Dahmer's Not Dead

remnants of a dead German Shepherd that must’ve been rotting in the sun for days. The stench made them both flinch back and throw up in tall weeds…

“What is that?” Gollimar griped.

“It ain’t good, I’ll tell ya that.”

“What’s this guy’s name again?”

Chase checked his notepad. “Dahmer, Jeffrey, white cauc., 31 years old. Works nightshifts as the Wokina Chocolate Factory on Toback Boulevard.”

Gollimar rapped bare knuckles hard on the to Room 213. The smell seemed to treble.

“Shit, the guy works nights,” Chase reminded. “He’s probably asleep.”

“Yeah, you’re right. He’s probably—”

The apartment door clicked open. A sullen face seemed to hang there, perplexed. Unshaven, kind of pallid, straight light-brown hair.

Crazy eyes, Chase noted at once.

“Yes?”

“Jeffrey Dahmer?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Sergeant Gollimar of the Milwaukee Police Department, and this here’s my partner, Corporal Chase. Mind if we come in and have a talk?”

Chase’s eyes seemed to snag on a visual tick, peering over his sergeant’s shoulder.

“Actually, I do mind, Officer. I work midnight shifts and I’m very tired—”

“Yes, sir, I understand that,” Gollimar responded in what cops called “report-speak,” a cordial, polite tone of voice even when you weren’t feeling cordial or polite. “But we’ve been asked to investigate a complaint filed by —”

Chase’s eyes suddenly bloomed like shocked flowers. He wasn’t even sure what he was looking at when his instincts popped a hair-trigger in his mind. In a well-trained half-second move, he hit the thumb-snap on his holster, shucked his Colt Trooper Mark III, and bulled past Gollimar. He snapped the revolver into the tenant’s face, shouting, “Put your hands in the air right now, put your hands in the air!”

Gollimar recoiled. “What the hell are you do—”

“There’s something hanging in the closet and something really fucked up on the bed!” Chase shouted. “Check it out while I keep a bead on this guy!”

 Sergeant Gollimar drew his own piece. “Hold him,” he said, moving cautiously into the foul, three-roomed apartment. The place was a dump, filthy, and the stench, now, was almost overpowering. What in God’s name… Then—

The closet. Jack said to check the closet…

Gollimar stared.

“It’s a—shit, man, it’s something from a gag shop,” he scoffed. They hung there absurdly. They couldn’t be real.

“The bed!” came Chase’s next bellow. “Look on the bed!”

Gollimar turned. Something wasn’t right. Suddenly his sweat was oozing and his mind fogged up. He looked down at the bed, which seemed covered with sheet plastic. Yes, he looked down and—

—stared.

These were no rubber party gags. They were real. They were severed limbs. And he knew now that the things he’d seen hanging in the closet—two severed hands wired together—were just as real. An arm on the bed looked as though the bicep had been filleted out of it. A glance higher in the closet showed him more darkened things sitting on the top shelf, but by then you could’ve put a gun to Gollimar’s head and he would not have moved forward for a closer inspection. Another glance, to the opposite corner of the bedroom, showed him a lidded 57- gallon industrial drum.

Drums, was all Gollimar thought.

“Holy shit, man!” Chase was yelling again. “There’s more stuff out here too! All over the place!”

This was no apartment, it was an interstice of hell. We’re in hell, Gollimar baldly thought. He did not know how to react. A psychic gag-reflex seemed to tremor in him while the little that was left of his professional instincts walked him out of the room.

“Keep your motherfucking hands in the air, you fucking son of a bitch, or so help me God, I’ll blow you clean into next year!” Chase was still bellowing from the other room.

Gollimar, shocked in only seconds, stumbled back amid the stench. Keep cool, keep cool. Don’t fall apart. “I gotta call for some back up. We got serious 64 material in there.”

“Tell me about it!” Chase cracked. “There’s a fucking head sitting in a box! Next to the refrigerator!”

There were, in fact, several more heads inside the refrigerator, a small 18.4-cubic foot Sears Kenmore. Gollimar, however, would never see those heads. His psyche would not allow him to pull open the door, nor would it allow him to look directly at the head in the box or even contemplate opening the Tappan chest freezer on the other side of the kitchen.

“I’m gonna kill you if you make one more move, you son of a bitch!” Chase yelled at the suspect.

Could a human spirit go numb? Gollimar floated more than walked deeper into the tiny, unkempt kitchen. He was about to pick up the phone and call District Six Dispatch when he noted the stove…

Something seemed to rumble there, a black, enameled pot. A lobster pot, he recognized. He and his wife had one; every Labor Day they went out back and cooked lobsters for their friends, a big party.

But this was no party.

Steam gently gusted from the pot’s lid. Gollimar would never have guessed in a thousand years that this same lobster pot would eventually be auctioned off nearly four years later for $2,500. It would be purchased by an aviation lawyer from Philadelphia. The refrigerator, on the other hand, would sell to a “private investor” from Reston,, Virginia, for 15.4. Many things in this self-same apartment, in fact, would sell for extraordinary sums solely due to the things which now occupied them.

Gollimar stared at the lobster pot. Then he lifted the lid with a pot-holder sporting a knit caricature of a Calico cat. Why he did this he would never know and always regret. He looked into the pot.

My God, he thought, but it was the palest and least sapient thought that had ever occurred to him in his life.

««—»»

“You all right?”

Gollimar, down on one knee, nodded with his forehead in his hand. The huge white van sat parked in the lot, a single light revolving. MILWAUKEE COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER read the side panel. Evidence was here too now, along with at least a dozen District Six cops. When Chase had seen what was in that lobster pot, he’d nearly lost his Double Whopper with Cheese. Gollimar had not been so lucky.

Two paramedics marched out of the apartment entry, bearing a stretcher topped by a number of plastic bags. A photographer from Ident reeled out behind them, his face pale as cream. More evidence techs entered the building, in rubber haz-mat suits and Scott Air-Pack respirators.

Gollimar’s voice sounded parched, only half alive. He rubbed his face and shivered. “What kind of a world is this?” he asked himself more than his partner.

“A fucked up world,” Chase answered just a listlessly. Every time he lit a cigarette, he spat it out. Everything seemed to taste the way the inside of that apartment smelled. He would have dreams of that smell for the rest of his life. Gollimar would resign in a year and a half, haunted too by dreams. Veteran street cops always expected the worst. But this?

This was worse than the worst could ever, ever be.

“An evil world,” Chase completed his response. A glance to the right showed him