CHAPTER NINETEEN

 

 

The darkness damped the room to perfect silence. Her lover slipped beside her into bed.

Helen gasped, in passion.

His hand gently molded the contours of her breasts, then slid lower. It touched her with such precision—the hand seemed to know her. A blurred face lowered, lips touched her lips and kissed. The room’s warm dark hid her lover’s face like a veil.

What’s…happening? Helen lamely thought. A tightness spired at her loins like an over-wound spring—any moment it might snap. The hand continued gingerly to investigate her.

“Darling,” Tom whispered.

Helen lay in a momentary shock. A cloud passed the window, letting winter moonlight fall into the room, beaming on Tom’s face.

Tom…

Short of breath, Helen moaned. Tom had come back to her… She pulled him naked atop her. Her nipples swelled so thoroughly they ached; she felt the veins beat in her breasts. She sensed an earthy purgation, a primal flux of feelings that demanded to be loosed.

But had she ever felt so overjoyed? She looked up into Tom’s face, saw his unmistakable smile and the familiar love in his eyes. The clean sweat of passion made his flesh shine, his big bright eyes gazing right back into hers.

“I love you, Helen.”

“I-I…love you too.”

There. Is wasn’t so hard to say, was it? She knew she loved him, it was just that she’d said it so infrequently, it seemed uncomfortable.

“I’m sorry things got so messed up between us,” he whispered.

“Me too.”

“We’ll work them out.”

“Yes. I want to.”

And she did, she did. In spite of all the things that had happened, and all the things she didn’t understand—she wanted to work things out. She needed to.

The feel of his weight on her, and its immediacy, parched her voice. She opened her legs, pulled him tighter.

“Make love to me,” she pleaded.

“Mm-hmm.”

Helen winced. The voice was different now, and then came the impact: the stench, so familiar from being in Tom’s lab—

Formalin. Disinfectant. Embalming fluid.

Helen screamed.

The face was plain in the moonlight, despite its broken-toothed smile and crushed facial bones.

It was no longer Tom who lay atop her. It was Jeffrey Dahmer.

The paralysis of nightmare locked her down on the bed. She squeezed her eyes shut, so not to have to look at this abomination, but dead fingertips plucked them back open.

“Look, look. See?” the morgue-cold corpse said.

The corpse-face was gone, its ravagement smoothing over, its bruises and contusions dissolving like white sand pouring, until it had blended completely into the face she’d seen so many times in the nightmares of her of past. A blank white face smooth as a featureless mask. Then the knife-slit mouth leaned down to kiss her, the vaguest tip of a grub-white tongue slipping between the lips…

 Helen awoke thrashing, shrieking soundlessly. The winter moon remained in her window, the room remained warm and dark as the dream. Was it really over?

She nearly fell out of bed reaching for the lamp, then nearly knocked the lamp over turning it on.

And there she lay in the sweat of her own horror, her nightgown glued to her skin as she waited for her heart to beat down.

She didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

 

««—»»

 

“I buy it,” Jan Beck said the next morning in the lab. Helen had just explained her theory: that Campbell was, without a doubt, the man who arranged Dahmer’s escape. “Can’t see why Olsher doesn’t, but you got to admit, he’ll never win any awards for speculative thinking. He’s brass. Brass can’t think past their noses.”

I’m brass too, Jan, Helen thought in response but said nothing. A tabloid lay on the counter; DAHMER WAS WRITING A COOKBOOK! the header boasted. Helen felt a quick twinge. “It’s still got plenty of missing pieces, though, and the only way I’m going to find them is to—”

“Find Campbell, sure,” Beck agreed. “No easy task either. You running his name?”

“I just started. It’s going to take a while. There are over 30,000 people in the state of Wisconsin named Campbell. I’m cross-reffing with prison and mental hospital releases going back three years, plus a general search on anyone named Campbell with a rap sheet for any sexually related crime. I haven’t got my hopes up, though. Sallee says guys this smart, and with this profile, probably haven’t been caught.”

Beck removed a bottle of Snapple from the lab fridge. “You run the name against hospital records, especially this hospital?”

“That’s the first thing I did—here and Columbus County General, where Dahmer’s so-called body was first taken. It came up zilch. There are two Campbells working here, and one there. None fit the mold.”

“At least you’ve got things cooking. You got a DF on North, and that will probably give you more leads down the road, you’ve got Central Programming running Campbell’s name. And while all that’s going on—”

“I have too fill in the holes,” Helen muttered, staring absently around the lab. She felt like she hadn’t slept at all, which was essentially true. The nightmare had bitten her deep. I’m turning into on of those proverbial obsessed cops. No life outside of the job. The case takes over everything, even your dreams. “I think that’s the main reason Olsher’s not taking me seriously. My theory doesn’t explain how Dahmer was positively ID’d via fingerprints. Repeatedly, his prints matched. One, after the beating at the prison, two, on arrival at Columbus County General for the first official pronouncement of death, and, three, after transport here. Three times those fingerprints matched, but then we dig up the body, and it’s Kussler.”

Beck shrugged as she tended a peripheral printer connected to a spectrographic point-processor. “Those prints matched because the guy being transported was Dahmer. He was switched with Kussler’s body after he arrived here. I don’t see any other explanation.”

Helen blinked at the hypothesis. It just sounded too far-fetched. “But the same body ID’d as Dahmer was pronounced dead repeatedly, Jan. The prison physician, the chief of ER at Columbus County General, and several more doctors here.”

“And Tom too,” Beck reminded off the top of her head.

Yeah, Tom too. The name soured her mood at once.

Beck drew on, “In other words, you don’t understand how Dahmer could’ve been pronounced dead when he was really alive? That’s the easy part.”

Helen peered at Beck. “How is faking death easy?”

“You’re forgetting one of this case’s most unique constituents, Captain. Succinicholine sulphate.”

“A deadly poison.”

“A deadly poison is certain doses, yes. But the doses Dahmer used on Arlinger and Dumplin weren’t high enough to be fatal. I’ve already explained that in my tox reports. Those two guys died as a result of torture and extreme physical trauma. It wasn’t the succinicholine that killed them. All that did was paralyze them.”

Helen listened hard, strained her perceptions. “I don’t think I’m following you.”

Beck looked exasperated. “Captain, that’s the key word here—paralysis. Dahmer’s paralyzing his victims with a neurological agent. It stands to reason that Dahmer used the same neurological agent on himself, to feign his death after the beating at the prison.”

“Would that…work?”

“With succinicholine sulphate? Of course it would work. The right dose would lower Dahmer’s respiratory rate and pulse sufficiently enough to fool a standard check for vital signs.”

Helen hadn’t thought of that. “Wow,” she muttered. “You’re right, it does make sense. But that would mean someone would’ve had to procure the succinicholine previously—”

“Sure, Campbell,” Beck suggested. “He had to have been the one who ripped it off from that ambulance jacking.”

“But the jacking was more than twelve hours after the beating?”

“So? By then the plan was already in motion; Campbell was stocking up on it for the murders he knew he and Dahmer would soon be committing. He probably already had stolen a sample previously. Jackings are commonplace. This was obviously something they were planning for months, or even since Dahmer’s initial incarceration in 92.”

Helen nodded to herself. “And it had to have been Kussler who snuck the succinicholine into the prison, on Campbell’s orders. Campbell was using Kussler the whole time, exploiting the love affair with him in order to manipulate him through his job at the prison.”

“A job which gave him direct access to Dahmer. Trading notes back and forth so Campbell and Dahmer could maintain correspondence, and planning the whole scheme from start to finish. It was more than likely Kussler himself who injected Dahmer with the succinicholine directly after the beating. A phony clinical death solid enough to fool any stethoscope.”

Now Helen’s senses seemed prickling. “And according to the roster at the prison, Kussler was on duty that same morning. But…” Here was a snag. “Was it Kussler who beat up on Dahmer’s face, or Rosser, the guy who’s been charged?”

“It had to have been Rosser, Captain. At least that’s my guess. Because the beating verifiably took place in the rec unit, and the only guys in the rec unit at the time were Dahmer, Vander, and Rosser.”

“So Rosser must have been on it too, right?”

“Had to have been,” Beck agreed. “Rosser agreed to beat Dahmer bad about the face. A short time later, Kussler gets into the infirmary and injects Dahmer with the succinicholine, or maybe Rosser did the injection himself. The prison physician pronounces him dead ’cos he’s got no vital signs. And the prints match every time they ran them because, up until the time he arrived here, it was Dahmer they were transporting.”

“And Rosser beats Vander up too, to make it look like a psychotic break. And nobody’s the wiser.”

“Sure, it’s just a theory at this point,” Beck said, now fiddling with comparison microscope, “but I don’t see any other possible explanation that could account for Dahmer’s survival. And that’s one thing we know for sure now. Dahmer’s still alive, and he’s out there, right now, killing again.”

 

««—»»

 

Beck’s summation helped Helen see it all now, but why bother running it by Olsher? Waste of time, she thought. Not until I get more evidence or manage to find Campbell.

Campbell, she thought. Your picture’s going to be in the paper today. Try hiding from that, asshole.

Next duty on the agenda, of course, was to reinterview Tredell Rosser, who was upstairs right now in the precaution ward. But when she was crossing the lobby, she stopped in at the newsstand to pick up today’s Tribune. And—

“Goddamn!” she complained loud enough for everyone in the lobby to hear. She tore through the paper, examining every page for the composite and announcement, and—

It’s not here!

Nowhere in the paper was there any sign of Campbell’s artist composite or the corresponding announcement she’d written revealing his last name.

Helen was on the pay phone at once, to Olsher.

“Damn it, Larrel! Why wasn’t my—”

“Save your breath,” Olsher told her over the line. “You want to know why the Tribune didn’t run you sketch and blurb, well I’ll tell you. The Commissioner’s Office said no way. Shit, Helen, the PC himself howled about it.”

“Why?” Helen griped.

“Because it’s a liability. Think, girl. You don’t have enough evidence on Campbell—whoever the hell he is, if he even exists at all—to add up to squat. You go running a guy’s likeness in the paper, along with his name, saying he’s wanted for questioning by the state police violent crimes unit? You know what he does then, Helen? He sues the department for fifty million and wins. It’s defamation of character. It’s an assault on his rights.”

“Aw, Chief, give me a break!”

Olsher’s voiced turned rigid. “I gave you a break this morning when I convinced the PC to keep you on the case, Helen. He wants you off. He thinks you’ve turned into a loose gun.”

Helen squinted her incredulity. “You’re kid—”

“I’m not kidding at all, Helen. You’ve shitnamed yourself bad. That exhumation only stirred the press up more, and now this. I told the PC you’re still the best investigator we got, so he agreed to keep you on. But any more bonehead moves like this, and I can’t cover for you anymore.”

Olsher hung up even before Helen could complain further. What’s the point! she thought, walking for the elevator, a headache kicking at the inside of her skull. If it had been such a bonehead move, why had Olsher suggested she attempt authorization? Are all the men in the world thick-headed morons, or is it me?

So now she was on the PC’s hit-list. Great. Olsher was right about one thing, though: she could kiss her promotion goodbye.

I could care less, she told herself.

This news about the paper wasn’t good; however, the news once she got upstairs was worse.

Helen obstinately flashed her badge to the charge at the reception desk for the psych wing.

“I need to talk to Tredell Rosser,” she said, more distracted by her headache than anything else.

“Sorry, ma’am,” the guard informed her.

“Sorry?”

“This morning during med call, Rosser was found dead in his cell.”

 

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