Band of Demons (The Sanheim Chronicles, Book Two) (21 page)

But time is fleeting. And they were almost out of it.

Chapter 21

October 14, 2007

Quinn woke with a start at 5 a.m., certain he had been dreaming something important. When he picked up the phone, he was grateful that for once, they had not gone roaming the evening before. They might have barely been in bed by now.

“Hello?” he managed, sounding even groggier than he felt.

“You need to meet me at the office,” Tim said. “Now.”

For a moment, Quinn assumed it was about a new story. He usually slept with the police scanner on, something he had been neglecting recently. Maybe there had been a major accident.

“What happened?” Quinn asked.

“Summer Mandaville happened,” Tim replied. “She just called me at home.”

“This early?” Quinn asked. “And why is she calling you? Did she scoop us and now wants to make sure she gets proper credit?”

“She thinks you’re the Prince of Sanheim, Quinn,” Tim said. “And unless we convince her otherwise, she’s going to print it in
The Washington Post
.”

*****

Quinn and Kate met him at the paper barely ten minutes later. Tim fumbled with the keys to the back door. The office was eerily quiet as they walked through it, their footsteps echoing up the wide staircase as they moved from the printing press in the basement to the editorial area up above. Tim was silent the entire time, acknowledging their presence with barely a nod as they followed him.

Tim flipped on lights, slowly illuminating the desks, and walked to his office. Kate and Quinn entered behind him—and by habit only since the building was empty—shut the door before they sat down.

Tim sat down behind his desk and looked at them both seriously.

“We have a bit of a problem,” he said. “I got a call from an extremely high-wired Summer Mandaville this morning. She’s convinced that Quinn is the Prince of Sanheim.”

“Tim, let me just…”

“Let me roll out her story first, Quinn,” he said. “Then we’ll talk through strategy. I’ve bought us a little time, mostly by claiming the entire exercise is a set-up, threatening to sue her and the
Post
for the next decade if she prints anything, and suggesting she’s mentally unbalanced.”

In that moment, Quinn could have kissed him. Laurence would have bent like a reed under the slightest pressure. But he knew Summer would at least pause as a result of Tim’s threats—the man could be damn intimidating when he wanted to be.

“My guess is she’ll still go forward,” Tim said. “And the second she does, you’ll both spend the next several weeks answering questions in Sheriff Brown’s office.”

“So what do we do?”

“Well, for starters, she is going to interview you at 10 a.m.,” he said. “I agreed to that on your behalf. She’ll come here and I will sit in.”

“Damn,” Quinn said.

“That also buys us some additional time,” he said. “In this case, she’s at least not worried about being scooped by you, so it stops her from just filing the story anyway.”

“What does she have?” Kate asked.

Tim’s eyes rested on her.

“Not a lot, but potentially enough,” Tim said. “She has photos of the incident at the Waterford Fair yesterday—an incident which you both should have reported on and put on our website by now. According to her, a kid dressed up as the Headless Horseman and Quinn attacked him.”

“No,” Quinn said. “It wasn’t like that. Well, I did attack him, but you’re missing context.”

“Enlighten me.”

“He was threatening the crowd,” Quinn said. “He nearly rode down some women and children. I just pulled him off his horse and stopped him.”

“According to Ms. Mandaville, you not only did that, you brandished a sword, held it over him, and nearly killed him,” Tim replied.

“If you interview the crowd…”

“What am I, your defense attorney?” Tim barked. “Even if you didn’t hurt the guy, can I just tell you how damn odd this looks? If what you’re saying is true—if someone ran down a crowd of fairgoers—why the hell didn’t you write it up as a story? What were you doing yesterday instead?”

“Tim, I….” Quinn started.

“Were you covering the fair?” he asked.

“Yes,” Quinn answered.

“And wasn’t that a pretty big event?” Tim continued. “The first thing you’re going to do after we leave this meeting is write me a story and you are going to do it from your perspective about the attack at the fair. Kate is going to head back out to Waterford and find some damn witnesses. The same witnesses that you should already have interviewed when they were standing around you.”

“Aren’t we a little off point?” Kate asked.

“No,” Tim replied, “We’re not. Running off like you did—and oh yes, Mandaville noted that to me several times—makes you look guilty. Not filing a story on an actual news event makes you look guilty. You see my point?”

“Quinn was upset,” Kate replied. “So was I. We weren’t thinking clearly. But it’s a long way from being a killer.”

“According to Mandaville, Quinn nearly killed the boy on the street,” Tim replied.

“We thought he was the Prince of Sanheim,” Quinn said, truthfully. He should have known better, but in that moment, he had believed it was the thing he had faced at night on the streets of Leesburg.

“And you were going to kill him? That’s interesting,” Tim said. “Because normal people don’t usually just up and kill someone they think
might
be a murderer. Normal people talk to the police. Reporters, by the way, who are most distinctly
not
normal people, write stories about murderers. They generally don’t kill people either.”

“I’m sorry,” Quinn said. “I really wasn’t thinking clearly. I thought…”

“We’re on the edge here, you two,” Tim said. “According to Mandaville, she has photos of the event in question, including of you holding a goddamn sword.”

“How does that link me to the Robertson murder or Lord Halloween?” Quinn asked.

“What was the murder weapon involved in both cases, Quinn?” Tim asked.

Neither Kate nor Quinn responded.

“Exactly,” Tim said. “But I don’t deny she has a lot of supposition in place of fact. She’s going to say you were one of the only ones to know the identity of Lord Halloween, giving you opportunity to kill him yourself, possibly as a way to impress your girlfriend, whose mother died at his hands. She’s going to claim that somehow you knew about Robertson’s misdeeds before anyone else—giving you the opportunity to kill him in retaliation for I don’t know what. She’s going to have a photo of you holding a sword over a kid as you are apparently angry at him for impersonating the so-called Prince of Sanheim, who enjoys dressing up as the Headless Horseman.”

“That’s not enough,” Quinn said. “It’s not enough to accuse me of murder.”

“Were you born yesterday?” Tim asked, practically shouting now. “She doesn’t need to accuse you of murder, Quinn. She just needs to mention those inconvenient facts and suggest you are a top suspect of the Loudoun County police department. She runs that photo in
The Washington Post
and you’re done, do you know that? We’re all done.”

“So what do we do?” Quinn asked.

“Get your heads out of your asses, start reporting the story from yesterday, and start thinking ahead,” Tim said. “That’s what we do. The police have the kid in custody, by the way, something I’ve already established this morning. His name is Jack Gill. Go down to the police department and make a statement, for God’s sake, both of you. While you’re there, find out more about who hired him and why. But not before leaving me with some kind of goddamned story first. Let’s play this carefully and we may yet come out of it with our skins intact.”

His tone was one of dismissal, so Kate and Quinn got up and walked out the door, feeling his eyes boring into them the whole way.

You think he knows the truth
? Quinn asked in his head.

I’m sure of it
, Kate responded.

*****

Kate and Quinn spent the morning working furiously. Kate drove out to Waterford where they were setting up for the final day of the fair, and tried to find anyone who had seen the preceding day’s events.

Quinn, meanwhile, wrote his view of what happened. He tried to write it cleanly, carefully, just focusing on the facts of the case—crazy kid attacks crowd at fair—and not on his own emotions. Somehow he didn’t think a first person perspective on how angry he was about someone impersonating the Headless Horseman was going to help him much.

Quinn called his police sources—which had expanded significantly after the whole Lord Halloween debacle—and established that Gill was still in custody and was expected to be charged with several criminal counts on Monday. Gill was claiming it was all a misunderstanding and attempting to blame the man who hired him. Unfortunately for Gill, he could only describe the man and had no idea who he was. 

Kate called in a couple of quotes and Quinn had something on Tim’s desk by 9:30.

Tim edited it with his usual speed and ferocity. Editors don’t use red pens anymore, and Quinn thought his copy was quite good, but he could see Tim deleting and retyping as he worked on it. He sent the final story to Quinn for approval and then published it on the website.

Quinn still missed the old days, when he had to wait a whole day to see how readers would react. Or maybe he really missed the cushy deadlines. Back then, you could wait until hours after an event happened to file a story. Now if it was an hour old, it was already yesterday’s news.

Still, by the time Summer walked in the door, the story was filed, edited, proofed and sitting on the website. Quinn didn’t know how many people read the paper over the weekend, but it would be there if anyone did.

Summer walked into the
Loudoun Chronicle
slowly, as if she expected to be ambushed at any moment. Her trip to the editorial section of the paper—tucked away behind administration, advertising and the lone-man operation that was the graphics department—was cautious. Quinn had assumed Summer would walk in with her nose in the air, but that wasn’t the impression he had. She seemed genuinely curious about the paper. All these years of competing with it and she had apparently never been here.

Even now, Quinn was surprised at how small she was. Maybe it was because he always competed against her, but reading her articles, he always had the sense she was bigger somehow. Taller, maybe, he wasn’t sure. But she was really quite petite.

Not everyone finds her personality such a drawback
, Kate thought in his head.

They just don’t know her very well, then
, Quinn responded.

Oh come on
, Kate responded.
You have to admit she’s formidable. She’s a good reporter. The only reason you dislike her so intensely is that you have to compete with her.

Maybe,
Quinn said reluctantly.
Still, I can’t imagine finding her attractive.

Janus did,
Kate said.

What are you talking about?

She slept with Janus,
Kate said.

Quinn’s eyes widened in shock.

“Get the fuck out,” he said out loud, but fortunately not loud enough for Summer to hear him. “Janus… He…”

But there had been something, hadn’t there? Janus had issues with Summer, and they squabbled whenever the two of them met, but it had been more flirtatious than the confrontations Quinn and she had.

When did you learn this?
He asked.

Something Janus mentioned when we were waiting for you to recover in that hospital in Bluemont last year. He swore me to secrecy.

Well, she didn’t seem very broken up when he died
, Quinn said.
I barely remember her at the funeral.

When I saw her at a county board meeting last December, she seemed really upset, distracted,
Kate said.
I actually had a human conversation with her. She told me she hadn’t stopped crying since the day he died. All she asked was that I not tell you about it.

And suddenly Quinn felt badly for Summer, his perennial nemesis. It’s funny when you think you know a person—when you are so sure that your impression of them is all there is. But there are always layers, always something you can’t see. You never really know anyone.

Why didn’t Janus tell me?

I think you know why,
Kate said.

Because I would have given him no end of hell about it
.

Exactly
, she responded.

Quinn watched Tim exit his office and walk toward Summer. His editor stuck out his hand and greeted her almost exuberantly.

“I’m Tim Anderson, the editor of the
Loudoun Chronicle
,” he said. “Your reputation precedes you, Ms. Mandaville. Welcome to the paper.”

Summer looked almost surprised at the gracious greeting.

Quinn nodded to Summer as she approached and Tim gestured for him to follow.