Maybe I should have used my feminine wiles on him.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said, stepping around him to leave, “let me find out what Luther’s highest bid is, then I’ll get back with you.”

He grabbed my arm again as I tried to walk past. “What will it take?”

Exasperated, I said, “I told you, a million clams.” A spark of happiness jumped inside me. I’d always wanted to use the term clams in a real conversation. “But let me see what Luther is willing to pay before I commit to that.”

He pulled me closer, fury sizzling around him. “Do you really think you’re just going to walk out of here?”

“That was the general plan, yes.” I wondered if it was too late to invoke my feminine wiles.

“Then you’re stupider than you look,” he said, wrapping one hand around my throat.

Yeah, it was probably too late.

He picked me up and slammed me against the shelves, guiding my head to a sharp corner, obviously hoping it would crack my head open and I’d bleed to death. Honestly, the man was an imbecile. Several people saw us come in together. What was he going to tell them? That I’d slipped and fell against the corner of a shelf that was actually taller than I was?

The guy would never learn. But before I could practice any of the fancy martial arts I’d learned in that two-week annex course, my head exploded with the fire of a thousand suns. An excruciating agony shot to the very core of my being. My eyes watered and I bit down to ride out the waves of pain. He let me drop to the ground but kept his hand around my throat and squeezed. Because bruises in the shape of his fingers wouldn’t be incriminating at all.

Uncle Bob chose that moment to storm the place, and Yost stumbled back in surprise. I rolled over onto my side to catch my breath. Both hands locked on to my head as I curled into a cheese ball.

“Uncle Bob,” I said in a super annoyed, my head is killing me voice, “you’re too early.”

I could see Yost out of the corner of my eye, the expression on his face priceless. He glanced at Ubie, then back at me, his mouth open in shock as an officer spouting the Miranda led his hands behind his back to be cuffed.

“I suppose I could’ve waited until he actually killed you,” Ubie said, helping me up. “With the other evidence, we got plenty, pumpkin.”

I grabbed for the stability of the shelf as Uncle Bob clutched me.

He brushed the hair out of my eyes. “You okay?”

After bringing my other hand forward to gloat about all the gushing blood I’d accumulated, I said, “There’s not a drop.” I turned my hand over in case I missed any. “There’s no blood whatsoever. How am I not bleeding to death right now? ’Cause that freaking hurt.” I said the last through gritted teeth while glaring at Yost.

In a fit of anger — or epilepsy, it was hard to tell — he ripped his yet-to-be-cuffed hand from the officer and lunged at me. I had no idea what he’d hoped to gain. Half a second before he was slammed onto the concrete floor, he’d grabbed a handful of shirt. The experienced officers took him down fast, and I went with him with a squeak of surprise, my shirt ripping all the way. I prayed to God the hidden-camera recording would never leave the evidence room. Ubie helped me up a second time, and I tried to give the girls their privacy, but with only half a shirt, it was difficult.

I collected myself the best that I could, then looked down at Yost. “This is so going on my bill.”

He growled under the officers’ weight as they cuffed him before dragging him to his feet and escorting him out of the hospital. The accumulation of dropped jaws as every head turned to watch in disbelief would have been humorous if my head didn’t hurt so bad.

Uncle Bob stayed behind with me. “So,” he said, watching them walk away, “are you going to call Agent Carson with the good news, or shall I?”

“You can do it,” I said, suddenly despondent. Was Yost just being mean, or did I really look stupid? “Just make sure Luther Dean isn’t anywhere nearby when you call her.”

“Why?”

“For one thing, he’s big.”

“And two?”

“His name is Luther, if that tells you anything.”

“Got it.”