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?”