CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Who knew? He mustn’t be afraid.
What would his father say?
He leans back to relax, closes his eyes. He feels slaked. He feels powerful. In the peculiar darkness behind his eyelids, he sees himself—
—digging up the bones of the little animals in his back yard in Bath, Ohio. Little toothpicks, they reminded him of. So fragile.
He’d melt the little bodies in the corrosives he’d mixed from his chemistry set. His father had given him the set. Then he’d bury the bones where they’d be protected. He could dig them up any time, couldn’t he? He could look at them whenever he wanted.
But he always knew that, one day, the bones would get bigger…
««—»»
He’s been asleep. When he wakens, the darkness is nearly the same as the color behind his closed eyes. Anguloid shapes hover: like diamonds, like pyramids, and—yes—like tented arches…
Eventually they dissolve as the moonlight brightens, brushing the rods in his eyes.
He sniffs the light-diced air and smells death.
««—»»
“It’s positive,” Beck said. “Across the board.”
Helen and Olsher sat there like two defendants who’d just been sentenced to death by the judge. Olsher didn’t even bother commencing one of his typical emotional outbursts. What good would that do? Helen just sat there.
Beck looked wrung out in her labcoat as she continued. “Everything. The second letter was written by Dahmer. Cellmark Labs came back with the DNA analysis, and the hairs on Arlinger’s body were Dahmer’s. And now this fingerprint. The optical interface gave us a 100-percent-probability match. Even the pore scheme’s between the ridges were clear enough to run. Jeffrey Dahmer put that letter on the desk.”
“Three strikes and we’re out,” Olsher said.
But Helen didn’t say anything. She couldn’t fathom what to say.
“So we were all wrong,” Beck pointed out. “In a big way.”
“And to make matters worse,” Olsher informed, “Dahmer sent a letter to the Tribune too. They’re running it tomorrow.”
Finally, Helen spoke. “Did you screen Dumplin’s blood?”
“Um-hmm.” Beck sat down exhausted in one of Olsher’s chairs. “Positive for succinicholine sulphate, point-zero-zero-nine mgs per deciliter. A sixteen-percent lower unit-per-deciliter dose, but Dumplin weighed more than Arlinger. Want to guess how much more?”
“Sixteen percent,” Helen said rather than asked.
“That’s right. So it’s a good possibility that it was an identical administration. Those point-four vials that were ripped off from the paramedic truck? An oral dose, slipped in a beer or something—point-zero-zero-nine mgs is a damn good approximation for a guy of Dumplin’s body weight.”
“I just can’t see Dahmer pulling an ambulance heist,” came Olsher’s flustered offer.
“I can’t see him doing a lot of this stuff,” Beck added. “But we’ve got no choice now but to accept the fact that he did.”
“Yeah,” Olsher said.
Helen looked at them both, squinting.
Olsher unwrapped a cigar. “What’s your problem?”
I love it when he’s in a good mood. But Helen couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. “Am I having auditory hallucinations, or am I to assume that the both of you are asserting that Jeffrey Dahmer is still alive and committing murders?”
“Are you dense?” Olsher objected. “You’ve seen the evidence. A positive DNA read, two positive graphology reports, and now a positive fingerprint. It’s Dahmer, Helen. None of us can deny that now.”
Helen wanted to throw her arms up and scream. “All that stuff, Chief, even the fingerprint, can easily be attributed to a copycat.”
“How?” Beck challenged.
“A close associate. Like we’ve talked about? Somebody in league with Dahmer before he was killed at the Center. One of these ‘groupie’ people.”
Beck and Olsher simultaneously glanced at each other. And frowned.
“Come on, Jan,” Helen insisted. “You saw the body. We both did.”
“We saw a body, Captain,” Beck retorted. “We saw a body beaten into unrecognizability. We saw a body with a mouthful of broken teeth that could easily have been Dahmer’s teeth in a substitute corpse. Take off those blinders for a minute and think.”
Helen didn’t like that, and she wasn’t buying any of this. At least not yet. “Christ, I’ve got plenty of leads—”
“You’ve got squat, girl,” Olsher told her. “What, some dope paramedic, and a prison electrician? That and a buck fifty’ll get you a cup of coffee at 7-Eleven.”
“We agree, Captain,” Beck stepped in, “that Dahmer couldn’t have gotten out of the prison without help. But it’s pretty fruitless at this point to deny that he did escape, isn’t it?”
Helen faltered, stared at them, blinked.
“So quit putzing around,” Olsher added a final point, puffing the atrocious cigar. “And start doing your job.”
««—»»
Start doing my job, huh? Helen simmered walking out of the office, and she simmered further on the road. They think I’m crazy…
What came next wouldn’t be easy. Verifying the fingerprints of the corpse, and that could only be done via the man who had performed the post-mortem on the body that was allegedly Jeffrey Dahmer’s.
Tom.
St. John the Divine’s Hospital seemed to lay in static glitter when she pulled up and parked—a lit, quiet fortress. This late, there was little activity: an ambulance here, a crash cart there. But it was mostly empty hallways and nodding security guards that greeted her entrance.
The basement felt frigid, sterile. She knew he was here because she’d seen his car in the state lot.
Tom looked up from the autoclave when she pushed through the chicken-wire doors.
“Uh…hi,” he said.
“Hello, Tom.” She tempered herself, tried to push it all away: the deceit, the other…men. “This isn’t a social call.”
“The Dahmer thing, then, right?”
“Yes.” Her heels ticked around the anteroom. Thank God the autopsy platform lay empty tonight. “I’ve got serious heat on my tail, Tom. Everyone’s saying Dahmer’s still alive.”
Helen quickly noticed the evening Tribune lying by the wash sinks. MORE NOTES, MORE DNA EVIDENCE, AND NOW—FINGERPRINTS! read the squashed headline. DAHMER IS STILL ALIVE!
“He’s dead,” Tom clarified. “As in, like, a doornail. I weighed the guy’s liver, for God’s sake. I took his heart out and scaled the calculi lining his aorta. He’s dead. The prints off his dead hand matched Dahmer’s. The teeth in his dead mouth matched Dahmer’s.”
“That’s just one thing I wanted to ask you about.” Helen had to stop and take a breath every so often. It wasn’t easy being businesslike with a man she used to be in love with, a man she’d planned to marry.
A man, she thought, who cheated on me with…other men.
No. It wasn’t easy at all.
“The teeth. Why couldn’t Dahmer’s teeth have been placed in the mouth of someone else? Some dead person of the same approximate height and weight, same hair color, etc.?”
Tom nearly reeled back and laughed. “You’re kidding me, right? That’s Alfred Fucking Hitchcock, Helen.”
She stared him down. It wasn’t like him to use profanity, nor was it like him to so quickly dismiss her speculations.
“What, Dahmer knocked his own teeth out and put them in another corpse? Come on. And let’s forget about the teeth just for one minute, okay? The corpse was fingerprinted, Helen, and the fingerprints matched Dahmer’s card from the detention center and Milwaukee PD when he was first arrested, and his Army prints.”
“Fine,” Helen replied. “But maybe he had an accomplice. And maybe that accomplice had not only the technical skills but also access to such things as, say, fingerprint records.”
Tom stared at her, incredulous.
Helen continued. Her last comment proved the hardest, but it was something that had bothered for the last hour or so, since leaving Olsher’s office.
No, this was no longer a man she loved.
This was business.
“An accomplice,” she said, “who would not only have access to hospital records but someone who would also have access to controlled pharmaceuticals, such as succinicholine sulphate.” Helen closed her eyes for a moment. “Such a person, wouldn’t you say, would have to be a higher-ranking employee of a hospital, wouldn’t he? And maybe someone who works at night, when shifts are staffed by fewer personnel.”
Tom gaped at her. “What are you saying?”
“Do you know anyone, Tom? Anyone who fits that criteria?”
««—»»
But he had a point. Just what was she saying?
Helen pulled the Taurus in and parked in the side lot. The tacky neon sign glowed: THE BADGE.
She’d only heard about the place, had never been here. Why on earth would a woman, much less a state police captain, want to go to a cop bar?
She wanted a drink. She needed a drink, in fact. And she didn’t want to go home. Going home would only remind her of too many things. Especially Tom.
Inside was smoky, dark. A room full of men, all obviously cops just off the three-to-eleven. People like me, Helen surmised. They don’t go home because there’s nothing to go home to.
A few heads turned, eyed her, then turned away. Helen pulled up a seat at the bar as blue-note jazz eddied softly from the juke. She ordered a glass of house wine from a keep who was obviously off-duty tin. A Smith Model 25 was strapped to his belt just below his barkeep vest. But what was Helen thinking?
Tom, she thought.
Tom.
Did she really suspect him?
He did the post, she reminded herself. And he has easy access to succincholine sulphate. He had unrestricted access to the body, for the whole time. But…
Big deal, she finally realized. Even if some way did exist to jink the fingerprint confirmation at the hospital, the body’s prints were also verified at the prison and the hospital in Portage.
She sipped her wine and shook her head. I must be way off track. How could Tom possibly have arranged the business with the letters left at the crime scenes, and a genuine fingerprint on the Dumplin letter? You’re grabbing at straws, Helen, she told herself now. Just what was she proposing? That Tom was some kind of killer groupie, in league with Dahmer while he was alive? And, above all, why? What motive would he have?
She could almost hear Dr. Sallee berating her. Dahmer was gay, and you’ve just discovered that Tom, too, has gay compulsions. You’re so disoriented, Helen, that you’re trying to blame him. You’re letting your sense of professional judgment take you off on the most absurd tangents.
Yeah, she thought. Yeah, I guess you’re right. The whole thing was absurd.
A copy of the Sunday supplement lay on the empty stool next to her. Dahmer’s grainy face seemed to give her the eye. IS THIS MAN STILL ALIVE? read the header. Helen smirked, didn’t even pick it up.
“Excuse me. You’re Helen Closs, aren’t you?”
Her gaze rose off the bartop, to meet the equal gaze of a man. Average height and build, short chestnut hair and mustache—decent-looking save for an atrocious rust-brown suit. The guy had cop written all over him.
“How do you know my name?” she asked without much interest.
“Your picture was in the Tribune, something about you hammering down on that scandal-monger Tait. Good for you, I say. These news guys, Christ, they’re all out for a buck.” The guy paused to swig mug of his draft. “I’m Nick, by the way. Nice to meet you.”
Helen shook his hand, felt sweat and anguish. “So what department are you with…Nick?”
“Madison Metro, Narcotics,” he seemed to be proud of. “I’m a captain too, sixteen years. I hear you’re gonna make DC next year.”
“Maybe,” she said. “If I don’t quit first.”
Nick laughed. “I hear ya. But with all that time in, why hack down your pension?”
Helen nodded glumly.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“I already have a dr—” But then she stalled, noticed her empty glass. Where the hell did all that wine go? she asked herself. She wanted another one but she wasn’t comfortable not paying for it. “Let me buy you one.”
“Hey, thanks. Bud draft.”
A Bud man, she thought despondently, and ordered another round. “Metro Narcs, huh? Crack chaser.”
“Yeah, but let me tell ya,” Nick posited. “This heroin tar is really on the rise. It’s the rich kids doing it; it’s in vogue ’cos you don’t use a needle, none of that AIDS taboo. They call it ‘H-Smoke’ and ‘Boy.’ You never read about it ’cos nobody thinks it’s hot. But this shit is tipping kids over faster than crack.”
Helen couldn’t imagine anything duller than talking shop with another cop. “I’d appreciate it,” she said, “if you wouldn’t cuss.”
“Oh, sorry—shit—I mean, wow—sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it, Nick.” Helen sipped her freshened wine, then abstractly noticed a thin white line on his left ring finger. A tan line.
“Divorced?” she asked. Immediately, though, she regretted it. What am I doing? Don’t lead this guy on! It wasn’t that she didn’t like him—there was no reason not to at this point. But his presence…aggravated her. She’d come here to sit by herself and think. And now, here she was asking personal questions.
“How did you— Oh, the tan line.” Nick laughed. “That’s what I call an investigator. Yeah, divorced, as in recently. I think it mentioned in the paper that you’re not married. Do yourself a favor—keep it that way. Matrimony and The Job don’t mix. Quickest way to screw up two people’s lives? Be a cop and get married.”
“Thanks for the advice.” Great, I’ve created a monster, a mouth monster, Helen realized when it became clear that Nick wasn’t going to be quiet and leave her alone. “What it didn’t say in the papers is that I’m divorced too.”
“Oh, yeah? A heel, huh? A real rubberneck?”
“Schmuck, I think, is a more accurate way to describe my former husband.”
“Hey, woe, I hear ya. When I went back to my place to get my stuff, my wife—can you believe it?—she leaned out the window and fired a bowl of hot chowder down on me. I wanted to jump back in my pickup and pop wheelies in the yard, the fuckin’ bitch… Aw, hey, sorry. Been a cop too long, ya know?”
Helen sighed.
“And, Jesus, all this Dahmer stuff. It’s almost like those rubbernecks in the press are happy about it, it gives them something to write about. Dahmer this, Dahmer that. Don’t go out, lock your doors. Big Bad Jeffrey Dahmer’s still alive.”
Helen squinted, looked up. “Do you believe that?”
Nick shrugged at the question. His beer left white foam on his upper lip. “Hell, I don’t know, but you’d think someone’d be all over the guy who did the autopsy. I mean, what a clusterfuck…pardon my language. I can’t help it, I—”
“I know, Nick. You’ve been a cop too long.” But her thoughts backtracked. The guy who did the autopsy… Tom again.
“And this stuff about the fingerprints. I mean, Christ, how could so many people screw up so many times in a row? It said in the paper that Dahmer’s prints were verified half a dozen times or something like that. It’s not like someone on the outside could’ve switched the print cards—classification and ID is all done through computers now.”
Helen’s thoughts backtracked some more. Someone on the outside…
“Rocket scientists, all of them. Bunch’a rubbernecks.” Nick laughed sarcastically. “With all this fuss, you’d think someone would be smart enough to get an exhumation order. Settle it once and for all. Just dig the asshole up and find out if it’s him or not. Ooops, there I go again. Sorry.”
“Can’t dig him up, Nick,” Helen reminded. “All state incarcerees who die in custody are cremated.”
Nick plopped down his empty mug, gestured the keep for another. “You know, for a gal who’s in the papers so much, you sure don’t read them very often, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
Nick leaned over the bar. “Hey, chief. Gimme that Tribune there, will ya? Slide it over here.”
Nick handed her the paper. It was true, Helen hadn’t had time to pay much attention. Three front-page articles on Dahmer, and one on Bosnia. STATE VIOLENT CRIMES UNIT CONTINUES TO DENY DAHMER’S ESCAPE, read one headline. And here was a small picture of Helen. What a terrible picture, she thought. I should sue them for defamation of character. Another header read: ENTIRE COLUMBUS COUNTY DETENTION STAFF UNDER INVESTIGATION. Nick’s finger pointed to a third. “There ya go.”
Helen’s eyes fixed down. CIRCUIT COURT BLOCKS “DAHMER’S” CREMATION.
“Two family members fighting over custody of the ashes,” Nick said. “Can you believe it?”
Helen half-tuned out Nick’s voice in order to read. She loved the way they’d put Dahmer’s name in quotes. But it was true. “You know, Nick. In the 90s I can believe it. But… All right, family members are suing each other over ownership of the ashes. But what’s that got to do with a county circuit judge blocking the cremation?”
“Keep reading.”
Unbelievable. To add to the ashes mess, a third party was suing the department of corrections, to see to it that there would be no ashes at all. And that third party was Father Thomas Alexander, the detention center’s chaplain. “As Jeffrey Dahmer’s only true friend,” Alexander stated to reporters, “I have an ethical responsibility to him, even in death. I was Jeffrey’s guide to faith, his spiritual guardian, and as an Epiphanist Protestant, I do not believe in the rite of cremation. I am, in fact, offended by it, as is God. Cremation was originally instituted by pagans in the Middle Ages as a protest to the chief tenets of Christianity: the glory of resurrection. Jeffrey would not want to be cremated, and he can’t speak for himself now, so I will. And I’ll tell you this, any county judiciary decision that conflicts with my wishes will be immediately appealed to the appellate courts, the state’s supreme court, and even the U.S. Supreme Court if need be.” Alexander’s hot air had sufficed to urge a judge to delay the cremation via “internment for the interim.” The body was buried yesterday at an unspecified cemetery.
So there it was, right in her face. And the solution was obvious. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this before? “Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Nick,” she blurted, got up, and rushed out.
««—»»
“You’ve gotta be shitting me.”
Helen didn’t quite know what to say. It was close to one a.m. now, yet she hadn’t thought twice about waking Olsher at his home. And here he stood now, on the front porch of his Chapel Forge rancher, in a robe and slippers as the winter air froze his breath.
“What the big deal, Larrel?”
“The big deal?” Olsher’s sleep-hooded eyes drilled into her gaze. “Do you know how hard it is to get an exhumation order? Do you know how much it costs? Do you have any idea of the heat we’ll have to take even in asking for one?”
“Then we’ll just have to take the heat,” Helen retorted.
Olsher winced as if stricken with sudden heartburn. “The press will kill us, Helen.”
“Larrel, we’re cops, remember? We have a job to do regardless of the press. We’re going to have to forget about the damn press for one minute and start making moves before the killer strikes again.”
“You still don’t think Dahmer is alive, do you?”
“No, Chief, I don’t. I think he’s dead and buried, and I think the murders are being carried out by an intricate copycat. An exhumation order will prove it.”
“And what if you’re wrong?”
“Then the papers will make us look like idiots, but they’re doing that right now anyway. And here’s another reason we need that body exhumed, Larrel. Let’s just say I’m wrong—which you already believe. If it’s not Dahmer in that grave, then we need to know who is. IDing the substitute body can get us a line on whoever helped Dahmer break out, which could lead us do Dahmer himself.”
Olsher blinked in the cold. “Well—hmm. You’re right, I never thought of that… You’re the investigator, how come you didn’t think of that?”
Helen laughed humorlessly. “I just did, Larrel. So get me that exhumation.”
“All right.” Olsher paused as though his mind was running in neutral. “No guarantees, but I’ll make the calls in the morning, see what they say. It’s the DA’s office who has to talk the jive to the judge, and the DA owes me a few favors.”
“Thanks, Larrel.”
Olsher turned in his foyer as he was closing the door. He was shivering obliviously. “You better be right, Helen. ’cos if you’re not, those people downtown will never put you up for deputy chief.”
Helen thought about that and shrugged back at him. “I don’t care,” she said, and remembered Nick’s eloquent jive. “Those people downtown are just a bunch of… rubbernecks.”
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