by Edward Lee
She knew he was right, but it still ticked her off. All right, I’ll work on it…
“Uh-oh,” Tom said. “Look, she’s rubbing her locket. That means we’ve pissed her off.”
Helen hadn’t even been aware of it, but now that he’d mentioned this, she couldn’t help but notice how desperately she’d been rubbing her father’s large, silver locket. She dropped it and smiled coyly. “Fuck you very much,” she said.
“That’s the spirit!”
Helen shrugged it off. At least she was making some headway with her problems. “Come on, Jan. Let’s go gawk at Jeffrey Dahmer’s body. And you can tell Mack the Knife there he can have me arrested for morbid malfeasance.”
««—»»
“Oh my God, this is disgusting!” Helen exclaimed.
“No, no,” Jan Beck whispered in something very much like awe. “It’s fascinating.”
Yet another state goon had ID’d them both at the entrance of ANTEROOM #4. DO NOT ENTER. AUTOPSY IN PROGRESS. Of course nothing, right this instant, was in progress save for Helen’s abhorrence. The body lay there so candidly it seemed surreal, like one of Tom’s CD-ROM games—a spooky veil like tulle which somehow enhanced details instead of detracting from them. The body was not covered, and it lay on a stainless steel morgue platform which came equipped with a removable drain-trap, gutters for “organic effluence,” and a motorized height adjustment. The corpse’s image was blatant, like a surprise shout in the dark.
Fluorescent lights hummed over their heads.
“Christ Almighty,” Helen uttered, at once fingering her locket again. “Look at his face.”
There really was no face, not even a facsimile of anything that could be called a human face. It looked more like a blue-black poultice, covered by a crust of red-black blood. The corpse lay stretched out straight, in stained, nearly tourmaline-green prison coveralls, pocketless via typical county prison inmate regulations. A white patch over the right breast read 177252, the county corrections index. Over the left breast read simply this:
DAHMER, J.
Helen felt something crawl up her skin when she read the nefarious name, something she could only describe as a hot chill.
“I wonder what the official C.O.D. was,” Beck queried.
“Probably not a heart attack,” Helen offered.
Beck’s tongue curiously traced her lower lip as she studied the corpse’s face. “Repeated blunt trauma,” she estimated. “But, Christ, it said on the radio he was beaten with a broom handle. I’ve seen enough head traumas to tell you, this was no broom handle.”
“And, Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy,” a voice drifted up behind them. It was Tom, wielding, as usual, his off-key sense of humor. Off-key because this was a morgue. “Multiple cou-counter-cou strike impacts, to respond to your insightful observation. Evidence is plain due to the extent of irregular pupillary dilation. Two blunt trauma impactations against the cranial occipital bone and the inion process. Multiple fractures and abundant spalling of inner calculi also in acute evidence. How’s that for fancy talk?”
Beck frowned. “The occipital bone is in the back,” she pointed out. “And it would take a man of some strength to crack the inion process with a broom stick.”
“Then you need to see the assailant,” Tom replied. “A genteel young man by the name of Tredell Rosser. He’s six-three, probably two-percent body fat and weighs in at two-twenty-five. Prison beefcake. This guy’s been lifting weights six days a week for the last four years. He makes Hulk Hogan look like Richard Simmons.”
“But the procumbent skull process?” Beck continued. “That mess wasn’t caused by any broom stick.”
“In my professional estimation, which of course is lauded as undisputable medical fact throughout the world’s community of pathology, the rest of the job was caused by a cinderblock wall.” Tom traipsed forward, snapping on pre-doubled pairs of Becton-Dickinson neoprene examination gloves. “And a concrete floor.”
Then Helen remembered more bits from the incessant radio coverage. Considerable amounts of blood reportedly were found on the floor and wall where Dahmer’s body was discovered. “Rosser took Dahmer down with the broom handle,” Helen ventured. “Then finished the job by—”
“By ramming his big mug into the wall and floor, with all his God-given might. Keep in mind, Rosser routinely bench presses three hundred and fifty pounds. And the rec superintendent at the prison claims that the guy is no longer allowed to practice on the heavy bag because he frequently breaks it open.”
“He just grabbed Dahmer’s ears and went to town,” Beck morbidly added.
“But we mustn’t misjudge,” Tom said. “Maybe he was just trying to knock a little sense into Jeff.” Then Beck: “Or maybe he was actually using Dahmer’s head to try and break out of prison.” He and Beck cackled, then, like witches.
Helen felt waylaid. “There’s a dead body in the room,” she complained. “How can you tell jokes in front of a corpse?”
“Because they don’t groan when you tell a clunker. Sorry, Jeff,” Tom apologized. “We get a little carried away here sometimes.”
“But, honestly,” Beck added to the fest, “we’re really very nice people once you get to know us.”
You’re both whacks, Helen thought. Only then did she turn to fully view Tom, in his “butcher’s blues,” as those in his field called them. He wore the morgue’s ghastly fluorescent light like a pallor; he could’ve passed for a corpse himself, here in such company. But his sense of humor, she realized, came as necessity. Jovial in a locker full of death, day after day. Sure, Helen knew the routine—her own job wasn’t dissimilar, only in that she got to see the corpses before he did, and she didn’t have to autopsy them. But she had to wonder, now in this strangest of rooms, amid the cloying fetor of formalin and cold blood: How does he keep it together? Here was a man who cut up dead people for a living, who autopsied children and weighed wet, extricated livers the way women weighed potatoes in the grocery store. He’s seen more guts than a fish market dumpster, Helen thought. How can he stand doing this every day?
The answer, of course, was reflective. He did it the same way Helen did her own job every day. He did it simply because it was his occupational responsibility. And by now, she suspected, looking at human innards was no more repulsive to him than the mechanic at the Exxon when he looked into an open hood.
Ranks of storage shelves behind him sat heavy with big smoke-colored glass bottles: JORE’S, ZENKER’S SOLUTION, PHENOL, FORMALIN 20-PERCENT. A tin tray marked AMYLOID/FAT NECROSIS PREP held several bottles of iodine and copper sulphate. A large sink and heat-sealing iron hung on the same wall.
“It’s an incredible head trauma,” Beck went on, refocusing back to the business at hand.
Tom added: “I’ve seen a lot of them, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything this bad. Not from blunt trauma, probably not even from a car wreck.”
Helen, to herself, agreed; she’d seen her share herself. But, of course, she saw corpus delectus much differently from a medical examiner or a forensic tech. Helen didn’t need to look close—that was Beck’s job. Helen realized she’d probably never seen a dead human body in such stunning detail.
But key words replayed, something snagging in her subconscious. They’re right, she realized. This is an extraordinary head trauma. The damage is so severe that—
“Wait a minute,” she said. “The investigator in me can’t resist this question. The face is unrecognizable.”
“Indeed,” Tom quipped.
“So how do you really know this is Dahmer?”
“Many reasons, my dear. For one, that’s his name and ident number on his coveralls.”
“Big deal,” Helen countered. “It wouldn’t be hard to put Dahmer’s clothes on someone else’s body.”
“No, but it would be a tad more difficult to put Dahmer’s teeth in someone’s else’s mouth, wouldn’t it?” Tom, then, held up an evidence bag full of teeth. The bag rattled like a baby toy. �
��The cavity and filling schemes on these teeth matched Dahmer’s prison dental records.”
“But the teeth were broken out of his mouth during the beating,” Helen argued. “It’s not inconceivable that a third party could’ve put Dahmer’s teeth in the mouth of another corpse.”
“After breaking the teeth out of that other corpse before transport,” Beck suggested. “And beating him to death similarly.”
“Sure,” Helen replied. “Why not?”
Tom laughed. “Women are so suspicious!”
“Hey, I’m paid to be suspicious,” Helen said. “I’m a state homicide investigator.”
“Have no fear, ladies. The body before you was also positively ID’d as Jeffrey Dahmer, not once, not twice, but three times, by his fingerprints. We’re pretty thorough around here.”
“Oh, well,” Beck chuckled. “It was fun while it lasted.”
“The state regs border on ridiculous, Helen,” Tom offered next, lining scalpels neatly on a shiny tray. “I even had to do a sex-chromatin test on this bastard—”
“You’re kidding?” Beck cut in.
“I wish I was kidding, and after having had the rather immodest opportunity of seeing Mr. Dahmer’s penis with my own eyes, I think I can safely say that the decedent is of the male gender. Or perhaps Helen suspects that a third party attached Dahmer’s penis to someone else’s body.”
Helen made a face like someone sucking a lemon wedge. “Jesus, Tom, you’re so gross.”
“Hey, I’m paid to be gross,” he cited. “I’m a medical examiner.” Whereupon both Beck and Tom laughed out loud.
Helen was appalled. Morgue humor was not something she was cut out for. But more questions itched at her. “One thing I don’t get. Why was he even brought here? How come the state’s doing the autopsy? Dahmer died in Columbus County, so shouldn’t the Columbus County M.E. be doing it?”
“More regs, hon.” Tom flicked on the overhead spots. “Our revered Wisconsin State Annotated Code cites, and I quote, ‘Any decedent currently in the correctional custody off any county of the Commonwealth of Wisconsin who may be deemed a public figure, notorious, or whose identity may be offensive to the public sensibility, shall become the immediate custody of the Office of the Wisconsin State Medical Examiner.’“
It didn’t make sense to Helen. “Why?”
“To avoid a botched post-mortem,” Beck answered.
Helen frowned. I was asking him, not you.
“The state doesn’t trust its own counties,” Tom elaborated, “and with fairly good reason. There’s less security at the county facilities, and there’s no expertise. Columbus is a perfect example. It’s the boondocks, and Portage is a boondocks town that just happens to have a county prison sitting in the middle of it. The Columbus County Coroner is also the county clerk, the recorder of deeds, the justice of the peace, assistant to the county executive, and he owns a used car dealership to boot. His name might as well be Uncle Jed, and the state doesn’t want Uncle Jed doing the post work on a ‘notorious figure.’ Christ, those hayseeds’d be selling Dahmer’s shoes, his hair and his clothes. They’d be snapping pictures of the corpse and selling them to the tabloids… By the way, where’s my camera?”
More levity, more jokes. It was getting on Helen’s nerves. Now that the examination lights were on, the morgue platform offered every detail of its occupant. Helen averted her eyes. “Who pronounced him dead, by the way?”
“About half the people in the U.S. Midwest. I was last, as a matter of fact, felt like I was standing in line with a ticket at Baskin-Robbins. First person to pronounce this sucker was the prison duty physician. Then the transport captain who took him to South Columbus General. Then the ER chief pronounced him dead as well as the hospital director. Then they transport the body here, and the whole thing happens again. Everybody wants to be able to say that they pronounced Jeffrey Dahmer dead, like they’re gonna get some prize or something. Me? All I get to do is cut the sucker up.”
“I heard MIT wants his brain,” Beck said, “for some cross-referenced histological study of sociopaths.”
“Oh, yeah?” Tom repeated his well-honed chuckle and then, at the pinnacle of bad taste, actually placed his hand on Dahmer’s forehead. “I guarantee you, there isn’t much of a brain left in this noggin. After a blunt trauma job like that?” Tom winked at Helen, cut a sly grin. “When I open this can, honey, there ain’t gonna be nothin’ inside except cranberry sauce.”
That was it for Helen. “Pardon me, folks, but I have to go throw up now. See you later.”
Tom was hooting it up. “Jan, go see if the turkey’s done, will you please? I love turkey with cranberry sauce.”
At once, all the blood in Helen’s face seemed to drain as she stumbled toward the exit.
“Don’t leave yet, honey! You’ll miss the fun. Wait!”
Helen, against all better judgment, turned to take a final glance over her shoulder.
Tom was holding a Stryker orbital saw in one hand, patting Dahmer’s head with the other. He revved the saw several times, begetting a sound like a monstrous dentist’s drill. “Headcheese for dinner tonight?”
Helen stumbled out, nearly fainting.
— | — | —
CHAPTER THREE
“This is EMT 1-5-4, transit orders logged and copied. We are 10-6 to posted call.”
“Roger, 1-5-4.”
Goodwin hung up the mike, readdressed the wheel. Cooper rode in the passenger seat, fingering the county map. “Shit, man,” he said. “We’re headed into No-Man’s Land. This whole call smells like a jacking.”
Goodwin tried to allay his partner, as the ambulance’s red-and-whites popped down the street ahead of them. “You heard the watch commander’s spiel. ‘Be wary of 911 calls with little or no detail or substance.’ I listened to the tape myself, Coop, right after we left the lounge. It was some male cauc. claiming his father suffered from WPW Syndrome, and he ran out of Quinidex Extentabs, 300 mgs. The guy knew what he was talking about. You think some ghetto dope jacker is gonna have the know-how to make up a call with that much clinical detail? Christ, something like only one person out of every half a million have WPW Syndrome.”
Cooper rubbed an eye; he was tired. “Can’t argue with ya there. Guess you called this one right. Yeah, sure, I can see it. Some ambulance jacker studying the PDR to research phony distress calls about fuckin’ WPW Syndrome.”
Pipe down, Goodwin thought. He turned left onto Utah Street. Sure, this was Precinct Five, a tough block, and God knew enough EMT trucks had been ambushed for pharmaceutical dope on phony 911 calls. Christ, you’d think these guys would wise up after so long, Goodwin thought. Ambulance jacking was getting to be old hat these days. All CDS was kept in safes; some of the crews were even packing guns without a license. “You could go to jail for that,” Goodwin had suggested to some guy in P6 who liked to keep a Colt .32 in his pocket. “Yeah,” the guy’d said back. “But I’d rather be judged by twelve than carried by six.” Goodwin figured the guy had a point.
“1500-Block, right?” Cooper repeated the call data.
“Yeah.”
“Well…we’re here.”
Goodwin idled the Ford F-150 Custom down the block, the GT Qualifier Dunlop radials crunching over broken glass. The red and whites continued to pop silently against old brick and dark windows. Boarded up rowhouses stared at them; Goodwin felt watched.
“I don’t see any—”
“That row there,” Cooper pointed. “The only one with the lights on.”
“Yeah. Come on.”
Goodwin took the keys with him; even though this looked perfectly legit, he wasn’t stupid. He’d been stupid once, in Falks County, and look what happened. I almost did time, he remembered. They got out, trotted up to the row, and knocked.
They knocked again.
“This has to be it,” Cooper commented. “Every other unit on the street is boarded up.”
Goodwin peered in the window, paused. “Jesus Christ,
so is this one. Look.”
Pried off planks lay at the window footing. Inside, a single lit lamp sat on the floor—a battery-powered lamp. The rest of the interior lay in shambles.
“Somebody put that lamp in there to draw us off,” Cooper said.
But Goodwin already smelled the rat. “We been set up. Get ready to run.”
They edged back to the truck, their eyes peeled for anything, a shadow, a face, the tracest movement. But—
Nothing.
“Looks like we’re all right.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They got back in, slammed the doors shut and locked them. But just before Goodwin would restart County Unit EMT 154, Cooper jerked back, shot a glance behind him.
“Hey, you mother—”
That was all Cooper got out of him mouth before—
pop!
It was the oddest sound, not even as loud as someone popping a plastic baggie. Nevertheless, Coop fell back into the footwell, his feet flying upward as a thin stream of blood sailed across Goodwin’s shocked face. A gurgling followed—Goodwin had heard it many times—a sucking chest wound, Coop’s lungs bubbling foamy blood through the hole. Then, again—
pop!
The gurgling abated. So did EMT Cooper’s death throes.
The whole scene seemed like a freeze-frame. It was over in less than the second it took to occur. Only then did Goodwin turn.
“God…damn…”
The figure in the back cabin stood perfectly still. A leather jacket, a dark-blue ski mask. White rimmed eyes seemed calm as they gazed.
The figure held a long low-caliber semi-automatic pistol in his left hand. Affixed to the barrel’s tip was, of all things, an empty twenty-ounce soda bottle full of gray smoke.