by Edward Lee
She sipped her wine and shook her head. I must be way off track. How could Tom possibly have arranged the business with the letters left at the crime scenes, and a genuine fingerprint on the Dumplin letter? You’re grabbing at straws, Helen, she told herself now. Just what was she proposing? That Tom was some kind of killer groupie, in league with Dahmer while he was alive? And, above all, why? What motive would he have?
She could almost hear Dr. Sallee berating her. Dahmer was gay, and you’ve just discovered that Tom, too, has gay compulsions. You’re so disoriented, Helen, that you’re trying to blame him. You’re letting your sense of professional judgment take you off on the most absurd tangents.
Yeah, she thought. Yeah, I guess you’re right. The whole thing was absurd.
A copy of the Sunday supplement lay on the empty stool next to her. Dahmer’s grainy face seemed to give her the eye. IS THIS MAN STILL ALIVE? read the header. Helen smirked, didn’t even pick it up.
“Excuse me. You’re Helen Closs, aren’t you?”
Her gaze rose off the bartop, to meet the equal gaze of a man. Average height and build, short chestnut hair and mustache—decent-looking save for an atrocious rust-brown suit. The guy had cop written all over him.
“How do you know my name?” she asked without much interest.
“Your picture was in the Tribune, something about you hammering down on that scandal-monger Tait. Good for you, I say. These news guys, Christ, they’re all out for a buck.” The guy paused to swig mug of his draft. “I’m Nick, by the way. Nice to meet you.”
Helen shook his hand, felt sweat and anguish. “So what department are you with…Nick?”
“Madison Metro, Narcotics,” he seemed to be proud of. “I’m a captain too, sixteen years. I hear you’re gonna make DC next year.”
“Maybe,” she said. “If I don’t quit first.”
Nick laughed. “I hear ya. But with all that time in, why hack down your pension?”
Helen nodded glumly.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“I already have a dr—” But then she stalled, noticed her empty glass. Where the hell did all that wine go? she asked herself. She wanted another one but she wasn’t comfortable not paying for it. “Let me buy you one.”
“Hey, thanks. Bud draft.”
A Bud man, she thought despondently, and ordered another round. “Metro Narcs, huh? Crack chaser.”
“Yeah, but let me tell ya,” Nick posited. “This heroin tar is really on the rise. It’s the rich kids doing it; it’s in vogue ’cos you don’t use a needle, none of that AIDS taboo. They call it ‘H-Smoke’ and ‘Boy.’ You never read about it ’cos nobody thinks it’s hot. But this shit is tipping kids over faster than crack.”
Helen couldn’t imagine anything duller than talking shop with another cop. “I’d appreciate it,” she said, “if you wouldn’t cuss.”
“Oh, sorry—shit—I mean, wow—sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it, Nick.” Helen sipped her freshened wine, then abstractly noticed a thin white line on his left ring finger. A tan line.
“Divorced?” she asked. Immediately, though, she regretted it. What am I doing? Don’t lead this guy on! It wasn’t that she didn’t like him—there was no reason not to at this point. But his presence…aggravated her. She’d come here to sit by herself and think. And now, here she was asking personal questions.
“How did you— Oh, the tan line.” Nick laughed. “That’s what I call an investigator. Yeah, divorced, as in recently. I think it mentioned in the paper that you’re not married. Do yourself a favor—keep it that way. Matrimony and The Job don’t mix. Quickest way to screw up two people’s lives? Be a cop and get married.”
“Thanks for the advice.” Great, I’ve created a monster, a mouth monster, Helen realized when it became clear that Nick wasn’t going to be quiet and leave her alone. “What it didn’t say in the papers is that I’m divorced too.”
“Oh, yeah? A heel, huh? A real rubberneck?”
“Schmuck, I think, is a more accurate way to describe my former husband.”
“Hey, woe, I hear ya. When I went back to my place to get my stuff, my wife—can you believe it?—she leaned out the window and fired a bowl of hot chowder down on me. I wanted to jump back in my pickup and pop wheelies in the yard, the fuckin’ bitch… Aw, hey, sorry. Been a cop too long, ya know?”
Helen sighed.
“And, Jesus, all this Dahmer stuff. It’s almost like those rubbernecks in the press are happy about it, it gives them something to write about. Dahmer this, Dahmer that. Don’t go out, lock your doors. Big Bad Jeffrey Dahmer’s still alive.”
Helen squinted, looked up. “Do you believe that?”
Nick shrugged at the question. His beer left white foam on his upper lip. “Hell, I don’t know, but you’d think someone’d be all over the guy who did the autopsy. I mean, what a clusterfuck…pardon my language. I can’t help it, I—”
“I know, Nick. You’ve been a cop too long.” But her thoughts backtracked. The guy who did the autopsy… Tom again.
“And this stuff about the fingerprints. I mean, Christ, how could so many people screw up so many times in a row? It said in the paper that Dahmer’s prints were verified half a dozen times or something like that. It’s not like someone on the outside could’ve switched the print cards—classification and ID is all done through computers now.”
Helen’s thoughts backtracked some more. Someone on the outside…
“Rocket scientists, all of them. Bunch’a rubbernecks.” Nick laughed sarcastically. “With all this fuss, you’d think someone would be smart enough to get an exhumation order. Settle it once and for all. Just dig the asshole up and find out if it’s him or not. Ooops, there I go again. Sorry.”
“Can’t dig him up, Nick,” Helen reminded. “All state incarcerees who die in custody are cremated.”
Nick plopped down his empty mug, gestured the keep for another. “You know, for a gal who’s in the papers so much, you sure don’t read them very often, do you?”
“What do you mean?”
Nick leaned over the bar. “Hey, chief. Gimme that Tribune there, will ya? Slide it over here.”
Nick handed her the paper. It was true, Helen hadn’t had time to pay much attention. Three front-page articles on Dahmer, and one on Bosnia. STATE VIOLENT CRIMES UNIT CONTINUES TO DENY DAHMER’S ESCAPE, read one headline. And here was a small picture of Helen. What a terrible picture, she thought. I should sue them for defamation of character. Another header read: ENTIRE COLUMBUS COUNTY DETENTION STAFF UNDER INVESTIGATION. Nick’s finger pointed to a third. “There ya go.”
Helen’s eyes fixed down. CIRCUIT COURT BLOCKS “DAHMER’S” CREMATION.
“Two family members fighting over custody of the ashes,” Nick said. “Can you believe it?”
Helen half-tuned out Nick’s voice in order to read. She loved the way they’d put Dahmer’s name in quotes. But it was true. “You know, Nick. In the 90s I can believe it. But… All right, family members are suing each other over ownership of the ashes. But what’s that got to do with a county circuit judge blocking the cremation?”
“Keep reading.”
Unbelievable. To add to the ashes mess, a third party was suing the department of corrections, to see to it that there would be no ashes at all. And that third party was Father Thomas Alexander, the detention center’s chaplain. “As Jeffrey Dahmer’s only true friend,” Alexander stated to reporters, “I have an ethical responsibility to him, even in death. I was Jeffrey’s guide to faith, his spiritual guardian, and as an Epiphanist Protestant, I do not believe in the rite of cremation. I am, in fact, offended by it, as is God. Cremation was originally instituted by pagans in the Middle Ages as a protest to the chief tenets of Christianity: the glory of resurrection. Jeffrey would not want to be cremated, and he can’t speak for himself now, so I will. And I’ll tell you this, any county judiciary decision that conflicts with my wishes will be immediately appealed to the appellate
courts, the state’s supreme court, and even the U.S. Supreme Court if need be.” Alexander’s hot air had sufficed to urge a judge to delay the cremation via “internment for the interim.” The body was buried yesterday at an unspecified cemetery.
So there it was, right in her face. And the solution was obvious. Why hadn’t anyone thought of this before? “Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Nick,” she blurted, got up, and rushed out.
««—»»
“You’ve gotta be shitting me.”
Helen didn’t quite know what to say. It was close to one a.m. now, yet she hadn’t thought twice about waking Olsher at his home. And here he stood now, on the front porch of his Chapel Forge rancher, in a robe and slippers as the winter air froze his breath.
“What the big deal, Larrel?”
“The big deal?” Olsher’s sleep-hooded eyes drilled into her gaze. “Do you know how hard it is to get an exhumation order? Do you know how much it costs? Do you have any idea of the heat we’ll have to take even in asking for one?”
“Then we’ll just have to take the heat,” Helen retorted.
Olsher winced as if stricken with sudden heartburn. “The press will kill us, Helen.”
“Larrel, we’re cops, remember? We have a job to do regardless of the press. We’re going to have to forget about the damn press for one minute and start making moves before the killer strikes again.”
“You still don’t think Dahmer is alive, do you?”
“No, Chief, I don’t. I think he’s dead and buried, and I think the murders are being carried out by an intricate copycat. An exhumation order will prove it.”
“And what if you’re wrong?”
“Then the papers will make us look like idiots, but they’re doing that right now anyway. And here’s another reason we need that body exhumed, Larrel. Let’s just say I’m wrong—which you already believe. If it’s not Dahmer in that grave, then we need to know who is. IDing the substitute body can get us a line on whoever helped Dahmer break out, which could lead us do Dahmer himself.”
Olsher blinked in the cold. “Well—hmm. You’re right, I never thought of that… You’re the investigator, how come you didn’t think of that?”
Helen laughed humorlessly. “I just did, Larrel. So get me that exhumation.”
“All right.” Olsher paused as though his mind was running in neutral. “No guarantees, but I’ll make the calls in the morning, see what they say. It’s the DA’s office who has to talk the jive to the judge, and the DA owes me a few favors.”
“Thanks, Larrel.”
Olsher turned in his foyer as he was closing the door. He was shivering obliviously. “You better be right, Helen. ’cos if you’re not, those people downtown will never put you up for deputy chief.”
Helen thought about that and shrugged back at him. “I don’t care,” she said, and remembered Nick’s eloquent jive. “Those people downtown are just a bunch of… rubbernecks.”
— | — | —
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It typically took days or even weeks for a police department to get a writ of exhumation. A plea of equity needed to be filed along with a petition of injunction to an officer of the court of general jurisdiction, in this case the Circuit Court of Madison County. Evidently, though, whatever favor it was that the district attorney’s office owed Olsher must’ve been a big one. Helen got a grumpy call from her boss at 6:30 the very next morning.
“Winter-Damon Cemetery,” he said. “The north end. Be there in an hour.”
The news woke her up at once. “That’s great, Larrel! Wow. You really burned some midnight oil.”
“Tell me about it.”
She showered and dressed hurriedly, her hair still wet when she dashed to the car. Now, at least, she could prove her point. When the body they pulled out of that grave proved to be Dahmer’s, she could focus her skills on the real elements of the case: a conspirator, or perhaps even several. Someone on the outside corresponding with Dahmer, secreting notes, planning all this as a good chess player anticipates his tactics ten moves in advance…
It was four degrees, according to the radio, with wind-chill, but Helen’s excitation kept her warm when she parked. She should’ve guessed it would be the old Winter-Damon graveyard just outside of Madison. The state owned part of it, to bury John and Jane Does, mental and nursing home patients with no next of kin, etc. A fleet of vehicles awaited, more than she’d expect for something like this. Beck was here with her work-up van, six state cruisers, two EMT trucks, a transport van from Columbus County Detent, a jade-green Pontiac Grand Am with federal plates. A sound of chugging combustion ruptured the chill air: an Ingersoll-Rand trencher/power shovel canting its blade—like a huge chainsaw—deep into the earth.
An array of scowling faces in winter hoods fired glances when Helen approached. Disdain, she thought. Everyone knows I’m the one who pushed for this. No one spoke to her as she shouldered through to get to Olsher. “It’s almost zero, Helen,” he told her. “You ain’t exactly the most popular gal in town right now.”
“I don’t care. This is great. I can’t believe how fast you got this. But—” She glanced down at the plots, marked only by small inset stones bearing an ID number. The trencher crew had already dug down to the top of the cement grave liner, but now they were cutting out what looked to be a recess at the head of the liner. “Why the extra hole?” she asked.
“Workspace,” Olsher answered. “The judge said yes, but only for purposes of identification on site, in extremis. We can do anything we want—take prints, tissue samples, hair, photographs—but it’s gotta be here. In other words, we can’t take the body back to the lab. When we’re done, we seal it up and leave.”
This sounded acceptable to Helen. “I saw a car with fed tags.”
“F.B.I. The SAC from the Madison FO brought two techs with him.”
And—” Helen squinted past the throng, at a blank white van sprung with several high-tech looking antennae and a small satellite dish. “What’s that?”
“It’s a commo-relay van, on loan from Justice. Go ask Beck for the details.”
“Sure, Larrel.” Helen faltered a moment. “You’re pissed at me, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess I am.”
Helen shirked away. Oh, well. Beck stood at the head of the digging; by now the trencher’s shovel had emptied the workspace. “Have a surgical mask,” Beck said, and handed one to Helen. “Me, I gotta wear that.” At her feet lay Scott Air-Pack with mask and umbilicus. “The body was embalmed but we still can’t take any chances on bacterial flux or a gas bolus.”
“But won’t the body be frozen?”
“Nope. It’s temperature will be below thirty-two, sure, but blood incipients—mainly the embalming solution—will prevent any freezing action of the flesh.”
“Larrel told me to ask you about that commo van.”
“This is a one shot deal,” Beck replied, removing wool mittens and replacing them with vinyl evidence gloves, “so we want to make the most of it. We’re doing three sets of prints—the county’s doing one, I’m doing one, and the Bureau’s doing the backup. See that dish on the van? It’s an uplink to a KV-11 geostatic satellite that’s owned by the Justice Department. Inside we got a UNISYS plate-scanner and digital-analog converter. We’ll be able to ID the body right here in the field.”
The technology seemed hard to believe. “How?” Helen queried, rubbing her bare hands.
“The processor will digitalize all three sets of prints, then feed the digitalization through the satellite to Justice’s Optical Ident Mainframe in Washington. We should have positive ID in less than five minutes.”
“Cool,” Helen said more to herself. Through the throng, she spotted Dipetro and an entourage of goons from the prison. He gave her a curt nod.
“All right, people, make way,” the F.B.I. man announced loudly, his breath gusting. He was dashingly handsome, of Oriental dissent—Hawaiian, Helen guessed. “Make way for the techs. Anyone clos
er than ten meters from the hole’s gotta wear a 15-micron surgical mask.”
“That’s my cue,” Beck said. Helen ineptly assisted the TSD chief in hoisting the air tank onto her back. Several others did the same. One masked man—a cemetery employee, Helen noted—jumped into the hole and quickly, amid an awful racket, cranked off the top of the grave liner with a gasoline-powered joint spreader, revealing a plain, veneered coffin lid. Then—
“Stand clear!” the Bureau’s Special Agent in Charge yelled. “Watch for gas!”
Another quick rev of the spreader forced open the coffin lid. And then…
Perfect silence.
Helen’s breath filtered through the blue surgical mask, turning white. With more than a little distaste, they all looked down into the opened coffin, and at the rigored, embalmed, and very pallid cadaver within.
««—»»
I don’t know how she does it, Helen thought, her gaze wide over the top rim of her mask. Jan Beck didn’t bat an eye climbing down into that hole. One of the field techs from the Bureau joined her and patiently raised first the cadaver’s right hand, then left, as Beck, just as patiently, inserted a hypodermic needle under each fingertip and injected several cc’s of glycerin, this to distend the pad of each finger and reverse any shrinkage due to desiccation. Then the dead hands were cleaned with isopropanol, sprayed with a clear, oil-based conductant, and printed on shiny mylar scan cards, which Beck had told her about just the other day. The oil-impressions against the mylar replicated the ridge patterns of the fingerprints much more accurately than ink and paper. The Bureau tech took the first set, then Beck, then someone from the prison. After which all three sets of cards were taken to the commo van.
In the meantime another state employee, also wearing an air pack and mask, got into the hole and began taking hair samples. Then he took several rather unpleasant tissue samples—much like coring for a soil sample—by inserting large gauge needles into the chest cavity, the abdomen, and the left thigh. When the employee climbed out of the hole, he paused a moment to glance at Helen, his eyes glaring at her through the plastic faceshield.