Dahmer's Not Dead

Back to the present—the world full of his fodder. He gets up, strays to the window—

One day you’ll be a taker. That’s why I’m doing this…

—then looks back with shimmering eyes at the dead man he’d been lying in bed with.

««—»»

Helen glanced at her office clock. Five minutes, she thought. He better not be late. She passed the time by reading one of the tabloids Olsher had inadvertently left. GOD TOLD ME TO DO IT, the top headline read. WHY I KILLED DAHMER, by Tredell Rosser. She flipped to the story, unable to believe that Rosser would’ve been granted an interview with any newspaper much less a tabloid. But when she read the “article,” she plainly saw that he hadn’t. Sources close to the Star have revealed— Helen didn’t bother reading further. Sources close, my ass, she thought. They just made it up, fabricated the whole thing. True, no one with a brain believed anything printed in a supermarket tabloid, but she just couldn’t understand how writers, however corrupt, could be allowed to fabricate “news.” Whatever happened to fraud? Whatever happened to libel? When the Founding Fathers had instituted the premise of free speech in the Constitution, Helen doubted that they meant it was okay for journalists to invent stories and cite anonymous “close sources” as verification.

It wasn’t even worth thinking about. A few minutes later, a man entered, and he didn’t look happy.

“Mr. Goodwin,” Helen greeted from her desk. “Thanks for coming. Please have a seat.”

Daniel Goodwin seemed to scowl in response to the greeting. “I sure don’t understand why I have to be dragged down here,” he said, seating himself. Nondescript in appearance, medium build, early 30s, but Helen could see the chip on his shoulder. Daniel D. Goodwin had been employed by the Madison County Rescue Squad for two years. He was also the lone survivor of the November 29th robbery of EMT Unit #154.

“You weren’t dragged down here, Mr. Goodwin,” Helen pointed out. “You were merely asked to avail yourself for some questions.”

“Avail myself, huh? I already talked to the Narcotics Unit. My partner gets killed, I get a concussion and hairline fracture, and they treat me like I’m the bad guy.”

“And why might that be?”

Goodwin’s face creased to a frown. “Because of the bum rap I got at Falks County FD, which I’m sure you know all about.”

Indeed she did, and a curious consideration, but Helen wasn’t quite sure what she thought about it yet. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Mr. Goodwin, and I’m sorry about your partner. I’d just like you to reiterate some points for me. You say you were assaulted by a lone gunman on the night of November 29th, at a few minutes after eleven?”

“That’s right, 2304, like it says in the report. I was cracked on the head.”

“With what?”

“The butt of his gun.”

“And this was after you opened the unit’s med safe.”

“Yeah. I don’t feel too good about it, but when somebody points a gun in your face and tells you to do something, you do it, especially after the same guy just shot one of your friends.”

“I’m sure I would’ve done the same thing, Mr. Goodwin,” Helen suggested. “Nobody expects you to risk your life protecting county pharmaceuticals. Ambulance jacking is rampant these days. Sixteen incidents already this year, and that’s just the southern district. But tell me a little more about your attacker.”

“It’s all in the report. The guy shot Cooper twice before I could even blink; he was waiting for us inside the truck when we came back from the address. The guy was smart. The average jacking’s always near an alley, never in the middle of a street; he put a lamp inside a closed rowhouse, made it look occupied. So the whole thing looked legit when we responded. But when we got back to the unit, the guy’s already in back waiting for us with the gun.”

Helen scanned the initial report filed by Madison Metro PD. “And the assailant had a pistol with a sound- suppression device?”

“A street silencer,” Goodwin elucidated. “A plastic soda bottle hose-clamped to the barrel; it’s big with dopers and street gangs. They used to use the big two-liter bottles until the soda companies came up with the bright idea of making twenty-ounce ones.”

“You seem to know a lot about it, Mr. Goodwin.”

“I’m an EMT. I see stuff like this all the time. A dozen times a year probably I transport some doper or junkie full of holes, and there’s always one of these bottles lying around near the scene.”

Helen nodded. Sometimes the ingenuity of the street was impressive. “It says here your assailant was tall, thin, wearing a leather jacket, gloves, and a ski mask, white caucasian.”

“Right. I know he was white because the eyeholes were big. And he sounded white on the 911 tape.”

“And after you opened the safe, he rendered you unconscious. And when you woke up, the first thing you did was examine the safe?”

“No, the first thing I did was radio for help. I was seeing stars. But I did manage to glance in the safe, and that was the strange part.”

Helen focused. “Strange because the typical products a jacker would go for were still there?”

“That’s right. We don’t carry much any more since jacking’s become popular. A little Dilaudid and a little Atropine—there’s nothing else in that safe a jacker could get high off of or sell.”

“But this jacker didn’t touch any of that. Am I correct, Mr. Goodwin?”

“All the Dilaudid and all the Atropine was still there. The only thing this guy took was a box of i.v.—”

“Succinicholine sulphate.”

Goodwin affirmed the fact with a nod. Helen paused, trying to read him. He seemed on the level, but—

So do a lot of people, she reminded herself. “Okay, Mr. Goodwin, now tell me about Falks County.”

Goodwin’s eyes thinned, and suddenly a vein was bulging on his temple. “Jesus Christ, I knew this was coming. Look, the county attorney’s office dropped charges. You want to know why? Because I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Well, they dropped charges for lack of enough evidence deemed sufficient for prosecution,” Helen made the minor correction.

“You people kill me,” Goodwin accosted. “Look, sure, I screwed up that night in Falks; I left the keys in the truck because there was a kid lying in the middle of the road with blood all over him, and it was a strapped call.”

“A strapped call?”

“We got the call when I was the only guy in the station, so that’s why I had no partner that night.”

Helen nodded again. “But, according to the Falks County investigator, your partner was in the station—

“He was in the can taking a dump, lady. What, I’m supposed to wait for him to finish wiping his ass when there’s a transport call for a kid bleeding in the street?”

“—and suggests that you deliberately left the station without him, because responding without him would have removed a second witness from the scene. Mr. Goodwin, the county investigator always believed that you arranged the whole incident on purpose in order to allow an unknown associate to commandeer your Falks County EMT van and then steal all the controlled pharmaceuticals in that med safe.”

There. That’s what she wanted to say, to gauge his reaction. And his reaction came as no surprise:

“That’s a bunch of fuckin’ bullshit! Do you know how much Dilaudid the average EMT truck carries? Ten tabs! Maybe worth five hundred bucks to a dealer on the street. And Atropine, it’s a cheap five-dollar high. Yeah, sure, lady, I’m gonna jeopardize my fuckin’ career to split a couple hundred bucks for the penny-ante dope in an EMT truck? Jesus Christ!”

Helen’s purpose was now served. Get him hot. Get him riled. Get him in a defensive emotional mode, because when that happened, people generally lost their sense of better judgment and would—

Slip up.