Page 15 of You Can Make Me (Carnival of Mysteries #28)

“He grew his beard out. I think it helps him not be so self-conscious about the main scar, but he had me take all the mirrors down. He asked me to help him trim it before he showered.”

“Mm-hmm. That’s the story you’re going with.”

I pushed Gene. “It’s true, dick. He’s never had a beard before.”

“And you have? Tell me, did you get your barber’s license when I wasn’t looking?”

I swore at him again, and he pulled me in for a side hug.

“I’m just catching up on fucking with you, D. I miss this.”

“Me, too.” I cleared my throat as the Harrises passed us and headed into the house. I tensed, thinking I should go in, but Gene squeezed my arm.

“Give them a minute. I talked to Frank. He’s solid. He’s real good with Cooper. Mom’s the heavy in that family.”

“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?”

“Nothing to say. 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 even younger than 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?”

“Nothing. Evans is in the wind. The others who were helping him all tell the same story. ‘He’s in my head. He tells me what to do and won’t leave me alone until I do what he wants.

I just wanted it to stop. I never wanted to hurt anyone.

’ Three of them are awaiting trial for their part in Cooper’s attack, the guys who ran you and Walt off the road and shot at you.

None of them have given us anything useful about Evans.

They don’t know where he is, or I’m sure at least one of them would have rolled over on the guy. They’ve got no affinity for him.”

Evans had worked for Caltrans and had extensive knowledge of the interstate properties. The old cistern where he’d hidden all the bodies was near an abandoned gold mine, beneath a shuttered Caltrans maintenance station. Who knew how many more hiding places he had?

Cooper had helped us locate the abandoned station where Evans kept his prey…

after he’d caught Kal and Dee Dee using a Ouija board.

I wished I could turn back time to before that moment, or maybe back to before Gene invited him to do a story about Dane.

As much as I wanted him in my life, if he’d never come to the house in Laurel Canyon that day, we wouldn’t be here.

He’d never know about the carnival, and I’d never have to break our rule of honesty always.

“Well, I’m sure as hell not going to say anything about the carnival, but you might want to ask Junior. Maybe he brings Dee Dee for a visit. Maybe Dee Dee and Cooper get to talking. Let Dee Dee decide what to tell him, but it would be good for Cooper to see him.”

Dee Dee was heavily scarred from his run-in with Evans, his body a roadmap of trauma, but his face hadn’t been as affected as Cooper’s. Still, the two of them had a lot in common.

“I was thinking that too. I’ll reach out to Junior. I owe him.” I couldn’t help but glance toward the door, wondering how Cooper’s reunion was going with his father.

“Yeah, yeah. I won’t bore you with police work anymore. You’re retired .”

I turned to face Gene. “I’m sorry, I’m just?—”

“We’re good, D. I’m just fucking with you. How does it feel, though? Is it what you thought it’d be?”

“What? Retirement?” I scoffed. I hadn’t had a chance to think about what it meant. “In what reality did I imagine retiring to take care of another man? If you would have told me this would be my life, I’d have written you up.”

Gene laughed heartily. “Yeah, you would have. You were a tough bastard as a training officer, but I owe you. You prepared me well. I hate doing the job without you, but you deserve a break. Take this time with Coop. Explore your options. There’s always consulting.

Shit, Sam’s got that gig with Walter’s cousin up in Calaveras, tracking down missing and vulnerable people.

That would be great for you, and they could use your extensive experience. ”

“Yeah, I talked to Elia a couple months before shit went down. She and Roz love having Sam onboard. They’re doing great things.”

Gene smiled at me for real this time, the smile that reminded me of all the shit we’d been through and how much I loved him like the brother I never had.

“This is your time. Yours and Cooper’s.” Gene patted me on the back. “Take your time.”

I wanted time with Cooper. I wanted him to get well and for us to be on the other side, making a go of this.

I prayed we’d get that chance.