CHAPTER SIX
“You’ve gotta be shitting me!”
Olsher’s face looked like a straining, pulsing dark fruit. Helen stood. The years had mellowed Larrel Olsher; Helen knew him to be far more laid back now, easy-going and insouciant, lower-strung pending his well-deserved retirement. Now, though, she feared she was watching her boss about to have a coronary.
whack!
Olsher slapped the newspaper. It was the evening edition of the Tribune, an early copy sent by courier.
“Larrel, what’re you yelling about?”
“This!”
Helen read the headline.
CRIME SCENE EVIDENCE INDICATES THAT DAHMER MAY HAVE ESCAPED.
Madison— Evidence procured by the Wisconsin State Police Violent Crimes Unit suggests that Jeffrey Dahmer, reported murdered by another inmate in prison over a week ago, may indeed still be alive. And on the loose. One Stewart K. Arlinger, a P Street bartender, was found murdered—mutilated—in a nearby motel. A hand-written note left by the killer was signed: Jeffrey Dahmer.
“This is garbage, Chief,” Helen assured. “I was at the scene. There are no verifiable fingerprints. It’s a copycat.”
“I know that, but what about them?” He tapped the newspaper in her hand. “Read more.”
The note is currently being analyzed by state police handwriting experts, to discern if it indeed was written by the infamous Dahmer.
“Chief, what are you getting all bent out of shape about? I’m telling you, it’s a copycat. There’s nothing in this perp’s m.o. that is even remotely similar to Dahmer’s. Didn’t the papers call you for a statement?”
“Of course they did. I gave them a twenty-minute spiel about how this was a copycat. And look what they published!”
The Tribune, of course, immediately contacted Deputy Chief Larrel Olsher of the state’s Violent Crime’s Unit, a special investigatory arm designed to probe particularly brutal state homicides. Olsher had this to say: “All the evidence suggests that this is a copycat slaying.”
“How do you like that shit?” Olsher’s voice pounded. “I talk to them for twenty-fucking-minutes, and all they publish is that! Ten fucking words!”
Olsher, at last, sat back down. “The PC’s going to be so pissed he’s gonna be shaking shit out his pant leg! I need you to fix this, Helen.”
`”Fix…what?”
“Fix this clusterfuck, that’s what! You’re the best investigator on this pissant, under-funded department. So go out and investigate. I want those TSD reports on my desk ASAP. I want forensic proof that this isn’t Dahmer, and I want it now. And before you do that, I want you to go to the papers and give those assholes the gist. They won’t listen to me, maybe they’ll listen to you.”
“All right, Larrel, don’t worry.”
Olsher took a moment to stare at her, the oddest of looks. “Tell me something, first. Do you think—do you think that… this really could be Dahmer?”
“No,” she categorically stated. “It’s not Dahmer’s modus at all, nothing like it. Dahmer was a recluse. He never publicized his crimes, and he would never—in a million years—leave a note for the police.”
“Tell them that!” Olsher barked, and sipped coffee as if to save his life. “Go to the fucking Tribune and tell them that! Right now! Then start checking out the works!”
“You got it.” That was all she said before she left the deputy chief’s office. Calming down Olsher in a bad mood, she’d long-since learned, was akin to calming down a pit bull.
All she could hope for was this: that Jan Beck and her Technical Services Division would put a lid on this fast.
««—»»
“My name is Helen Closs”—she flashed her badge—”and I’m with the Wisconsin State Police Violent Crimes Unit. I’d like to speak to the executive editor of the Tribune.”
Helen would’ve expected a gum-chewing blonde, but instead it was a fat guy with glasses who tended the reception desk of the Clark Avenue newspaper.
“Mr. Tait’s in conference, ma’am,” the guy informed her without even looking up. He was reading a book called Palace Corbie. “Would you like to make an appointment for tomorrow? Or you can wait here if you like, for maybe two hours.”
Helen took off her topcoat. “If I have to wait for more than two minutes, I’ll close your newspaper down.”
The book slowly lowered. “Pardon me?”
“I just carded three Vietnamese men working your loading dock. They were unable to verify their United States citizenship. They didn’t have green cards and they carried no legal form of identification. Plus you have pallets of newspapers blocking the west access of loading dock, which obstruct city services in general and fire-fighting equipment in particular. I can close you down with a court order pending a citation hearing. It would take no more than forty minutes to get the paperwork served.”
The fat guy was on the phone in a heartbeat, and another heartbeat later he was smiling cordially and telling her, “Mr. Tait will be happy to see you now. Third door on the left.”
Helen took the central hall, passing coves of computer stations and journalists tapping keyboards. The obstruction to city services was weak, and even though the Vietnamese men were obviously illegal, it would take something more like two days to serve the papers with immigration violations. But white lies weren’t really lies.
“Ah, Captain Klause,” the paper’s exec editor greeted in her in his office.
“Closs,” she corrected.
“Have a seat. What can I do for you?”
“Turn on a tape recorder and print everything I say in tomorrow morning’s edition.” Helen sat down, poker-faced.
Tait had a nicely trimmed beard and hair pulled back in a ponytail. “I’m always happy to accommodate the police,” Tait said. “Coffee?”
“No thank you. Just turn on your recorder or get a pencil and a piece of paper while I dictate to you.”
“My handwriting’s atrocious.” Tait turned on a small Sony tape recorder extracted from a desk drawer. “Shoot.”
“Speculations published regarding the possibility of Jeffrey Dahmer still being alive are premature, unfocused, and irresponsibly directed. The P Street murder of Stewart K. Arlinger at the White Horse Inn was a single incident and certainly perpetuated by what we call a derivative-stage killer, not Jeffrey Dahmer. Jeffrey Dahmer is dead. I saw his dead body in the state police morgue facility on November 29, 1994. His body was positively ID’d. And as far as the note left at the P Street crime scene, it’s a fake. The Wisconsin State Police Violent Crimes Unit has successfully dealt with far more grievous homicides in the past, and we will deal with this one in a manner that is thorough, expeditious, and final. Now, turn off the tape recorder.”
Tait did so, an approving look on his face.
“Print that, verbatim, in tomorrow morning’s edition, on the front page, Mr. Tait, and include an official retraction of the tabloid-like tripe you published today.”
“Hmmm. Interesting. The police can order a newspaper what to print.”
“No, but the police can close down any enterprise which perpetuates federal violations of the United States Code regarding the employment of immigrants.” Helen got up, began to put on her coat. “Have a good day, Mr. Tait.”
“How do you know those guys on the dock don’t have work visas?” Tait asked.
“Because if they did, you would have told me that by now, Mr. Tait.”
“Good point. But don’t the people have a right to be informed of even extreme possibilities when a murder has been committed?”
“They have a right to be informed of the truth based on a professional analysis of evidence,” Helen said. “They don’t have the right to be frightened by irresponsible journalism fabricating news in order to sell more papers than the competition.”
“I hear you, Captain Klause—”
“Closs.”
“—and I’ll publish your statement as instructed.” Tait leaned back in a chair that must’ve cost a thousand dollars. He lit a Marlboro. “But let me make a statement of my own, to you. Fair enough?”
Helen turned at the door.
“You better be right,” Tait said, and winked.
««—»»
CRIMINAL EVIDENCE SECTION.
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Helen’s heels snicked past doors with queer plastic signs: Toolmarks, SEM, Electrophoresis, Spectrometry. This was the wing opposite the state morgue in the basement of St. John the Divine hospital, the Technical Services Division. A skein of politics propelled here: the state deficit, however phantom due to a balanced-budget amendment, exceeded millions; under the current governor, true, it was going down fast, but the problem still existed. Hence, the state leased the hospital’s basement for one dollar per year, in exchange for corporate tax breaks. Politicians wheeled and dealed just like district attorneys and pawn shops. It was all the same in a way.
The hallways down here seemed labyrinthine, and reminded Helen of the primeval CD-ROM games that Tom played. Whenever she came down here, she felt a thousand feet beneath the earth. This was Jan Beck’s domain.
In an quad-room that looked something similar to a high-school biology lab, a plaque read DIAGNOSTICS. Jan Beck sat amid bulky machines that hummed in ranks and regurgitated rolls of tractor-fed paper. She wore a white cotton apron like a butcher’s.
“It’s a felt-tip pen with standard blue ink that manufacturers refer to as Blue-Dark 4b,” the TSD honcho said. “But that’s just a service standard. Different variations of the same hue are used with different application systems.”
“Application systems?” Helen questioned. She was tired now, frazzled and emptied. All she could think about, in the back of her mind, was Tom. “A pen’s a pen, Jan,” she tried to focus.
Beck sat beside a clunky looking machine. “Not really. Today you’ve got ballpoints, hardpoints, drypoints. You’ve got a plethora of adhesion inks for another plethora: Micro-balls, liquid pumps, fine-points, medium points, etc. In other words, the service standard for—as the example is here—Blue-Dark 4b is chemically dissimilar for each manufacturer.”
“What you’re saying,” Helen guessed without a whole lot of interest, “is that Blue-Dark 4b in a Scripto pen is identifiably different from Blue-Dark 4b in a Bic pen?”
“Exactly. Each company fine-tunes the service-standard ink formulas for their own application systems.”
“Their own pens, you mean.”
“Exactly,” the pale, kink-haired woman repeated.
“So the trick, first, is to analyze the ink on the letter and identify the manufacturer of the pen, which will probably take forever.”
“It took me about ninety minutes, Captain,” Beck surprised her. “With a liquid chromatograph, a Canon digitizer, and a computer search of the printed mole-index. Your P-Street killer wrote the note with the most popular, the most reliable, and the most common felt-tip pen in the world. A Flair.”
“You found all that out in ninety minutes?”
“Sure. Sometimes it takes longer if the uplinks are busy, but it’s usually a breeze. It still doesn’t give us much, though.”
“At least it’s something,” Helen remarked.
“Well, I should have a lot more for you soon.”
“What I need more than anything, Jan, is some kind of graphological proof that the handwriting wasn’t really Dahmer’s. Then I can put a hard lid on the press.”
“I’m working on it.” Beck leaned back on a machine which sported a face of dials, jumping meters, and a hatch for a belly, a BV Model 154 peptide analyzer made by a company called Dissel Industries in Erlangen, Germany. It identified trace organic food substances in the digestive system by measuring peptidal enzyme deviations, and it cost the state over $100,000. If a decedent ate a Big Mac on Thursday night, Jan Beck would know that by early Friday morning. “That part might take another—”
“Jan,” Helen implored, “I need it in a day, no more.”
“—another eight hours,” Beck continued without pause. “I have a trace plate cooking right now.”
“A trace plate?”
“A high-grain photograph of the letter, which I snapped immediately. Then, to sniff out fingerprints, I put the physical body of the note through an Anthra-Hydrin fume.”
“What’s that?” Helen made the mistake of asking.
“In the old days we had two major critical fingerprint-detection substances: Anthracene and Neohydrin. Then a third came along called Cyanoacrylate, which will detect latent ridge patterns left on ideal surfaces by someone who’s even wearing rubber surgical gloves.”
“You’re kidding? Rubber gloves?”
“Sure. Sebaceous secretions of certain incipient amino acids will molecularly penetrate rubber surgical gloves, which happen to be the misconceived glove of choice for serial killers and burglars. Somebody should tell these assholes to wear jersey gloves, or driving gloves. Anyway, when I first got into the business, I worked for a county department on the east coast, and I had a fifteen-year-old homicide where the suspected perp was placed off the crime scene by an unreliable witness. The county attorney’s office was bugging the hell out of me to look back into it, so I used Cyanoacrylate on the target perimeter and found this guy’s prints all over the place. And it washed in court; the asshole got sent up to Jessup for forty years for a crime he committed over a decade earlier.”
“Thank God there’s no statute of limitations for murder.”
“Well, there shouldn’t be for any major crime, but there’s nothing any of us can do about that, is there?” Beck proposed, and twisted off the top of a bottle of Peach Snapple. “But back to what I was saying. A company called CRP recently used a thermal-fusion technique to combine the three latent ident substances I was telling you about, all three in one is what I’m telling you. It’s great. A low-therm fume application with this stuff, Anthra-Hydrin, will sap an image off of any solid surface, even if the surface was touched by surgical gloves, and the readout will be admissible even without a digitalization. The whole process takes about eighteen hours.”
“Fine,” Helen said, pushing back a headache. “But what about the graphology? The analysis that will prove the letter wasn’t written by Dahmer? You said it only takes eight hours. When will you be able to give me something I can give the papers?”
“I don’t even know what the press is talking about. Where do they get this shit? The peripheries of the P-Street m.o. are so different from Dahmer’s, it’s ridiculous.”
“That’s what I told them.”
“And I gotta tell you, we found two cooking utensils in the motel room.”
“Cooking ut—”
“A paring knife and an aluminum spatula, and, yes, they each contained traces of human muscle tissue.”
Helen thought back. “There was a cooking odor in the room, but no kitchen appliances.”
Beck shrugged. “So the perp brought in a hotplate or a Hibachi or something? Big deal.”
Big deal? “Jan, are you telling me that the perp ate pieces of the victim?”
“It’s impossible to say for sure since I don’t have the perp’s stomach contents to read. But, under the circumstances, I’d say that it’s a very good possibility. Part of Arlinger’s left bicep was cut out of his arm. Dahmer did the same thing to one of his victims. But it’s just more copycat stuff.”
Helen considered this, then agreed. “Okay, okay, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.”
“So there’s nothing to worry about with the press, is there?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” Helen stalled. Her mind kept flicking back to Tom. Stop it! You’ve got a job to do! Forget about Tom! “So you were saying. How long before you can give me positive proof that the note wasn’t written by Dahmer?”
Beck’s dark eyes mused back in a quick mathematical surmise. “Well, the trace plate’s cooking now for, I guess, five hours. A trace plate is a computer enhanced photographic negative—real size—of the original letter. Once I get the plate out of the processor, I’ll put it in there.” Beck pointed to another anonymous machine on the other side of the narrow room. “That’s an A/N spectrophotometer. The A stands for assay. Want to guess what the N stands for?”
Helen’s eyes squinted down on a yellow-and-scarlet label stuck to the machine’s baseplate. WARNING, THIS DEVICE CONTAINS RADIOACTIVE ISOTOPES. STAND CLEAR.
“You’re kidding me? You’ve got a nuclear reactor sitting in here?”
“Not precisely,” Beck replied with a smile. “A beryllium shroud covers the active pit, so you’re not going to melt. The pit, a pellet of plutonium 235, activates any amino-acid residuum on the note. Then I’ll take the note and compare it to samples of Dahmer’s handwriting that Columbus County Detent has already couriered over. I’ll feed the works into a comparison computer index which files, in duplicate, line-quality, letter formation, letter- and word-spacing—in microns, mind you—clockwise, counter-clockwise, straight-line, and curvature motion, terminal strokes, and relative position, the entire graphological ball of wax. We don’t do it the old way anymore. A felt-tip pen won’t leave any measurable impactations—we don’t need any of that in this day and age. My computer analysis of the P-Street letter will give you what you need. And I can hand it to you in—” Beck looked a her watch. “Say, three and a half hours from now.”
Helen, however weary from all the forensic word salad, was impressed.
“That would be great, Jan. Thanks for hustling.”
“That’s my job.” Beck sipped more Snapple. “How’s Tom, by the way?”
The question wiped the slate of Helen’s mind clean. And without even a perfunctory thought, she blurted an answer:
“We broke up.”
The remark weighed Beck’s face down like a high g-force. “You—you’re kidding.”
“I mean, I think we broke up,” more bad water spilled out of Helen’s mouth.
Beck’s voice softened, and she leaned forward as if she were in a college dorm asking her roommate a sensitive question. “Why?” she asked.
I caught him cheating on m— Helen’s thoughts began. Gritting her teeth forced it back, to wordlessness.
But then a tear formed in her eye and she got up and turned very quickly. Her self-esteem, whatever remained of it, could not allow the chief of the technical services division see her cry.
“It just wasn’t working out,” she said and left.
««—»»
Two voices.
Two men in the dark.
“I feel so—”
“Shut up. Stop being such a pussy.”
Silence, for a moment.
“You’re gonna make me sick of you.”
“Please.” A gasp, a sob. “I can’t help how I feel. I would do anything for you.”
One shadow shape turned to the other.
“I know. And you already have.” A lean to the side. A kiss on the cheek and a crude caress. “And I thank you for that.”
Sobbing, in response.
“And you’ll do more from me, won’t you?”
A heated rustle beneath damp covers. An arm shot around the other’s shoulder. “Yes, oh yes! Anything!”
“Good.”
The one shadow stood up, wended through silken dark, through blackness like a sweet song. Metal clicked. Then the shadow returned.
In his hands dangled another shadow: handcuffs.
“You love me, don’t you?”
“Yes! Yes!”
“Do you really?”
“Christ—yes!”
“It’s an easy thing to say. But are you willing to prove it?”
A whisper more fierce than the hardest shout:
“YES!”
“Good, that’s good.” Then more silence, and then: “Turn over and put your hands behind your back.” The ratcheted cusp of the handcuffs clicked open. “Just like last night and the night before that and the week before that and the month before that.” The cuffs snapped closed. “Just like every night from now on,” said the man who was once the boy from Bath, Ohio.
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