Page 5 of Illusionist
Somebody's been killing off these so-called Prophets. Slowly. Carefully. The pattern's there if you squint. I've been staring at them for years, and every time I got close, the trail just stopped. Like somebody knew I was coming and put the dishes away.
This is the first time it hasn't. Someone at HQ gave me something I can actually work with. Missing men and towns visited by this particular carnival.
I pour the bad coffee, take a sip, set it back down. Poke the laptop awake.
The corporate filings load slowly on cheap motel Wi-Fi.Seven Sins Entertainment, LLC.There are only two names on every document, every license application, every insurance binder, every permit pulled in every county the carnival's set up: Elias Vale and Silas Crowley.
That's it. Two signatures. Two men running a multi-state operation with a payroll big enough to need a real accountant, and they've decided the paperwork stops at them.
I run the names. I've run the names before. I run them again because that's what you do at ten at night in a motel when you've already eaten the diner's grilled cheese and you're not going to sleep anytime soon.
Elias Vale. No record before the aughts. Social security number issued late—he was almost an adult. He has a Nevada driver's license. His tax returns are clean. His credit history sounds like he was born at twenty with a checking account and a business plan.
Silas Crowley. Same pattern. Same year, more or less.
Maybe they'd go unnoticed if it weren't for a governor's daughter named Basia Langford getting a stalker named David, who wouldn't shut up about a place called the Sanctum. If it weren't for a hacker named Ethan Kane, who uncovered a whole bunch of kids popping up all over the place around the same time with no birth certificates.
I lean back. Crack my neck. Look out the window at the wheel.
Could've been a coincidence. But we have missing men. And two ghosts running the carnival that was in town for every disappearance.
I pull up what I have on the traveling carnival. The Seven Sins website is gorgeous, and you can buy a ticket online in about four clicks, but you cannot for the life of you find a face on theabout uspage. The performers are masked in everypromotional image. Stunning, elaborate,creepymasks. I still don't know the faces underneath.
I've been here three days. On day two, I parked the rental at the far end of the fairground lot in the afternoon, blended with the families coming in for the early shows, walked the main path with a corn dog in one hand, and marked attractions.
The layout's pretty typical. Big Top in the center, mirror maze to the north, fortune teller off the main drag in a tent that smells like cloves from twenty feet away. The Ferris wheel and the carousel anchor the south end. There's a perimeter of food stalls. Behind all of it is the staff area—trailers in neat rows, fenced off, private.
The keyboard's getting warm under my hands as I work, scrolling through the spreadsheet. I cross-reference the carnival's tour schedule against the disappearance dates. Six for six. The first one I could write off. The second, I could call a coincidence. By the third, I'd have wanted to know why the locals weren't already on it.
And that's the part that keeps me up at night. If these were normal men, I'd have a serial case and a task force and a media circus by now. But all of these disappearances got suppressed by someone with a hell of a lot of clout. I'm lucky they got spotted and brought to my attention at all.
I shut the laptop. Stand. Look at the lights coming from the fairgrounds. I can faintly hear the haunting music brought over by the breeze.
Surveillance from a distance only gets you so far. I've gotten what I'm going to get sitting in this motel. Just permits, plates, vague websites.
Tomorrow night, I'm getting closer. Tomorrow night, I'm watching the show.
2
SILAS
“You're going to dislocate your shoulder doing it that way.” Logan's sprawled across the picnic table behind the big top, boots up, lighter clicking open and shut in his palm.
“I'm not going to dislocate anything.” I roll my shoulder, testing the range of motion. The chains are heavy tonight—real iron, not the aluminum props most illusionists use. “I've been practicing this for weeks.”
“Weeks,” Rowe echoes from where he's leaning against the table's edge. His lion, Caesar, is stretched out in the grass nearby, tail twitching. “Remember when you practiced that underwater escape for weeks?”
“That was different.”
“You nearly drowned.”
“Inearlyperfected the timing.” I adjust the cuffs at my wrists, checking the give. “Tonight's crowd deserves something special. Everyone does the standard straitjacket routine. No one's escaping chains while?—”
Logan snorts. “While what? Setting them on fire? Because I could help with that.”
“No fire.”
“Everything's better with fire.”
