by Edward Lee
“Now I get your point,” Helen admitted. It was something she hadn’t even considered.
“So that’s why Dipetro was smart to bar Dahmer from ingoing and outgoing mail. The whole thing’s just a bad move that makes everybody look bad. This center’s received literally tens of thousands of letters addressed to Dahmer. He was never allowed to see a single one.”
Helen agreed with the notion, but it was her bad luck, too. “That pops my balloon real fast,” she said, eyeing Edwards’ pack of Marlboro Box.
“Would you like one?” he offered.
“I’d love one but I can’t. I quit a year ago.”
“Good for you. And what do you mean it popped your balloon?”
“I’m sure you read about the ‘Dahmer’ letter found on P Street the other night.”
“Sure. And I think I just read today that handwriting experts verified it as Dahmer’s writing.”
“That’s right. But I don’t believe for a minute that Dahmer committed the murder. It’s a copycat, and the letter was written well before the murder.”
“Ah, I see,” Edwards said. “And you want to know how Dahmer’s handwriting got out of the prison. Well, I can tell you, we’ve already been all over that.”
“Enlighten me.”
“It had to have been written before he came here, either before he was caught, or during the short time he was in Milwaukee County pending trial.”
Helen had already tried to give that speculation some credence. “I don’t think so. The nature of the letter was religious.”
“But Dahmer had some minor religious fixations before he was even caught.”
“Right,” Helen agreed. “And the major biblical quote in the P Street letter was something Milwaukee PD overheard him say on the day he was arrested. All that was in the papers, sure. But whoever leaked the contents of the letter to the press didn’t quote it entirely. The letter also made a brief reference to Dahmer’s ‘baptism.’“
“Holy shit!” Edward exclaimed. “You’re kidding me? Dahmer wasn’t baptized until last May.”
Helen rubbed her chin in disgruntlement. “Right, and that can only mean that the letter was written sometime after last May, and how can this be, since Dahmer hasn’t been allowed to send any letters since the day he got here?”
Edwards leaned back in his gray, upholstered chair. He eyed her with something akin to amused sorrow. “Looks like you’ve got a hell of a problem on your hands, Captain.”
Helen sighed. “Tell me about it.”
««—»»
James J. Dipetro ran the slam; he’d been the Director of the Columbus County Detention Center for ten years, and for ten years there hadn’t been so much as a single escape. An action guy who didn’t fool around. They sent him in here to do a job, and now that he’d done it, he was up for a high-level post in the local government. Helen could imagine his outrage at the multitude of accusations suddenly leveled against himself and his facility. Right now this guy’s got about as much chance of making Director of Public Safety, Helen thought, as I’ve got of making the Olympic Figure Skating Team.
“You want what?” Dipetro asked. Hyper-tensive, Type-A all the way. A big beefy man with a trimmed beard and light-brown hair thinned by worry and stress. And a derisive glare sharp as an icepick.
“Access to your maintenance logs and personnel rosters,” Helen repeated. She’d gotten nowhere in the Records and Admin offices. “I want to cross-reference them, see which employees had any kind of regular contact with Dahmer.”
“What the hell for?”
“To verify a conspiracy theory.”
“That’s all I need,” Dipetro griped. “As if the goddamn press isn’t bad enough telling everyone that Dahmer’s still alive. Now I got the state cops wanting to tell them it was one of my people who helped get him out.”
This guy was going to be a tough case. “That’s what I’m trying to disprove, Mr. Dipetro. I don’t believe that Dahmer’s alive anymore than you do. But this entire furor in the press revolves around the letter left at the crime scene. Your upper staff have assured me that Dahmer was barred from maintaining outside correspondence because of his federal status rating—”
“That’s right,” Dipetro hastened to agree. “That asshole hasn’t sent or received a single letter since the day we locked him down.”
“—therefore it must’ve been someone working inside the prison who was forwarding mail for him. This whole schmear in the papers revolves around the P Street letter; that’s how they’re able to maintain the assertion that Dahmer escaped. If I can prove that one of your employees was smuggling out correspondence for him, then the lid gets slammed shut on the press and you’re off the hot seat.”
“Oh, well—”
“And furthermore, if I’m lucky, it’ll probably lead me to the real killer, who’s probably some kind of psycho groupie, a guy who paid one of your employees to exchange correspondence under the table.”
Dipetro’s pit-bull demeanor changed quick when he realized that Helen was on his side. “Right. Great. So tell me exactly what you want.”
Helen gave him a card with the state police data-processing batch/search-code on it. “Tell the people in your records office to transfer all prison maintenance logs and duty rosters to my computer. Then I can run a cross-check.”
“You got it, but…” Dipetro grumbled through a pause. “I can tell you right now, all the DOs on transport and escort duty have a revolving schedule. Same in any prison, for obvious security reasons. And as for the rest, contractors and maintenance personnel are never allowed in the cells unless the inmate is on detail somewhere else in the center.”
Helen felt certain she was on the right track. “Fine, Mr. Dipetro. But let’s just do this my way, okay?”
“Sure, sure,” he mumbled and picked up the phone. “Right now I’d sell my soul to get these newspaper assholes off my back.”
««—»»
Two hours later, back in her own office, Helen had a name.
— | — | —
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Merrimac, just off Route 12. About halfway between Madison and the Correctional Center in Portage, and only a twenty-minute drive for Helen. A decent middle-class suburb, with blocks of apartment complexes on the outskirts. And the building in question, in some odd way, reminded Helen of Dahmer’s building on North 25th Street in Milwaukee.
“Mr. Kussler?”
A timid face showed in the door’s chained gap. “Uh, yes?”
Helen held her ID up. “Helen Closs, State Police. May I have a word with you, please?”
Back at HQ, even Helen’s marginal data-processing skills had gotten her what she wanted. It had only actually taken a few minutes for Dipetro’s Records technicians to copy the logs and rosters to the State Police Macro Analysis Computer. From there, Helen had input a simple search and retrieve command identifying Dahmer, Jeffrey as the proximity subject. There had to be a human common denominator in there somewhere, some person during the course of prison duties who came in regular contact with Dahmer or Dahmer’s cell. Helen would’ve guessed it was a detention officer, but she was wrong. What the computer handed her instead was this:
M:/>RETRIEVE/COMMAND FILE RELAY FROM WSP MAC FILE AUX:
KUSSLER, GLEN, A.
DOB: 30 JULY 60
FILE ADDRESS: 2900 SHIPMASTER, UNIT 4, MERRIMAC, WI
OCC STAT: PHYSICAL PLANT DEPARTMENT, COLUMBUS COUNTY DETENTION CENTER.
OCC SPEC: ELECTRICIAN
EVAL RATING: GOOD STANDING
Helen didn’t need to print out the whole file; this was all she wanted. A quick call to Portage informed her that Mr. Glen A. Kussler, a civilian employee, was off today.
So she went to his home.
“What, what’s this all about?” Kussler let her into the apartment. Nice place for low rent, clean and well decorated, with plush carpet on the floor and stark art-decoish furniture. The place even smelled nice—Carpet deodorizer, Helen guessed. Lik
e the brand she used.
“I need to ask you about your service log at the prison,” she said.
He looked dismayed in response. Glen Kussler brought a meek if not insecure air with him: thin, gangly, over-reactive gray eyes and a twitching mouth. Thinning hair the color of mature straw sat very fine on his head. He wore heather-blue running sweats but obviously hadn’t been running.
“My service log?” he questioned.
“That’s right, Mr. Kussler.” Why waste time? She laid it on the line. “I need to know why you ‘serviced’ Cell 648 roughly twice a month for the last year and a half.”
Kussler peered at her. “648? Six Block. Isn’t that—”
“Jeffrey Dahmer’s cell,” she told him. “According to your service orders filed with the Physical Plant supervisor, you worked on Dahmer’s cell nearly twice a month since shortly after his incarceration. The average repair or service call per cell is only once every three or four months. Why did you need to service Cell 648 so many more times than normal servicing?”
“To change the running bulb. Each cell is equipped with what we call a running bulb that’s controlled by the central block command console. It’s turned on in the morning at 6:30 and turned off every night at ten. By the DO. The inmates themselves have no control over it.”
“You’re telling me that you changed a light bulb in Dahmer’s cell twice a month but only changed them in the other cells every three or four months?”
“Yes, Miss Gloss. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“It’s Closs, not Gloss.” Helen felt slightly taken aback by a sudden inkling of arrogance in Kussler’s tone. “Why? For what reason would Cell 648 be that unique? Why would Dahmer’s running bulb burn out so many more times faster than the running bulbs in a typical cell?”
She watched the man’s face closely, for a giveaway tic, a wavering of eye movement, any gesture of negative-impulse response. Sallee had taught her this and it worked.
But not today.
“Did you check the circuit blueprints?”
“Well, no,” Helen admitted.
“You should have, then you’d know the answer to your own question, Miss—”
“Closs. Captain Helen Closs,” she repeated.
Kussler’s eyes drifted up. “Oh, yes. I read your name in the newspaper today, didn’t I?”
He probably had. She hadn’t even checked for herself yet, but she suspected the venerable Editor Tait had lambasted her after the graphology reports had come in. “Perhaps,” she ducked out of it. “But what’s that about blueprints?”
“The architectural schematics. You’re an investigator, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Then certainly, since your undue questions involve electrical maintenance at the center, you would’ve thought to investigate the prison’s blueprints with regard electrical layout.”
This guy turned into an prick real fast, Helen thoughts snapped. He was, very indirectly, putting her down and doing a solid job. It was obvious. “To tell you the truth, Mr. Kussler, I didn’t think to do that at all because I can surmise no reason.”
“Ah, well. Surmise this then, Miss Gloss—”
You dick, Helen thought.
“It should come as no surprise, even to a novice, that the longevity of, say, lightbulbs are dependent upon such things as resistance, ohms, and variables that exist between the industrial transfer of low- and high-tension current. If you’d made obvious inquiry, and first inspected the prison’s architectural blueprints, you would have easily noted that Cell 648 is the last cell on the east tier. You would have also noted that the prison was constructed to run by ten electrical phases and that the east tier runs precisely parallel to phase seven which happens to service the center’s administrative wings. An anomaly in construction, by happenstance, placed the last cell on the east tier—Cell 648—on the same domestic power line that runs the seventh electrical phase.”
“How could I have possibly known that, Mr Kussler?”
“Simple, Miss Gloss. By investigating. You are, as you’ve stated, an investigator.”
Helen found it difficult not to unload on his sarcasm. This guy’s worse than Tait at the Tribune, she thought.
“—and likewise,” Kussler continued, “you would then not find it necessary to harass county employees.”
“I apologize, Mr. Kussler,” Helen steeled herself to say. “You feel that I’m harassing you by asking a few questions?”
The lines around Kussler’s eyes slackened. “Perhaps harassment is too harsh a term. Indispose—is that a more accurate term? Or inconvenience?”
Helen took a breath, counted to ten very quickly. “I apologize for the inconvenience then, Mr. Kussler. But would you be so kind, in lieu of my obvious investigative ineptitude—”
—to tell me what the FUCK you’re talking about, you snide, pompous ass!—
“—to explain to me exactly what you mean?”
“I’d be delighted.” Kussler sat down on a stark polycarbonate-framed couch that Helen would sooner kill herself than have in her own apartment. “It’s like this. By an accident of construction, Cell 648 is the only cell in the prison that is fed by an electrical phase-line run outside of the cellblock phases. Phases One through Six serve those cellblocks. Phases Seven through Ten feed the rest of the prison, the administrative wings. Jeffrey Dahmer’s cell, in other words, though it should’ve been connected to Phase Six was actually connected to Phase Seven, and Phase Seven suffers an anomaly of its own. A dreadful incidence of high-tension power fluctuations.”
Helen opened her mouth to object, then closed it a moment. Father Alexander, the equally snide prison chaplain, had mentioned much of the same. A lot of power fluxes, she remembered.
“So,” Kussler continued, “that is the reason the running bulb burned out twice a month in Cell 648, where as the running bulbs in typical cells only burned out two or three times a year.”
“Then how come there aren’t an equally high number of service calls to the admin wing, Mr. Kussler?” Helen was happy with herself for thinking of.
“Because the running bulbs in the cells,” Kussler answered just as quickly, “are incandescent, while all the administrative fixtures are fluorescent tubes, which typically last twenty to thirty times longer.”
This guy is making a fool out of me, and there’s nothing I can do about it, Helen realized. But her questions, she had to admit, were satisfiably answered.
Helen rebuttoned her overcoat. “I guess that’s about it then. Thank you for your time, Mr.—” Helen’s worse judgment couldn’t resist—”Mr. Kuntler.”
Kussler’s face turned up, incised. “I’m sorry, but what was that?”
“I said thank you for your time, Mr. Kussler.”
Kussler nodded, eyes thinned. “That’s what I thought you said.”
Helen turned for the door. “And have a good day—”
—you DICK!
Helen went back out to her Taurus, but she scarcely had time to start the ignition before her pager went off.
The number on the tiny screen she knew at a glance.
It was Jan Beck. And the suffix after the number struck her with even more alarm:
URGENT.
««—»»
“That’s something though, ain’t it? I mean, Christ—Dahmer.”
“You can say that again. And did you read the Tribune? Some high-brass state cop walked in there yesterday and swore they had proof it was a hoax, guaranteed that the letter was phony. Then a couple hours later their crime-lab people are saying it’s Dahmer’s handwriting.”
Bar chatter. Barkeep and lone patron at the rail. The man, the only other customer in the place, sat at a back cocktail table, in the dark.
The man liked the dark.
Friends, the place was called. Low-key hangout. Just a clean, simple bar, not an action joint like the places on the other side of the block where you could pick up some trade in less time than it took to order a beer. H
e sipped a bottle of Holsten and listened to the two up front continue their dull banter.
If they only knew…
He looked at them from his place. They were nearly stereotypes: the rail guy in tight jeans, a candyass black leather jacket, short dark hair and mustache. The keep was fat and meek, wire-rim circular spectacles and a short blond ponytail.
“Lemme have a Windex,” the rail guy asked.
“Windex, sure. A little of the old Blue C., a little of the old Stoli, and—damn, where’s that sour mix?” The keep stooped, hunting in the small reach-ins behind the bar. “Come on, sour mix, where are ya? I know you’re hiding in here somewhere—”
The man’s eyes went out of focus, wide and blank like diminutive moons in the barlight—
—and the words turned echoic, sounds struggling under water—
—the words—
—digging deep, deep, deeper until he was drowning in them—
««—»»
“I know you’re hiding in here somewhere.”
He’s back, he’s home, thinks the boy from Bath, Ohio. He thinks this in a way that’s terrifying yet somehow complacent.
Because he’s used to it.
The closet, the kitchen cabinets, under the bed—it doesn’t matter. Dad thinks it’s a game. Once he even hid in the attic, during the summer. He’d passed out it was so hot up there. But when he’d wakened, he’d been in Dad’s bedr—
He stifled the thought, shut it right down.
Today he’s under the bed again, only this time the bed in the guest room. Maybe he won’t think to come in here, the boy prays…