Dahmer's Not Dead

Dahmer’s Not Dead

by Edward Lee & Elizabeth Steffen

Kindle Edition

Necro Publications

2011

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DAHMER’S NOT DEAD

© 1999 by Edward Lee & Elizabeth Steffen

DEDICATION:

To Doris June and J-Fer.

Also, for Debra Miller, Patricia Bradley, Vette Myers and the rest of my federal and civilian friends who indulge me in my eccentricities and animal adventures. Thank you!

And for R.K.

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PROLOGUE

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN, JULY, 1991

“PV-Two-Zero-Seven, do you copy?”

“This is Two-Zero-Seven, I read you. Go ahead.”

“PV-Two-Zero-Seven, are you 10-8?”

“Roger.”

“Proceed to AB on North 25th Street, Building 1055, Unit 213 for possible Signal 22. Investigate and report.”

“Roger, but what’s the scoop?”

“Possible domestic complaint. Standby for complainant descript via case number filed by PV-Two-Zero-Eight… Tenant’s name is Dahmer, Jeffrey, 31 years old, white male…”

««—»»

“10-4,” Chase groaned. “Two-Zero-Seven 10-6 to North 25th Street. Out.”

What a pain in the ass, he thought, hanging up the mike. He stubbed out a Winston and honked the cruiser’s horn. Kick me too, why don’t ya? In moments Chase’s partner, Sergeant Dallas Gollimar, returned to the patrol car with two coffees and a bag of Burger King Double Whoppers with Cheese. “What!” Gollimar snapped.

“We just got a goddamn call,” Chase complained.

“You’re jivin’ me, right? It’s twenty minutes before shiftchange!”

Chase started the shining white Dodge Diplomat, an old car but ever reliable. He and Gollimar were good cops, as far as street cops went. You gave them shit, they’d give it right back to you, but you treat them decent, they’d do the same. They’d seen their share of the tough stuff on this victor beat, and never balked. They knew what they were doing, and they knew the job. Only thing they hated was punt calls twenty minutes before they were off shift.

“We just got a Signal 22,” Chase said. “Christ, I don’t even know what the hell that is.”

“Unknown Trouble,” Gollimar told him, getting in, slamming the door. “I haven’t heard that one in years. Usually they turn out to be domestics.”

“That’s what dispatch said.” Chase lit another Wintson. “You ready for this? Two-Oh-Eight just copped some kid running down the street screaming. The kid had his hands cuffed behind his back, had bruises on him.”

“Two-Oh-Eight? Who’s that? That’s Beer Gut and Karp, ain’t it?”

“Right.” Chase pulled out onto the hot bright street; the traffic was a bitch, but you got used to it. Daylight raged across the windshield. “So they pick this kid up, and the kid tells them some guy tried to kill him in his apartment, some guy named Dahmer, North 25th Street. And we gotta check it out.”

“Bullshit!” Gollimar exclaimed. “It’s twenty minutes before we go off! Those fuckin’ guys are always punting their shit to us. Let them take the call!”

“Can’t. It’s in our loke, Weiser’s orders. Beer Gut and Karp are writing up the in-pross paperwork right now; they had to take the kid to the hospital. The kid had bruises, like I said, and claimed he’d been drugged.”

“Drugged? Oh, man. This sounds like a crock of shit. Somebody always drop-kicks their garbage calls on us. I’ll give you ten to one, Beer gut and Karp are both slugging coffee and donuts and laughing it up right now, those fat sons of bitches.”

Chase shrugged, cruised past The Pier Three Annex, a restaurant he’d never be able to eat at. On 32.5 a year and city taxes going up fifteen percent? Stuckey’s was more like it. And Burger King. But— A job’s a job, he realized. Things could be worse.

“Hey, man?” he asked. “Where’s my Double Whopper with Cheese?”

««—»»

“A terrible, terrible smell, all the time now,” the old lady told them. Chase and Gollimar had met her on the landing, not the super but some old crone in a shaggy robe. “And the noise! You boys wouldn’t believe it.”

“What kind of noise, ma’am?” Gollimar asked.

“Like…power tools or something like that. A big saw.”

Power tools? Chase wondered. Okay, so the guy’s building something. The only thing that smelled was this call. They got them all the time like this. A lover’s spat. The girl gets pissed, runs out, talks shit about her hubby or boyfriend, then has a change of heart. They kiss and make up. All charges dropped. Only difference here was the complainant was a guy, which either meant he was gay or he had one tough girlfriend with the first name Jeffrey. But what else had the old lady said? Something about a smell? “I don’t smell anything,” Chase observed.

“Neither do—”

“Ho!” Chase jerked back and nearly yelled just as they’d taken another step.

There was a smell, all right. Faint but pungent. Disgusting. It brought Corporal Jack Chase’s memory back to childhood days, when he and a friend named Lee had been rummaging around behind the old, closed McCrory’s in Newark. They’d stuck their gallant young heads right into that open BMI dumpster and seen what were probably the