CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Helen felt on wires when she strode into Olsher’s office to explain. Dahmer was alive—she had no choice but to believe that now—but she now knew something else. Campbell was the mystery man behind Dahmer’s escape.
A note on the door read, Back in five minutes. Helen waited, flipping through a copy of the Enquirer, incredulous at the headline. DAHMER IS A VOODOO ZOMBIE! How could Olsher read this crap? The article ensued: Our reporters have solved the mystery, and you read it here first! Jeffrey Dahmer is a voodoo zombie, and has risen from his grave by means of an ancient spell! “Yes, we did it, we brought Dahmer back,” admits Chez Diablique, a world-famous voodoo mojo from the Haitian-based Pabla Cult. His wife, the renowned mambo priestess agrees: “Jeffrey’s spirit contacted us from beyond the grave, and asked for our help. So we began casting voudun resurrection spells…”
Helen put the tabloid in the trash.
Eventually, Olsher returned, with a steaming cup of coffee. Helen didn’t dawdle; she jumped right in and explained her point of view.
“Campbell, huh?” Olsher questioned. “And you got this from —what?—some male whore?”
“Chief, the guy’s sweating a jail sentence, he was coming clean,” she insisted. “Campbell was the exploitative lover of Glen Kussler, the guy whose body we found in Dahmer’s grave. Campbell had an obsession with serial killers, Dahmer in particular. It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
Olsher’s upper lip turned up in a pinch. “What’s obvious?”
“Jesus Christ, Chief! We’ve got a name and a description of the man who is in collusion with Dahmer! Campbell’s a Dahmer groupie, and that’s why he pursued a relationship with Kussler.”
“I don’t get it.”
Helen gnashed her teeth. “Kussler worked for the prison; Kussler specifically serviced Dahmer’s cell. Isn’t it obvious that Campbell was using Kussler to secretly slip mail back and forth between Dahmer and Campbell?”
Olsher shrugged, began unwrapping an El Producto. “Not really.”
Helen wanted to bang her head on Olsher’s desk. “It all fits, Chief. Campbell’s the missing piece.”
Olsher splayed his hands, wincing. “Campb— Helen, who the fuck is this Campbell? Some name a male whore gave you? Bring Campbell in and we’ll grill him, but you can’t do that because you don’t have him.”
“No, I don’t, but at least I got his last name and his description. For crying out loud, haven’t you been listening to me? I met Campbell myself!”
“You met Campbell? I thought you met Kussler?”
Helen pulled in a long, exasperated breath. “I met Campbell at Kussler’s apartment, but I didn’t know he wasn’t Kussler at the time. It was Campbell, but he told me he was Kussler.”
“Oh, he told you he was Kussler, is that it?”
Helen glared at him.
Olsher went on, wetting the cigar end. “So how do you know it wasn’t really Kussler?”
Helen exploded, “Because Kussler’s been in a fucking hole in the ground for the last three weeks!”
Olsher didn’t flinch at the outburst. “Oh, so you’re saying that Campbell sprung Dahmer from the prison, then murdered Kussler and put his body in Dahmer’s place?”
“Yes!”
Olsher leaned back calmly. “I don’t think it flies.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Larrel—there’s no other answer.”
“You want to go with it, fine.”
“And since I know what Campbell looks like, I’m going to get the artist in ident to do a composite, and run it in the paper.”
“I still think you’re grabbing for sh—”
“Okay, Larrel, whatever you say.” She’d had enough of this. “Let me get to it. Oh, and I need your permission to put a DF on North.”
“Who’s North?”
Helen clenched her fists, closed her eyes. “The prostitute who told me about Campbell.”
“And Campbell’s the guy who said he was Kussler but he wasn’t really Kussler, he was just saying he was Kussler, because he’d already killed Kussler and somehow got him buried in place of Dahmer?”
“Stop screwing with me, Chief.”
Olsher spared the smallest hint of a smile. “Who’s screwing with you? And why do you want a DF on this guy North?”
“To track his whereabouts on the board. Then the computer inputs any locations and stores them in a database. Any repeated lokes North travels to will come up on the cross reff. North is probably going to continue turning tricks. I want to know who any of his other steady johns are so I can question them. They might’ve known Kussler too, or people who did, and from that I might be able to get more on Campbell.”
But by then Olsher was barely listening. “Sure, a DF request—go do it. Have Supply and Central Commo call me for the authorization.”
Helen left when Olsher lit the odiferous cigar. His head must be harder than the wall. She stalked downstairs to the armorer in the Property and Supply Depot, who quickly verified the request with Olsher over the phone. A DF transponder (the DF for direction-finder) was a piece of surveillance hardware not new to larger and more modern police departments; they were tiny tracking devices generally planted on cars without the owner’s knowledge. The device emitted an exclusive frequency processed by a set of radio triangulators, and pinpointed the target vehicle’s location at any time on the DF board at Central Communications. Helen had already run North’s name through MVA and found out what he drove: a gold 87 Dodge Colt, two-door. A surveillance warrant wasn’t necessary—at least not in this state—because tracking a person’s public whereabouts was not deemed an invasion of privacy.
Hawberk was the armorer/property officer’s name, according to his tag, a beat street cop waiting out his pension papers. He had a complexion like a sponge. “A DF transponder, huh? They run on nickel-cads. They’ll pipe a freq transmission for ten to fourteen days before you have to replace it,” he told her nearly incomprehensibly. “But cold weather like we’re having now? I’d change the battery once a week during the job.”
“Okay, just let me have it.”
“Which series? We have two.” This was probably making Hawberk’s day; he reached under the counter and produced a pair of small hinged boxes like he was a jeweler showing her watches. One unit was the size of a dime, the other a nickel. “This big one here,” his stubby finger pointed to the latter. “It’s a two-way unit, has a distress signal. We use them mostly for guys working undercover who can’t wear a wire, you carry it around in your pocket with your change. The DF board’ll be tracking you the whole time, but if you run into trouble”—he picked it up and offered a mock demonstration—”you press down real hard on this little grid on the side, and it sends out a distress beacon. The board reads the distress code, and since they already know exactly where you are, they can dispatch a response team immediately.”
“But I’m not going to be carrying this,” she pointed out, already overwhelmed. “I want to track a car.”
“Oh, well why didn’t you say so? You don’t need the two-way unit, you need the one-way.” Now Hawberk picked up the dime-sized transponder. “The batteries in these are tiny, so bring it in to me whenever you need a change.”
“What’s the best place to plant it?” she asked. “Under the hubcap?”
“No, no,” he objected. “What if the person you’re tracking gets a flat tire? He’ll go to change it and find the damn thing. Best place is up under the bumper, but a lotta these new cars? They have plastic bumpers so it won’t work—the attachment base is magnetic.”
Helen rolled her eyes wearily. All this tech stuff—she was sick of it. Just give me the damn thing and tell me where to stick it! I don’t need a technical dissertation!
“Up under the bumper if it’s a steel bumper,” he went on. “Or some secure location in the undercarriage. Just make sure it sticks. You don’t want this baby dropping off onto Rowe Boulevard the first time he hits a pothole.”
“Fine, great. The undercarriage. Make sure the magnet sticks.”
Hawberk closed the box, then filled out an inventory release. “Take this to Central Commo, and they’ll activate the tracking frequency with the DF board. It’s sixteen-point-six-five megahertz, very reliable.
“Yes, yes, thank you.” Helen grabbed the box and form, turned hastily to leave.
“Any place in Greater Madison your suspect goes to, they’ll read it on the DF board, and feed the grids into the computer.”
Helen pulled away. “Right, yes, I understand that.”
“Then all you have to do is call up the grids, which will already be converted to city plat numbers.”
“Fine. Thank you.”
“Use the city grid map to match the plats, and you got the exact locations of everywhere in town your suspect parks his car.”
“Fine. Have a good day.”
“And don’t forget to change the battery every week,” Hawberk reminded over her. “This kind of cold weather drains them—”
Helen glided out; her mind stuffed to overflowing with details. Next she activated the frequency with Central Communications, gave the transponder along with North’s address and MVA specs to a plainclothes in Intelligence Branch, and sent him out to plant the device on North’s 87 Dodge Colt.
What a pain in the butt, she thought, only now, for the first time all day, taking a few minutes to sit down and have a cup of coffee. Computers, DF transponders, city plats and grid conversions? One day, she suspected, the world would be so cluttered with technology, specs, and frequencies that everyone would go completely insane.
The DF would help a lot, though. More grist for Helen’s investigative mill. North, now that his escort service had been closed down, would very likely solicit a new one, and finding out where that new service was would give Helen a brand-new client base to check out. Clients who may have known Kussler, and any other prostitutes Kussler may have solicited, all whom, in turn, might know more about Campbell. Additionally, since Kussler regularly solicited North, he may have recommended North to friends.
But Helen’s coffee didn’t even have time to get cool before she was up and out. It took two hours with the police artist and IdentiKit technician to get a good digital composite on what she remembered of Campbell’s face. Another hour at the Police Commissioner’s Office to process a press-release request for the composite to be published in the papers. And yet another hour at the assistant district attorney’s office getting North’s active charges dropped in place of probation before judgment. And after all that, the day was almost done. But she still had one more thing to do, didn’t she?
She had an appointment, with Dr. Sallee.
««—»»
“I’m sorry, Helen. I remember telling you psychiatrists were only right ninety-nine percent of the time. Well, here’s the one percent. I called it wrong.”
“So did I,” Helen said. Only now, in Sallee’s office, did she feel wound down from all the rigors of the day. The office was tranquil, blissfully sedate. Sallee’s voice gave her solace.
“I was convinced, as you, that Dahmer was genuinely dead, and that the perpetrator was a copycat,” he said. “But at least, in your discoveries today, you have a positive link to the accomplice. A name, a face, all in one day? That’s fast work.”
“Not fast enough. It’s only a last name, and a sketched composite face. Not a whole lot in the thick of things.”
“There you go again, as always, Helen. Downplaying your skills, self-effacing the efforts of your own ingenuity.”
Helen audibly moaned.
“Any more dreams?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Resolved anything with Tom?”
The name made her feel distant from herself, as though she were looking at herself in a tiny window very far away. “No.”
Sallee seemed to sense that she didn’t want to talk about herself today, she wanted to talk about—
“Campbell, then,” he said. “And it’s typical. Everything North told you about Campbell fits the basic profile of the accomplice, even before we knew his name. If I were you, I’d keep a close eye on North.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” she explained. “I have a direction-finder on his car. Central Commo will follow and copy any places in the city grid that North drives to.”
“Good thinking. A log of North’s associates will give you more names of persons who may have been acquainted with Kussler, and perhaps even Campbell himself.”
Helen nodded sluggishly. Suddenly she felt exhausted. God, I wish I could just go to sleep right here in his office.
“And just as I was telling you several days ago, the so-called ‘killer-groupie’ phenomenon—obsessive-reference disorder,” Sallee said. “It’s precisely what you predicted.”
“You predicted it, Dr. Sallee. I simply followed up on it.”
Obsessive-reference disorder, she thought. Great. If it’s not technical gobbledegook, it’s clinical gobbledegook.
“—very very common for certain sexual extroverts to become fascinated with and obsessed by serial killers. They regard them as heroes, they even admire their deeds. And a good many of them are X,Y,Y-Syndrome candidates, as I’ve previously mentioned. What North disclosed, I mean—not only Campbell’s obsession with Dahmer, but his other sundry interests: sadistic sex, explicitly brutal videos, snuff films—”
“He also said Campbell played excessively violent computer games, not the popular games, but the underground ones.”
Sallee nodded. “I remember the Senate hearings. There’s an entire subculture of people who patronize these games. They order them through the mail, and over the Internet by use of privileged down-loading codes. There’s a flurry of such games—depicting rape, torture, murder and mutilation from the player’s perspective. It’s a sick world, Helen, but I don’t have to tell you that.”
Yeah…
“And just more verification as to Campbell’s psycho-sexual, obsessive profile,” Sallee continued.
“But still, it’s Dahmer who’s doing the killing, and I need you to refresh my memory. Whatever that rare syndrome is that could make Dahmer change.”
Sallee fiddled with piles of papers on his desk as he spoke, a fuss-budget. “Yes. A conative-episodic break. I wouldn’t have counted on something like that at all—it’s just so rare. But it’s equally obvious. With Campbell’s assistance, Dahmer is indeed committing new murders, via a new modus, and that new modus can only be explained by an episodic break, or something similar.”
“But what kind of things could cause such a mental break?”
“Chiefly?” Sallee said. “A memory flashback. Sometimes flashbacks are triggered by sudden hormonal imbalances, a readily accessible cause for a personality reversal in someone like Dahmer, someone with an introverted psychological mein. Another incidental that’s interesting is the statistical age-group. Psychopaths and sociopaths who experience this sort of episodic break are almost always in the same age margin: thirty to forty. Dahmer is now thirty-four. And the actual clinical incident is statistically identical too, due to a natural increase in certain neurotransmitters in the brain. Certain mentally unstable persons, due to irregularities in brain chemistry, experience an increase in specific neurotransmitters, whereas a healthy person would experience a decrease due to aging, in particular a neurotransmitter called L-dopamine. This upsurge can effect a sudden memory improvement, often digging up memories previously buried via childhood trauma. One more thing: inadvertent memory flashbacks are sometimes caused by sudden dietary changes, the same kind of change one might experience going from a lifetime of learned eating habits to a pre-designated prison diet. I suppose it’s possible, too, that one of the prison psychiatrists attempted a ‘flooding,’ ‘memory-regression,’ or ‘desensitization’ technique as part of Dahmer’s therapy, and a memory flashback occurred through one of those means. But those are really the only documented instances of a triggering of a conative-episodic break. Some…catalyst… that causes the subject to remember previously buried traumatic experiences from childhood…”
««—»»
—and suddenly he remembers it all. It had been years, hadn’t it, and he’d never remembered his father, and what his father had done to him. Only very recently—a year ago?—when the show he’d seen it on Geraldo, about adults experiencing a resurface of childhood memories, and it had thrown him into that awful trance—
««—»»
“Upon the initial catalytic recollection,” Sallee told her, “the subject often describes a situation triggering a formal memory—a memory buried since childhood—and then experiences a sort of retrogressive trance—”
««—»»
—that brought it all up like pus in a boil. Everything his father had done to him as an innocent, terrified child, and everything he’d said afterward. Like “Fear is power, son. Real men take life by the balls. They take what they need, and they become powerful in the fear they hold over others. When you’re older, you’ll understand. You’ll thank me for this. You’ll see that I’m doing this for you…because you’re the same way…”
««—»»
Helen didn’t remember a whole lot of her abnormal psych from college. “A retrogressive trance?”
“Or a simple trance state, like lucid dreaming, inverse somnambulism, things like that. Something triggers the subject to remember, in the space of a day or even an hour, a virtual lifetime of buried traumatic memories from the formative and preadolescent years. Almost always, Helen, these memories involve sexual abuse perpetrated by a close family member—such as the mother or father—”
««—»»
“Father,” he thought when it all came back. “My own father…
««—»»
“According to the journals, at least,” Sallee drew on, “these are typical catalysts for a previously psychopathic or sociopathic subject who has experienced a conative-episodic effect. And, yes, Dahmer, based on what he told me when I interviewed him upon incarceration—as well as what I’ve read about him since then—is a good or even excellent candidate. In other words, as rare as the syndrome may be, Jeffrey Dahmer’s basic psychiatric profile provides a sound breeding ground, so to speak, for a patient who’s undergone this form of episodic break. And another thing you might find compelling. Many subjects report a history of military service—the service being, at least subconsciously, reckoned as a means of escape from the foundry of the childhood trauma. And such subjects statistically are removed from service early, for any number of reasons—”
««—»»
And the man who was once the boy from Bath, Ohio, remembers now how desperately he wanted to leave, to get away from it all, and how, at age eighteen, he went to the Army recruiter—
««—»»
“—that may be deemed psychoactively pertinent. Dahmer, after all, had joined the Army, and was soon separated from service to due alcoholism—”
««—»»
—but that didn’t last long, either, did it? The Army hadn’t worked out at all—
««—»»
“Dahmer, of course, claimed that his drinking wasn’t excessive at all, claims that the charges were trumped up by his company commander because he’d told a few other enlisted men that he was gay,” Sallee said.
This was all news to Helen. She’d never researched Dahmer’s bio history that well, just the modus stuff.
««—»»
—but none of that really mattered now, did it? No, he thinks.
“Dahmer told me that his childhood was normal,” Sallee continued, when he was growing up in Bath, Ohio. Of course, this was over two years ago, well before the episodic break he’s obviously experienced since then. Yet he admitted that he did indeed kill small animals—sometimes he would even dissolve the flesh off their bones with corrosives he’d concoct from the chemistry set his father gave him for his birthday. This boy was melting the flesh off dogs and birds and hamsters yet he referred to his childhood as ‘normal.’ He was oblivious. He said he did it because he loved the animals.” Sallee tossed his shoulders. “Beyond that, you tell me. We only have clinical criteria to go by, but every subject, in some way, is possessed of patented differences.”
Helen let the slew of words sink in. “But subjects like this, like Dahmer, or like anyone else with the background. Once they experience the flood of back memories, once they remember all the bad things that happened to them—is it common for them to go on killing sprees?”
Sallee sat poised, the thin blond hair gleaming on his balding pate. “Not only is it common, it’s nearly exclusive. As the old saying goes, opposites attract. People who suffer a conative-episodic break go from one opposite to the next—in personality, I mean. They’ve always been killers, yes. Dahmer killed animals as a child, a hitchhiker when he was eighteen, and seventeen other people before his apprehension. But its the perception of murder that changes. Introversion to aggression. Symbolic murder to murder based in a sense of retribution and revenge. A passive personality form which quickly changes over to an aggressive one. What we’re talking about here is a complete metamorphosis of character, and there is no doubt now that Jeffrey Dahmer experienced this metamorphosis quite recently, and used that new aggression, based on his resurfaced memories, to devise an intricate means to escape his incarceration and continue his murderous acts on a shining, new plane.” Sallee looked at her. “Jeffrey Dahmer’s only compulsion right now is to resurrect the power he once knew. And kill.”
««—»»
“Kill,” he thinks now.
In fact, that’s all he ever thinks about now.
Kill.
««—»»
Helen, in spite of her fatigue, tried to compute all of this at once. It wasn’t hard. “I think I understand it all now, Dr. Sallee. But let me ask you one thing. You mentioned that the episodic break is founded on some aspect of abuse from childhood, some—ideation? Is that the right word?—founded in the symbol of fear equaling power. Dahmer’s crime-scene letters have said the same thing. ‘Feel the fear.’“
“Yes. Exactly. So what’s your question?”
“I’m wondering about the absolute base-structure of this ‘fear.’ I mean, the locality. Dahmer’s heyday was in the city of Milwaukee—that’s where he thrived on his fear. But now he’s killing people in Madison. To retrieve this sense of power, I’d think he’d return to Milwaukee, his virtual hunting-ground of fear. Why the change of locales?”
“That’s simple,” Sallee said. “Dahmer’s already done Milwaukee. Now he wants someplace new. A new locale, new fuel for his power. New meat.”
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