I’m going to make it, he thought. I’m finally going to make it.
He stole a look behind him, but nothing appeared to give chase. Instead Quinn stepped into the enfolding darkness of the bridge and could have dropped to his knees in thanks.
As he crossed the threshold, though, he saw another figure move in the shadows right toward him. It happened so fast, Quinn could not block anything, and suddenly someone grabbed him by the shoulders.
Quinn tried to break free of the grasp, but the figure held him steady. For a second, Quinn was worried it was the Horseman. That somehow he had gotten into the bridge and had been waiting for him.
“Calm down, Quinn,” a voice said as he struggled. “I don’t know what you have been running from. But you look like hell. Relax.”
Quinn suddenly focused on the face before him. At first, a sense of relief washed over him. A friend was here, he thought. Someone who could help him face what was out there in the darkness waiting.
And then all the memories of the past few weeks flooded back to him like a punch in the stomach. Quinn had not escaped anything. He had traded one monster for another.
The figure in front of him was Kyle Thompson.
“Hello, Quinn,” Kyle said and smiled benevolently, still holding his arms. “So nice to see you here.”
Quinn shook himself loose and practically fell over. By reflex, he looked again to the road behind him, but there was nothing there.
Quinn started, momentarily at a loss. They had known, of course. They had figured out who Lord Halloween was. But that was theory, this was reality.
“Quinn-honestly you’ve looked better. You look, and please don’t take offense at this, like shit.”
Kyle looked different than when he had last seen him. There was a large mark just below his left eye. It looked like a burn, one that wasn’t healing well.
“I’ve been wanting to congratulate you on your new relationship with sweet Trina. I had been expecting her too, you know.”
“You’re a sick fuck, Kyle,” Quinn said.
“You know what’s sick, Quinn?” he said. “You are the second person to learn my identity and not go to the cops. Is there something in the fucking water around here that makes people act so stupidly?”
“Buzz,” Quinn said. He tried to send a mental image to Kate, but there was nothing. Whatever was blocking them from communicating was still doing so.
Quinn could barely see Kyle. The moonlight crept just to the edge of the bridge, but they stood toward the middle, where the light appeared to be swallowed whole.
“Yes, Buzz,” Kyle said. “Dear old paranoid Buzz. He came to warn you two, did you know that? He came to the hotel once he figured out that Kate was really Trina.”
Quinn thought of the security video and nodded. He had seen Buzz’s jacket, then. It was one piece of the puzzle that hadn’t worked with the theory, but now it fell into place.
“So one day I find Buzz skulking around my house, even sitting in my chair,” Kyle said. “For the life of me, even now, I can’t think of why he didn’t confide in someone. He could have told the police, or you, or Laurence, or somebody. I don’t get it, I really don’t. When I saw him in that chair, I thought the game was up. Seriously, he should have at least passed a note, or left something in his will, right?”
“He was paranoid,” Quinn said. “Just like you said.”
“Yeah, he had that whole thing with the police,” Kyle said as if reminiscing good-naturedly about an old colleague. “I thought that was pretty funny, actually. I have to say-Buzz was not on my target list at all. I never liked him, but he was respectful of me. Not of Kyle Thompson, I mean, but Lord Halloween. He was always talking me up. Talking about how I would come back, about how the police would never catch me. I thought he was a pretty good PR man myself. It is a real shame he had to die.”
“What happened?”
“Well, Buzz pulls out this gun and starts like he is the psychopath. I thought I could bluff my way out at first, but he didn’t go for it. No, he knew he had the right guy.”
“How?”
Quinn waited for Kyle to make a sudden move, maybe pull a knife, but he seemed enraptured by his own story.
“Who knows?” Kyle said. “I went to his house and there was a file on me that was unbelievable. He had detected movement patterns, sketches, a whole bunch of stuff. It was a pretty accurate record. I mean, I didn’t stop killing in those 12 years, did I? And Buzz somehow could see my work all over the place. Out in West Virginia. On the Appalachian Trail. Most of the time he got it right. But I still don’t know how he landed on me.
“So he sits there with a gun in his hand. Now I don’t like guns myself. I think they are overly violent and not as… artistic as a serious person would like. A knife-that is a weapon I can really embrace. But good ‘ol Buzz waited too long. I think he wanted to ask questions or something. He told me not to move, but I knew what was coming if I stayed still. So I jumped. He fired and missed me. I, on the other hand, did not miss. I never miss.
“He had guts, I’ll give him that. Not like you-running through the forest like a man being chased by a bee.
“So I looked at Buzz and realized it was time for Kyle Thompson to sail out of the picture. It was very liberating, Quinn. I just sliced and diced, and suddenly I didn’t have to worry about how Kyle looked anymore. Kyle was dead. And all I had to do was call Laurence once and talk with a really low voice. He really thought I was Buzz. That man is an idiot.”
“The police identified your body. They even had DNA testing. We couldn’t figure out how you pulled that off,” Quinn said.
“Come on, Quinn, catch up,” Kyle replied. “I mutilated Buzz’s corpse and killed a police courier that was taking the DNA sample for testing. I replaced the kit with some of my DNA. No one even thought about why I would kill a police courier. That is the benefit of being random all these years. When you do it on purpose, nobody knows.”
Kyle cocked his head to the side and grinned.
“Am I scaring you?”
“How many people have you killed?”
“I’ve lost count,” Kyle said. “I really have. But now it’s my turn to ask questions. You figured me out. How?”
“You just said it yourself. Not all your killings were random over the years.”
“Good. Very good.”
“This whole ‘Lord Halloween’ thing was a shtick, wasn’t it? I mean, you enjoyed killing people, but you could have done that without drawing attention to yourself.”
“I had become quite good at it,” Kyle replied.
“But you invented Lord Halloween. Why?”
“I think you must know,” he replied.
“It was so simple we didn’t see it,” Quinn said. “Tim Anderson said you were always hanging around, that you were obsessed with the paper. You wanted to be a reporter.”
“Not just any reporter, Quinn,” he said. “I wanted to cover crime. I enjoyed it. I reveled in it. Crime was the beat for me.”
“But they already had a crime reporter.”
“And he was good,” Kyle said. “No, he was fantastic. There was no way they would give me that beat as long as he was there.”
“So why not just kill him? Why invent a whole persona?”
“For one, it was a fun challenge,” he said. “I’d been killing for years, but changing patterns, changing methods, ensuring not to draw attention to myself. This was different. This was a direct challenge to God and man to find me. Secondly, I wasn’t even a reporter yet, Quinn. If I had killed Tim, someone else at the paper would have taken his place. Then I would have had to kill them. At what point would someone figure out what I was up to? No, I had to create a disincentive to being the crime reporter. It had to be a job no one wanted 12 years ago. And it worked like a charm. Anderson ran off and… there I was.”
“The girl in the basement? She wasn’t random either, was she?”
