by Edward Lee
But that was one thing about prayers. They were never answered.
Silence. Stillness. Shadows of legs lay long across the guest room carpet. And next—
The entire bed rises. His father glares down.
“There you are,” he says.
««—»»
“There you go,” the keep said, sliding the translucent-blue Windex shooter to his patron.
“Thanks,” said the rail guy.
The keep glanced across the dark room. “Hey, friend. You ready for another Holsten?”
“Yes. Please.”
What next? he thought.
The way he felt, so full and brimming—he knew he had to do something soon.
“There you go.” The keep put the beer down on the table. “Care for anything to eat? We’ve got a great special today. Chicken Tenders in Mustard Sorrel Sauce.”
“Hmm. That sounds wonderful.” The offer sounded tempting. A good sorrel sauce would make any meat come alive.
Any meat.
“Thanks,” the man said, “but to tell you the truth, I’m not that hungry now. I think maybe I’ll try to whip that up myself later, when I have more of an appetite.”
««—»»
“Take a look.”
Jan Beck handed Helen a short, tractor-fed sheet of multi-colored graphical printing paper. What was printed on it might as well have been Druidic glyphs.
3 - [-3 - (-succinate-2) - 4 -(chloro- N -(2-chloroethyl)- C5H11C12. -(4-sulph—HN2)-0
“What’s this?” Helen asked. “It looks like something kicked out by the SEM. Some drug?”
“It’s a mole-chain, a chemical designation,” Jan Beck replied. “The last leg of my tox screen of Arlinger. And, no, it’s not from an SEM. Christ, scanning-electron microscopes are thirty years old. The only people who use SEMs these days are flunky novelists who don’t do their research. We haven’t used ours in years. This is from an AFM—that’s Atomic Force Microscope. They’re state of the art and brand new.” Beck rested a hand on a respectably sized machine to her right, with a face plate that read: TopoMetrix. “It’s ten times faster and ten times smaller than an SEM.”
“And ten times more expensive, I suppose?”
“Well, no, actually it’s only about twice as expensive. You’re looking at about four hundred grand here. But if you want fast results, like we do, we pay.”
We? Helen wondered. Yeah, that’s right—the taxpayers. “So why did you page me? What’s this all about?”
“That mole chain came from the tox screen I was just telling you about,” Beck went on.
“A chemical analysis of Arlinger’s blood?”
Beck gave a nod. “It’s a paralytic agent by the trade name of succinicholine sulphate. This guy ingested a massive dose shortly before death.”
“You’re telling me that this stuff is what killed him?”
“No, no, when I say massive dose I don’t mean massive enough to kill him. Point-zero-three would be enough to kill, not much but from what I can tell, it was orally administered, probably put him under in about twenty minutes. My read tells me it was a dose of approximately 0.01 mgs per deciliter.”
A…paralytic agent? “In other words, Arlinger was paralyzed before he was murdered?”
“That’s a fact.”
Helen couldn’t help but acknowledge the impact of this. “But Dahmer did the same thing too, didn’t he? Back in 90?”
“Yes and no. He frequently drugged his victims, but not with anything like this.”
“Barbiturates,” Helen said, remembering.
“Right, street barbiturates to be exact. Quaaludes, Valium, and other benzodaizepam off-shoots. He bought them from pushers on the street, in the Milwaukee dope districts.”
The last thing Helen needed was another m.o. similarity, and with this, she didn’t see much of a difference. “Valium or Quaaludes or this stuff? What’s the difference?”
“That’s where you lucked out. The dissimilarity is just too apparent. Succinicholine sulphate isn’t something you buy from a pusher on the street; it has absolutely no use as a recreational narcotic.”
“Then—” Helen wondered. “Where did the P Street killer get this…succinicholine sulphate?”
“Only two places possible: a drug manufacturer or a—”
“A hospital?”
“Right,” Beck assented. “SS doesn’t produce any kind of a high, it merely paralyzes the skeletal musculature. And that would explain why Arlinger’s body showed no signs of struggle. He couldn’t struggle, not with a cardiovascular system full of this stuff. What it all boils down to, Captain, is that your man knocked his victim out, just like Dahmer did, but with the least likely and the least accessible substance. The only place you’ll find a lot of SS are in ambulances and ERs. They use the stuff for sudden seizure traumas.”
But Helen, based on what she’d just been told, was already contemplating the worst implication. “Paralyzes the skeletal musculature… You mean—”
“What I mean, Captain, is that Arlinger couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even flinch. But one thing he could do was feel. It’s the ultimate torture. Arlinger felt everything while the killer was cutting on him.”
Helen blanched.
Everything, she thought. Everything…
“And there was nothing he could do about it,” Beck finished, “except lie there and take it till he died.”
— | — | —
CHAPTER TWELVE
Olsher did a double-take passing her office, then, squinting, stuck his big head in. “Jesus, Helen, it’s going on midnight. I saw you in here this morning at—what?—eight?”
“Seven,” Helen corrected, glancing up from her desk. And I’m not even on the clock.
“You ought to go home, get some rest.”
“So should you,” she suggested. “You’ve been working just as long as I have.”
“Can’t sleep,” the deputy chief grumbled.
“Fifty cups of coffee a day, it’s no wonder.” She noticed a tabloid under his arm, The Star. GOVERNMENT ADMITS: DAHMER WAS PART ALIEN! Helen just shook her head.
“Hey, coffee’s the only thing that makes me happy. And how can I sleep when I gotta worry about what the press is going to say about us tomorrow? Tait really slapped it to you in the Tribune.”
“I heard. But I got more important things to worry about than the worst newspaper in the city.” Then she explained Jan Beck’s tox screen of the blood of Stewart K. Arlinger, and the dose of succinicholine sulphate.
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Olsher perked up. “Nothing like the run of the mill street tranks Dahmer used.”
“That’s not how the papers’ll see it,” Helen posited. “They’ll only see what they want to see. Even though this is a completely dissimilar drug, they’ll play it as another similarity simply because Arlinger was drugged before his murder. And that damn letter is still killing us.”
“So what are you working on now?”
“Trying to get a line on where this succinicholine came from. You can’t buy it on the street—it has no street value. According to Beck, the only places are emergency rooms and ambulances, and the manufacturer, of course, but that’s in Newark, New Jersey, and pharmaceutical manufacturers all have security like Fort Knox.”
“But still, it’s got to be some sort of theft.”
“Sure.”
Olsher, obviously weary but trying not to show it, leaned against the office doorway. “So where do you go from there?”
“All clinical pharmaceuticals have a federal control number, and whenever they’re stolen or found missing in inventory, it has to be reported to NCIC and also FDA. And the only way hospitals can make a report like that in the first place is through the state police MAC. So that’s what I’m doing now.” Helen’s hand bid her computer CRT. “Unfortunately, at this hour, only half the terminals are on line. It’ll take me some time, in other words.”
“Well, just make sure you don’t drop de
ad from sleep deprivation. If you start to burn out, go home. It can wait till tomorrow.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
Distant footsteps could be heard behind Olsher, from the hallway. The deputy chief took a quick glance, then whispered, “Looks like you got a visitor.”
“What?” A visitor? At this hour? “Who is it, Larrel? Is it Beck?” Helen liked Beck, even though it was hard. Beck didn’t resent Helen’s rank, she merely was suspicious of anyone with rank. Which was normal and very human. Helen had been the same way when she first joined. However—
“It’s Tom,” Olsher piped to her. “See ya later.”
The name jolted her.
Tom.
Oh, no. What am I going to— This was a surprise she didn’t need. There was no time to prepare, no time to think out what she wanted to say, no time—
“Hi, Helen.”
Speechless. Locked in mental rigor. What am I going to say to him? What should I do? Yet here he was, standing right in her office. She’d been thinking about him off and on for the last several days, knowing she would have to confront him eventually but— Burying my head in the sand, as usual, she admitted. She missed him, she wanted to talk to him and try to work things out, but how could she? After that phony story about the hospital annex, an annex that didn’t exist?
Helen felt stifled. “Hi.”
“So, how have you been?”
“All right. Well, busy I should say.”
“I guess so, with all this P Street stuff wreaking havoc in the papers. I’ve had five FOIA requests already, for ID verification on Dahmer’s body. Even got a double-check order from the people running the Bureau’s Optical Latent Mainframe. It’s crazy.”
“Yeah,” was all Helen could say. She tried not to look at him but had to. Dressed as usual, in decent gray slacks, a white Christian Dior shirt, and a labcoat. The image kicked her back to any similar night in he past: they’d both be getting off late, he’d come pick her up, and they’d go back to his place and fall asleep in each other’s arms. It was comforting, it was nice. But…
Not tonight, she guessed.
Eventually he broke, shifted his stance. “Well, I’m not any good with small talk and neither are you. I guess the real reason I came was to, you know, find out what’s going on…with us, I mean.”
“I—” She couldn’t take her eyes off him. “I don’t know.”
Tom shrugged, looked awkwardly around the office as he spoke. “You have this paranoid idea that I’m seeing some other woman, but I’m not. It’s your imagination.”
Helen bit back a more perfunctory response. First of all, she was sick of being called paranoid, even though she knew she was. And how could he even say such a thing straight to her face. “Tom, look, I called the hospital to see if the annex number was the same one on your pager. And you know what they told me? They told me that there is no annex at the hospital.”
Tom shrugged again. “Of course there isn’t an annex at the hospital. The annex isn’t on the hospital premise, it’s downtown on Bilker Street.”
Helen’s eyes widened.
“It’s a supply repository, Helen, a warehouse. The hospital rents space there for inventory storage. Every hospital in the county rents space there. That’s where we keep our overstock, and certain deliveries are taken there if there’s no room at St. John’s. And that’s also the reason there was a different prefix on my pager. I would’ve explained it all if you’d have given me the chance.”
Helen continued to sit there with her eyes propped open, as if glaring at her own haste and, yes, her own paranoia. Her fingernail ticked against the desk, right next to the phone book.
“Go ahead and check if you don’t believe me.”
She couldn’t do that—that would be too much. And, now, it was plain to see just by looking at him that he was telling the truth.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“And to get back to my point. I don’t think we should trash our whole relationship because of something like this.”
Helen nodded in embarrassed agreement. In no time, she was rubbing her locket.
“So why don’t we, like, get together sometime soon and talk about things. Not right now—I need a little space right now and I’m sure you do too. But soon. I mean, if you want to.”
“I do want to,” she peeped.
“Okay, then. We’ll get together soon, okay?”
“Yes.”
“Take care—” He smiled. “And quit rubbing that locket.”
She smiled back, flushed, and watched him leave, sat there and listened to his footsteps disappear down the vacant hall.
How many more ways can you be an asshole, Helen? she asked herself. How many more ways can you screw up?
She tried to resist the impulse but couldn’t quite do it, and this made her feel even worse. Even now, the number she’d seen on Tom’s pager reminded burned in her head—224-9855—and in her reverse directory, she looked it up.
No surprise, either. 224-9855, BILKER MEDICAL SUPPLY ANNEX, 959 Bilker Street, N.W.
He was telling the truth.
Yeah, screw up a little more why don’t you, Helen? Chase every man out of your life forever. Paranoid bitch.
She wanted to get up just then, run after him, apologize and plead with him. I love him, she realized. I’ve got to tell him.
At the same time, though, her printer began to percolate, paper feeding automatically as her search request was finally answered.
M:> MAC SEARCH SYSTEM REQUEST
FR: CLOSS, H. WSP VCU, CRED #/ID 455
DE: PROXIMAL THEFT REPORT/FED CONTROL #51995/ SUCCINICHOLINE /SCHILLER INC>/LOT #42239SV/EXP. 3-97/LICENSED UNDER U.S. PATENT #4,315,926
CASE NUMBER TH 1514 MADISON PD
M_INIT ALLOCATE SPEC MEMORY
STATE SIGNAL CODE 84CV/ COUNTY EMT VEHICLE #154 REPORTS THEFT OF CONTROLLED PHARMACEUTICALS ON 1500 BLOCK, UTAH STREET, MADISON.
Utah Street, Helen paused to muse. A ghetto block. It was more than that, though. The 1500 block, part of Madison’s Precinct Five, was the worse crime district in the city.
PARAMEDIC COOPER, C., REPORTED DEAD ON ARRIVAL TO ST. JOHN THE DIVINE’S HOSPITAL VIA MULTIPLE GUNSHOT WOUNDS TO THE ABDOMEN AFTER LONE ARMED ATTACKER ENTERED VEHICLE #154. DRIVER GOODWIN, D., SUFFERED HAIRLINE CRANIAL FRACTURE AND CONCUSSION AND NOW LISTED ON COMP LEAVE IN GOOD CONDITION. PHARMACEUTICAL VAULT REPORTED RANSACKED.
M:>FIND [……………GO TO NEXT]
AMONG FDA CONTROL SUBSTANCES REPORTED STOLEN:
SEARCH OBJECT:
CARTON, ONE, TWELVE (12) .4 MG INTRAMUSCULAR VIALS OF PARALYTIC AGENT SUCCINICHOLINE SULPHATE (SOLUTION) [SEE LOT # ABOVE FOR MNFR REC.]
END OF SEARCH SYSTEM REQUEST
How do you like that? Helen thought, creaking back in her chair. An ambulance jacking. It happened all the time these days. Drug addicts would frequently make phony 911 calls to some remote, dark alley, overpower the paramedics, and steal any drugs that the vehicle might be carrying.
And this perp stole a carton of succinicholine sulphate?
An interesting find but it was useless to her without the date. Quickly she punched in the cited Madison PD case number, waited, stared at the screen at moment later.
FIND: MADISON PD CASE # TH 1514, PREC 5
CITED: SIGNAL 84CV/THEFT OF PROPERTY FROM REGISTERED COUNTY EMERGENCY VEHICLE
The date blinked back at her.
2304 HRS/11-29-94
“November 29th,” she whispered to herself.
Just one night after Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered.
— | — | —
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Circles.
Squares.
Triangles.
Planes.
Me, he thinks in the dark.
««—»»
The heat swooshes on. The curtains move. White moonlight winks in the vaguely moving gap.
It is in this gap that he sees it all, his destiny.
Me, me…
From the nightmare, he hears a voice—
A man’s gotta grab life by the balls, his father said once afterward. Moonlight looked like ice in the window panes.
Real men take what they want.
His father’s face smiles through a scarlet grin.
The little boy’s hand quivers.
It’s take or be taken. One day you’ll understand.
««—»»
Back to the present—the world full of his fodder. He gets up, strays to the window—
One day you’ll be a taker. That’s why I’m doing this…
—then looks back with shimmering eyes at the dead man he’d been lying in bed with.
««—»»
Helen glanced at her office clock. Five minutes, she thought. He better not be late. She passed the time by reading one of the tabloids Olsher had inadvertently left. GOD TOLD ME TO DO IT, the top headline read. WHY I KILLED DAHMER, by Tredell Rosser. She flipped to the story, unable to believe that Rosser would’ve been granted an interview with any newspaper much less a tabloid. But when she read the “article,” she plainly saw that he hadn’t. Sources close to the Star have revealed— Helen didn’t bother reading further. Sources close, my ass, she thought. They just made it up, fabricated the whole thing. True, no one with a brain believed anything printed in a supermarket tabloid, but she just couldn’t understand how writers, however corrupt, could be allowed to fabricate “news.” Whatever happened to fraud? Whatever happened to libel? When the Founding Fathers had instituted the premise of free speech in the Constitution, Helen doubted that they meant it was okay for journalists to invent stories and cite anonymous “close sources” as verification.