CHAPTER EIGHT

 

 

“I’m sorry I missed my appointment again,” she said at the door. A school girl apologizing to the home-room teacher for being late. “And I’m sorry to be disturbing you at home. But I really need to talk to you.”

“Come in,” Dr. Sallee replied. His eyes thinned, then he smiled minutely. Dr. Sallee was a leaning, balding man who seemed constantly buoyant in some subdued way, despite an equally constant physical awkwardness Helen could never decipher. He had a nice Colonial brick house in the East End full of bookshelves and portraits. Dark, cluttered. In the den hung a picture of Sigmund Freud, while over the mantle was a large portrait of Elvis Presley. At work, Sallee routinely dressed in fine slacks, shirt, and tie, covered by a cliched white labcoat. Now, though, off duty so to speak, he dressed simply in jeans and t-shirt. Dr. Sallee was the chief of the state police mental hygiene unit as well as the chief psychiatric consultant for the H. Andrew Lynch Evaluation Center, where all convicted state incarcerees were evaluated; whether they would officially be deemed criminals or mental patients was decided by this man. He showed her into a similarly dark and cluttered study and sat behind a teak desk identical to the one he had at his office. Helen sat down in an armchair opposite.

“And I can also tell,” he continued, “that your problems with Tom are not what you want to talk to me about.”

Helen felt flummoxed. “How did you know? What, you can tell just by looking at me?”

“Of course. It’s all kinesthetics, Helen. The way you walked to the door with a harried spring in your step. The very open way you’re sitting across from me right this moment. You generally sit with your knees together and your hands in your lap, a position of introversion and personal insecurity.” Sallee’s gaze drifted upward, in contemplation. “No, I’d say you’re here to talk to me about something completely irrelative to your personal life. Am I right?”

“Yes,” Helen admitted.

“Something work related?”

“Yes.”

Heaps of books threatened to overrun the desk top. Sallee had to nearly look over them to address her. “Let me take a guess. The Dahmer business that was in the papers today?”

For a third time, then, she said “Yes” to this uncanny man.

 “Your contention, I presume, is that Dahmer is dead, and that someone else is pulling a copycat.”

“Exactly,” Helen said. “And I might need you to back me up with the press.”

“You doubt your own professional credibility?”

“I’m just a flatfoot, Dr. Sallee, but you’re a clinical psychiatrist, and the press is a different animal altogether.” Helen felt surprisingly collected, something she’d never felt before in the midst of Sallee. “We’ve got DNA tests going on some hair evidence found at the Arlinger murder site, and when they come back negative we’ll be off the hook. But that could take weeks.”

“And in the meantime, you’re worried that the newspapers will cause an undue level of fear by slanting their articles to suggest that Dahmer’s still alive?”

Helen nodded. “So that’s why I need your help. I’ll need to keep reiterating our conviction that Dahmer’s modus is completely different from the perp at P Street, despite minor similarities.”

“Minor similarities that the press will enforce as major. Some trace suggestions of cannibalism, cooking utensils. And an unbound victim who showed no signs of struggle. These are elements that any killer would be well aware of just by reading the papers two years ago. This is all easily conveyed, but the hard part is conveying it convincingly.”

“And that’s exactly why I need to know more details…about Dahmer.”

“Well, then I suppose I’m the man for the job, Helen.” Sometimes Sallee smiled in a way so subtle it was hard to even interpret as a smile. “But, I warn you—psychiatrists are only right ninety-nine percent of the time.”

“I’ll take the odds. You actually interviewed Dahmer, didn’t you? A long time ago?”

“Um-hmm. I was his first official clinical interviewer, to be precise. I evaluated him in 92, gave him his initial battery of TATs, Meyers-Kastles, and MMPIs. The most significant thing you can tell the press is that Dahmer’s psychiatric profile was existential—an existential costive, we call them—reclusive, complaisant, and completely lacking psychopathic and pathological behavior patterns. He never lied, either; pathological criminals always lie.”

Helen scribbled notes, then looked up leerily. “What about the, you know, the sexual element?”

“Let me elaborate more specifically. Dahmer was an existential stage-costive with an obsessive-thematic erotomanic impulse. He was subject only to an unsystematized longing-delusion—in other words he was not delusional in typical ways. Despite the mode of violence, he was actually very affectionate toward his victims. He loved his victims, which explains his attempt to lobotomize them.”

Helen’s expression twisted. “Lobotomize—”

“Oh, yes. On several occasions, Dahmer drugged his victims to unconsciousness and then drilled holes in their skulls, after which he inserted various types of needles into their brains—”

Helen paled.

“—and he did this, not to be brutal, but to try to damage their motor capabilities. He even claimed that one such victim survived for a short time after regaining consciousness. To put it more colloquially, he wanted ‘love-zombies.’ He wanted lovers who wouldn’t leave him. I recall him elucidating something to the affect: ‘I loved them all, and I wanted them to stay with me. When they died, I kept parts of them, so that parts of them would be with me always.’“

“In other words, that’s why he kept the skulls, and the body parts in the freezer?”

“Yes, and that explains the cannibalism too. When a victim died, he’d eat a part of that victim, ‘so that part of him would be inside of me,’ he said.”

Helen tapped her pen on her pad. “Why didn’t you commit him?”

“No responsible psychiatric evaluator would’ve. Our guidelines for incarceration versus institutionalization are very specific.” Sallee quickly slipped a paper-covered manual— State of Wisconsin Parameters for Penal Admission: A Psychiatrist’s Guide—and, without opening it, quoted: “‘The clinician in charge of psychiatric evaluation must never admit a subject to state mental-hygiene custody unless said subject demonstrates verifiable symptoms of psychopathy or hallucinosis.’ What that means is that Dahmer needed to display a clear separation from reality, the ‘Right from Wrong’ tenet. Which he didn’t. I also did the evaluation on Tredell Rosser, Dahmer’s alleged murderer, and a completely different story. The press is charging that Rosser should never have been put in prison in the first place, because he’s completely insane. But they’re completely wrong. He’s a pure-bred Ganser.”

Helen knew the term. Ganser Syndrome was common among prison inmates: faking a psychiatric disorder in hopes of receiving a transfer to a mental hospital. “Rosser was trying to push some sort of religious fixation, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, and he’s quite good at it,” Sallee affirmed. “But not good enough for me. He continues to claim that he’s a thousand years old, and the Son of God, a very well-formed forgery of a systematized grandiose pietistic delusion. I could tell he was lying the minute he stepped into my office, but he’s convincing enough for laymen and even some of the prison officials. Eventually I got the court’s permission to narco-analyze him. He’s perfectly sane, read about Ganser techniques in some book by one of those underground publishers.”

“Then why did he kill Dahmer?”

“For popular status on the mainline. Several of Dahmer’s victims were African-American. Rosser knew that he’d become a hero inside by killing Dahmer and Vander, the latter being affiliated with white supremacist groups. And all this hoopla about as possible conspiracy, that Rosser was aided by detention employees—it’s pure nonsense. He’s the lone perpetrator. By killing Dahmer and, at the same time maintaining his Ganser, he knows he’ll be relocated to a mental hospital.”

Helen surveyed her notes, chewed her lip as she thought. “Now, can you give me some kind of potential profile on the P-Street killer? Is there enough you can draw from based on the crime scene?”

Sallee began to seem bored, fingering a big, blue Stelazine paperweight. A flier top the desk clutter read: What Every Doctor Should Know About Extrapyramidity. “That’s relatively easy. Whoever committed the Arlinger murder looks like a clear-cut X,Y,Y Syndrome. The underpinnings were spiteful, even mocking, totally unlike Dahmer in his day. Dahmer would never leave a body for the police to find; that’s why he disposed of many of the parts in separate parcels, dissolved them in drums of corrosives, etc. His very first victim, in fact, a hitchhiker he murdered when he was eighteen, was disposed of similarly; he buried the separate pieces in the woods behind his house. His entire life from pre-adolescence to adulthood is a prime example of unwavering costive existentialism. Burying pieces of things he was fond of in places he was in proximity to. Dahmer was raised in Bath, Ohio, claimed that his father gave him a chemistry set for his birthday. He’d solicit people in the papers who were trying to give away pets, and he’d take them, kill them, and then dissolve the carcasses down to their skeletons with high-acid and base compounds he’d concoct with the chemistry set. It was his secret, he never told anyone, then or now. Psychiatric labels are very specific; subjects tend to remain very solidly in their categories once they’ve reached instinctive phases. There’s little individuality, in other words. Gacy, Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas all came from totally different backgrounds, were subject to totally different formative upbringings, and executed equally different m.o.s—yet they all had nearly identical IQs—rather high, by the way—and remained subject to the same pathological symptomology. More recent examples are Rene Aulton and Susan Smith—maternal filicists. Mothers who kill their own children all display nearly identical behavior patterns despite totally dissimilar reactive and reflective designs.” Sallee paused for a consideration. “Is this all going over your head?”

“Well, yeah,” Helen admitted, looking down at the technical gobbledegook on her notepad.

 “Psychotic killers as well as borderline sociopaths tend to display irrevocable pattern behavior. My point is, to put it more simply: Dahmer never strayed from his demential purview; what he did in Milwaukee in 1991 was merely an emblematic amplification of the same things he was doing as a boy in Bath, Ohio. Any forensic psychiatrist in the country will tell you the same thing. Despite the outward similarities on P Street, the perpetrator clearly displays a different profile. He’s nothing even close to Dahmer; instead, he offers a different mental state: semi-delusional, aggressive, hyper-violent. By leaving the body and the note for the police to find, he’s challenging the authorities, something Dahmer would never have done. Only a full-stage episodic break could account for someone like Dahmer committing the crime at P Street. Your perpetrator merely copied the most simplified aspects of Dahmer’s atrocities, while ignoring the actual psychological imprint.”

“One of the first things I’m going to do is run a computer break-down of recently released mental patients and convicts,” Helen said.

“And you should, but don’t be disappointed if you come up with nothing,” Sallee countered. “Arlinger’s murderer is quite crafty—the note, for instance, and his avoidance of being seen entering the motel. If he committed crimes like this in the past, he probably hasn’t been caught.”

“So where do I start?”

“Obsessional contact is usually how this kind of killer is launched into an active crime-phase.”

Helen didn’t get it. “Obsessional contact?”

“The letter left at the P Street Motel was undoubtedly written by Dahmer some time before his death. But Dahmer was in lockup, so we can safely assume that the P-Street killer was in contact with Dahmer during his incarceration. Look for a ‘Killer Groupie,’ someone drawn to Dahmer via his publicity. It’s either someone he was corresponding with, or someone in close contact in the prison.”

Helen complimented herself on having already essentially discerned that. “At least that’s an easy lead.”

“Of course. I’m sure the prison keeps a log of all correspondence leaving the facility, for legal reasons.”

Helen’s hand began to cramp, she was writing so fast. But at the end of the manic scribbling, she felt satisfied that she had what she needed. “This is great, Dr. Sallee. This’ll help me lot.”

“And as for our good friends with the newspapers, feel free to quote me. You can even direct them to me personally if you like.”

“Thanks.” Helen felt winded after the influx of information. She put away her pad and began to get up. “I guess that’s it then.”

“Oh, no it’s not, Helen,” the psychiatrist contradicted. “You still have some other things to tell me, don’t you?”

Helen knew full well what he was driving at. Immediately, and without conscious forethought, she began rubbing her locket between her fingers. Just as immediately, her previous job-related zeal collapsed.

And all of her fear swooped down on her.

“You’re an ostrich, Helen.”

“A—what?”

Sallee looked at her. “You bury your head in the sand. Right now the sand is your job. But eventually, you’re going to have to take your head out of it, aren’t you?”

She knew exactly what he meant. She was avoiding her problems, not facing them. Eventually she’d be right back to Square One, right back in the jaws of all her inadequacies: her mood swings, her pre-menopausal fears, her complete lack of personal security…

“You’ve got a lot to be proud of, don’t you?” Sallee suggested.

Her response was bitter as turpentine. “Like what?”

“You’re among the most decorated officers in the history of Wisconsin law enforcement. Your arrest-versus-conviction rate is phenomenal. And you’re the only female on the force who’s ever been up for deputy chief. Aren’t those accomplishments you can be proud of?”

“Not really,” she mumbled in admission. “I’ve never felt very driven. I think it’s been mostly luck.”

“That’s foolishness, and you know it. You refuse to give yourself any credit at all merely because you’ve never had what you perceive of as a successful relationship with a man. That’s irrational and wholly illogical.”

He’d said it all a thousand times, but it never really mattered. It was impossible for her to feel any other way.’

“Still having nightmares?”

She gulped and nodded. “The pale figure chasing me.”

“Any other dreams?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Any sexual implications?”

The question didn’t even embarrass her any more. “No, I— Oh, wait I did have a different dream, just before—” But the memory stopped her from continuing, lopped off the rest of the recollection like a knife through a carrot on a butcher block.

Sallee’s tone never changed. “Just before what?”

Her fingers rubbed frantically against the locket. “Just before I woke up and heard Tom talking on the phone…to another woman.”

The doctor nodded as if unimpressed. “Tell me the dream.”

“There was a—a fire or something. I was rushing to put it out.”

“Were you naked?”

Helen popped brow. “Yes.”

“And you weren’t particularly afraid or the fire, were you?”

“No, no I wasn’t. But how did you—”

“Go on.”

Flustered, she tried to remember. The water hose… “The fire was burning, so I ran to get a hose to put it out, but when I turned it on, no water came out.”

“And the fire continued to burn,” Sallee said rather than asked.

“That’s right.”

“But I must say, Helen. That’s a very sexual dream.”

Her eyes squinted up. “How so?”

“Look at the symbology and then look at yourself. Your greatest fear is that menopause will kill your sexuality, and hence make you less attractive to men. The fire in the dream represents your sexual self—a woman still quite sexually capable, a sexual yearning that needs to be quenched. Fires are quenched by water, correct? But you couldn’t get the water to come out of those hose… Correct?”

Suspiciously, she nodded.

“And let me guess,” Sallee went on, “sometime previously you’d had sex with Tom. You were excited, even orgasmic. Am I on track?”

Now she actually blushed. “More than you realize.”

Sallee held a finger up, in further postulation. “But Tom himself, he experienced some sudden sexual dysfunction.”

He lost his erection, she shamedly remembered. He couldn’t come. But Sallee’s “guesses” began to mildly infuriate her. It was as though he was picking her brain against her will. “How can you possibly know that?”

“It’s a terribly common dream, Helen,” Sallee replied and nearly chuckled. “No water came out of the hose, symbolic of Tom’s inability to complete the act. It’s a dream of clear paranoia: Tom gave you pleasure but experienced none himself, so, paranoically, you blame yourself, you feel you failed in being able to satisfy him as he satisfied you, so know you’ve developed this ideation that he’s cheating on you, that’s he’s seeking some other woman.”

Helen threw her hands up. There was no use. “But that’s where you’re wrong. I’m pretty sure he is seeing another woman.”

“Pretty sure? Not totally?”

“Well—” She faltered. “Not totally, but—’

Sallee cut her off yet again. “And even if he is, Helen, there’s no relevant reason for you to blame yourself for every incompatibility, is there?”

“No, but…that’s just how I feel, I guess,” she admitted, now fighting to hold back tears. “I can’t help it.”

“Of course you can. You can by acknowledging yourself before others, Helen. That’s the root of all your problems. You judge yourself by over-reacting to the people close to you, which, in turn, creates an erroneous judgment. We’ll continue to work on it, okay?”

Her eyes remained on the floor as she nodded.

“And another thing I think you should do is go and talk to Tom. You just said yourself that you don’t know for sure that he’s seeing another woman. More than likely, you’ve jumped to conclusions, like you frequently do.”

“I know,” she peeped.

“So go and find out, go talk to him. You’ll regret it if you don’t, and you may very well be surprised if you do. Are you going to do that?”

“Yes,” she agreed.

“And I want you to come and see me again, okay?”

“Yes, I will.”

“All right, then. Try to feel good about yourself, because you’re a good person and you should feel good. And quit rubbing that damn locket.”

Now, at least, she was able to spare a smile.

“I’ll see you soon, Helen, and good luck with the case.”

“Thank you,” she said and got up. Her mind swam, she knew he was right. I am a good person, goddamn it! Why can’t I get that into my thick head?

She stopped at the door to gaze over her notes one last time, a police instinct. A final check to see if she was forgetting anything. And one of the last lines snagged her.

“There was one thing you mentioned,” she said. “Something about a break. Let’s just say for one minute that Dahmer is alive and that he did get out of prison and murder Alringer on P Street. What could account for the change in his behavioral profile?”

“Oh, yes, but that’s a very rare and obscure syndrome,” Sallee told her. “We call it a conative-episodic break. Its the only clinical phenomena that could account for an existential costive like Dahmer to enter into an X,Y,Y-like mental state.”

Helen highlighted that part in her notes. “But what are the actual chances of that?”

Sallee belittled the possibility with a brief snort. “The chances of that happening, Helen, are literally one in a million.”

 

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