Dahmer's Not Dead

his PV, Two-Zero-Seven; in the back seat sat the suspect, handcuffed and waist-chained. Chase, as if summoned, approached the unit, shouldered past the surrounding phalanx of uniforms.

 The day blazed, the sun high in a perfect sky. Birds chirped and swirled in elegant circles overhead. It was a beautiful day. So how could something like this happen? How could it?

Chase leaned over the half-opened back window. “Hey,” he said.

The suspect looked up. The pale face remained calm, calm as the July sky.

“How could you do something like that?” Chase asked in a voice like crumbling rocks.

The suspect returned Chase’s glance. The eyes set in the head looked dead.

“Thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven,” Jeffrey Dahmer said. “Yet thou shalt be brought down into hell—”

Good God Almighty, Chase thought.

“—deep into the pit.”

— | — | —

CHAPTER ONE

COLUMBUS COUNTY DETENTION CENTER, PORTAGE, WISCONSIN

NOVEMBER 28, 1994, 7:50 A.M.

“Come on, J.D., get the lead out, huh? You too, Rosser.” Detention Officer Wells wished for a smoke, a cup of coffee. He needed to find Perkins to get yesterday’s scores, which he himself had missed due to a preposterous argument with his wife. He cowed Dahmer, Vander, and Rosser into the Block C recreational unit. The three ragtag inmates shuffled along with their mops and buckets, all dressed in dark-green prison coveralls. Vander was a white supremacist, Wells had heard, and belonged to some KKK-like club full of silly bonehead nazis. Killed his wife and said two black guys did it. Rosser, black himself, stood close to 6’3”, all muscle and bad news, playing a Ganser game according to the prison psych staff. Terrifying to look at, murder and madness on two legs. The sides of his head were shaved—since the new detent rule that allowed convicts to have their hair any way they wanted. “A violation of the basic human right to self-expression,” some ACLU lawyer had insisted. Fine. They could shave their heads and shellack them for all Wells cared. Rosser, yes, had the sides shaved, with a fat plop of hair sitting on top. A new DO several months ago had made the mistake of offering personal comment. “Get that black buck Jiffy Pop shit off your head, you asshole,” he’d told Rosser. The DO had been fired the same day for racial traducement, even though the DO himself had been black. But that was fine with Wells too. In the slam, he did not perceive race, or convicts and their identical human freight. They’re all in this together, so the last thing any of them need are DO’s in their shit simply because of their color. Rosser had shot a guy in the head four times during a hold up in 1990, wasn’t up for parole till 2042. His Ganser was a God theme, not uncommon.

But then there was Dahmer—“J.D.,” as he was called by most everyone on the block. His parole didn’t come up until 2927. Gee, Wells thought in jest. I wonder if he’ll make it? Kind of a quiet sad sack, which surprised every DO in this 676-man Rock Ramada. When a guy strangles and dismembers seventeen people, and eats some of them, you expect him to have a certain look, a certain aura. But Dahmer didn’t have any of that. He was a pud. He’d cranked on thirty pounds since coming here in February, 1992. Sat in Cell 648 most of the time, smoking cigarettes and listening to religious music. Weird thing was he’d asked for general pop, which sounded pretty stupid to Wells. Every black inmate in the joint wanted Dahmer’s ass, yet the guy gets his lawyer to plead with the director to give him main line habitation. Some schmuck last July tried to cut Dahmer’s throat during a church service but botched it because the blade fell off his shank. Still, though. Dahmer knew people were gunning for him yet he insisted on living in the general prison population. “I want to see the world,” he’d told Wells. This ain’t no world, you meat-head, Wells had thought. It’s a fucking county max full of killers, and half of ‘em want to kill YOU. Didn’t matter to this guy, though. It seemed almost like he was begging for it. So the director gave him tee-seg—therapeutic segregation—and let him be on the clean up crew for seventy-cents an hour. He was out four hours a day on detail, and he attended the service in the chapel every morning.

“Dahmer, hey, Dahmer,” Rosser taunted. “What human meat taste like?”

“Shut up, Rosser,” Wells ordered. Dahmer remained silent, shuffling along next to Vander. Vander’s bald head gleamed in the caged line lights. “Don’t listen to him, J.D.,” Vander said aside. “He’s an asshole.”

“Dahmer, hey, Dahmer—”

“Goddamn it, Rosser, I said shut up,” Wells repeated. “You don’t and I throw your big bad killin’ ass straight back into bev-seg where you can count the lines in the cinderblocks for twenty-three and a half hours a day.”

“Ain’t no cell on earth can hold the Son of God,” Rosser whispered. “You are the number of the beast, and that number is six-hundred, three score, and six.”

“Cut with the Ganser shit. You’re just making an asshole of yourself.”

“You callin’ the Son of God an asshole?”

Wells couldn’t help but laugh. He followed them up into the gymnasium, then pointed out their assignments. “Vandie, J.D., you two split between the weight room and the treadmill cove, and Rosser, you mop the latrine. Got it, guys?”

Dahmer and Vander nodded. But Rosser? No way. He’d always be running his yap about something. “Aw, man,” he complained. “You’re gonna make the Son of God mop the latrine, man?”

“That’s right.”

“But-but, I am the million-year-old Son of God!”

“Fine,” Wells said. “And you’re gonna get that latrine so clean that God Himself would happy to drop His poop in our bowls, so tell that to your Dad. I’ll be right outside but I got my eye on all of ya’s. Get the job done and no dicking around.”

The three inmates dispersed with their forlorn buckets and mops. Wells went back out on the main line, tapped out a cigarette.

No sign of Perk. Christ, I wonder how bad the Redskins lost yesterday. Wells had a fin on a tight spread, but Shuler was looking hot.

Early morning, the main line seemed oddly quiet, a Zombieville of shuffling men all dressed in the same muck-green prison utilities and all wearing the same drained faces. Wing sectors of four to six men each were being escorted to and from chow. Wells thought it was funny; this morning Dahmer had eaten only one hard-boiled egg —he ate the egg white only, leaving the solid yolk—and some cereal with no milk. Said he was on a diet, of all things. Who the hell do you need to look good for? Wells thought. The wall?

Wells drably smoked half his cigarette, then tamped it out in the red butt-can. Perkins must be on drive detail, escorting inmates to the county courthouse in downtown Portage.

About ten minutes later, at precisely 8:10 a.m., DO Wells turned to go back to his supervisory post, but he didn’t even have time to finish the turn before the lock-down alarm began to blare through the prison like an air raid siren, so loud that even the dense block walls seemed to throb outward with each blast. The prison was having a heart attack.

««—»»

The nightmare-face hovered so close she could smell it. Yet it didn’t smell real, it didn’t smell human. Like clay, it smelt, like damp, creeky earth. The face seemed gray in the dream, as though its features had been crudely gouged from a blank of—indeed—clay. A slit for a mouth, a slit for nose. Twin slits for eyes. But whose face was it?