The Throat

'I'm sorry.'

'That's all right, Walter. Please give me your name, address, and date of birth.'

'My name is Walter Donald Dragonette, and my address is 3421 North Twentieth Street, where I have resided all of my life since being born on September 20, 1965.'

'And you have waived the presence of an attorney.'

'I'll get a lawyer later. I want to talk to you first.'

'The only other thing I have to say is that this conversation is being videotaped so that we can refer to it later.'

'Oh, that's a good idea.' Dragonette looked up at the ceiling, and then over his shoulder, and grinned and pointed at us. 'I get it! The camera's behind that mirror, isn't it?'

'No, it isn't,' Fontaine said.

'Is it on now? And are you sure it's working?'

'It's on now,' Fontaine said.

'So now we can start?'

'We're starting right now,' Fontaine said.

11

The following is a record of the conversation that followed.

     WD: Okay. I have one thing I want to say right away, because it's important that you know about this. I was sexually abused when I was just a little boy, seven years old. The man who did it was a neighbor down the street, and his name was Mr. Lancer. I don't know his first name. He moved away the year after that. But he used to invite me into his house, and then he'd, you know, he'd do things to me. I hated it. Anyhow, I've been thinking about things, about why I'm here and all, and I think that's the whole explanation for everything, right there, Mr. Lancer.

PF: Did you ever tell anyone about Mr. Lancer? Did you ever tell your mother?

WD: How could I? I hardly even know how to describe it to myself! And besides that, I didn't think my mother would believe me. Because she liked Mr. Lancer. He helped keep up the tone of the neighborhood. Do you know what he was? He was a photographer, and he took baby pictures, and pictures of children. You bet he did. He took pictures of me without my clothes on.

PF: Is that all he did?

WD: Oh, no. Didn't I say he abused me? Well, that's what he did. Sexually. That's the really important part. He made me play with him. With his, you know, his thing. I had to put it in my mouth and everything, and he took pictures. I wonder if those pictures are in magazines. He had magazines with pictures of little boys.

PF: You took pictures, didn't you, Walter?

WD: Did you see them? The ones in the envelope?

PF: Yes.

WD: Well, now you know why I took them.

PF: Was that the only reason you took pictures?

WD: I don't know. I sort of had to do that. It's important to remember things, it's very important. And then there was one other reason.

PF: What was it?

WD: Well, I could use them to decide what I was going to eat. When I got home from work. That's why I sometimes called the pictures, the envelope of pictures, the 'menu.' Because it was like a list of what I had. I was always going to get the pictures organized into a nice scrapbook, with the names and everything, but you got me before I got around to it. That's okay, though. I'm not mad or anything. It was really just having the pictures, really, not putting them in a book.

PF: And help you pick out what you were going to eat.

WD: It was the menu. Like those restaurants that have pictures of the food. And besides, you can wander down Memory Lane, and have those experiences again. But even after you sort of used up the picture, it's still a trophy—like an animal head you put on a wall. Because a long time ago, I figured out that that's what I was, a hunter. A predator. Believe me, I wouldn't have chosen it, there's a lot of work involved, and you have to have incredible secrecy, but it chose me and there it was. You can't go back, you know.

PF: Tell me about when you figured out that you were a predator. And I want to hear about how you got interested in the old Blue Rose murders.

WD: Oh. Well, the first thing was, I read this book called The Divided Man, and it was about this screwed-up cop who found out that he killed people and then he killed himself. The book was about Millhaven! I knew all the streets! That was really interesting to me, especially after my mother told me that the whole thing was real. So I learned from her that there used to be this man who killed people and wrote blue rose on the wall, or whatever, near the bodies. Only it wasn't the policeman.

PF: It wasn't?

WD: Couldn't be, never ever. No way. No. Way. That detective in the book, he wasn't a predator at all. I knew that—I just didn't know what you called it, yet. But whoever it really was, he was like my real dad. He was like me, but before me. He hunted them down, and he killed them. Back then, the only things I killed were animals, just for practice, so I could see what it was like. Cats and dogs, a lot of cats and dogs. You could use a knife, and it was pretty easy. The hard part was getting the skeletons clean. Nobody really knows how much work that is. You really have to scrub, and the smell can get pretty bad.

PF: You thought that the Blue Rose murderer was your father?

WD: No, I thought he was my real dad. No matter whether he was my actual father or not. My mother never told me much about my dad, so he could have been anybody. But after I read that book and found out how real it was, I knew I was like that man's real son, because I was like following in his footsteps.

PF: And so, a couple of weeks ago, you decided to copy what he had done?

WD: You noticed? I wasn't sure anyone would notice.

PF: Notice what?

WD: You know. You almost said it.

PF: You say it.

WD: The places—they were the same places. You knew that, didn't you?

PF: Those Blue Rose murders were a long time ago.

WD: There's no excuse for ignorance like that. You didn't notice because you never knew in the first place. I think that's really second-rate.

PF: I agree with you.

WD: Well, you should. It's shoddy.

PF: You went to a lot of trouble to recreate the Blue Rose murders, and nobody noticed. Noticed the details, I mean.

WD: People never notice anything. It's disgusting. They never even noticed that all those people were missing. Now I suppose nobody'll even notice that I got arrested, or all the things I did.

PF: You don't have to worry about that, Walter. You are becoming very well known. You're already notorious.

WD: Well, that's all wrong, too. There isn't anything special about me.

PF: Tell me about killing the man on Livermore Street.

WD: The man on Livermore Street? He was just a guy. I was waiting in that little alley or whatever you call it, in back of that hotel. A man came along. It was, let's see, about midnight. I asked him some question, who knows, like if he could help me carry something into the hotel through the back door. He stopped walking. I think I said I'd give him five bucks. Then he stepped toward me, and I stabbed him. I kept on stabbing him until he fell down. Then I wrote BLUE ROSE on the brick wall. I had this marker I brought along, and it worked fine.