Page 30 of You Can Make Me
“I noticed. Hey, so what’s going on with the case? Any word on Evans?”
Virgil Evans was responsible for a string of murders committed in the late seventies/early eighties, and he only stopped when he was charged with Tess Miller’s homicide. After twenty years in prison, he got out on good behavior…or so they said. His particular gift of persuasion helped him work his way up to managing a halfway house, despite the conflict of interest.
Gene and I learned about Evans from Junior, when we took over the Dane Donovan cold case from him. When Junior found Dane, the folk singer identified Evans as potentially being the man who’d attempted to murder him in 1979.
Gene and Dax went after him, but Evans disappeared during the collapse of an old mine.
It was one of his acolytes in murder—Hunter Holland—who’d attacked Cooper. We found them, and had hoped to take Holland into custody, thinking he knew where Evans was hiding…but Holland elected to finish himself off with a self-inflicted knife wound.
And before we’d reached them, he’d had time to use that knife on Cooper.
We hadn’t been able to save Cooper from the attack, but we’d kept him alive until the Life Flight arrived. I’d followed him to the hospital and hardly left his side since. I’d had to rely on Gene’s infrequent updates, and being out of the investigation didn’t sit well with me. I wasn’t sorry, though. I’d had much more important things to do.
“We’ve put together a timeline, and the FBI’s forensic team has identified the remains of at least seven individuals from the makeshift crypt where he’d stashed them, including Tess Miller.”
“Damn. I’d say poor Dee Dee, but at least now he can bury her.”
“Yeah. There are still more bodies down in that cistern to identify, I don’t know how many, but they’ve had to give up searching for Evans. Couple of their guys nearly got crushed when a support beam fell, so the operation has been paused. There’s a task force headed up by Ramos from LAPD, a detective from LASO, and I’m pitching in when I can.”
“How ’bout Dax?”
Our fourth musketeer, Detective Dax Brown, had fallen out of favor with us after saying some stupid homophobic shit to Junior, after everything that man had done for him. He was damn lucky I hadn’t seen him since the shit he’d pulled.
“He was on leave for a couple weeks. They sent him to the department shrink to make sure he hadn’t had some sort of breakdown in that mine. The kid nearly killed us, pulling that lever and setting off Evans’ fucking booby traps. Captain mostly has him working on other shit, so we don’t interact as much as we used to.”
“Shit. I don’t know if I could hold back after what he did.”
“I haven’t strangled him yet, and Walter definitely hasn’t, so no one else gets to. I know Dax feels terrible, but that whole scenario…he fucked up so many things. He needs to stew for a good while before I’ll even think about trusting him again.”
“You believe Evans was manipulating him?”
Gene nodded. “Likely, but his transgressions were numerous even before he nearly got us killed.”
“Cooper dreamed about the carnival.”
Gene’s forehead grew lined with tension.“Shit.”
“Exactly. I don’t like it.”
“What’d you say?”
“Nothingtosay. Not my place to tell him anything, and I don’t want to encourage discourse.”
The fucking carnival.
I’d heard about it for the first time just a couple of days before Cooper’s attack, when Junior found himself a ghost from a cold case. That ghost apparently had been hanging out at a carnival for forty years…and hadn’t aged a single day. The ghost—missing folk singer Dane “Dee Dee” Donovan—hadn’t had much to say about the place other than “time ran different,” and it “was what it needed to be, and went where it needed to go.”
Dane and his friend Kal had both worked there, without actually knowing it at the time.
Kal had apparently worked at the carnival decades longer than Dane, but he hadn’t been keen on offering any more details. He looked evenyoungerthan the folk singer.
Shortly before Cooper’s attack, Kal and his husband, musician Ryan Wells, found Dane wandering in the desert in the middle of the night, apparently where the carnival had spit him out. That chance meeting is what had started this whole fiasco.
I used to mostly blow off that kind of woo-woo. Now I was a believer in shit like Ouija boards, time travel, and witches. But the carnival was still a total mystery.
I knew I could ask Junior, but I didn’t want to put him in that position, although maybe if Cooper could talk to Dee Dee—if Dee Dee was willing—maybe Cooper would see that he could have a fulfilling and satisfying life, even with scars and a TBI. Then he could forget about the damn carnival.Nothing good could come of him poking around that bit of lore, but I had a feeling he wouldn’t let it go, no matter how much I tried to dissuade him. Of course, it could have been any carnival, but the way everything was going, he had to mean this particular one.
“So nothing, huh?”
