CHAPTER TWO
“…bludgeoned to death by another inmate,” the radio squawked. “James Dipetro, director of the 676-man Columbus County Detention Center, where the infamous cannibalistic murderer was serving a 936-year sentence, told reporters that he fears the suspect, one Tredell W. Rosser, may now be regarded as a celebrity by the prison’s other minority inmates. ‘We fear,’ Dipetro said, ‘that Rosser will become a prison folk hero of sorts, and not just by Columbus inmates but by every Hispanic and African American convict in the country…’“
Helen, in pre-8 a.m. rush hour, switched the radio station. Dahmer, Dahmer, Dahmer, her thoughts complained. The news dominated every radio station she turned on, and morning tv hadn’t been any better. Jesus Christ, is that all anyone cares about? Dahmer? I’m absolutely SICK of hearing about him!
But if that were really the case, why was Helen driving to the state morgue to see the body?
««—»»
The man walks down the sun-lit street, in Madison, Wisconsin. Bright light but cold, like his heart. The chill air whips his face, yet he feels numbly warm. The city seems to swarm around him, not part of him, and he not part of it. But that’s how it always is. He ducks out; he doesn’t want to be on the street too long. He doesn’t want to be seen.
Some time later, he finds himself walking up a flight of stairs, each footfall slow and plodding and deliberate. He feels different now, like some odd toggle in his brain has been switched. Nevertheless, each step he takes upward takes him back…
««—»»
BATH, OHIO, MAY, 1971
The boy from Bath, Ohio.
What a dumb name for a town, he always thought. But right now he was thinking about things far more crucial.
Spring heat cooked his back. His sweat drenched his shortsleeve, plaid shirt as he ran, yes, ran in spite of the prickling heat—hoping to get home before his father did. He cut through yards, the long way, to get home from school every day. He couldn’t stand to be taunted by the other kids. Faggot, they called him. Pussy. In phys ed, the captains had been choosing up teams. Gil Valeda, who was probably the best athlete in the fifth grade, if not the best in all of Summerset Elementary, laughed when the boy had jerked his hand up, wanting to be, for once, on a winning team. “No way,” Valeda had said. “You’re a weakling, a little faggot.” The boy had been chosen by the other side, last pick. They’d lost the softball game 11 to nothing. His other teammates had blamed him, of course, for striking out three times, for dropping a ball in right field.
He pretended not to hear, and not to care.
But he really did care.
And one day, he knew, he would show them all…
««—»»
I’m free, he thought.
And he was hungry.
««—»»
“…bludgeoned to death with a broom handle,” another radio announcer was spewing in an automaton’s voice. “Authorities say that the murder occurred at approximately eight a.m. yesterday, when Dahmer was on a custodial detail in the gymnasium of the Columbus County Detention Center. Prison guards discovered a bloody broom handle nearby, and another inmate, reportedly a friend of Dahmer’s, was beaten also, and is now listed in critical condition at St. John the Divine Hospital in Madison. Officials say that Dahmer’s face was beaten so severely that—”
Helen changed radio stations yet again, trying to edge her way to the state employees lot. Tom had left a message on her answering machine. “Hi, Helen, it’s me. I won’t be getting off at seven this morning, I’ve been ordered to stay on. You’re never gonna believe this—Greene’s on vacation, so I’m the Acting Chief Medical Examiner while he’s gone. What I mean is I’m the one who’s going to autopsy Dahmer’s body! See ya tonight!”
Even Tom seemed to have the bug. What was the fascination? Perhaps it was Helen’s job that bored her on the topic; she saw death every day, and killers, to her, were all one in the same. They were the active statistics on a grim social spreadsheet, numbers that produced other numbers. She could think of it in no other terms: victims as well as perpetrators could never be humanized by the homicide investigator. Otherwise that homicide investigator would burn out in a year or two and wind up contemplating suicide every day. Last night’s 64 proved a case in point; if Helen thought of the decedent as a baby, a kid, a human child, etc., the freight of that humanity would wring her dry. It would wring anyone dry, she thought. To her, that baby could only be this: a homicide stat, a number on a very dark piece of paper.
It made her feel so cold, though, thinking about it at times like these. Maybe she was lying to herself; she’d done that a lot in her life. Acting one way but actually feeling another. How much longer could she pretend not to feel, if this were truly the case? She remembered the day Deputy Chief Olsher had barged into her office with a smile like a great, black pumpkin, and told her that Henry Longford had been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. Longford had run a sophisticated point-network for the distribution of child pornography; Helen, working liaison with the Justice Department, had helped send Longford up to the Federal Max in Marion, fifteen years with no parole. “See, Helen?” Olsher reveled. “There really is a God. That sick piece of garbage’ll be dead before he’s even got five under his belt!” Helen’s initial reaction had been one of stoic nonchalance. She’d responded with something like: “Right now I’m too busy to even think about Longford.” Something like that, which sent Olsher away with the oddest expression. When she’d gotten home, however, she’d begun crying in fits, slowly but surely remembering the tiny, washed out faces in all those video masters, the nine-year-old thousand-yard stares. Eventually her sobs meshed with an hour-long paroxysm of manic laughter. It was strange what this job would do to people.
St. John the Divine Hospital was just south of Madison, and there, occupying half of its basement, was the Office of the Wisconsin State Medical Examiner along with the WSP Main Crime Lab. Tom’s workplace, and Beck’s. But Helen noted an immediate curiosity. Why bring Dahmer’s body here? she asked herself. Upon sentence, Dahmer had come into the correctional custody of the County of Columbus, whose own M.E. facilities were at South Columbus General just outside of Portage. Why call in the state M.E.?
Helen had to show her badge and ID three times just to get through the ER wing—she avoided the north entrance upon noticing an influx of news hawks and cameras—and three more times just to get downstairs. Why all the heat? There were cops everywhere: state troopers as well as a lot of Madison Metro PD. In the basement she first passed the lock-up wing, a little ICU prison for injured inmates and arrestees. PREPARE TO BE MAGNOMETERED UPON ADMITTANCE. LAW ENFORCEMENT EMPLOYEES CHECK WEAPONS IN WITH PROPERTY OFFICER HERE. Her high heels ticked across shiny tile; at the end of the corridor, another sign announced: WISCONSIN STATE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH, MADISON SUBSTATION. Then, a final plaque: MORGUE.
“Helen!” Tom greeted when she entered. She’d been ID’d a final time at the recept desk. “I would’ve thought you’d be home asleep.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she admitted. Intermittent nightshifts played havoc with her metabolism, but it must for Tom too. Nevertheless, he looked cheery and alert in his disposable autopsy blues. Helen had tried to sleep upon her return from the Farland call, but the pallid nightmare-face had kept hounding her. Waxlike, exsanguinated. When the cool, claylike hands had dipped to touch her bare breasts, she’d bolted awake and gave up on any further attempts to sleep.
“I’d come over there and kiss you,” he joked, “but, as you can see, I’m sterile.”
“What difference does it make to cadavers?”
“State regs, hon. Pretty soon the cadavers’ll be suing us—and winning. You got my message, I take it.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Say, what’s with all the heat? It was like trying to get into the Pentagon.”
“Aw, you know. Something like this, press fodder? I’ve even got a trooper guarding the back entry. They’ve caught six people already trying to sneak in here.”
“For what?”
“To get a picture of the body. One guy tried to steal his inmate number off his prison coveralls, another guy said he wanted to steal one of his teeth.”
This was ridiculous. “Dahmer’s teeth?”
“Sure,” Tom said, pulling out a box of Johnson & Johnson Morgue Swipes. Kills E. Coli and Other Morgue-Related Bacteria on Contact! Kills Herpes, Hepatitis B and HIV! the blue and white box bragged. “I’m amazed by the level of detail that the press has got their hands on. Christ, Columbus County Detent leaks like a sieve. Most of Dahmer’s teeth were broken; this guy says he heard it on the radio, thought he’d zip in here real quick and cop one of the teeth. They charged him with trespassing on state property and ‘morbid malfeasance.’“
“Jesus,” Helen dismissed. “They ought to charge him with being an asshole too, but I don’t think that one’s in the state books.”
“Not yet, anyway, but we can always hope.”
So that explained the undue police presence, which miffed her right off the bat. These cops had better ways to serve the public interest than guarding a corpse. Right now, on Clay Street, crack was being sold. Right now in the stan district, heroin tar was being cut. Right now, somewhere, a woman was being raped.
In the prep room, Helen at once found herself hemmed in by dented file cabinets, bookshelves, and a lot of computer equipment. One CPU, she noted, was a UNISYS 1500 latent datalink, which had state and federal mainframe access to every felon fingerprint in the country. A small, glass scan-pallet would digitalize the latent and feed it into the system. Cost per unit: $650,000. Too bad it crashed regularly. An equally expensive mass photospectrometer ticked in the corner like a cooling car engine.
A chuckle, then: “Mix you a drink?” Tom was mixing a formalin/alcohol mixture in several big translucent squeeze bottles: cadaver preservative. Helen hated the smell of formalin; it was the only thing that gave her a headache worse than tequila.
“So how’d that 64 go last night?”
“Terrible. It was a baby,” she finally told him. “Beck was there, as usual, and she was all over me. There was no way in hell that I could’ve written up for VCU. I don’t understand it. Beck hates me.”
Tom was wincing immediately, which mystified Helen. But before she could even ask, a figure appeared from the dressing room, dressed in the same disposable morgue blues. It was Jan Beck.
“I don’t hate you, Captain,” she said. “I was just bent out of shape last night, and I apologize.”
Good job, Helen! She felt like a perfect ass, but the scenario infuriated her. What the hell is Beck doing here! she wanted to shout.
“Jan’s doing the assist,” Tom explained. “I think I told you on my message, Greene’s on vacation as of last Sunday, went to Bowie, Maryland, or some hole in the wall town like that. I’ll bet he’s crapping his blues right now.”
Helen’s face screwed up. “What, autopsying Jeffrey Dahmer is a big deal?”
“My dear, in the world of forensic pathology, receiving the opportunity to perform the post-mortem on a world-famous serial-killer is a career event.”
Beck laughed. Helen rolled her eyes.
“I’ll be ready to roll in a few minutes,” Tom said more to Beck. “I’ve gotta let the instruments cook a little longer in the ‘clave.” His eyes gestured the Magna brand 260-degree autoclave percolating in the corner like an industrial washer. Helen thought it absurd to have to sterilize instruments that would be used on dead people. Tom had said the machine cost the state over $4000. I could do the same job with a boiling pot of water, Helen thought.
“Come on,” Beck implied to Helen, and a wave of hand. “Let’s go look.”
“Go look at what?” Helen replied.
“You know. The body.”
“I didn’t come here to see the body,” she insisted.
“Oh, yeah, then why are you here? Let me guess. You came all the way to the state morgue to ask Tom what he wants for dinner tonight?”
A brief impulse flared. First of all, Helen didn’t like the way Beck had so easily referred to Tom by his first name; second, she liked least the fact that it was common knowledge she and Tom were dating, an unwritten no-no for state employees. But then the good Dr. Sallee’s remonstrations kicked in, as they usually did. You’re so insecure, you’re paranoid. You over-react to everything. You have to work on this, Helen. You must, or you’ll never be happy.
She knew he was right, but it still ticked her off. All right, I’ll work on it…
“Uh-oh,” Tom said. “Look, she’s rubbing her locket. That means we’ve pissed her off.”
Helen hadn’t even been aware of it, but now that he’d mentioned this, she couldn’t help but notice how desperately she’d been rubbing her father’s large, silver locket. She dropped it and smiled coyly. “Fuck you very much,” she said.
“That’s the spirit!”
Helen shrugged it off. At least she was making some headway with her problems. “Come on, Jan. Let’s go gawk at Jeffrey Dahmer’s body. And you can tell Mack the Knife there he can have me arrested for morbid malfeasance.”
««—»»
“Oh my God, this is disgusting!” Helen exclaimed.
“No, no,” Jan Beck whispered in something very much like awe. “It’s fascinating.”
Yet another state goon had ID’d them both at the entrance of ANTEROOM #4. DO NOT ENTER. AUTOPSY IN PROGRESS. Of course nothing, right this instant, was in progress save for Helen’s abhorrence. The body lay there so candidly it seemed surreal, like one of Tom’s CD-ROM games—a spooky veil like tulle which somehow enhanced details instead of detracting from them. The body was not covered, and it lay on a stainless steel morgue platform which came equipped with a removable drain-trap, gutters for “organic effluence,” and a motorized height adjustment. The corpse’s image was blatant, like a surprise shout in the dark.
Fluorescent lights hummed over their heads.
“Christ Almighty,” Helen uttered, at once fingering her locket again. “Look at his face.”
There really was no face, not even a facsimile of anything that could be called a human face. It looked more like a blue-black poultice, covered by a crust of red-black blood. The corpse lay stretched out straight, in stained, nearly tourmaline-green prison coveralls, pocketless via typical county prison inmate regulations. A white patch over the right breast read 177252, the county corrections index. Over the left breast read simply this:
DAHMER, J.
Helen felt something crawl up her skin when she read the nefarious name, something she could only describe as a hot chill.
“I wonder what the official C.O.D. was,” Beck queried.
“Probably not a heart attack,” Helen offered.
Beck’s tongue curiously traced her lower lip as she studied the corpse’s face. “Repeated blunt trauma,” she estimated. “But, Christ, it said on the radio he was beaten with a broom handle. I’ve seen enough head traumas to tell you, this was no broom handle.”
“And, Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy,” a voice drifted up behind them. It was Tom, wielding, as usual, his off-key sense of humor. Off-key because this was a morgue. “Multiple cou-counter-cou strike impacts, to respond to your insightful observation. Evidence is plain due to the extent of irregular pupillary dilation. Two blunt trauma impactations against the cranial occipital bone and the inion process. Multiple fractures and abundant spalling of inner calculi also in acute evidence. How’s that for fancy talk?”
Beck frowned. “The occipital bone is in the back,” she pointed out. “And it would take a man of some strength to crack the inion process with a broom stick.”
“Then you need to see the assailant,” Tom replied. “A genteel young man by the name of Tredell Rosser. He’s six-three, probably two-percent body fat and weighs in at two-twenty-five. Prison beefcake. This guy’s been lifting weights six days a week for the last four years. He makes Hulk Hogan look like Richard Simmons.”
“But the procumbent skull process?” Beck continued. “That mess wasn’t caused by any broom stick.”
“In my professional estimation, which of course is lauded as undisputable medical fact throughout the world’s community of pathology, the rest of the job was caused by a cinderblock wall.” Tom traipsed forward, snapping on pre-doubled pairs of Becton-Dickinson neoprene examination gloves. “And a concrete floor.”
Then Helen remembered more bits from the incessant radio coverage. Considerable amounts of blood reportedly were found on the floor and wall where Dahmer’s body was discovered. “Rosser took Dahmer down with the broom handle,” Helen ventured. “Then finished the job by—”
“By ramming his big mug into the wall and floor, with all his God-given might. Keep in mind, Rosser routinely bench presses three hundred and fifty pounds. And the rec superintendent at the prison claims that the guy is no longer allowed to practice on the heavy bag because he frequently breaks it open.”
“He just grabbed Dahmer’s ears and went to town,” Beck morbidly added.
“But we mustn’t misjudge,” Tom said. “Maybe he was just trying to knock a little sense into Jeff.” Then Beck: “Or maybe he was actually using Dahmer’s head to try and break out of prison.” He and Beck cackled, then, like witches.
Helen felt waylaid. “There’s a dead body in the room,” she complained. “How can you tell jokes in front of a corpse?”
“Because they don’t groan when you tell a clunker. Sorry, Jeff,” Tom apologized. “We get a little carried away here sometimes.”
“But, honestly,” Beck added to the fest, “we’re really very nice people once you get to know us.”
You’re both whacks, Helen thought. Only then did she turn to fully view Tom, in his “butcher’s blues,” as those in his field called them. He wore the morgue’s ghastly fluorescent light like a pallor; he could’ve passed for a corpse himself, here in such company. But his sense of humor, she realized, came as necessity. Jovial in a locker full of death, day after day. Sure, Helen knew the routine—her own job wasn’t dissimilar, only in that she got to see the corpses before he did, and she didn’t have to autopsy them. But she had to wonder, now in this strangest of rooms, amid the cloying fetor of formalin and cold blood: How does he keep it together? Here was a man who cut up dead people for a living, who autopsied children and weighed wet, extricated livers the way women weighed potatoes in the grocery store. He’s seen more guts than a fish market dumpster, Helen thought. How can he stand doing this every day?
The answer, of course, was reflective. He did it the same way Helen did her own job every day. He did it simply because it was his occupational responsibility. And by now, she suspected, looking at human innards was no more repulsive to him than the mechanic at the Exxon when he looked into an open hood.
Ranks of storage shelves behind him sat heavy with big smoke-colored glass bottles: JORE’S, ZENKER’S SOLUTION, PHENOL, FORMALIN 20-PERCENT. A tin tray marked AMYLOID/FAT NECROSIS PREP held several bottles of iodine and copper sulphate. A large sink and heat-sealing iron hung on the same wall.
“It’s an incredible head trauma,” Beck went on, refocusing back to the business at hand.
Tom added: “I’ve seen a lot of them, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything this bad. Not from blunt trauma, probably not even from a car wreck.”
Helen, to herself, agreed; she’d seen her share herself. But, of course, she saw corpus delectus much differently from a medical examiner or a forensic tech. Helen didn’t need to look close—that was Beck’s job. Helen realized she’d probably never seen a dead human body in such stunning detail.
But key words replayed, something snagging in her subconscious. They’re right, she realized. This is an extraordinary head trauma. The damage is so severe that—
“Wait a minute,” she said. “The investigator in me can’t resist this question. The face is unrecognizable.”
“Indeed,” Tom quipped.
“So how do you really know this is Dahmer?”
“Many reasons, my dear. For one, that’s his name and ident number on his coveralls.”
“Big deal,” Helen countered. “It wouldn’t be hard to put Dahmer’s clothes on someone else’s body.”
“No, but it would be a tad more difficult to put Dahmer’s teeth in someone’s else’s mouth, wouldn’t it?” Tom, then, held up an evidence bag full of teeth. The bag rattled like a baby toy. “The cavity and filling schemes on these teeth matched Dahmer’s prison dental records.”
“But the teeth were broken out of his mouth during the beating,” Helen argued. “It’s not inconceivable that a third party could’ve put Dahmer’s teeth in the mouth of another corpse.”
“After breaking the teeth out of that other corpse before transport,” Beck suggested. “And beating him to death similarly.”
“Sure,” Helen replied. “Why not?”
Tom laughed. “Women are so suspicious!”
“Hey, I’m paid to be suspicious,” Helen said. “I’m a state homicide investigator.”
“Have no fear, ladies. The body before you was also positively ID’d as Jeffrey Dahmer, not once, not twice, but three times, by his fingerprints. We’re pretty thorough around here.”
“Oh, well,” Beck chuckled. “It was fun while it lasted.”
“The state regs border on ridiculous, Helen,” Tom offered next, lining scalpels neatly on a shiny tray. “I even had to do a sex-chromatin test on this bastard—”
“You’re kidding?” Beck cut in.
“I wish I was kidding, and after having had the rather immodest opportunity of seeing Mr. Dahmer’s penis with my own eyes, I think I can safely say that the decedent is of the male gender. Or perhaps Helen suspects that a third party attached Dahmer’s penis to someone else’s body.”
Helen made a face like someone sucking a lemon wedge. “Jesus, Tom, you’re so gross.”
“Hey, I’m paid to be gross,” he cited. “I’m a medical examiner.” Whereupon both Beck and Tom laughed out loud.
Helen was appalled. Morgue humor was not something she was cut out for. But more questions itched at her. “One thing I don’t get. Why was he even brought here? How come the state’s doing the autopsy? Dahmer died in Columbus County, so shouldn’t the Columbus County M.E. be doing it?”
“More regs, hon.” Tom flicked on the overhead spots. “Our revered Wisconsin State Annotated Code cites, and I quote, ‘Any decedent currently in the correctional custody off any county of the Commonwealth of Wisconsin who may be deemed a public figure, notorious, or whose identity may be offensive to the public sensibility, shall become the immediate custody of the Office of the Wisconsin State Medical Examiner.’“
It didn’t make sense to Helen. “Why?”
“To avoid a botched post-mortem,” Beck answered.
Helen frowned. I was asking him, not you.
“The state doesn’t trust its own counties,” Tom elaborated, “and with fairly good reason. There’s less security at the county facilities, and there’s no expertise. Columbus is a perfect example. It’s the boondocks, and Portage is a boondocks town that just happens to have a county prison sitting in the middle of it. The Columbus County Coroner is also the county clerk, the recorder of deeds, the justice of the peace, assistant to the county executive, and he owns a used car dealership to boot. His name might as well be Uncle Jed, and the state doesn’t want Uncle Jed doing the post work on a ‘notorious figure.’ Christ, those hayseeds’d be selling Dahmer’s shoes, his hair and his clothes. They’d be snapping pictures of the corpse and selling them to the tabloids… By the way, where’s my camera?”
More levity, more jokes. It was getting on Helen’s nerves. Now that the examination lights were on, the morgue platform offered every detail of its occupant. Helen averted her eyes. “Who pronounced him dead, by the way?”
“About half the people in the U.S. Midwest. I was last, as a matter of fact, felt like I was standing in line with a ticket at Baskin-Robbins. First person to pronounce this sucker was the prison duty physician. Then the transport captain who took him to South Columbus General. Then the ER chief pronounced him dead as well as the hospital director. Then they transport the body here, and the whole thing happens again. Everybody wants to be able to say that they pronounced Jeffrey Dahmer dead, like they’re gonna get some prize or something. Me? All I get to do is cut the sucker up.”
“I heard MIT wants his brain,” Beck said, “for some cross-referenced histological study of sociopaths.”
“Oh, yeah?” Tom repeated his well-honed chuckle and then, at the pinnacle of bad taste, actually placed his hand on Dahmer’s forehead. “I guarantee you, there isn’t much of a brain left in this noggin. After a blunt trauma job like that?” Tom winked at Helen, cut a sly grin. “When I open this can, honey, there ain’t gonna be nothin’ inside except cranberry sauce.”
That was it for Helen. “Pardon me, folks, but I have to go throw up now. See you later.”
Tom was hooting it up. “Jan, go see if the turkey’s done, will you please? I love turkey with cranberry sauce.”
At once, all the blood in Helen’s face seemed to drain as she stumbled toward the exit.
“Don’t leave yet, honey! You’ll miss the fun. Wait!”
Helen, against all better judgment, turned to take a final glance over her shoulder.
Tom was holding a Stryker orbital saw in one hand, patting Dahmer’s head with the other. He revved the saw several times, begetting a sound like a monstrous dentist’s drill. “Headcheese for dinner tonight?”
Helen stumbled out, nearly fainting.
— | — | —