Dahmer's Not Dead

“What I mean, Captain, is that Arlinger couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even flinch. But one thing he could do was feel. It’s the ultimate torture. Arlinger felt everything while the killer was cutting on him.”

Helen blanched.

Everything, she thought. Everything…

“And there was nothing he could do about it,” Beck finished, “except lie there and take it till he died.”

— | — | —

CHAPTER TWELVE

Olsher did a double-take passing her office, then, squinting, stuck his big head in. “Jesus, Helen, it’s going on midnight. I saw you in here this morning at—what?—eight?”

“Seven,” Helen corrected, glancing up from her desk. And I’m not even on the clock.

“You ought to go home, get some rest.”

“So should you,” she suggested. “You’ve been working just as long as I have.”

“Can’t sleep,” the deputy chief grumbled.

“Fifty cups of coffee a day, it’s no wonder.” She noticed a tabloid under his arm, The Star. GOVERNMENT ADMITS: DAHMER WAS PART ALIEN! Helen just shook her head.

“Hey, coffee’s the only thing that makes me happy. And how can I sleep when I gotta worry about what the press is going to say about us tomorrow? Tait really slapped it to you in the Tribune.”

“I heard. But I got more important things to worry about than the worst newspaper in the city.” Then she explained Jan Beck’s tox screen of the blood of Stewart K. Arlinger, and the dose of succinicholine sulphate.

“That’s good, isn’t it?” Olsher perked up. “Nothing like the run of the mill street tranks Dahmer used.”

“That’s not how the papers’ll see it,” Helen posited. “They’ll only see what they want to see. Even though this is a completely dissimilar drug, they’ll play it as another similarity simply because Arlinger was drugged before his murder. And that damn letter is still killing us.”

“So what are you working on now?”

“Trying to get a line on where this succinicholine came from. You can’t buy it on the street—it has no street value. According to Beck, the only places are emergency rooms and ambulances, and the manufacturer, of course, but that’s in Newark, New Jersey, and pharmaceutical manufacturers all have security like Fort Knox.”

“But still, it’s got to be some sort of theft.”

“Sure.”

Olsher, obviously weary but trying not to show it, leaned against the office doorway. “So where do you go from there?”

“All clinical pharmaceuticals have a federal control number, and whenever they’re stolen or found missing in inventory, it has to be reported to NCIC and also FDA. And the only way hospitals can make a report like that in the first place is through the state police MAC. So that’s what I’m doing now.” Helen’s hand bid her computer CRT. “Unfortunately, at this hour, only half the terminals are on line. It’ll take me some time, in other words.”

“Well, just make sure you don’t drop dead from sleep deprivation. If you start to burn out, go home. It can wait till tomorrow.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

Distant footsteps could be heard behind Olsher, from the hallway. The deputy chief took a quick glance, then whispered, “Looks like you got a visitor.”

“What?” A visitor? At this hour? “Who is it, Larrel? Is it Beck?” Helen liked Beck, even though it was hard. Beck didn’t resent Helen’s rank, she merely was suspicious of anyone with rank. Which was normal and very human. Helen had been the same way when she first joined. However—

“It’s Tom,” Olsher piped to her. “See ya later.”

The name jolted her.

Tom.

Oh, no. What am I going to— This was a surprise she didn’t need. There was no time to prepare, no time to think out what she wanted to say, no time—

“Hi, Helen.”

Speechless. Locked in mental rigor. What am I going to say to him? What should I do? Yet here he was, standing right in her office. She’d been thinking about him off and on for the last several days, knowing she would have to confront him eventually but— Burying my head in the sand, as usual, she admitted. She missed him, she wanted to talk to him and try to work things out, but how could she? After that phony story about the hospital annex, an annex that didn’t exist?

Helen felt stifled. “Hi.”

“So, how have you been?”

“All right. Well, busy I should say.”

“I guess so, with all this P Street stuff wreaking havoc in the papers. I’ve had five FOIA requests already, for ID verification on Dahmer’s body. Even got a double-check order from the people running the Bureau’s Optical Latent Mainframe. It’s crazy.”

“Yeah,” was all Helen could say. She tried not to look at him but had to. Dressed as usual, in decent gray slacks, a white Christian Dior shirt, and a labcoat. The image kicked her back to any similar night in he past: they’d both be getting off late, he’d come pick her up, and they’d go back to his place and fall asleep in each other’s arms. It was comforting, it was nice. But…

Not tonight, she guessed.

Eventually he broke, shifted his stance. “Well, I’m not any good with small talk and neither are you. I guess the real reason I came was to, you know, find out what’s going on…with us, I mean.”

“I—” She couldn’t take her eyes off him. “I don’t know.”

Tom shrugged, looked awkwardly around the office as he spoke. “You have this paranoid idea that I’m seeing some other woman, but I’m not. It’s your imagination.”

Helen bit back a more perfunctory response. First of all, she was sick of being called paranoid, even though she knew she was. And how could he even say such a thing straight to her face. “Tom, look, I called the hospital to see if the annex number was the same one on your pager. And you know what they told me? They told me that there is no annex at the hospital.”

Tom shrugged again. “Of course there isn’t an annex at the hospital. The annex isn’t on the hospital premise, it’s downtown on Bilker Street.”

Helen’s eyes widened.

“It’s a supply repository, Helen, a warehouse. The hospital rents space there for inventory storage. Every hospital in the county rents space there. That’s where we keep our overstock, and certain deliveries are taken there if there’s no room at St. John’s. And that’s also the reason there was a different prefix on my pager. I would’ve explained it all if you’d have given me the chance.”

Helen continued to sit there with her eyes propped open, as if glaring at her own haste and, yes, her own paranoia. Her fingernail ticked against the desk, right next to the phone book.

“Go ahead and check if you don’t believe me.”

She couldn’t do that—that would be too much. And, now, it was plain to see just by looking at him that he