The Last Victim_ A True-Life Journey Into the Mind of the Serial Killer - Jason Moss [81]
The way he told it, he awoke in the morning to find the boy standing over his bed with a knife. After a struggle, the boy was stabbed in the stomach and killed. Soon after, Gacy walked into the kitchen to discover that the boy had made breakfast for him, and had apparently walked into his room with the knife in hand to call him to the breakfast table.
“See,” Gacy said, displaying his scarred arm.
I nodded. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions about that night?”
“What do you want to know?”
Just as I was about to reply, I heard the gate at the end of the hall open up, followed by the sound of the guard walking down the hall.
“Food’s here!” Gacy announced.
We were going to have lunch together? I don’t know why this surprised me. I guess it just seemed incongruous that we’d be doing something so ordinary. It was almost as if we were ensconced at the Hilton and room service had arrived.
The guard brought in two trays, each laden with something approximating roast beef—plus some applesauce, a glass of milk, an apple, and some bread. The roast beef was a greenish color and extremely tough. It also had a horrible smell. I thought briefly about the cold hamburger I’d bought from the dispensary earlier, but even the thought of that made me ill.
Our conversation ceased as Gacy began to stuff his face with the food. I couldn’t do anything but watch.
“Go on, Jason, eat!” said Gacy, the perfect host. “This is one of the best meals we get. I ordered it special for you.”
I smiled gratefully and began playing with the apple-sauce.
“So,” he continued, “you wanted to know about the Greyhound bus boy.” He took a big chunk of leathery meat, dunked it in some gravy, then stuffed it into his mouth.
“Look,” he continued between chews, his mouth working hard on the meat, “it was consensual sex. We fell asleep together. Then I thought he was trying to kill me.”
“But he was just making you a nice breakfast,” I argued.
Gacy seemed to be staring at me intently. Was he looking at my crotch? No, it was my uneaten food.
“Hey, would you like my lunch?” I offered. “I’m really not that hungry.”
He reached over and grabbed my tray, digging into the meat with relish. With his mouth full, he returned to the subject of his first kill, but ignored the earlier point I’d made.
“He ruined my rug,” he said, as if that explained why he deserved to die. “Besides, he shouldn’t have tried to attack me.”
“But he wasn’t trying to hurt you,” I reminded. “You knew it then, and you know it now.” This was the first time I’d actually challenged him, but I’d been with him all morning and I still hadn’t pried loose any secrets. I wanted this visit to have some value.
He remained calm. “Hey,” he said, “you don’t stand over someone with a knife while he’s sleeping.”
“So what happened after you stabbed him?” I prodded. He was sopping up the last of the gravy with his bread, and I was afraid he wouldn’t be so accommodating once lunch was over.
“Let me tell you something, Jason. You can tell when someone is dead because he shits all over the floor. The kid stunk up the place. I dropped him in the crawl space.”
I couldn’t believe it! He was actually admitting that he’d put the body in the place where all the other bodies were found!
“So if it was an accident,” I asked innocently, “why did you bury the body instead of just telling the police?”
Now Gacy adopted the same pedantic tone I’d heard so many times before, as if I were some kind of idiot who was altering the facts. Listening to him could be infuriating, because his arguments always sounded halfway convincing. Only after you carefully poked and prodded at his version of events did his lies unravel. After listening to him for a minute, I decided it was best to leave the burial issue alone and hit another angle.
“How did it feel to kill that kid?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It didn’t feel like anything. I didn