by Edward Lee
“No,” Helen grated. “Your plan was brilliant, I’ll admit that, and I’ll even admit that, toward the end, I actually went with the flow and believed that Jeffrey Dahmer was still alive. But he isn’t, is he?”
“Don’t be so sure, Captain,” Campbell went on in his coy tone. “Are you sure about that? Are you certain?”
He darted away, back to the room off to the right. Then a squealing sound was heard, like casters or something. In another moment, though, Campbell came back out, pushing before him a wheeled office chair.
Sitting in the chair was, his eyes opened and staring at her, was Jeffrey Dahmer.
A very dead Jeffrey Dahmer.
He looked like a raddled ghost at first, streaked white. But it didn’t take Helen long to understand that he’d been regularly dusted with ground limestone to cut back on the stench of autolysis and rot. His face was but a mask—a crushed mask—the red blood so oxydized that it had turned black as charcoal.
Helen tried again to gauge the use of her hands and arms, but—not much better than before. The succinicholine was wearing off, but Campbell had mentioned that it was a “half dose” of Trexaril that he’d administered as an antedote. Would much physical mobility would she regain, with a “half dose?”
The pieces were all here now—she only had to calculate the obscure ones. And she had to bide for time, to let more of the antidote work through her system before Campbell decided to kill her. And he was right. It would be glorious for him, when they found the body of the Captain of the State Police Violent Crimes Unit tortured and dead with Jeffrey Dahmer’s DNA, handwriting, voiceprints, and fingerprints all over the scene.
Kill time, she thought. Her arms struggled to flex. Kill time before he kills you.
“Dahmer really was murdered by Tredell Rosser, in the prison rec unit, on November 28th, wasn’t he?” she asked.
“Yes,” Campbell said.
“And you had been corresponding with him for some time before that, hadn’t you? That’s the only reason you pursued a relationship with Kussler. Kussler had access to Dahmer’s cell, and you used that access to maintain correspondence with Dahmer when he was alive, didn’t you?”
“Very astute, Captain,” Campbell admitted. “Yes.”
Helen remembered everything Dr. Sallee had told her about such people. Killer groupies. Obssesive-reference disorders. “Kussler would take your letters, leave them in Dahmer’s cell when he was on work detail, and take his letters to you out.”
“Yes.”
“But we never found any trace of your letters to him.”
“I wrote them on toilet paper,” Campbell informed. “Where they could be read very quickly and then effectively flushed.”
“So you planned all of this well beforehand.”
Campbell laxed back in his chair, thinking. “I did, yes, but not Jeffrey. Jeffrey would write to me frequently, citing his conviction that it was only a matter of time before some inmate in the prison murdered him. He was well aware of the number of enemies he’s accrued. The rest was me, my planning, my calculation.”
“You’re a very smart man,” Helen said.
Campbell’s own gaze bore down on her. “I’m a thousand times smarter than you, or any of the other government lackies on your three-ring-circus police department. If you’re so smart, how did I manage to arrange Jeffrey’s phone call to you? A phone call, mind you, that rendered a positive voiceprint?”
“Anyone with the right equipment could’ve done that,” Helen talked right back to him. “Dahmer was interviewed several times on tv. All you had to do was videotape the interviews, and then sound edit the words out to construct sentences which you later played over my phone. The second call I received, when you were already in my apartment waiting for me, was easily done with a call converter and automatic telephone dialer preset with a nominal dial delay. You were waiting for me in my apartment. You were watching out the window. When you saw me park my car in my lot, you called your own number, connected to the converter and auto-dialer, punched in an activation code, and hung up.”
Campbell nodded, not quite as enthusiastically as before. “Good thinking. That’s—well—that’s exactly what I did.”
“And the DNA verification tested in the hairfall? That was easy too. You already had Dahmer’s dead body. You merely left a few of his hairs at each crime scene. The dental match was a cinch—it was still Dahmer’s body on the slab when it was ID’d, before the switch. And the fingerprints? That was no big deal either, for the same reason. Before Dahmer’s print ridges rotted, you applied them to the Flair pen and all of the pieces of paper you used to produce the letters. You probably have a whole stack of blank sheets of paper here, with Dahmer’s fingerprints on them. And spatulas and knives and Flair pens too. You probably applied your own body sweat to Dahmer’s dead fingertips to make the impressions, because sweat doesn’t leave DNA.”
Campbell’s mouth twitched a bit. “A commendable speculation, Captain. And, again, you’re right. The amino acids left by fingerprint ridge patterns can last for years. I used Dahmer’s dead hands to leave prints on over a hundred pieces of blank paper, as well as kitchen utensils, to leave at future crime scenes.”
“So when that thing sitting in the chair rots down to a skeleton, you’ll still have latent evidence that he’s still alive and killing people.”
“Yes,” Campbell assented. “Right.” He paused, looked around in the dark. By now, though, Tom, bound and gagged in his own chair, had passed out. “You’re right about all of that, Captain, but any articulate person could make such speculations. The real instance of genius was the evidence that started it all. The handwriting evidence. Those letters left at the crime scenes were too specific to have been written by Jeffrey before his death. So how do you explain that? How do you explain the letters?”
“I’m not sure exactly how you pulled it off,” Helen said. “But it’s easy to guess how you did it in general.”
“Oh? And how is that?”
“You’re a computer expert. North told me that last week, and so did my tech at headquarters. I mean, Christ, you made a modem-based computer program from scratch that sideswiped all of Bell-Atlantic’s trace processors. Someone with that kind of skill could probably also find a way to duplicate Dahmer’s handwriting on a computer and then generate exact letters on a high-tech printer.”
“Again,” Campbell admitted. “I’m impressed.” The lit monitors behind him glowed like eerie static. A variety of printers sat to their side. “My secret correspondence with Dahmer provided me with an infinite inventory of his handwriting. I used a grid scanner, scanned each and every word into my CPU. It wasn’t easy, and it proved very time-consuming—quite different from traditional flatbed scanning. But eventually I had thousands of words, all written by Dahmer, that I could rearrange to say what I wanted, and then print.”
“Tell me this, though,” Helen asked, as much to bide time as to satisfy her curiosity. “As far as I know, even the most sophisticated computer printers use dry ink cartridges. Even if you used a color printer, our forensics people would’ve known after a single test that the notes were computer generated. How did you manage to print the letters in Flair ink?”
Campbell’s mouth twitched into another smile, and patted one of the printers, a large, clumsy looking one, plaqued with the name TEKMARK. “The very first printers capable of graphical output weren’t laser printers at all. It was a combination of printing technologies that were eventually developed in the systems of today—thermal firing heads and bubble-jet ink transference. They existed in the 70s, before personal computers even existed, and they were very expensive. But instead of dry ink, they used liquid ink that was sublimated before being transferred to the firing heads. I prepared a wash solution, using blue Flair pen filaments, and that’s what I use to fill the printer drum when I print out a letter from ‘Jeff.’“
Helen couldn’t help but acknowledge the man’s technological prowess. His plan was brilliant,
and it had succeeded every step of the way. Realizing that, however, wouldn’t solve her more immediate problems, like trying to find a way to escape.
She thought again, If I could only move. But, hard as she tried, her hands only rose, perhaps, to the level of her bosom. And her legs? Her legs still felt as dead as logs.
She needed more time.
“You’re an industrious man,” she commented, “and a very smart one.”
Campbell winced, stiffening in his seat. “Don’t patronize me, goddamn it!”
“I’m not. How can I be patronizing you? Your plan worked right down to the last letter. You fooled my entire technical services division—my fingerprint experts, my programming specialists, all my hand-writing analysts and voiceprint technicians. You have an entire city—or I should say, an entire country—believing that Jeffrey Dahmer is still alive and maintaining his murder spree. And, to top it all off, you’ve got me. Your nemesis, your opponent. For the last month, I’ve devoted my entire life to finding you. And what do I get for my efforts? The rare opportunity to sit half-paralyzed in a chair and look a mass-murderer in the eye. We battled. You won. I lost.”
Campbell lost the rigid poise, relaxing. “Yes. Yes, I suppose you’re right. And it’s complimentary for you to admit that.”
“You’re going to kill me, right?”
“Of course,” he replied without pause. “I have to. I have no choice. But even if I did, I’d still do it. Because, as you’ve just pointed out, I am a mass-murderer.”
How true.
“Excuse me,” Campbell politely stated. “In all this frenzy, I’ve worked up an appetite.”
He disappeared behind her, and she could hear him opening the refrigerator. She kept her eyes well out of range of Dahmer’s partially rotten corpse, took several deep breaths, shut her eyes, and pushed. Not her body but her brain. She pushed every dram of energy and volition against the fading paralysis…and raised her arms.
“Would you like some?” Campbell offered when he returned. He reseated himself by his computers, holding a sandwich.
“I…think…I’ll pass.”
Campbell took a bite, munching. “But it’s all relative, isn’t it? Meat is meat. British expeditions to New Guinea over a hundred years ago reported that human flesh, when cooked properly, tasted nearly identical to pork. They called it ‘long-pig,’ in fact, for that same reason. Really, Captain. You mustn’t be so close-minded.” He mockingly held the sandwich out. “Sure you won’t join me?”
“No,” she said. “Thank you.”
“And what is that you’re doing now? What’s that around your neck that you’re rubbing? A pendant?”
“It’s a silver locket.” Helen, in Campbell’s absence, had raised her hands to the locket. It was the most she could manage. “Some people bite their nails? I have this bad habit of rubbing my locket when I get nervous, and I guess I have pretty good reason to be nervous now, don’t I?”
Campbell blurted a laugh. “I should say so! Did Tom give it to you?”
“No. My father.” She couldn’t help the reaction: her fingers rubbed the locket so hard she thought she might wear off the finish. But still, she needed more time to let the antidote work its way through her system.
“Do you…hate me?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” Campbell answered. “You’re nothing like the others at all. I actually admire you. I admire your character. I admire your ability to accept defeat.” Campbell took another bite of the abyssal sandwich. “And I promise you, Captain Closs, I won’t make a spectacle of you, nor will I torture you. I will be merciful…and quick.”
“‘Blessed are the merciful,’“ she quoted scripture, “‘for the merciful shall be shown mercy.’“
“Amusing, but I’m afraid I was never quite the Bible scholar Jeffrey became. I loved him, yes, but in spite of my love, I could never bring myself to believe in a god such as yours.”
Kill time! Now her legs were regaining some feeling. Keep him talking! “But how can you love someone you’ve never met?”
“That’s what you don’t understand,” Campbell offered next. “Jeffrey and I did meet. I’ve known him since the first grade. We grew up in the same town—”
“Bath, Ohio,” Helen remembered.
“And I suppose I’ve loved him ever since. I remember when his father gave him the chemistry set—my father gave me one too, when I told him about it—and Jeffrey and I learned how to make our own corrosives. It was Jeffrey’s idea. All the little animals. Jeffrey loved them—so much in fact that that’s what impelled him. He killed them, of course, but he didn’t want to lose them. So we’d bury the bones in his backyard. Eventually I was the one who began to get the animals for him. Then…” Campbell seemed to sift into a daze. “Time went on. We got older, and my love for him grew stronger, but Jeffrey didn’t have the same kind of conception of love, I guess. I wanted to be part of his life, I wanted us to kill together, but he never understood that. Eventually his home life became so nebulous that he joined the Army; I tried to join right along with him, but the recruiters rejected me after the first battery of psychological tests. And since I was never officially recruited, my induction fingerprints were never taken.”
Now Helen began to see the pieces fit. They were starting to form into the intricate human jigsaw that made this man named Campbell.
“So where does Tom fit into all of this?” she asked, and took another glance at his bound form in the other chair.
“How does he fit in?” Campbell replied. “By default, I’m afraid. I’m an opportunist, Captain. When I found out you were involved with him, I used that to my advantage, because I also new, through acquaintances in the life, that Tom was quite bisexual, which I guess you weren’t aware of until recently.”
“No,” Helen admitted. “I wasn’t.”
“I knew you were close, but I couldn’t let you get too close. I needed to throw you off track a little, and Tom was the perfect scapegoat. Bisexual, a high-ranking hospital staffer as well as a pathologist. And with access to and knowledge of succinicholine. You fell for that too, didn’t you?”
“Hook, line, and sinker,” Helen admitted.
“And as I’ve already said, I was the one who made the call to North’s new escort service, told them to send North to Tom’s address, knowing you’d find out via your surveillance, and then planting the succinicholine in his floppy disk files. Later tonight, I abducted him at the hospital when he was coming on duty, drove his car to North’s apartment, killed North, and then it was all set. Getting into your own apartment was doubly easy because Tom still had your keys.”
More pieces, then, fitting together exactly. But… How much time? Helen wondered in the most suppressed anguish. Her fingers nervously rubbed the locket. How much more time to I have?
Then she remembered more of what Sallee had told her. Campbell’s obsessive-reference disorder, and his X,Y,Y-Syndrome traits. Subjects are frequently male, and sexually abused by their father, or father figures… There was no evidence that Dahmer had ever been abused by his father, nothing incriminating about Dahmer’s father at all. But what about Campbell’s father?
“Tell me about your father,” she dared to ask.
Campbell stared at her, then, for so long she thought she’d lapsed into a dream. She could use a dream right now, couldn’t she? A nice dream, of pretty places and good people. A dream of a world where there were no killers…
Campbell’s voice sounded corroded now—rock sluiced by acid. “My father,” he said and paused again. “I—I suppose I owe it all to him.”
“In what way?”
“My father taught me, through his own methods, what life is really all about. He used to tell me that we all have to make our little marks on the world, and if we don’t, there’s no point to our lives. He’d tell me this almost every day.”
“Yes?” Helen goaded him.
“Yes,” Campbell answered. “Every day before he raped me.”
Helen gazed
at him, tried to wonder what his life was like. But that was no real excuse. Abuse only sired more abuse—but that was no consolation to the victims. She felt sorry for him in the plight of what him must have experienced. But—
She still hated him, still wanted to kill him.
“It’s all about power,” Campbell explained. “Some people are users, some people are the used. Kussler loved me, and I used that to exploit him, to keep me in touch with Dahmer through his job at the prison. Kussler was weak; to maintain my power over him, I’d break up with him every few months, to keep him in a state of longing, and then I’d take him back.”
Just as so many battered wives return to abusive husbands, Helen thought. North had made the same point the first time she’d talked to him.
“I knew Kussler—he was a common mind. A patsy. Just like you.”
Helen closed her eyes.
“It’s all about power,” Campbell repeated, “and what greater power can there be than this? When the hunted destroys the hunter?”
Campbell’s silhouette stood up, took something unseen off the work desk. He appeared as a messiah just then, a knowing figure with hands outstretched in wisdom and truth—
Except in one hand he held a knife.
And next, he said, “Thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven. Yet thou shalt be brought down into hell, deep into the pit.”
Helen prayed to a god she didn’t even think she believed in.
“I won’t break my promise,” Campbell said. “I will be merciful and quick.”
Helen thought, I’m going to die now, but then she opened her eyes. And she saw—
She saw something—
—something she’d been waiting for.
“Let me say one last thing,” she bid. “You’re very smart, the letters, the phone calls and fingerprints, and especially the way you anticipated my surveillance of North.”