“The same.”
“That’s where we were the night of the accident.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“I walk to that house every night. It’s part of my watch. I saw you kids there. I figured you were just getting into normal trouble, so I thought I’d just watch for a few minutes to make sure that everything was going to be all right. I was just about to leave when I saw him…”
“Who?”
“The same person… thing… that I saw walk into that same house and slaughter those nuns so many years prior.”
“I didn’t see anyone other than the six of us.”
“I was standing atop the hill on the other side of the road, leaning against the trunk of a tree when something caught my attention out of the corner of my eye. I turned to see, but there was nothing there. I could feel him out there with me, though, his cold eyes watching me. I could taste his breath on the wind, feel him in my bones. I had seen him in those woods a handful of times in the interim, a shadow slipping behind a tree, a dark face leering at me from the shadows, but it wasn’t until that moment that I knew that he wanted me to see him.”
Scott stared closely at him. The whole thing sounded like complete and utter hogwash, but he could tell from the man’s face that he believed every word that came out of his mouth.
“I heard shouting, and I turned just in time to see two of you kids come running out the front door, one dragging the other. You got into your car and started to back up. It was at that point that I could feel him standing next to me. There was a certain aura of coldness around him; I could feel it straight through the flesh on my arms, aching in the center of my bones. All I could hear was the sound of his breathing, the sound of razors scraping across flesh. My knees were knocking as I turned to look, but I only caught a quick glimpse of his face, his eyes settled into shadow, his cracked lips pressed tightly over his teeth. The skin on his cheeks was dry and flaking, the purple veins right up against the surface of his pale, blue flesh. I flinched as he raised his arm and pointed down toward the road. I followed where his finger pointed just in time to see someone else racing to his car to follow you. I turned back, but he was already gone.”
“Who’s he?”
Harry rose from the chair and walked across the room, closing the door. There was a large white sheet of butcher’s paper pinned to the back of the door. Stepping through the mess of boxes, he sat back down in the chair and flipped a switch on the side of the reel to reel, a thin line of white flowing right in front of Scott’s face on the way to the wall.
“I’d like you to meet LeRoy Trottier,” Harry said, sliding the clip forward on the camera. The film began to feed through.
“Who?”
“Just watch.”
The scratched and lined, faded color picture appeared on the wall, amidst the crackling of the spinning reel.
A man sat a table in the center of the screen, his fingers laced before him, his head bowed. Slowly, he raised his eyes and stared into the camera, his dark, deep-set eyes staring right through Scott as he sat in the small, darkened room. His wild, black hair was streaked with lines of gray, as was his long, scraggly beard. He had thick, bushy brows and his forehead was heavily lined. Only the bottom row of teeth was visible beneath the long mustache, crooked and jagged. Slowly, his tongue appeared, licking his lips as he prepared to begin.
“So you say you’ve seen him with your own eyes,” the man said, smiling, his deep, guttural voice filling the room.
“Let’s start from the beginning, Mr. Trottier,” Harry said, the old recording stealing years from his voice. “First off, can you please state your name for the camera.”
He grinned, removing his hands from the table and leaning back in the chair, relacing his fingers behind his head.
“Leroy Francis Trottier,” he said, cocking his head. “Welcome to the Canyon City Correctional Facility, where friends and good times come together every single day behind bars.”
He laughed.
“It’s important that you take this seriously, Mr. Trottier—”
“Call me LeRoy.”
“I’d appreciate it if we could keep this interview formal.”
Smirking, he nodded, placing a hairy, bare foot on the table in front of him.
“Now Mr. Trottier,” Harry continued, “Would you please state for me why exactly you are in prison.”
“You already know.”
“Please, Mr. Trottier, I need you to be cooperative. I can always just use your file.”
“You need my words. You’ve already read my file. You’re looking for something that’s not in there.”
“Granted, but I’m also giving you the opportunity to tell things in your own words for posterity.”
His mouth slowly parted as he ran his tongue over his front teeth, staring down into his lap only momentarily before turning back into the camera and nodding.
“Okay,” he said, dryly. “Let’s start from the top. My name is LeRoy Francis Trottier and I am serving four consecutive life terms in the Canyon City Correctional Facility for murder. I was convicted in front of a jury of your peers, on four counts of first degree murder for the slayings of my wives and a police officer.”
“Your wives?”
He smiled.
“I initially had four of them, but one ran off during the night, taking my children with her. The other three pretended that they had no knowledge of what happened to the children, but I knew better. They were all in on it. They lied right to my face, so I was forced to try to get the information out of them using what I call ‘special tactics.’”
“Special tactics?”
“Yes,” he said, dropping his foot back to the floor and leaning all the way forward, the shackles on his wrists glimmering from the light of the camera. “I took a knife, a long, hand crafted blade with a jagged, serrated edge, and forced it into their lower stomachs, just to the inside of the hip bone. Slowly, I dragged it inward and downward, careful not to nick the intestines. You should have seen the way the blood spilled out from down there, covering their legs and staining the hairs of their privates. I gave them every opportunity to talk, to tell me themselves what they had done with the kids, but damned if the first one didn’t lie to me right from the start, telling me they’d taken them to live with her sister in Montana.”
“But they didn’t?”
“She didn’t even have a sister. Can you believe that? I’d have almost believed her if she’d told me they crawled away themselves to join the circus. But no, she had to lie straight to my face. So, I had no choice but to finish the incision and drag her intestines out around the room, draping them over the furniture and around the table. She got to watch for a while, well, until finally she coughed up what looked like a gallon of blood. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she was gone.”
“So you moved on to the other two?”
“Hell, they’d been in the room watching me with the first one. They told me right away what happened to them, squealing like little pigs. They cried and cried and told me how sorry they were that they had conspired against me, told me they’d make it up to me any way that I wanted.”
“But you killed them, too.”
“Of course. They took my children from me. So I gutted them just for fun.”
“Jesus…”
“Listen to me, college boy. My daddy used to say if you’ve got a cow that don’t give milk, it’s called a steak. Same thing applies here. I’ve got three wives who give away my children, knowing that was the only reason that they were brought there in the first place. That means that they’d outlived their usefulness.”
“I don’t understand why the other two just sat there watching as you tortured the first.”
“They were shackled to the wall.”
“Oh.”
