CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

 

 

Helen never fully lost consciousness. The blow to the head wore off, yet afterwards she lay completely unable to move. Of course. Succinicholine sulphate did not cause unconsciousness—it caused paralysis, and that’s exactly how she lay in the back of Campbell’s van. Conscious, hyper-alert…and totally paralyzed.

Back at the apartment, he’d thrown her over his shoulder, carried her out the back through the laundry rooms. A van sat waiting.

She could feel the tires humming beneath her, she could hear the motor drone. The only part of her body she could move was her eyes, and if she strained them to the left hard enough, she could see Campbell in the driver’s seat. He drove carefully, checking his mirrors, evenly accelerating and decelerating, using his signal at every turn.

He never looked back at her as he spoke.

“I know you can hear me. You just can’t move or talk. When I found out about North’s escort service being raided I figured it was only a matter of time before you caught up to him. I knew all about his little jaunts with Kussler during our frequent breakups, and it figures the jabbering little worm would tell North all about me. But I guess it all worked out better anyway. It helps make Jeffrey’s return all the more powerful, and that’s what this is all about, Captain Closs. Power.”

Power, Helen managed to think. She remembered what Dr. Sallee had said. Fear equals power.

“And he’s waiting for us right now, Jeffrey is, back at the house. So is Tom.”

Tom, she thought. The evil son-of-a-bitch.

“Won’t it be glorious when they find your body?”

 

««—»»

 

“Home again.”

The van decelerated, went over a bump, then seemed to move up an incline. A driveway, she guessed, and then the speculation was verified when Campbell clicked a button, and she heard a garage door rising. The van pulled into a lit garage, stopped.

Thunk

The driver’s door shut, then the windowless rear doors were pulled open.

“Do come in,” Campbell offered. “We simply love having guests over.”

Then he hoisted her up, flung her over his shoulder, and carried her into the house.

Helen felt like a feedbag as she was lugged up short steps, through a utility room, a dark kitchen, then—

Her breath was punched from her lungs as she was dropped onto the floor of another night-dark room.

She nearly vomited, she was so sick with fear.

A light flicked on. Barely audible footfalls could be heard crossing the carpet. Helen lay face down, a dropped doll, and part of her hoped she would remain that way until she died. She didn’t want to be turned over. She didn’t want to see.

“Upsy-daisy.” Hands slipped roughly into her armpits, jerked her upward. Her shoes fell off as her heels dragged; then she was dropped in a chair.

“Open your eyes.”

Helen didn’t want to. She knew what she would see… “I can’t,” she lied.

“Succinicholine doesn’t effect levator and optical muscle groups. Now, open your eyes, or I’ll cut your eyelids off with pinking shears.”

Helen gulped, opened her eyes, and looked at him in the light. He looked the same since she’d last seen him—the day he’d been masquerading as Kussler.

Fine, sandy-blond hair; a tight, wired physique like a feather-weight boxer. The lean face reminded her of something lupine. Bright gray eyes narrowed in calculation—behind their brightness, though, she could see the madness, just as calculative. Aglow, like gray gems from hell.

If I could only move, she thought.

“So what now? Is that what you’re thinking?” His mouth twitched into a smile. “Should I rape you? That would be easy, wouldn’t it? What could you do?”

As Helen’s head lolled, all she could do was point her eyes up and see his face…

“Throw you back onto the floor? Tear your clothes off? But, no, we’re not interested in women—you know that by now.” Now the mouth twitched into something of a frown, a persnickety criticism. “What power could be gained in that? Women’s lives are so pale, and so predictable. Such frail beings, you are. No spark, no vitality at all.”

You motherf—

“This is a world of men, and you’ve let yourselves be our servitors since we were apes. Why waste our power on such petty things like women?”

Helen knew she was a hair’s width away from death, but even in her fear, she longed to retort. I’ll show you frail, I’ll show you petty, you psychopthic asshole. You and your buddy Dahmer. I’d take both of you down with my bare hands if I wasn’t paralyzed.

And her adrenalin just then, surging with her hatred, made her feel white hot. She could do it—she knew she could. Grab this wiry monster by the throat and squeeze until his neck cracked…

If, came the irrevocable reminder, I wasn’t paralyzed.

“But it wouldn’t be gentlemenly not to give you your due, would it?” he mocked. “How rude of me!”

He moved out of her field of vision, leaving her to stare at a flank of computer equipment: several CPUs, several big monitors. Of course. North had told her he was a computer fanatic, and the commo tech had verified it. Only someone with quintessential programming skills could’ve prevented the phone calls from being traced.

A sharp pain stung her neck—so sudden and harsh she wanted to scream. But no scream found its way to her paralyzed lips.

Campbell stepped back into view. “I case you’re wondering, I just injected you with half a cc of Trexaril, a half dose. It blocks all sulfer-based cholinergic agents. You’ll be able to talk in a few minutes. You’ll even be able to move a little.”

Move, she thought. Something in her mind froze. Move a little.

But would it be enough?

“Jeff?” he called out. “We’re back, and I’ve got her. Start getting ready, okay?” Then Campbell sat a his work desk, revolved around on the chair to face her. “North, obviously, told you my name, but I guess there are quite a few Campbells in the Wisconsin phone book, hmm? Even if you’d located me from my job, my employer has a phony address in my records file, and I’m sure you also know that my fingerprints aren’t on file, either. No doubt you dusted Kussler’s apartment.”

Helen’s throat tightened through a wallow. Then…she was able to nod. The injection was working—already she could tip her head around and minutely move her fingers and toes.

And when she tried to talk:

“Where do you work?” she slurred. “At the hospital?”

“Of course.”

Her mouth felt like wet clay as she struggled to continue speaking. “We record-checked everyone at every hospital in the state…and none of the Campbells match the prints you left at Kussler’s apartment.”

“Of course they didn’t,” Campbell informed her. “All state and county hospital employees are fingerprinted upon employment.”

“Then how could you possibly beat it?”

“Because, unlike Kussler, I work for a private contractor. Custodial services—a drab job, I know—but one that gave me access to the hospital without an ID on file.”

How simple, yet effective. Most hospitals did contract out for janitorial and maintenance services—to private sector contractors. Therefore a name-check would come up negative because Campbell wasn’t a hospital employee, he was a sub-contractor employee who worked for the hospital.

“Which,” he went on, “and as I’m sure you’ve already figured out, gave me access to most of the premise. Janitor’s have key access, to any wing on the maintenance roster. Nightshifts, less staff, less security, less patient/treatment traffic. And, yes, it was rather easy getting into the main nurses’ station to switch Rosser’s meds with a fatal dose of succinicholine. Getting Jeff out of the morgue before the autopsy and putting Kussler’s body in his place—well, that was a bit more difficult.”

Just then Helen’s ear felt pricked. She heard a sound, a tiny clatter, coming from another room.

Dahmer, she thought. She leaned up in the chair. “You killed your own lover. You used him as a body to make the switch.”

Campbell chuckled, a silhouette before his lit monitors. “I used him for quite a bit more than that, Captain. The perfect dupe, the perfect patsy. Kussler’s love was like a woman’s. He was weak, manipulable. He was absolutely pathetic.”

Helen staid a more proper response. Her fingers were moving almost freely now, and her forearms twitched too, when she tried to move them. If she could only have full use of her hands… “But you had help,” she contested. “There was no way you could’ve gotten Dahmer out of the hospital and left Kussler’s body in his place at the morgue on your own. It was Tom, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, Tom was very helpful indeed,” Campbell replied. “A deputy medical examiner, he was the highest ranking staff member on duty most nights.”

Helen wasn’t absolutely sure she caught his meaning. Much more important, she knew, was regaining the use of her hands without letting him realize it. If I could use my hands, she realized, then I could…

“You used Tom too, didn’t you?” she suggested, “just like you used Kussler. For your own end. Once you didn’t need Tom anymore, you killed him, didn’t you?”

Campbell’s voice leveled in its tenor. “As I’ve said, it’s all about power, Captain Closs. I use people—yes—to suit my own needs. And I make no apologies for it.”

Her eyes struggled to reckon him, to see the machine behind the madness…

“But it’s time now, isn’t it?” Campbell’s silhouetted form stood up before the flanks of monitors and CPU chasses. “It’s time you met Jeff.”

Campbell disappeared, a spirit in a dark breeze. Helen used his absence to test her muscle response. Her fingers turned into claws and her teeth ground as she strained to move her forearms. They moved, perhaps, two inches before they fell back down.

Shit…

She took fast, deep breaths, to raise her heart-rate and cycle more of her blood through her metabolism, worked the Trexaril faster through her system. But as she did so—

My…God…

Her eyes wandered, strayed to the kitchen, then stopped and stared. A plastic drum, like the big industrial drums Dahmer had used to dissolve flesh off bones with mercuric and sulphuric acid, sat beside the entry next to the counter. A black lidded pot simmered gently on the range. Helen could’ve sworn she smelled the aroma of something like pork chops. Then—

She squeezed her eyes shut.

Hanging on a pegged towel rack was—

Jesus Christ!

—something she at first took to be a tan chamois or dish towel. But a closer squint showed her what it realy was:

A large, irregular cutting of human skin, complete with abundant chest hair, and tiny shrunken nipples.

click

A door-latch opened. Helen jerked her gaze to the right. A dark doorway now stood before her, and in that doorway, two figures took slow, deliberate steps. “Come on,” Campbell’s voice insisted. “You can do it. She wants to see you…”

Helen’s eyes felt pried open by surgical stitches as she stared. Campbell attentively assisted his slow-stepping companion.

“That’s it, that’s it,” he said. “One step at a time.”

It’s him, she thought. It’s really him… I’m about to meet Jeffrey Dahmer…

Campbell aided his companion toward the long work desk, then sat him down in the silhouette shadows cast by the monitors. Helen’s eye peered forward, unblinking, as the shadow seemed to stare back at her. She could feel its black gaze on her face, she could sense the vision on her.

Campbell moved toward a lamp. “Captain Helen Closs, I’d like you to meet—”

The light snapped on.

Helen’s eyes bulged at the sight of the person sitting in the chair.

“—Tom Drake,” Campbell finished. “Tom, say hello to Captain Closs.”

In the light now, Tom’s face tremored, his eyes bulging at hers. His hands were bound in front of him by the wrists, a gag tied through his teeth.

“Tom’s a dupe just like most people,” Campbell announced. “Naturally you’d suspect him of complicity since it’s well know amongst my clan that he sometimes prefers the company of a man. The magazine article about your fetid relationship only tipped me off to what I already had heard. And he was the perfect pawn to draw you off of me.”

Tom’s face strained toward her, tears in his eyes, terrified as he sat helpless in the chair.

Campbell continued, “I planted the succincholine in Tom’s apartment, which I knew you’d eventually find. Never trust a bisexual man, hmm? And it was me who made the phony call to North’s new escort service and sent North to Tom’s address. Why? Because I knew you’d have surveillance cops watching his every move.”

“Not surveillance cops,” Helen corrected. “I planted an electronic device on North’s car, that could monitor his movements through our communications office.”

“Such technology!” Campbell exclaimed. “Big Brother just keeps getting bigger.” Campbell came away from the desk, approached her, and leaned over into her face. “But do you want to know about technology, Captain Closs? I can tell you all about it. Do you want to know about the dental match? Do you want to know about the DNA match in the hair, the handwriting match on the letters, and the fingerprints? Do you, Captain Closs? Are you ready to confess to me that I am your intellectual superior? Are you ready to admit to me that I had you, and everyone else, fooled all along?”

“No,” Helen grated. “Your plan was brilliant, I’ll admit that, and I’ll even admit that, toward the end, I actually went with the flow and believed that Jeffrey Dahmer was still alive. But he isn’t, is he?”

“Don’t be so sure, Captain,” Campbell went on in his coy tone. “Are you sure about that? Are you certain?”

He darted away, back to the room off to the right. Then a squealing sound was heard, like casters or something. In another moment, though, Campbell came back out, pushing before him a wheeled office chair.

Sitting in the chair was, his eyes opened and staring at her, was Jeffrey Dahmer.

A very dead Jeffrey Dahmer.

He looked like a raddled ghost at first, streaked white. But it didn’t take Helen long to understand that he’d been regularly dusted with ground limestone to cut back on the stench of autolysis and rot. His face was but a mask—a crushed mask—the red blood so oxydized that it had turned black as charcoal.

Helen tried again to gauge the use of her hands and arms, but—not much better than before. The succinicholine was wearing off, but Campbell had mentioned that it was a “half dose” of Trexaril that he’d administered as an antedote. Would much physical mobility would she regain, with a “half dose?”

The pieces were all here now—she only had to calculate the obscure ones. And she had to bide for time, to let more of the antidote work through her system before Campbell decided to kill her. And he was right. It would be glorious for him, when they found the body of the Captain of the State Police Violent Crimes Unit tortured and dead with Jeffrey Dahmer’s DNA, handwriting, voiceprints, and fingerprints all over the scene.

Kill time, she thought. Her arms struggled to flex. Kill time before he kills you.

“Dahmer really was murdered by Tredell Rosser, in the prison rec unit, on November 28th, wasn’t he?” she asked.

“Yes,” Campbell said.

“And you had been corresponding with him for some time before that, hadn’t you? That’s the only reason you pursued a relationship with Kussler. Kussler had access to Dahmer’s cell, and you used that access to maintain correspondence with Dahmer when he was alive, didn’t you?”

“Very astute, Captain,” Campbell admitted. “Yes.”

Helen remembered everything Dr. Sallee had told her about such people. Killer groupies. Obssesive-reference disorders. “Kussler would take your letters, leave them in Dahmer’s cell when he was on work detail, and take his letters to you out.”

“Yes.”

“But we never found any trace of your letters to him.”

“I wrote them on toilet paper,” Campbell informed. “Where they could be read very quickly and then effectively flushed.”

“So you planned all of this well beforehand.”

Campbell laxed back in his chair, thinking. “I did, yes, but not Jeffrey. Jeffrey would write to me frequently, citing his conviction that it was only a matter of time before some inmate in the prison murdered him. He was well aware of the number of enemies he’s accrued. The rest was me, my planning, my calculation.”

“You’re a very smart man,” Helen said.

Campbell’s own gaze bore down on her. “I’m a thousand times smarter than you, or any of the other government lackies on your three-ring-circus police department. If you’re so smart, how did I manage to arrange Jeffrey’s phone call to you? A phone call, mind you, that rendered a positive voiceprint?”

“Anyone with the right equipment could’ve done that,” Helen talked right back to him. “Dahmer was interviewed several times on tv. All you had to do was videotape the interviews, and then sound edit the words out to construct sentences which you later played over my phone. The second call I received, when you were already in my apartment waiting for me, was easily done with a call converter and automatic telephone dialer preset with a nominal dial delay. You were waiting for me in my apartment. You were watching out the window. When you saw me park my car in my lot, you called your own number, connected to the converter and auto-dialer, punched in an activation code, and hung up.”

Campbell nodded, not quite as enthusiastically as before. “Good thinking. That’s—well—that’s exactly what I did.”

“And the DNA verification tested in the hairfall? That was easy too. You already had Dahmer’s dead body. You merely left a few of his hairs at each crime scene. The dental match was a cinch—it was still Dahmer’s body on the slab when it was ID’d, before the switch. And the fingerprints? That was no big deal either, for the same reason. Before Dahmer’s print ridges rotted, you applied them to the Flair pen and all of the pieces of paper you used to produce the letters. You probably have a whole stack of blank sheets of paper here, with Dahmer’s fingerprints on them. And spatulas and knives and Flair pens too. You probably applied your own body sweat to Dahmer’s dead fingertips to make the impressions, because sweat doesn’t leave DNA.”

Campbell’s mouth twitched a bit. “A commendable speculation, Captain. And, again, you’re right. The amino acids left by fingerprint ridge patterns can last for years. I used Dahmer’s dead hands to leave prints on over a hundred pieces of blank paper, as well as kitchen utensils, to leave at future crime scenes.”

“So when that thing sitting in the chair rots down to a skeleton, you’ll still have latent evidence that he’s still alive and killing people.”

“Yes,” Campbell assented. “Right.” He paused, looked around in the dark. By now, though, Tom, bound and gagged in his own chair, had passed out. “You’re right about all of that, Captain, but any articulate person could make such speculations. The real instance of genius was the evidence that started it all. The handwriting evidence. Those letters left at the crime scenes were too specific to have been written by Jeffrey before his death. So how do you explain that? How do you explain the letters?”

“I’m not sure exactly how you pulled it off,” Helen said. “But it’s easy to guess how you did it in general.”

“Oh? And how is that?”

“You’re a computer expert. North told me that last week, and so did my tech at headquarters. I mean, Christ, you made a modem-based computer program from scratch that sideswiped all of Bell-Atlantic’s trace processors. Someone with that kind of skill could probably also find a way to duplicate Dahmer’s handwriting on a computer and then generate exact letters on a high-tech printer.”

“Again,” Campbell admitted. “I’m impressed.” The lit monitors behind him glowed like eerie static. A variety of printers sat to their side. “My secret correspondence with Dahmer provided me with an infinite inventory of his handwriting. I used a grid scanner, scanned each and every word into my CPU. It wasn’t easy, and it proved very time-consuming—quite different from traditional flatbed scanning. But eventually I had thousands of words, all written by Dahmer, that I could rearrange to say what I wanted, and then print.”

“Tell me this, though,” Helen asked, as much to bide time as to satisfy her curiosity. “As far as I know, even the most sophisticated computer printers use dry ink cartridges. Even if you used a color printer, our forensics people would’ve known after a single test that the notes were computer generated. How did you manage to print the letters in Flair ink?”

Campbell’s mouth twitched into another smile, and patted one of the printers, a large, clumsy looking one, plaqued with the name TEKMARK. “The very first printers capable of graphical output weren’t laser printers at all. It was a combination of printing technologies that were eventually developed in the systems of today—thermal firing heads and bubble-jet ink transference. They existed in the 70s, before personal computers even existed, and they were very expensive. But instead of dry ink, they used liquid ink that was sublimated before being transferred to the firing heads. I prepared a wash solution, using blue Flair pen filaments, and that’s what I use to fill the printer drum when I print out a letter from ‘Jeff.’“

Helen couldn’t help but acknowledge the man’s technological prowess. His plan was brilliant, and it had succeeded every step of the way. Realizing that, however, wouldn’t solve her more immediate problems, like trying to find a way to escape.

She thought again, If I could only move. But, hard as she tried, her hands only rose, perhaps, to the level of her bosom. And her legs? Her legs still felt as dead as logs.

She needed more time.

“You’re an industrious man,” she commented, “and a very smart one.”

Campbell winced, stiffening in his seat. “Don’t patronize me, goddamn it!”

“I’m not. How can I be patronizing you? Your plan worked right down to the last letter. You fooled my entire technical services division—my fingerprint experts, my programming specialists, all my hand-writing analysts and voiceprint technicians. You have an entire city—or I should say, an entire country—believing that Jeffrey Dahmer is still alive and maintaining his murder spree. And, to top it all off, you’ve got me. Your nemesis, your opponent. For the last month, I’ve devoted my entire life to finding you. And what do I get for my efforts? The rare opportunity to sit half-paralyzed in a chair and look a mass-murderer in the eye. We battled. You won. I lost.”

Campbell lost the rigid poise, relaxing. “Yes. Yes, I suppose you’re right. And it’s complimentary for you to admit that.”

“You’re going to kill me, right?”

“Of course,” he replied without pause. “I have to. I have no choice. But even if I did, I’d still do it. Because, as you’ve just pointed out, I am a mass-murderer.”

How true.

“Excuse me,” Campbell politely stated. “In all this frenzy, I’ve worked up an appetite.”

He disappeared behind her, and she could hear him opening the refrigerator. She kept her eyes well out of range of Dahmer’s partially rotten corpse, took several deep breaths, shut her eyes, and pushed. Not her body but her brain. She pushed every dram of energy and volition against the fading paralysis…and raised her arms.

“Would you like some?” Campbell offered when he returned. He reseated himself by his computers, holding a sandwich.

“I…think…I’ll pass.”

Campbell took a bite, munching. “But it’s all relative, isn’t it? Meat is meat. British expeditions to New Guinea over a hundred years ago reported that human flesh, when cooked properly, tasted nearly identical to pork. They called it ‘long-pig,’ in fact, for that same reason. Really, Captain. You mustn’t be so close-minded.” He mockingly held the sandwich out. “Sure you won’t join me?”

“No,” she said. “Thank you.”

“And what is that you’re doing now? What’s that around your neck that you’re rubbing? A pendant?”

“It’s a silver locket.” Helen, in Campbell’s absence, had raised her hands to the locket. It was the most she could manage. “Some people bite their nails? I have this bad habit of rubbing my locket when I get nervous, and I guess I have pretty good reason to be nervous now, don’t I?”

Campbell blurted a laugh. “I should say so! Did Tom give it to you?”

“No. My father.” She couldn’t help the reaction: her fingers rubbed the locket so hard she thought she might wear off the finish. But still, she needed more time to let the antidote work its way through her system.

“Do you…hate me?” she asked.

“Oh, no,” Campbell answered. “You’re nothing like the others at all. I actually admire you. I admire your character. I admire your ability to accept defeat.” Campbell took another bite of the abyssal sandwich. “And I promise you, Captain Closs, I won’t make a spectacle of you, nor will I torture you. I will be merciful…and quick.”

“‘Blessed are the merciful,’“ she quoted scripture, “‘for the merciful shall be shown mercy.’“

“Amusing, but I’m afraid I was never quite the Bible scholar Jeffrey became. I loved him, yes, but in spite of my love, I could never bring myself to believe in a god such as yours.”

Kill time! Now her legs were regaining some feeling. Keep him talking! “But how can you love someone you’ve never met?”

“That’s what you don’t understand,” Campbell offered next. “Jeffrey and I did meet. I’ve known him since the first grade. We grew up in the same town—”

“Bath, Ohio,” Helen remembered.

“And I suppose I’ve loved him ever since. I remember when his father gave him the chemistry set—my father gave me one too, when I told him about it—and Jeffrey and I learned how to make our own corrosives. It was Jeffrey’s idea. All the little animals. Jeffrey loved them—so much in fact that that’s what impelled him. He killed them, of course, but he didn’t want to lose them. So we’d bury the bones in his backyard. Eventually I was the one who began to get the animals for him. Then…” Campbell seemed to sift into a daze. “Time went on. We got older, and my love for him grew stronger, but Jeffrey didn’t have the same kind of conception of love, I guess. I wanted to be part of his life, I wanted us to kill together, but he never understood that. Eventually his home life became so nebulous that he joined the Army; I tried to join right along with him, but the recruiters rejected me after the first battery of psychological tests. And since I was never officially recruited, my induction fingerprints were never taken.”

Now Helen began to see the pieces fit. They were starting to form into the intricate human jigsaw that made this man named Campbell.

“So where does Tom fit into all of this?” she asked, and took another glance at his bound form in the other chair.

“How does he fit in?” Campbell replied. “By default, I’m afraid. I’m an opportunist, Captain. When I found out you were involved with him, I used that to my advantage, because I also new, through acquaintances in the life, that Tom was quite bisexual, which I guess you weren’t aware of until recently.”

“No,” Helen admitted. “I wasn’t.”

“I knew you were close, but I couldn’t let you get too close. I needed to throw you off track a little, and Tom was the perfect scapegoat. Bisexual, a high-ranking hospital staffer as well as a pathologist. And with access to and knowledge of succinicholine. You fell for that too, didn’t you?”

“Hook, line, and sinker,” Helen admitted.

“And as I’ve already said, I was the one who made the call to North’s new escort service, told them to send North to Tom’s address, knowing you’d find out via your surveillance, and then planting the succinicholine in his floppy disk files. Later tonight, I abducted him at the hospital when he was coming on duty, drove his car to North’s apartment, killed North, and then it was all set. Getting into your own apartment was doubly easy because Tom still had your keys.”

More pieces, then, fitting together exactly. But… How much time? Helen wondered in the most suppressed anguish. Her fingers nervously rubbed the locket. How much more time to I have?

Then she remembered more of what Sallee had told her. Campbell’s obsessive-reference disorder, and his X,Y,Y-Syndrome traits. Subjects are frequently male, and sexually abused by their father, or father figures… There was no evidence that Dahmer had ever been abused by his father, nothing incriminating about Dahmer’s father at all. But what about Campbell’s father?

“Tell me about your father,” she dared to ask.

Campbell stared at her, then, for so long she thought she’d lapsed into a dream. She could use a dream right now, couldn’t she? A nice dream, of pretty places and good people. A dream of a world where there were no killers…

Campbell’s voice sounded corroded now—rock sluiced by acid. “My father,” he said and paused again. “I—I suppose I owe it all to him.”

“In what way?”

“My father taught me, through his own methods, what life is really all about. He used to tell me that we all have to make our little marks on the world, and if we don’t, there’s no point to our lives. He’d tell me this almost every day.”

“Yes?” Helen goaded him.

“Yes,” Campbell answered. “Every day before he raped me.”

Helen gazed at him, tried to wonder what his life was like. But that was no real excuse. Abuse only sired more abuse—but that was no consolation to the victims. She felt sorry for him in the plight of what him must have experienced. But—

She still hated him, still wanted to kill him.

“It’s all about power,” Campbell explained. “Some people are users, some people are the used. Kussler loved me, and I used that to exploit him, to keep me in touch with Dahmer through his job at the prison. Kussler was weak; to maintain my power over him, I’d break up with him every few months, to keep him in a state of longing, and then I’d take him back.”

Just as so many battered wives return to abusive husbands, Helen thought. North had made the same point the first time she’d talked to him.

“I knew Kussler—he was a common mind. A patsy. Just like you.”

Helen closed her eyes.

“It’s all about power,” Campbell repeated, “and what greater power can there be than this? When the hunted destroys the hunter?”

Campbell’s silhouette stood up, took something unseen off the work desk. He appeared as a messiah just then, a knowing figure with hands outstretched in wisdom and truth—

Except in one hand he held a knife.

And next, he said, “Thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven. Yet thou shalt be brought down into hell, deep into the pit.”

Helen prayed to a god she didn’t even think she believed in.

“I won’t break my promise,” Campbell said. “I will be merciful and quick.”

Helen thought, I’m going to die now, but then she opened her eyes. And she saw—

She saw something—

—something she’d been waiting for.

“Let me say one last thing,” she bid. “You’re very smart, the letters, the phone calls and fingerprints, and especially the way you anticipated my surveillance of North.”

“You’ve already told me that. Please don’t beg for your life. It will soil my opinion of you.”

“But what you’re not considering is the fact that I anticipated something too.”

Campbell paused. The knife glinted. “What?”

“The state psychiatrist told me that serial-killers crave power rooted in fear, and the greatest display of that power eventually arrives when the killer seeks to kill those who’re after him, like what you just said: the hunter destroyed by the hunted. So it was logical for me to assume that you might try this.”

Campbell squinted at her.

“So I took a precaution,” she continued. “And when you were getting your…sandwich…I regained enough use of my arms to activate that precaution.”

Campbell peered. “What?”

Helen opened the locket on her chest. The picture of her father was long gone; instead it was replaced by something else.

A nickel shaped metal disk, with a gridded button on it.

“This is a direction-finding transponder,” she told him, “identical to the one I used on North’s car. Except this one has a distress frequency which relays back to state police headquarters. I was able to activate the distress switch when you went to the kitchen.”

“You’re…lying,” he murmured.

“Right now there are probably fifty tactical police officers surrounding this house,” Helen said.

 

— | — | —