Third Grave Dead Ahead (33 page)

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.