by Edward Lee
An effective appeal, and Helen, for the most part, agreed. But still she held her ground. “I need more on Cam.”
“There isn’t any more! I’ve told you everything Glen told me. Christ, I’ve told you what the guy’s into, what he looks like, I’ve even told you his name.”
“What, Cam? That’s probably a nickname.”
North’s mouth opened, paused. “Oh, you’re right, I didn’t mention it. It’s Campbell.”
Cam. Campbell, she thought. But did he make it up in desperation? Helen didn’t think so. His eye-movements weren’t right for lying, and neither were his kinestethics. “Campbell, fine. But that’s a very common last name. I need Campbell’s first name too.”
North’s face tensed up, cords beneath veins straining in his neck. “Christ, lady, I don’t know his first name! If I did, I’d tell you! Jesus Christ, I don’t want to go to the joint!”
Helen nodded. There was no practical reason to pressure him further. She placed one of her cards on the coffee table and stood up. “You’ve been very cooperative, Mr. North. If you can think of anything else, please call me. In the meantime, I’ll talk to the district attorney and ask him to drop the charges against you.”
North looked up like a child looking at an angel. “For real?”
“Sure. But you better keep your nose clean from this point on because if you get busted again, you will go to jail, and there’ll be nothing I can do to help you.” Helen seriously doubted that Matthew North would desist from his occupation, but she felt it only appropriate to make the warning.
“Gee—I mean, thanks.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. North. I’ll see myself out.” Helen left the apartment, and went back out onto the street. Campbell. I got a name, at least. There were probably tens of thousands of Campbells in the state of Wisconsin, but it was something. Plus, she knew what Campbell looked like; North’s description verified that she’d met Campbell herself, using Kussler’s name. From here she could run rap checks, prison and metal hospital release checks, any number of things. This ten-minute interview with North had given her more solid investigatory data than everything she’d accrued since Dahmer’s staged death at the prison.
At least I’ve got something to work with now.
Helen was about to unlock the Taurus when padded footfalls resounded behind her, and a voice: “Hey, Captain, wait a minute.”
North huffed right up to her, his breath misting. Shirtless and barefoot, he remained impervious to the biting cold. “There’s one more thing I just remembered.”
“I’m listening, Mr. North.”
“That bit Glen told me about Campbell being into rough videos and violent computer games?”
“Yes?”
“Well, now that I think of it, Glen mentioned something else too, something pretty weird. It’s not all that surprising, though, since, like I said, Campbell was—”
“Sick pup material.”
“Right. Well, Campbell had this other really nutty pet peeve. He was into killers.”
“Into killers?”
“Yeah, Glen mentioned it to me once, said it really whacked him out. Campbell had a hobby, he kept a scrapbook full of newspaper clippings and stuff. Articles about famous killers, you know, serial murderers, Bundy, Gacy, guys like that, but—”
Helen’s head tilted like a bird’s. She stared in complete bedazzlement at what North was saying, and what she strangely sensed he was about to say.
“—but,” North rambled on, “he was especially obsessed with Jeffrey Dahmer.”
— | — | —
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Helen felt on wires when she strode into Olsher’s office to explain. Dahmer was alive—she had no choice but to believe that now—but she now knew something else. Campbell was the mystery man behind Dahmer’s escape.
A note on the door read, Back in five minutes. Helen waited, flipping through a copy of the Enquirer, incredulous at the headline. DAHMER IS A VOODOO ZOMBIE! How could Olsher read this crap? The article ensued: Our reporters have solved the mystery, and you read it here first! Jeffrey Dahmer is a voodoo zombie, and has risen from his grave by means of an ancient spell! “Yes, we did it, we brought Dahmer back,” admits Chez Diablique, a world-famous voodoo mojo from the Haitian-based Pabla Cult. His wife, the renowned mambo priestess agrees: “Jeffrey’s spirit contacted us from beyond the grave, and asked for our help. So we began casting voudun resurrection spells…”
Helen put the tabloid in the trash.
Eventually, Olsher returned, with a steaming cup of coffee. Helen didn’t dawdle; she jumped right in and explained her point of view.
“Campbell, huh?” Olsher questioned. “And you got this from —what?—some male whore?”
“Chief, the guy’s sweating a jail sentence, he was coming clean,” she insisted. “Campbell was the exploitative lover of Glen Kussler, the guy whose body we found in Dahmer’s grave. Campbell had an obsession with serial killers, Dahmer in particular. It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
Olsher’s upper lip turned up in a pinch. “What’s obvious?”
“Jesus Christ, Chief! We’ve got a name and a description of the man who is in collusion with Dahmer! Campbell’s a Dahmer groupie, and that’s why he pursued a relationship with Kussler.”
“I don’t get it.”
Helen gnashed her teeth. “Kussler worked for the prison; Kussler specifically serviced Dahmer’s cell. Isn’t it obvious that Campbell was using Kussler to secretly slip mail back and forth between Dahmer and Campbell?”
Olsher shrugged, began unwrapping an El Producto. “Not really.”
Helen wanted to bang her head on Olsher’s desk. “It all fits, Chief. Campbell’s the missing piece.”
Olsher splayed his hands, wincing. “Campb— Helen, who the fuck is this Campbell? Some name a male whore gave you? Bring Campbell in and we’ll grill him, but you can’t do that because you don’t have him.”
“No, I don’t, but at least I got his last name and his description. For crying out loud, haven’t you been listening to me? I met Campbell myself!”
“You met Campbell? I thought you met Kussler?”
Helen pulled in a long, exasperated breath. “I met Campbell at Kussler’s apartment, but I didn’t know he wasn’t Kussler at the time. It was Campbell, but he told me he was Kussler.”
“Oh, he told you he was Kussler, is that it?”
Helen glared at him.
Olsher went on, wetting the cigar end. “So how do you know it wasn’t really Kussler?”
Helen exploded, “Because Kussler’s been in a fucking hole in the ground for the last three weeks!”
Olsher didn’t flinch at the outburst. “Oh, so you’re saying that Campbell sprung Dahmer from the prison, then murdered Kussler and put his body in Dahmer’s place?”
“Yes!”
Olsher leaned back calmly. “I don’t think it flies.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Larrel—there’s no other answer.”
“You want to go with it, fine.”
“And since I know what Campbell looks like, I’m going to get the artist in ident to do a composite, and run it in the paper.”
“I still think you’re grabbing for sh—”
“Okay, Larrel, whatever you say.” She’d had enough of this. “Let me get to it. Oh, and I need your permission to put a DF on North.”
“Who’s North?”
Helen clenched her fists, closed her eyes. “The prostitute who told me about Campbell.”
“And Campbell’s the guy who said he was Kussler but he wasn’t really Kussler, he was just saying he was Kussler, because he’d already killed Kussler and somehow got him buried in place of Dahmer?”
“Stop screwing with me, Chief.”
Olsher spared the smallest hint of a smile. “Who’s screwing with you? And why do you want a DF on this guy North?”
“To track his whereabouts on the board. Then the computer inputs any locations and stores them in a database
. Any repeated lokes North travels to will come up on the cross reff. North is probably going to continue turning tricks. I want to know who any of his other steady johns are so I can question them. They might’ve known Kussler too, or people who did, and from that I might be able to get more on Campbell.”
But by then Olsher was barely listening. “Sure, a DF request—go do it. Have Supply and Central Commo call me for the authorization.”
Helen left when Olsher lit the odiferous cigar. His head must be harder than the wall. She stalked downstairs to the armorer in the Property and Supply Depot, who quickly verified the request with Olsher over the phone. A DF transponder (the DF for direction-finder) was a piece of surveillance hardware not new to larger and more modern police departments; they were tiny tracking devices generally planted on cars without the owner’s knowledge. The device emitted an exclusive frequency processed by a set of radio triangulators, and pinpointed the target vehicle’s location at any time on the DF board at Central Communications. Helen had already run North’s name through MVA and found out what he drove: a gold 87 Dodge Colt, two-door. A surveillance warrant wasn’t necessary—at least not in this state—because tracking a person’s public whereabouts was not deemed an invasion of privacy.
Hawberk was the armorer/property officer’s name, according to his tag, a beat street cop waiting out his pension papers. He had a complexion like a sponge. “A DF transponder, huh? They run on nickel-cads. They’ll pipe a freq transmission for ten to fourteen days before you have to replace it,” he told her nearly incomprehensibly. “But cold weather like we’re having now? I’d change the battery once a week during the job.”
“Okay, just let me have it.”
“Which series? We have two.” This was probably making Hawberk’s day; he reached under the counter and produced a pair of small hinged boxes like he was a jeweler showing her watches. One unit was the size of a dime, the other a nickel. “This big one here,” his stubby finger pointed to the latter. “It’s a two-way unit, has a distress signal. We use them mostly for guys working undercover who can’t wear a wire, you carry it around in your pocket with your change. The DF board’ll be tracking you the whole time, but if you run into trouble”—he picked it up and offered a mock demonstration—”you press down real hard on this little grid on the side, and it sends out a distress beacon. The board reads the distress code, and since they already know exactly where you are, they can dispatch a response team immediately.”
“But I’m not going to be carrying this,” she pointed out, already overwhelmed. “I want to track a car.”
“Oh, well why didn’t you say so? You don’t need the two-way unit, you need the one-way.” Now Hawberk picked up the dime-sized transponder. “The batteries in these are tiny, so bring it in to me whenever you need a change.”
“What’s the best place to plant it?” she asked. “Under the hubcap?”
“No, no,” he objected. “What if the person you’re tracking gets a flat tire? He’ll go to change it and find the damn thing. Best place is up under the bumper, but a lotta these new cars? They have plastic bumpers so it won’t work—the attachment base is magnetic.”
Helen rolled her eyes wearily. All this tech stuff—she was sick of it. Just give me the damn thing and tell me where to stick it! I don’t need a technical dissertation!
“Up under the bumper if it’s a steel bumper,” he went on. “Or some secure location in the undercarriage. Just make sure it sticks. You don’t want this baby dropping off onto Rowe Boulevard the first time he hits a pothole.”
“Fine, great. The undercarriage. Make sure the magnet sticks.”
Hawberk closed the box, then filled out an inventory release. “Take this to Central Commo, and they’ll activate the tracking frequency with the DF board. It’s sixteen-point-six-five megahertz, very reliable.
“Yes, yes, thank you.” Helen grabbed the box and form, turned hastily to leave.
“Any place in Greater Madison your suspect goes to, they’ll read it on the DF board, and feed the grids into the computer.”
Helen pulled away. “Right, yes, I understand that.”
“Then all you have to do is call up the grids, which will already be converted to city plat numbers.”
“Fine. Thank you.”
“Use the city grid map to match the plats, and you got the exact locations of everywhere in town your suspect parks his car.”
“Fine. Have a good day.”
“And don’t forget to change the battery every week,” Hawberk reminded over her. “This kind of cold weather drains them—”
Helen glided out; her mind stuffed to overflowing with details. Next she activated the frequency with Central Communications, gave the transponder along with North’s address and MVA specs to a plainclothes in Intelligence Branch, and sent him out to plant the device on North’s 87 Dodge Colt.
What a pain in the butt, she thought, only now, for the first time all day, taking a few minutes to sit down and have a cup of coffee. Computers, DF transponders, city plats and grid conversions? One day, she suspected, the world would be so cluttered with technology, specs, and frequencies that everyone would go completely insane.
The DF would help a lot, though. More grist for Helen’s investigative mill. North, now that his escort service had been closed down, would very likely solicit a new one, and finding out where that new service was would give Helen a brand-new client base to check out. Clients who may have known Kussler, and any other prostitutes Kussler may have solicited, all whom, in turn, might know more about Campbell. Additionally, since Kussler regularly solicited North, he may have recommended North to friends.
But Helen’s coffee didn’t even have time to get cool before she was up and out. It took two hours with the police artist and IdentiKit technician to get a good digital composite on what she remembered of Campbell’s face. Another hour at the Police Commissioner’s Office to process a press-release request for the composite to be published in the papers. And yet another hour at the assistant district attorney’s office getting North’s active charges dropped in place of probation before judgment. And after all that, the day was almost done. But she still had one more thing to do, didn’t she?
She had an appointment, with Dr. Sallee.
««—»»
“I’m sorry, Helen. I remember telling you psychiatrists were only right ninety-nine percent of the time. Well, here’s the one percent. I called it wrong.”
“So did I,” Helen said. Only now, in Sallee’s office, did she feel wound down from all the rigors of the day. The office was tranquil, blissfully sedate. Sallee’s voice gave her solace.
“I was convinced, as you, that Dahmer was genuinely dead, and that the perpetrator was a copycat,” he said. “But at least, in your discoveries today, you have a positive link to the accomplice. A name, a face, all in one day? That’s fast work.”
“Not fast enough. It’s only a last name, and a sketched composite face. Not a whole lot in the thick of things.”
“There you go again, as always, Helen. Downplaying your skills, self-effacing the efforts of your own ingenuity.”
Helen audibly moaned.
“Any more dreams?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Resolved anything with Tom?”
The name made her feel distant from herself, as though she were looking at herself in a tiny window very far away. “No.”
Sallee seemed to sense that she didn’t want to talk about herself today, she wanted to talk about—
“Campbell, then,” he said. “And it’s typical. Everything North told you about Campbell fits the basic profile of the accomplice, even before we knew his name. If I were you, I’d keep a close eye on North.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” she explained. “I have a direction-finder on his car. Central Commo will follow and copy any places in the city grid that North drives to.”
“Good thinking. A log of North’s associates will give you more names
of persons who may have been acquainted with Kussler, and perhaps even Campbell himself.”
Helen nodded sluggishly. Suddenly she felt exhausted. God, I wish I could just go to sleep right here in his office.
“And just as I was telling you several days ago, the so-called ‘killer-groupie’ phenomenon—obsessive-reference disorder,” Sallee said. “It’s precisely what you predicted.”
“You predicted it, Dr. Sallee. I simply followed up on it.”
Obsessive-reference disorder, she thought. Great. If it’s not technical gobbledegook, it’s clinical gobbledegook.
“—very very common for certain sexual extroverts to become fascinated with and obsessed by serial killers. They regard them as heroes, they even admire their deeds. And a good many of them are X,Y,Y-Syndrome candidates, as I’ve previously mentioned. What North disclosed, I mean—not only Campbell’s obsession with Dahmer, but his other sundry interests: sadistic sex, explicitly brutal videos, snuff films—”
“He also said Campbell played excessively violent computer games, not the popular games, but the underground ones.”
Sallee nodded. “I remember the Senate hearings. There’s an entire subculture of people who patronize these games. They order them through the mail, and over the Internet by use of privileged down-loading codes. There’s a flurry of such games—depicting rape, torture, murder and mutilation from the player’s perspective. It’s a sick world, Helen, but I don’t have to tell you that.”