"How many did you kill?"

Roger remained silent, staring blankly at the table, ignoring the two cops hovering over him.

"Did you write this?" The fat officer asked, waving a notebook over Roger's head.

Soon it wouldn't matter. That which was sacred, that which he had failed, would be revealed soon enough. He didn't want to waste his time repeating what he had already committed to paper.

"We got us a regular serial killer here."

But there was nothing regular about Roger, and if they'd read the damned confession instead of waving it around like a flag, they'd understand that his taking of life provided him no thrill, no ventilation for rage. In fact, his duty brought him only misery.

He did not have the killing instinct. Maybe the others had found excitement in the ritual, Roger didn't know.

"What about that kid in Evergreen?"

In the distance, he heard a car horn blare. The sound died quickly to be replaced by the grinding of metal on metal.

Tears ran down Roger's cheeks. His body trembled. Roger looked up at the two men interrogating him; one stared angrily, and the other slapped the notebook against his leg.

When I was ten my father took me into the woods above our house. He knew I was afraid because the weather was turning cold, and everyone knew that once the first snow fell, another kid would disappear. There would be another empty desk at school. That was how I marked winter in those days, by the kids whose seats were empty on the day following the first snowfall.

And the weather was turning cold.

My best friend in those days was Ralph Deerfield, a round kid with the greatest comic book collection on the eastern slope of Colorado, or at least what I imagined was the greatest collection since I had only seen his, and it took up five good-sized cardboard boxes.

"Do you know why the leaves fall?" my father asked. We stood in a broad stand of Aspen. The leaves had already turned golden with red veins. Though a few littered the ground at our feet, most still clung to the skeletal white limbs. Before I could answer his question, he said, "Leaves fall to help the tree live. They compost and draw insects that live and die there in the ground near the trees. The leaves return to the ground to provide food for the trunk and the limbs. That way the tree can make it through winter until new leaves sprout in the spring."

"Just tell us, what did you do with their blood?"

I followed my father through that stand of Aspen and began the long climb. The hillside was covered in frost. The ground looked like the skin of a decomposing dragon; leaves, like scales, dotted the crusted earth. We climbed nearly to the top of the hill and then my father stopped and held out his hand.

I noticed his shirt parted; I saw the nest of hair on his chest, and I wanted to curl up there and be warm and not hear anything else about leaves feeding trees. All I wanted was warmth and cartoons or one of Ralph's really good comic books.

"It's going to snow tonight," my father said, gripping my hand tight, tighter than he had ever grasped it before.

I trembled.

My father sensed my fear and smiled. "Don't worry, Champ. The Snow Man can't hurt you."

That's what we all called the guy who stole the kids, the guy who created the empty chairs in class. We called him the SnowMan. We believed that he snatched kids and then ate them up like a fairy tale troll, and in our mythology, any one of us could be next.

We stood on an outcropping of stone beneath a forest of evergreens. I gazed out to the west where the sky was still blue because I already knew what I'd see to the north. I'd see the clouds rolling in over the mountains; I'd see the snow coming.

I didn't want it to snow.

"We're a lot like those leaves," my father said, putting his hand on my head. He guided me down a narrow path, between the pine and the spruce sentinels on either side of the trail, until the trail ended at another steep hillside. "A lot like them," he said.

"The blood, you asshole… Did you drink it? Bathe in it? Shit, we're not getting anywhere with this guy."

My first one, his name was Jimmy, I found him in Denver at a bar on Ninth Street. He followed me around for about thirty minutes, a beautiful kid with longish red hair and one of those mouths you can't help but want to taste. He was very pale, so pale like a statue. Beautiful.

But I didn't kill him because he was beautiful, nor because I have some deep self-loathing or because I feel sexually inadequate.

I killed him, quite simply, because I had to.

We spoke for nearly an hour before he told me that his company would cost me a hundred dollars an hour. I laughed and assured him that money was not an issue. I'd pay him five hundred for the night if he'd avail himself to me. He leaned forward and kissed me, and as I'd expected, his lips were narcotic.

I asked him to leave the bar and meet me in twenty minutes by the Capital Building. I slipped a twenty into his palm as a token of good faith, while shaking his hand goodbye. I told him to bundle up against the cold; the weathermen had promised snow later.

After Jimmy left, I made a point of speaking loudly with the bartender and even hitting on a couple of men who showed not the slightest interest, at which point, I left for my rendezvous.

"We know you fucked them. We found semen in the throats of two of the kids and in the rectum of the others. Safe sex not big in your neck of the woods?"

Outside, the sound of crunching metal continued, but the officers didn't seem interested. Roger stared at the iron grate covering the window. Snow salted a black blanket of night. A scream rose and fell so quickly it might have been the wind whistling through a crack in the windowpane.

"You get off on cutting them up? Does the blood make your dick hard?"

Just read.

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