Third Grave Dead Ahead

  But for him to say that I’d summoned him just didn’t make sense. I’d have to look into that one.

  “How long have you been awake?”

  I snapped back to Garrett and looked at my watch. Or, well, my wrist where my watch would have been had I remembered it. “Um, about thirteen days.”

  He seemed to still beside me. I couldn’t be sure, though. I was drifting in and out of reality, if the little girl with the kitchen knife on his hood was any indication. I suppose she could have been a departed, but they rarely rode on hoods.

  “Look, I realize you’re different than the average human,” Garrett said, his tone guarded, “but thirteen days without sleep can’t be good for anyone, not even you.”

  “Probably not. Did you buy a new hood ornament?”

  He glanced at his hood. “No.”

  “This doctor have a name?”

  He reached across my lap into the glove box and pulled out a card. “Here’s his info. He’s supposed to go to your office this morning if you make it in.”

  Dr. Nathan Yost. “I’ll make it in. Is he a friend of yours?”

  “Nope. He’s an asshole. But everyone else on planet Earth seems to worship him.”

  “All righty, then.” I tried to stuff the card into a pocket, then realized I didn’t have any. “Hey, I left my bag in Misery.”

  Garrett shook his head. “The things you say, Charles. Oh, I keep meaning to tell you, I’ve been working on a special list of things one should never say to the grim reaper.”

  I chuckled. “I have so many comebacks to that, I don’t think I can pick just one.”

  “I’ll start at the bottom,” he said with a grin. “Are you ready?”

  I shrugged my right eyebrow. “As I’ll ever be.”

  “Okay, number five, I’m dead tired.”

  “So, it’s not a particularly long list.”

  “Do you want to hear the list or not?” he asked as we pulled into the parking lot of my apartment building.

  “I’m weighing my options. This list could either be a revelation of apocalyptic proportions or a complete waste of my limited brain fuel. I’m leaning toward the latter.”

  “Fine, I’ll tell you the rest when you’re in a better mood. It’ll make it more suspenseful.”

  “Good idea,” I said with a thumbs-up. Suspenseful, my ass.

  “Nobody recognizes true talent anymore.” He escorted me upstairs. “Are you going to get some sleep?” he asked as I inched the door closed between us, leaving him in the hallway.

  “Not if I can help it.” At least he’d been of some use to me. I’d made it through another hour without sleep.

  Just as I closed the door and turned toward the coffeepot, he reopened it, muttered, “Lock this,” then closed it again.

  I trudged back and locked the door only to hear keys jiggling in the lock about two seconds later. Either that, or I’d fallen asleep standing up again. Since Reyes hadn’t appeared to offer me an earth-shattering climax, probably not.

  Cookie burst in, walked right past me, and headed straight for the coffeepot. “Did you talk to Garrett?”

  I followed her. “Yep. I think there was a clown in my apartment this morning.”

  “Are my pajamas that bad?” she asked, surveying the pj’s she still wore.

  “No.” I blinked back to her. “A dead clown.”

  “Oh. Like a departed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he gone?” she asked, glancing around in concern.

  “Yes. He crossed.”

  “Well, that explains the clown comment. I just thought you were being a smart-ass.”

  That trip made me super sleepy. Maybe I really did need a shot of adrenaline. “Hey, I thought you were going back to bed.”

  “I was, but visions of sugarplums kept dancing through my head. Sugarplums of the male variety, if you know what I mean. Speaking of which,” she said, taking a long draw on her java, “was Garrett naked?”

  “Why would Garrett be naked?” I asked, carefully placing a frown on my face to camouflage the giggle bubbling up inside.

  “I was just wondering if he sleeps naked.”

  “I have no idea if he sleeps naked. He would hardly answer the door that way.”

  She nodded in thought. “That’s a good point. Oh, crap, I have to get Amber up for school.”

  “Okay, I need a shower anyway. I still smell like coffee. And I need to run by Super Dog sometime today. Don’t let me forget.” I headed for the bathroom.

  “You got it. Oh,” Cookie said, pausing at the door, “I meant to tell you, I borrowed a can of coffee from the office.”

  I stopped and hit her with my best glower of astonished disappointment. “You stole a can of coffee from the office?”

  “I borrowed a can of coffee from the office. I’ll buy another with my next paycheck.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “Charley…”

  “Just kidding. Don’t worry about it,” I said with a wave of my hand. “It’s not like I pay for the stuff.”

  She had started out the door but stopped again. “What?”

  “The coffee. I don’t actually pay for it.”

  “Where do you get it?”

  “I swipe it from Dad’s storeroom.” When she flashed me a look of shock and disapproval, mostly disapproval, I held up my hands and did the time-out gesture. “Hold up there, missy. I solved cases for that man for years. The least he can do is provide me with a cup o’ joe every now and then.”

  My dad had been a detective with the Albuquerque Police Department, and I’d been helping him solve crimes since I was five. For some reason, it’s a lot easier to solve crimes when you can ask the victim who did it. While my dad retired a few years ago, I still did the same for my uncle Bob, also a detective with APD.

  “You steal our coffee from your dad?”

  “Yep.”

  “I drink stolen coffee?”

  “On a daily basis. Do you remember that morning about a month ago when we were out of coffee and then that guy came in with a gun and tried to kill me, and Reyes materialized out of nowhere and sliced his spine in half with that ginormous sword he keeps tucked under his robe, and Uncle Bob came with all those cops, and my dad started questioning the whole spinal cord thing?”

  After a long moment, she said, “Barely,” her voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “Well, I needed a cup of coffee after that near-death experience like you would not believe, and we didn’t have any. So I took a can out of Dad’s storeroom.”

  “Charley,” she said, looking around as if someone were listening, “you can’t just steal your dad’s coffee.”

  “Cook, at that moment in time, I would have sold my body for a mocha latte.”

  She nodded in understanding. “I can certainly see why you did it that one time, but you can’t keep doing it.”

  “Oh, so it’s okay for you to steal, but not me?”

  “I wasn’t stealing. I was borrowing.”

  “Whatever helps you sleep at night, Bonnie. Say hey to Clyde for me.”

  With a loud sigh, she headed out the door again. Just before I closed the bathroom door, I called out to her, “By the way, he answered the door shirtless.”

  After a loud gasp, she said, “Thank you.”

  2

  There is a great need for a sarcasm font.

  —T-SHIRT

  I took a quick shower, pulled my hair into a ragged ponytail, and dressed in a pair of comfortable jeans, a loose black sweater, and a pair of killer boots I got off a biker for a lap dance. He was pretty darned good, too, after I got past my aversion to back hair.

  “I’m leaving the whole shebang in your hands, Mr. Wong!” I shouted as I gathered up my paraphernalia. Mr. Wong had come with the apartment and acted as part roommate and part creepy dead guy hovering in the corner. I’d never actually seen his face. It was difficult to see with his nose buried in the corner day after day, year after year. But his plain, g
ray clothing suggested he’d likely been an immigrant from the 1800s or even a Chinese prisoner of war. Either way, I liked him. I just wish I knew his real name. I called him Mr. Wong because he looked more like a Mr. Wong than a Mr. Zielinski. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  Cookie had taken her daughter, Amber, to school then walked the thirty-something feet to work earlier. Our business was on the second floor of Calamity’s, my dad’s bar, which sat right in front of our apartment building. The short commute was nice and rarely involved rabid raccoons.

  I strolled to the office, my thoughts wandering, as they always did, to Reyes Farrow. The moment I closed my eyes, he was there, and it seemed like neither of us had any control over that fact whatsoever.

  I was smack-dab in the middle of reviewing our last encounter in my mind, my girl parts tingling at the mere thought of him, when a wave of sadness drew me out of my musings. As a reaper, I could feel emotion radiate off people, but normally the emotions of the everyday person didn’t interfere with my thoughts. I’d learned long ago to block them out, like white noise, unless I purposely wanted to read them, to study the aura of someone I was investigating. Today, however, the heart-wrenching emotions emanating from a car across the street caught my attention. Oddly, they seemed to be directed my way. I glanced over. An older-model Buick sat idling half-obscured by a delivery truck, and I could just make out a woman with dark hair and large sunglasses as she watched me cross the parking lot. The reflection of the early morning sun made it impossible to gather any specifics.

  While I normally entered through the back entrance of the bar and took the interior set of stairs to my office, today I decided to go around to the front in hopes of a better look at her.

  I was doing my best nonchalance, glancing to the side as much as the next person would, when the woman shifted into drive and took off. The sadness and fear she’d left in her wake saturated the air around me, and I couldn’t help but breathe it in.

  I paused on the sidewalk and felt inside my pocket for a pen to write down her license plate number on my palm. Alas, I had no pen. And I’d already forgotten several of the six digits. There was an L, I think. And a 7. Damn my short-term memory.

  Without giving it another thought, I hiked up the stairs to the office. The front door led directly into the reception area, fondly referred to as Cookie’s God Danged Office so Keep Your Dirty Feet off the Stinkin’ Furniture. Or CGDOSKYDFOTSF for short.

  “Hey, hon,” she said without looking up from her computer.

  I hoofed it to the coffeepot that resided in my own little slice of official heaven. The offices of Davidson Investigations were a tad dark and dated, but I had high hopes wood paneling would come back into style eventually. “The oddest thing just happened to me.”

  “You remembered the night you lost your virginity?”

  “I wish. There was a woman parked in the street watching me.”

  “Hmmm,” she hmmed, only slightly interested.

  “And she reeked of sadness. It just consumed her.”

  Cookie looked up at last. “Do you know why?”

  “No, she took off before I could talk to her.” I scooped enough coffee grinds into the filter to give it the taste and texture of unrefined motor oil.

  “That is strange. You know your dad’s going to figure out you’re stealing his coffee. He was a detective for over twenty years.”

  “See this?” I asked, showing her my pinkie between the doorways. “I have that man wound tight around this baby. So don’t sweat it, chiquita.”

  “Don’t expect me to visit you in prison.” A tinkling bell sounded as the front door opened. “Can I help you?” Cookie asked as I walked into the reception area for a look-see.

  “Yes, I need to talk to Charley Davidson.” A nice-looking man with light hair and pale blue eyes walked up. He wore a white doctor’s lab coat with a sky blue shirt and navy tie and had an expensive briefcase in one hand. With my super-sleuth powers of deduction, I decided he could be the very doctor Garrett had told me about.

  “I’m Charley,” I said, but I didn’t smile in case I was wrong and he was really there to sell me magazine subscriptions. I didn’t want to encourage him.

  He reached out his hand. “I’m Dr. Nathan Yost. I got your name from Garrett Swopes.” For a man with a missing wife, his innards were oddly panic-free. His emotions were in turmoil, just not the kind of turmoil one would expect from a man with a missing wife. A missing dog maybe. Or a missing eyebrow after a night of debauchery, but not a missing wife. Still, his hair was mussed and unkempt and his eyes were lined with fatigue and worry, so he fit all the grieving-husband criteria at first glance.

  “Please, come in.” I showed him into my office. “The coffee’ll be ready in a minute, or I can offer you a bottled water,” I said after he sat down.

  “No, nothing for me, but thank you very much.”

  “Not at all.” I sat behind my desk. “Garrett told me you’d be coming in. Can you tell me what happened?”

  He straightened his tie and glanced around at the artwork covering my walls. I had three paintings that my friend Pari had done. Two were very old school detective—the detectives female, naturally, with fedoras, trench coats, and smoking guns to go along with their sultry gazes. And the one right behind my desk was a little more goth, with a young girl washing blood from her sleeves. It was just enough of an abstract to make it difficult to see exactly what she was doing, an inside joke between Pari and me. Mostly because laundry day ranked right up there with paper cuts and stubbed toes.

  “Absolutely,” he said after taking a deep breath. “My wife has been missing for a little over a week.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” I said, fishing out a notepad and pen from my desk. “Can you explain what happened?”

  “Of course.” His expression turned mournful. “My wife was out late with some friends, so I wasn’t worried when I woke up around midnight and she wasn’t home yet.”

  “What day was this?” I asked, taking notes.

  He raised his eyes and thought back. “Last Friday night. So, I woke up Saturday morning and she still wasn’t home.”

  “And you tried her cell?”

  “Yes, and then I called the friends she’d been out with.”

  “And was her cell on?”

  “Her cell?”

  I paused and looked up at him. “Her cell phone, when you called it, was it on or did it go straight to voice mail?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, his brows sliding together. “Um, voice mail, I think. I was very upset by that point.”

  Wrong answer. “Naturally. What time did she leave her friends?”

  “Around two.”

  “I’ll need their names and contact information.”

  “Of course.” He combed through his briefcase and handed me a piece of paper from a leather portfolio he’d retrieved. “This is a list of most of her friends. The ones she was out with that night are starred.”

  “Great, thank you. And what about family?”

  “Her parents died a few years ago, but she has a sister here in Albuquerque and a brother in Santa Fe. He owns a construction company. You know”—he scooted closer to my desk—“they weren’t really close. It’s not something she liked to talk about, but I wanted you to know in case they seem uncooperative.”

  Interesting. “I understand. Little of that in my family, too.” While my sister and I had recently reconnected after years of borderline apathy, my stepmother and I had barely spoken in decades. Since most things out of her mouth were rude and self-centered, I’d always considered our cool relationship a good thing.

  I took down the names of her siblings and the places his wife had done volunteer work, just to make it all official looking. He’d stumbled a little with the verb tense, but I let it go for now.

  “Has there been a ransom demand?”

  “No, that’s what the FBI’s waiting for. I mean, that’s what this has to be about, right? I’m well o
ff. They just want money.”

  “I can’t say, but it’s certainly a motive. I think I have enough to get started. I just have one more question.” I fixed an Alex Trebek gaze on him, sympathetic with a trace of arrogance, mostly because Alex clearly has the answer to Final Jeopardy! ahead of time. Kind of like me now. “Sometimes, we have a feeling, Dr. Yost, a gut instinct. Do you ever get those?”

  Pain flashed across his face and he lowered his head. “Yes, I do.”

  “Do you have one now? Do you feel like your wife is still out there, waiting for you to find her?”

  With his stare still locked on the floor, he shook his head. “I would like to believe she is, but I just don’t know anymore.”

  Wrong answer again. He would totally suck at Final Jeopardy! The slip in verb tense, the fact that he didn’t know if his wife’s phone had been on or not—had he actually been looking for her, he would have known—and the fact that he hadn’t used his wife’s name throughout the entire conversation all added up to a wealthy doctor with blood on his hands. The omission of his wife’s name meant that he no longer saw her as a living, breathing person. While that didn’t necessarily mean Mrs. Yost was dead, it was a strong indicator. Either that or he was purposely trying not to see her as a person, trying to put her out of his mind.

  But the final nail was the fact that people with missing spouses or children clutched on to the belief that their loved ones were still alive with every ounce of strength they could squeeze out of their bodies, especially after only a week. Sometimes even seeing a loved one’s remains didn’t help. They simply couldn’t let go. But someone who had killed his spouse would never know to cling on to that hope, no matter how false it might be. Which meant Mrs. Yost was most likely dead. But I wasn’t about to tip him off to the fact I knew he was as guilty as sin on Sunday, just in case I was wrong. If she were alive, I’d need time to find her before he finished the job.

  “I understand,” I said. “But I want you to hold on to the belief that she’s okay, Dr. Yost.”