Chapter 36
Two days later.
I’d been on the phone for twenty minutes with Coker’s sister—or estranged sister, to be more accurate.
The woman, named Rose, said that she hadn’t talked to her brother in fifteen years.
I’d just gotten a story about him killing the family dog when he was ten then the replacement family dog when he was twelve.
“Geez,” I said. “We actually found a deceased cat in his townhome.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Rose said. “If he had a break with reality, he might have forgotten that he even had a cat. Meaning he could have not fed it or given it water or anything for weeks, months, or who knows. He might have killed it himself for that matter—strangled it for making noise or something. Your guess is as good as mine.”
“You mentioned these breaks with reality before,” I said. “Can you tell me more about that?”
“Personally, I always thought that he had a multiple personality disorder. I mean, my mom had him seen by every child therapist, psychiatrist, and doctor imaginable when he was young. And they each had their own diagnoses for Evan. Manic depressive, bipolar, schizophrenic, schizoaffective, histrionic, you name it. He spent the years from about eight to eighteen medicated. But he could vary from genius smart and charming one week to socially awkward and almost learning disabled the next. He could be sweet and caring or violent and dangerous. Just giant ups and downs. And then sometimes a mix of it all. And then he would get lost in his own world and forget everything. He’d miss work for weeks at a time, miss school when he went, stop talking to his girlfriend.
No reason for any of it. And it wasn’t really like he forgot.
That’s probably the wrong word. He just didn’t even know.
Like it wasn’t a conscious decision. He would wake up one day, and the fact that he had a job to be at would never even register. ”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah, it was a lot.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, what led to you guys not speaking anymore?” I asked.
I leaned back in my office chair at work and put a leg up over my other knee.
“My husband,” she said. “Nah, I’m not going to blame it on him.
He was right. I’ll be the first to admit that I had too much of a tolerance for Evan.
I mean, that probably sounds bad—he was my brother, and he clearly had mental problems. And I don’t really think that was his fault.
I’m not going to say that excuses any of his actions, but…
” I heard her let out a puff of air into the phone.
“Anyway. It all kind of started with one event. Evan had one of what my mother called his ‘breaks’ or whatever. He’d been staying with us—by us, I mean me, my husband, and our two little ones.
I think our daughter was three or four, our son probably seven or eight. So this had to be around 2000.”
“So this is, like, twenty-five years ago?” I asked for clarity.
“Around there, yeah,” she said. “At the time, he’d been doing good.
Really good, actually. He had an internship at a law firm and was going to college to study law.
He was getting straight A’s. He hadn’t had any kind of a ‘break’ for a couple years.
And then one day, he left the house and didn’t come back.
Didn’t go to school, didn’t go to work. We filed a missing persons report.
There wasn’t a trace of him. Until I got a call from a hospital in Jacksonville about two weeks later.
He’d been Baker Acted. They found him, covered in blood, which wasn’t his, in someone’s house.
He somehow got into someone’s home in the middle of the night and actually got into bed between some older couple.
The wife woke up, and there’s Evan, naked and covered in blood, asleep in bed between the woman and her husband. ”
“Did they ever find where the blood came from?” I asked.
“A pig.”
“A pig?” I asked.
“Yeah. But how he got it on him or what he did, we never actually found out,” she said.
I let out a long breath. “So after the naked-in-bed thing…”
“Yeah, so that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for my husband.
He didn’t want Evan in our house with our children.
Evan had to go. At the time, I didn’t think it was the right thing to do to send Evan away, but our mother took it upon herself to move Evan in with her.
She’d inherited our grandpa’s old town house when he passed away and had been staying there for a year or two at the time.
She passed away the next year, and that left Evan there alone.
The place was paid for, so all he really had to come up with was the HOA fees and the taxes.
I tried to keep a relationship with Evan, inviting him to dinner and holidays, and I’d go visit him and stuff, but after my mother passed, he seemed to always just be nasty toward me.
I’d go visit him, and the house would be disgusting, and I’d yell at him to clean the place up.
So after a while, he didn’t want me coming over anymore.
Honestly, I think he felt like I abandoned him or something by kicking him out.
I don’t know. The relationship was just never really the same after that, and our talking got less and less frequent.
Then when we moved to Georgia in 2010, that was about the end of us talking at all.
I’d thought about reaching out I don’t know how many times, but after a while, it’s just kind of easier to not. ”
“Sure,” I said. My mind went back to how he’d signed the letter and what he said to me in his town house.
With her talking about him possibly having a split personality, it made more sense.
We hadn’t found anyone connected to Evan named Steven, and from everything we knew, he had committed the killings alone.
“Does the name Steven mean anything to you? Like maybe Evan calling himself Steven?”
“Yeah,” she said. “A hundred percent. That was his go-to excuse when he was a kid. Steven did it. Steven did everything. Steven killed both of our dogs when we were little, not Evan.”
“Interesting,” I said.
I talked to Coker’s sister for another ten minutes or so and thanked her for taking the time to talk to me.
While nothing she said would undo what her brother had done, it did give us a little insight into him as a person.
I asked if it would be okay to reach out to her again if I needed to, and she had no problem agreeing to that.
“Wow.” I leaned forward and hung the phone back on the base.
“In the middle of something?”
I looked up. Steve was standing in my office doorway.
“Nah. What’s up?” I asked.
Steve walked into my office and plopped down in a chair across from me at my desk. “Nothing important. I just talked to Sasha a little bit ago. She wants to know if you and Amy want to do dinner somewhere Friday or Saturday night. We both are off Saturday. As in, you and I.”
“I’ll ask Amy. See what her work schedule is like. But I would think we could, yeah. Did Sasha have some place in mind?”
Steve shrugged. “I don’t know. That was about the extent of that part of the conversation. She just asked me to ask you if you guys wanted to.”
“Gotcha,” I said. “Yeah, I’ll let you know. Probably.”
“Cool. What was that phone call? I caught the ‘wow’ as you hung up.”
“Coker’s sister,” I said.
“He had a sister?” Steve asked.
“That, he did,” I said.
“What did she say?”
“Oof.” I shook my head. “A lot. From what she said, her brother was broken upstairs from pretty much childhood. Killing family pets, seeing all kinds of doctors for his issues, medicated half his life, the works.”
“Seems to fit,” Steve said.
“Yeah. She said that she hadn’t talked to him in probably fifteen years. But wasn’t surprised when she heard about what he did on the news.”
“Is she local?” Steve asked.
“Nah. She lives in Georgia,” I said.
“But not surprised with what he did, eh?”
“Not in the least. I guess he got the Baker Act–treatment, like, twenty years ago.”
“Also seems fitting,” Steve said. “What did he do?”
“She said that he’d been doing good. Then one day, he went missing. Was MIA for a couple weeks. They found him when he got into some older couple’s home one night. The wife woke up and found Coker covered in blood, asleep in their bed and in between her and her husband.”
“What?” Steve asked.
“That’s what she said.”
“Covered in blood? Whose?” Steve asked.
“A pig’s, I guess.”
“Right,” Steve said. “I’ve seen that happen a million times.”
I shrugged. “She said that she always thought he had split personalities. That when he was younger, anything bad that he did was never done by him. It was always done by Steven.”
“Ah, the name on the letter.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Do you think he actually had multiple personalities? Or was just nuts?”
I again shook my head. “Don’t know. But what I do know is he took two innocent lives that should still be here. And damn near took a third.”
“Yeah. How is Enfield doing?” Steve asked.
“It sounds like he’ll be fine,” I said. “He got out of the hospital this morning. Concussion, lots of staples and stitches, probably some reluctance to do any stakeouts for us in the near future. I’m just glad it worked out that I got there when I did.”
“For sure,” Steve said.
Behind Steve, Halloway was walking fast toward my office.
“Cap is coming,” I said. “He has the ‘something happened’ walk going.”
Steve looked over his shoulder.
“Time to go!” Halloway said.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Halloway walked into my office. “They just found Sloan’s Honda Accord,” he said.
I stood from my desk and pulled my suit jacket off the back of my chair.
“Go get a car,” I told Steve.
The End