The Evil Returned

by Richard Raven

  That was when she decided that she was going to have a look for herself. The first chance she had. For the moment, though, she put it out of her mind, concentrating on her driving.

  The hospital wasn’t that far from her house. Avoiding the more heavily traveled roads and streets, she got there in only about fifteen minutes. She took the elevator to the third floor, carrying the bag she found in Jeff’s closet that contained his sneakers and phone and a complete change of clothes. A green nylon windbreaker with the name of his company on the back she held in her other hand. When she entered Jeff’s room, a nurse had just finished removing his IV line and was pressing a bandage to his arm.

  One look at his face and it was all Janice could do to keep from gasping out loud.

  My God, what’s happened now? He looks worse now than he did when I first saw him Saturday morning. A sudden and horrible thought occurred to her. Oh, dear Jesus, no…don’t let it be that. Please, not that.

  The nurse smiled as she passed, heading for the door, but Janice hardly noticed her. As soon as the woman was out of the room, Janice moved slowly toward the bed.

  “Jeff?” Her voice was barely above a whisper.

  For a moment it seemed as if the sound of her voice hadn’t reached him at all. He just lay there, pale of face and unmoving, his eyes blank and staring at nothing. She was about to try again when he blinked and his head moved. Only then did his eyes find her. Her eyes met his, and she realized with a little shudder that she was looking straight into the eyes of a man who stood only inches away from the precipice of hell.

  “What’s the matter, hon?” She stood at the foot of his bed. God, do I really want to hear this?

  “Have a seat, Janice,” he said in a voice so small that it was hardly there at all.

  Chapter Twenty

  A few minutes before three o’clock a nurse finally came in with the release papers for Jeff to sign, followed quickly thereafter by an orderly with a wheel chair.

  The orderly had just wheeled him through the hospital’s main entrance when Jeff quit the chair over the young man’s protest and walked to where Janice stood waiting at the opened passenger door of her car. A fine mist was blowing in a light breeze that left his face feeling a little cold. Before Janice could walk around to the driver’s side Jeff had his phone out, which he had powered up in the elevator.

  “Law office of Daren Evans, how may I help you?” greeted a female voice.

  “This is Jeff Taylor and I need to speak to Daren, now.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Taylor, but Mr. Evans is—”

  “Look, I’m sorry, too,” he interrupted, “but I don’t have time to be nice and polite and I don’t give a damn where you have to go to find him, just get him on the line.”

  There was a second of silence, then a click as he was put on hold.

  “Your lawyer?” Janice asked, fastening her seatbelt.

  Jeff nodded, reaching with his free hand for his own seatbelt. Janice pulled away from the hospital, drove sedately past crowded parking lots and medical office buildings, and down a long and sweeping drive that emptied onto a busy four-lane boulevard. She had just pulled into traffic when Jeff finally heard a familiar voice in his ear.

  “Hey, Jeff, was up?” greeted the baritone voice of the man Jeff had known and been friends with since their freshman year in high-school. Their friendship bloomed during their days spent on the basketball court and baseball diamond and had carried them into adulthood, growing stronger with the passage of time. Each was the Best Man at the other’s wedding, and Jeff and Angela had spent some fine evenings in the company of Daren and Jasmine Evans.

  “From where I’m sitting, Daren, it looks like all hell’s breaking loose.”

  A brief silence, then, “Okay, tell me about it.”

  Jeff told him every detail of his encounters with first, Detective Leonard Ross the night before, then the lady detective a few hours ago. The only thing he left out was the remarks Jarvis had made at the end about Janice. Nor had he mentioned that to Janice; he could see no reason to and every reason not to.

  There was another brief silence in his ear.

  “You say it was Yolanda Jarvis who talked to you today?”

  Yeah, it was. You know her?”

  “Know of her—and she’s tough. I’m not surprised she leaned on you that way. If anything, I’d have to say you got off pretty damned easy.”

  Easy for you to say. “Daren, just what the hell are these people doing? Are they even trying to find Angela, or are they just hunting for some reason—any reason— they can use to hang it all on me so they can stamp ‘finished’ to the whole mess? I know it’s not an election year, but is someone in that department up for a promotion or some kind of bullshit like that?”

  “Jeff, calm down. Look, I know how you feel—”

  “The hell you do,” Jeff interrupted, his voice a flat and brutal monotone. “Believe me, you don’t have a goddamn clue how I feel right now.”

  “Okay, you’re right. I don’t, I admit. But, Jeff, I have to say that, at this point, everything you’ve told me sounds routine.”`

  “Routine?” Jeff’s voice was equal parts incredulity and exasperation. “Daren, God alone knows where my wife is right this second—there’s nothing even remotely routine about that. To make it even worse, the people who are supposed to be looking for her can’t seem to find their own asses with both hands and a map. Jarvis told me the State Police and the Feds are thinking about pulling out—can that possibly be true?”

  “That’s my understanding, yes.”

  “They’re just giving up,” Jeff declared. It wasn’t a question.

  “No, Jeff, they’re not just giving up. At this point, nothing has turned up to keep them in the investigation. If that changes, they’ll be back in.”

  “Like I said,” Jeff mouthed bitterly, “they can’t find their own asses. Damn it, Angela didn’t vanish into thin air—there’s got to be something.”

  “From what you told me…it appears there is something.”

  “Are you trying to be funny?” There was now an edge to Jeff’s voice.

  “No, I’m not. Jeff, you’ve got to understand that, in cases like this, they often have to start with the husband or boyfriend—or, in some cases, the ex-husband or ex-boyfriend. That’s just the way it is. It appears that they’ve got some proof of infidelity. Now, I know you don’t want to hear that, and I’m sorry, but they’ve got it and from the sound of things, they appear to be going with it. So far, to my knowledge, it’s the only thing that anyone has been able to come up with. They really have no other choice at this point but to back away from the kidnapping angle and I think I can safely say that goes for the possibility that she may have left the area of her own accord. I think they were pretty much satisfied that didn’t happen after they searched your house. Everything in that house connected to her seemed to be as she left it and that she intended to come back to it. Even I could see that, and they didn’t take a thing away with them, either.”

  “So I can expect more of what I went through today,” Jeff said slowly, “and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better and there’s not a thing I can do about it.”

  “Yeah, Jeff, I’m afraid so, but you have to expect that. Take a second and put yourself in their place, okay? You take her alleged infidelity, put it with the fact that you were the last person to see her, add the fact that you’ve got twenty-five K in life insurance on her, and it’s only logical that they’re going to be looking at you, and I mean hard. At this point, I’d have to say they really have no one else except you to focus on and up until now they haven’t been able to get at you because of medical reasons. Incidentally, are you still in the hospital?”

  “No, I’m on my way home.”

  “Man, that’s great news. No lingering issues, clean bill of health?”

  “As far as I know. I’m going home without any pills or even a prescription.”

  “Fantastic.”

&nb
sp; “If you say so,” Jeff murmured. “While the cops are busy trying to hang a crime on me that I didn’t commit, they’re going to just let Angela and what really happened to her slide right through the cracks. Yeah, that’s fucking fantastic.”

  “Jeff, all you can do is ride it out. I don’t think it’s going to be a long ride, either. It won’t take them long to realize that they’re looking at the wrong man. Tell me this—at any time did Jarvis read you your Miranda Rights?”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “Good. And you did tell her that you’d be willing to take a polygraph, right?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Good. Then all that concerns me at this point is this issue she raised about you holding something back.” A pause, then, “You’re not holding anything back, are you?”

  At that point, Jeff hesitated; there was something he was holding back. That he had seen an old woman standing in the road that night. Not once, but twice, and that he had almost hit her with the car the first time and had talked to her the second time.

  The simple truth was that, at first, he didn’t remember anything about the old woman. When he first spoke to officers over the weekend and they asked what had made him swerve off the road, he told them it was a coyote. At the time he honestly believed it was a coyote. It wasn’t until his confrontation with Jarvis that he remembered about the old woman. It was like someone had snapped their fingers—and there she was. The old woman, in his mind’s eye, standing in the middle of the road.

  At the time he remembered it, however, all of Jeff’s instincts were screaming at him to keep his mouth shut about it. For one thing, he could well imagine how the lady detective would have likely reacted if he had mentioned an old woman and that this old woman had warned him that he needed to get back to Angela. For another, there was something about that whole thing that just seemed so surreal that he wasn’t at all sure that he believed it himself, then or now. Even Angela, though convinced when she joined him the second time he searched for the old woman, had voiced some doubts of her own about it. It was Angela, as they were getting back into the Mazda, who had wondered out loud if what he had really seen was a coyote, and if he’d had more of that wine with dinner than either of them remembered. Maybe she had been right about all of it, too. Especially the wine. So he had judged it best to keep silent with Detective Jarvis; he judged it best to do the same thing with his friend and attorney.

  “I’m not holding a thing back. I’ve got no reason to.”

  “Then I think you’ve got nothing to worry about. Not from a legal standpoint, anyway. As far as all that about Angela…my God, Jeff, beyond the fact that it’s a shock and I never would’ve believed such a thing, I don’t know what to say.”

  That pretty much says it all right there. “What about this thing with Damon? Can they really use that against me?”

  “I’d say it is swaying their thinking a little at this point. But it all becomes moot if they can’t find any hard evidence that you did harm to Angela—which, as you and I both know, they’re not going to find. To be perfectly honest with you, if you face any kind of real threat, it won’t come at you from the police, but from the other direction. I’m still convinced of that.”

  “I’ve been convinced of that threat since the day he walked out of prison almost a month ago,” Jeff said grimly.

  “Has he tried to make contact with you at all since we last talked about this?”

  “There hasn’t been a word from him and I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him. Believe me, I’ve been looking over my shoulder almost every minute of the time.”

  “Odd,” Evans mused. “Of course, I was never around him very much, but Damon never seemed to me the type to make idle threats.”

  “He’s not, trust me on that.”

  “Then the only thing you can do is keep a sharp eye and be careful. I wish there was something else I could tell you, but it’s really up to him to make the first move.”

  “Like waiting for a hurricane to roll out of the ocean and blow you away.” The very words Jeff had said to Angela before they left the house Friday night. Only now he found himself faced with what would likely turn out to be two hurricanes, each coming from a different direction and one as bad as the other.

  And somewhere, lost in the middle between the two, was Angela. Damn, what a perfect mess.

  “One more thing, Daren, and I’ll let you go,” Jeff said, a weariness in his voice that was all too real. “Why would that Detective ask me last night about those other two women? Debra Massey and this Tanya Harris? That makes absolutely no sense at all to me. I mean, what does either of those women have to do with Angela?”

  “My guess is that they must think there’s some connection between those women and Angela. In the case of the Harris woman, based solely on what I’ve seen on the news, I think there may very well be a connection of sorts with Angela’s disappearance.”

  “Really,” Jeff allowed, completely surprised. “What kind of connection?”

  “As close as they can figure it,” Evans began, “Harris disappeared from the bus station at roughly the same time that you and Angela were sitting down to dinner at Anthony’s. They’ve got the time frame by virtue of a phone call Harris made to her father. Then, around nine-fifteen or so, she was spotted at a convenience store south of town. I think you may know the store I’m talking about—the one there at the juncture of County 7 and State 365? The Kwik Mart?”

  “Yeah,” Jeff mused, “I do know that store. In fact, Angela and I passed it that night as we were trying to get home.” And, as far as he could remember, it had been around nine-fifteen, give or take five or ten minutes.

  “Well, they have video footage from the security cameras that show Harris getting out of a car and going into that store. Her father identified her from the video. The clerk on duty that night apparently told police that Harris came in and asked to use the ladies’ room. Then the video shows Harris walking out of the store and leaving in the same car she arrived in. All local TV stations have run this footage numerous times—you know, asking for the public’s help. They’re trying to get a line on that car and the driver.”

  “Damn,” Jeff mused softly. “Then that puts the Harris woman only about ten miles away from where Angela and I got stranded.”

  “Exactly, and I’m sure that’s what the police are looking at. My guess is that they were doing a bit of fishing in the hopes you could shed some light on Harris or the car and, perhaps, help establish a link with Angela. You know, something you might’ve seen out there on the road, something like that.”

  Jeff sighed, exasperated. Everything seemed to keep coming back to what he may or may not have seen on that damn road that night. All he had seen, for Christ’s sake—and he still wasn’t all that convinced that he had—was an old woman in a long dark dress and a red sweater. Beyond that, he hadn’t seen a goddamn…

  …only he had seen something else that night. It was just now coming back to him. It was that car, the one that had looked to him like a Mustang. The damn car that had shot past them and almost cut them off when it crossed back over the center line. There was nothing surreal about that car; he wasn’t the only one who saw it. Angela had seen it as well and had remarked about it. Come to think about it, they both had remarked about it. In fact, they had gotten into a bit of a spirited teasing match, and it all started because of that car. That dark-colored Mustang. What was it Angela had first said about it? “Whoever that is must be crazy. It looks like he’s trying to hit us.”

  Yeah, that was it. He could now see that car clearly in his mind’s eye. Could hear the muscled might of its engine; even smell its hot and pungent exhaust. Not only that, but there was something else about the car he now remembered. He had seen it at the time when the car had veered across in front of them, but he really hadn’t paid attention to it. He had been more concerned with keeping the two cars from crashing, so that brief glimpse he had of the back of the Mustang had slipped his mind.
r />   “Daren,” he asked as carefully and casually as he could manage, “do they know what kind of car it was that Harris was riding in?”

  “The best guess is a late-model, dark Mustang.”

  Oh, shit. “Was the Harris woman a local?” Jeff asked.

  “No, actually, she wasn’t. She was from out of state. If I remember right I believe the news said she was from Saint Louis. Yeah, it was Saint Louis. Her father is the one who reported her missing Saturday morning when she failed to arrive in Dallas on the bus as she was supposed to, and he later came down here from Saint Louis.”

  Jesus H. Christ. Jeff felt a tiny flutter in his heart that stilled his breath. What he had seen on the back of that Mustang was a set of Missouri tags. He had seen enough of those tags in the past to be able to recognize them with no problem.

  “Why don’t you see if you can catch some of the news footage about Harris when you get home?” the attorney was saying. “It might jar something loose in your memory.”

  “Yeah,” Jeff said quietly, “I might do that.”

  “Look, man, I got to run. Jaz said for me to tell you that she sends her best and for to bring your butt out to the house as soon as you feel up to it.”

  “You tell Jaz I said thanks, and that goes for you, too.”

  “Keep in touch, Jeff.”

  Jeff ended the call. Then he closed his eyes and leaned back into the passenger seat. He was still holding his phone, his mind spinning like a Frisbee. He could hardly believe the sheer weight and gravity of what had just dropped into his lap with the force of a meteor. Will they ever believe that I simply forgot about that car in all the chaos that’s hit me since then? Jeff thought about that some more, and the words of Yolanda Jarvis came back to him. “You can be assured, too, that we will find out what you’re holding back, and it’ll go hard for you when we do because you had your chance to come clean about it.”

  No, they’ll never believe that. They’ll see it as what I’ve been holding back no matter how I try to explain it. And that’ll make a really bad shitstorm even worse. Especially if Yolanda Jarvis has her way about it.