Dahmer's Not Dead

“A—” she began and that’s where she left it. He didn’t need to know, and she didn’t want to repeat what Central Comm had just told her: the victim was an infant. “It’s just…bad, as usual.”

But that was Helen’s job: the bad ones, the ones too intensive or excruciating for the local departments to handle on their own.

She hurried to take a two-minute shower, hauled on her dress and her Burberry overcoat—a very nice coat that Tom had given her last Christmas. Then she was hustling out with her hair still wet.

“Don’t I get a kiss?” Tom asked. He stood ready at the door, surprising her. Then he kissed her on the mouth and embraced her in a tight, warm hug.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered again.

“Hey, the Kung Pao can wait, and so can those shrimp things.”

“No, I mean about before.” And then his own words haunted her: You really are making this hard. She knew she was, she knew it all too well. Her entire adult life was proof.

He was so cute, so handsome. Short, dark hair; deep, penetrating eyes full of compassion and intellect. He had a rampant sense of humor too, unlike her former husband who was about as upbeat as Jean Paul Sartre. Tom could joke away the worst stress headache or post-shift blues.

Her own eyes opened on his softly smiling face, and she nearly melted. I don’t deserve him, she thought, but then she could hear Dr. Sallee berating her all the way from HQ.

“You’re going to rub that thing into non-existence,” he warned.

What? she wondered, then she realized: she was rubbing her locket again, pressing hard. Over the years she had indeed rubbed off quite a bit of the surface detail.

“You always rub that locket when you’re upset.”

“I’m not upset,” she countered.

“Well, when you’re stressed out, worried, whatever. Why?”

She didn’t answer directly because she couldn’t. But she guessed he was correct. The locket was her Linus blanket, her rabbit’s foot, she supposed. “It’s like a good luck charm, and I’m probably gonna need it tonight.”

“Still don’t want to tell me about that 64 in Farland?”

“No,” she asserted. But the words were still there, flotsam in a dark sea. A baby. Someone killed a baby… But people killed babies every day in this demented age. It’s my job to investigate murder, she scolded herself. She let go of the locket. So go do it and stop being such an insecure wuss.

“Go on, get out of here,” Tom said. “You can’t keep public service waiting. Do you have your gun?”

“Yes,” she groaned. Helen hated guns but she had little choice but to carry one. A tiny Beretta Jet-Fire, .25 ACP. She was so bad at the range she had to be waived every year to qualify.

“Good. And be careful, okay?”

“I will.” She could tell, as she always could, that here was a man who was genuinely concerned with her, and someone who genuinely loved her. Don’t screw it up again, Helen, she warned herself.

She kissed him again and left.

««—»»

Dane County didn’t have its own PD—they were uncharted, like a lot of Wisconsin’s counties. What they had instead was a small-time sheriff’s department. Helen’s response grid—Grid South Central—stretched from Beloit to the Petenwell Reservoir; this one, at least, wouldn’t be too bad of a drive in her unmarked. There’d been times when she’d had to take the pill-white Ford Taurus a hundred miles out of Madison merely to write up a prelim WSP Form 18-82—Initial Investigatory Report for Possible Critical Case Homicide—and then recommended as to whether or not the 64 warranted the intervention of the Wisconsin State Police Violent Crimes Unit. VCU was run by six regional field liaisons, all captains, one of whom was Helen Closs. Eighteen years with the state police, she’d started at Traffic and worked her way up. Three years ago, working with the Intelligence Unit, she’d orchestrated a state-wide sting operation that had brought the house down on a complex cocaine triad whose shooters had murdered half of their informant line as well as four state undercover cops. Result: promotion to captain, commendations from the governor and the director of the DEA, and a transfer to the coveted VCU. The unit let her work alone, make her own decisions, and left CES and Processing at her instant disposal. Thus far, of the seventeen critical homicides that had taken place in her grid, Helen had solved sixteen, the highest success percentile in the history of the department. In another year, she’d be up for deputy chief.

A grand career, in other words. Yet grand was the last thing she felt. Forty-two, she thought dryly, and premenopausal according to my blood tests. One bum marriage and half a dozen bum relationships. Was it age, or just the world? The world was a vampire whose lips and fangs sucked up a little bit more of her vitality as each year passed. A world of murderers and child molesters, of Fetal Cocaine Syndrome and gang rape and failure. She hadn’t truly seen the sun shine in twenty years.

Just darkness, and the ebon of the human mind.

A plethora of visibar lights erupted as Helen pulled up at her 20. State Technical Services looked like scarlet phantoms roving the darkness; Sirchie portable UV lamps glowed eerily purple. The techs wore red polyester utilities so that any accidental fiberfall wouldn’t be confused as crime-scene residue by the Hair & Fibers crew back at Evidence Section.

Cold air choked her when she got out of the Taurus’ capsule of heat. Her breath turned to dismal gaseous frost. A long county road—ravined and flawlessly straight—seemed to extend into infinity. A couple of Dane County Sheriff’s cars—old Ford Tempos—sat parked off the road in a vast cornfield that had been threshed to nubs a few months ago, their headlights aimed at the contact perimeter. Three state cars were here too; on any case that might qualify as a VCU candidate, Central Communications would dispatch the nearest state units, to help the local department secure the scene, and CES had been dispatched right after them, a powder-blue van which served as a mobile crime lab, and a couple of station wagons the same odd color. The uniforms, both county and state, seemed oblivious to the cold, unjacketed as they leaned against their cars.

“Captain Closs?” one voice rang out.

Helen showed her badge and ID to the corporal who approached her, a young guy from Highway Division.

“Is Beck here?” she asked, turning up her collar.

“Yes, ma’am.” He pointed to the lit ravine. “Down there. It’s…”

“What, Corporal?”

“It’s pretty bad, ma’am.”

Helen ignored the comment, glancing instead up toward the county cars. Several of the men were smoking. “Tell those idiots from Dane to put there cigarettes out and pocket the butts. Jesus Christ, this is a crime scene.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And if I see any state cops smoking here, I’ll write them up. I’ll make the Wicked Witch of the West look like Little Orphan Annie. Got it?”

The corporal nodded, his face whitened raw by the cold. Or perhaps it was really shock. After all, there was a dead infant somewhere on this perimeter.

Helen squinted again at the county responders: a mopey, ragtag bunch. “I mean, what is this? The Keystone Cops?”

“Those county SD guys? They don’t know what to do, that’s why they called in a VCU request when they found the body.”

The body, Helen finally remembered why she was here. The baby. “Who’s the trooper in charge? You?”

“No, ma’am.” The corporal stolidly pointed again toward the ravine. “Sergeant Farrell, right over there.”

Helen turned without further word. Farrell was down on one knee beside the CES van, his forehead in his hand.

She could see that he’d vomited. “Are you all right, Sergeant?”

Farrell looked up, blinked hard. “I—”