Third Grave Dead Ahead

by Darynda Jones

  “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 mi
l?”

  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 t
ime 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.