A Soul To Steal (The Sanheim Chronicles, Book One) (29 page)

“Please,” the man said. “You already know who I am. The name’s Tim Anderson. And this is the last time I will ever introduce myself this way. Shall we go inside?”

*****

The inside was cramped and dirty. Kate and Quinn sat in the living room looking at the sole decoration in the house: guns. Every different type of assortment hung on the wall. Quinn wondered if ammo was nearby and wouldn’t have been surprised if it was.

Anderson
sat down.

“I wasn’t into guns before I met Lord Halloween,” he said. “But afterwards… Well, it seemed like a good idea to be prepared.”

Kate nodded.

“I got my first gun as soon as we moved,” she said. “After my Mom died. My Mom had never really wanted me to be trained on a weapon, but after she was gone, well, my Dad thought she would understand.”

Anderson
nodded.

“How did you find me?” he asked.

“Tracked your writing style,” Quinn responded. “There’s an internet program…”

“The one Alexis wrote about?” Anderson said.

“Yeah. You still read the paper?”

“Every week,” he said. “I have to.”

“It would be your first sign that he’s returned,” Kate said.

Anderson
nodded again.

“I’m going to save you a lot of trouble,” he said. “I don’t know who he is. If I did I would have told the police or died trying to kill him myself.”

“I know,” Kate said. “But I think his interaction with you is critical. The letters tell a part of the story, but not all of it makes sense. Why not use his nickname earlier? He claims he killed a girlfriend of yours and then he let you go. I never knew he let anyone go.”

Anderson
sighed and waited.

“I’ll start at the beginning,” he said. “The
Chronicle
was my home and I loved it. I worked every day and had very little social life. In those days, I was a rising star. Laurence let me do whatever I wanted and once I started winning Virginia Press Association awards, Ethan let him pay me closer to a living wage. I was a big fish in a little pond and I liked it. I didn’t expect to be there much longer—maybe a couple more years—before I would try my hand at the
Post
or one of the dailies just outside D.C.”

“Then Lord Halloween showed up,” Kate said.

“I thought the first letter was a joke,” Anderson said, and he wasn’t looking at them anymore. He was staring at the window as if lost in memory. “‘Some of what I tell you will be lies.’ He had said it himself. I thought it was some kind of prank that Buzz or Kyle had created.”

“They both worked there then?” Quinn asked.

“Buzz did,” Anderson replied. “Kyle was actually working for the fire department at the time, but he desperately wanted to be a reporter. He was always hanging around the paper, wanting to know the latest scoops. He asked me to help get him a job, which I did, albeit unintentionally. I left. Anyway, those guys were both known for a practical joke or two, so I thought this was a good one. I thought it was sick, don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t take it seriously. I did what any good reporter does, however. I checked out the scene myself.

“Up until the moment I found her body, I still thought it was a setup. Just where he told me, there was an easel set up and painting equipment. And I kept thinking, ‘Wow. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make this joke work.’ I walked around the park, looked at the painting, which was quite good, and was just about to get back in my car when I saw it. There was a clump of forest just outside the clearing and I saw something glinting in the sun. It was a paintbrush. So I went over to check it out and the body was just ten feet away. There was blood all over the ground and the number of flies buzzing around her was incredible. I didn’t know they could be that loud—or there would be that many. I vomited into the bushes. I had never seen a dead body and I simply couldn’t look away. It wasn’t like the movies. I kept looking at her face, which looked frozen in agony.”

“What did you tell the police?”

“Everything,” he said. “I knew if I didn’t it would look suspicious. I knew enough not to contaminate the crime scene, drove to the office, gave the letter to Laurence and we called the police together. Showed them the letter, which they promptly took, and they went to find the body. I spent a full day being questioned by them. I think many of the cops thought the letter was a ruse—that the woman was somehow my girlfriend and I had just created an elaborate scheme. I don’t think they seriously considered that it was for real. Well, not until the second letter.”

“Did you check that out ahead of time too?” Quinn asked.

“No,” Anderson said. “That time I just called the police. I had no choice. They had ordered Ethan Holden not to publish the letters and I was to hand them over as soon as they came in. I wasn’t even supposed to read them first.”

“Ordered him not to publish?” Quinn asked. “They can’t do that.”

“That was what I said,” Anderson responded. “In the early days, it was all about journalistic integrity to me. We had a duty to warn the public, we had a responsibility to give information to the readership. And hell, it was a good story, right? It wasn’t the primary motivating factor, but I’m not saying I didn’t know that.”

“But Laurence wouldn’t do it?”

“The problem wasn’t Laurence,” Anderson said. “It was Ethan. He would rant and rave about not being a puppet to a madman. He saw it as a noble thing that we weren’t publishing the letters. For a while, we didn’t even use the nickname. I couldn’t change his mind. I actually thought about giving the letters to the
Post
, but I was being watched too carefully. As soon as I got a letter, I would show it to Laurence, he would make a copy, and we would give it to police. But the cops got wise to the act. They got a couple of the letters before I could even see them.”

“What happened?”

“If you’ve seen the letters, you know,” Anderson said. “He got angry. He didn’t get the publicity he wanted and I wasn’t doing my job. I managed to sneak a few things into the early articles so that he didn’t feel like I was totally ignoring him, but I didn’t see it as my job to do his bidding. I didn’t really think he would come after me. It sounds stupid now, but I was a journalist and we view ourselves as protected. I could cross crime scene lines, ask rude questions to important people—we are observers of the world, not participants.”

“But Lord Halloween didn’t see it that way,” Kate said.

“No,” he said. “First there were the phone calls. They started in the evening. Just someone calling and then hanging up. I could never hear anything but breathing. But the calls started coming in the middle of the night. I kept my phone on in case there was some kind of emergency and at first I didn’t want to turn it off, but eventually I had to. There was no pattern to them. He could call you at 1 a.m., then fifteen minutes later, then wait two hours. But I wasn’t sleeping well. I wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep and when I finally did—the phone would ring.”

“He was trying to harass you, put you off guard,” Kate said.

“Exactly,” he said. “It struck me as a militaristic tactic, really. It was strategic. He didn’t want me to be thinking totally clearly. And then I started to feel watched. When I went to the grocery store, I would feel like someone was following me. I would park my cart, walk over to get milk and come back and find some of the things I thought I had bought weren’t there. I know it sounds crazy, but do you have any idea how unnerving that is? He’s messing with my fucking shopping cart in the middle of a store and I don’t catch a glimpse of him? And then I was doubting myself. Did I really buy that guacamole? It only happened a few times—but it happened, I know it did. The last time my entire cart was rammed into a store display. The manager thought some kid did it, but I knew. Of course I knew.

“And it got worse. He bled into everything. I would be at the book store and books would start falling off the shelves around me, just barely missing my head in one case. No one ever saw anything and I just seemed crazy. Maybe I was crazy, I don’t know. I saw him everywhere in everything. I couldn’t be anywhere anymore without a clear line of sight. I moved my desk to a far wall so no one could sneak up behind me. I bought four extra locks and a security system for my apartment—this was before the real rush on that stuff occurred. I was afraid to shower or play music or watch TV or do anything that made any noise.”

Anderson
was shaking then, not looking at anyone. He was slightly rocking back and forth as if trapped in a memory.

“And then Carrie…”

There was a long pause. Quinn wondered if he would start talking again and then Kate quietly said, “Carrie Sterns?”

For just a moment, the spell was broken and Anderson looked up.

“Yeah,” he said. “Victim number nine to you, isn’t she?”

Kate shook her head. “You should know better.”

“Right,” Anderson said. “Your mother.”

“She was your girlfriend?” Quinn asked.

Anderson
laughed. Once again, Quinn was struck by how little warmth or humor was in that laugh.

“No,” Anderson said. “That was the thing. She wasn’t. She was just a girl I knew in the advertising department. She was pretty and I liked her, but we had only gone out once after work. It wasn’t a serious thing and we didn’t even kiss. She was so sweet, though. The reporters never mixed with the advertising staff, but she was an exception. Everyone loved her. She was nice and thoughtful. She remembered birthdays. I at first thought she was flirting with me—that’s why I asked her out—but I realized later she was that way with everyone. She was one of those people that make you think the world is better and brighter than it is.”

“And he murdered her,” Kate said.

“No,” Anderson said forcefully. “He butchered that girl. Murder is too nice a word for what he did. He tortured her. I saw the police report. It took hours for her to die. Hours in which I’m sure she begged for God, or the police, or anyone to come find her. Hours in which she was lying so near other people that if they had only heard her, they could have saved her.”

“She died by the printing press,” Kate said.

Anderson
looked surprised.

“How could you possibly know that?” he asked.

Kate shook her head. “Does it matter?”

“Yes,” Anderson said, and his eyes looked shrunken and hollow. “It matters to me. That girl’s death is my fault. I didn’t cut her face up or make small incisions on her body to let the maximum amount of blood drain without letting her die quickly, but it’s my fault. He killed her because I didn’t do my job. He killed her because I didn’t give the public all the information it deserved. He killed her because I listened to the cowards and the fools who say they have control, when they control nothing! All they wanted is to control information. Did they try to find the killer, or did they just hope he would go away? They were powerless to stop him and they did everything they could to make it seem like they were in charge, but he was in charge.

“I broke the rules and a sweet, pretty, lovely girl who always remembered birthdays and everyone loved died in the worst fashion I can imagine. We were all in the building, did you know that? She was dying and calling for help and we were all there! All of us upstairs making changes and doing our jobs and she was begging us to help. But we couldn’t hear her. The printing press was running and running and running and it was so loud. She died screaming for help, knowing it was seconds away.”

Tim Anderson wrapped his arms around his legs. Quinn had the feeling this was something he had wanted to say for 12 years and never had.

“In the letter, he made it sound like you were dating Carrie,” Kate said. “Do you think he knew you weren’t?”

“Oh, he knew,” Anderson said. “It was all just an elaborate trap. I had to spend hours talking to the police about a relationship that simply did not exist. They thought I did it. Once again, they thought I was Lord Halloween. Because why not? They couldn’t find any other candidates. Holober was a sick fuck, but he wasn’t a serial killer and they knew it. He was just another schizophrenic. They wanted a better candidate. I spent hours with the police. Hours I should have been looking for the real killer.”