Dahmer's Not Dead

vehicles awaited, more than she’d expect for something like this. Beck was here with her work-up van, six state cruisers, two EMT trucks, a transport van from Columbus County Detent, a jade-green Pontiac Grand Am with federal plates. A sound of chugging combustion ruptured the chill air: an Ingersoll-Rand trencher/power shovel canting its blade—like a huge chainsaw—deep into the earth.

An array of scowling faces in winter hoods fired glances when Helen approached. Disdain, she thought. Everyone knows I’m the one who pushed for this. No one spoke to her as she shouldered through to get to Olsher. “It’s almost zero, Helen,” he told her. “You ain’t exactly the most popular gal in town right now.”

“I don’t care. This is great. I can’t believe how fast you got this. But—” She glanced down at the plots, marked only by small inset stones bearing an ID number. The trencher crew had already dug down to the top of the cement grave liner, but now they were cutting out what looked to be a recess at the head of the liner. “Why the extra hole?” she asked.

“Workspace,” Olsher answered. “The judge said yes, but only for purposes of identification on site, in extremis. We can do anything we want—take prints, tissue samples, hair, photographs—but it’s gotta be here. In other words, we can’t take the body back to the lab. When we’re done, we seal it up and leave.”

This sounded acceptable to Helen. “I saw a car with fed tags.”

“F.B.I. The SAC from the Madison FO brought two techs with him.”

And—” Helen squinted past the throng, at a blank white van sprung with several high-tech looking antennae and a small satellite dish. “What’s that?”

“It’s a commo-relay van, on loan from Justice. Go ask Beck for the details.”

“Sure, Larrel.” Helen faltered a moment. “You’re pissed at me, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

Helen shirked away. Oh, well. Beck stood at the head of the digging; by now the trencher’s shovel had emptied the workspace. “Have a surgical mask,” Beck said, and handed one to Helen. “Me, I gotta wear that.” At her feet lay Scott Air-Pack with mask and umbilicus. “The body was embalmed but we still can’t take any chances on bacterial flux or a gas bolus.”

“But won’t the body be frozen?”

“Nope. It’s temperature will be below thirty-two, sure, but blood incipients—mainly the embalming solution —will prevent any freezing action of the flesh.”

“Larrel told me to ask you about that commo van.”

“This is a one shot deal,” Beck replied, removing wool mittens and replacing them with vinyl evidence gloves, “so we want to make the most of it. We’re doing three sets of prints—the county’s doing one, I’m doing one, and the Bureau’s doing the backup. See that dish on the van? It’s an uplink to a KV-11 geostatic satellite that’s owned by the Justice Department. Inside we got a UNISYS plate-scanner and digital-analog converter. We’ll be able to ID the body right here in the field.”

The technology seemed hard to believe. “How?” Helen queried, rubbing her bare hands.

“The processor will digitalize all three sets of prints, then feed the digitalization through the satellite to Justice’s Optical Ident Mainframe in Washington. We should have positive ID in less than five minutes.”

“Cool,” Helen said more to herself. Through the throng, she spotted Dipetro and an entourage of goons from the prison. He gave her a curt nod.

“All right, people, make way,” the F.B.I. man announced loudly, his breath gusting. He was dashingly handsome, of Oriental dissent—Hawaiian, Helen guessed. “Make way for the techs. Anyone closer than ten meters from the hole’s gotta wear a 15-micron surgical mask.”

“That’s my cue,” Beck said. Helen ineptly assisted the TSD chief in hoisting the air tank onto her back. Several others did the same. One masked man—a cemetery employee, Helen noted—jumped into the hole and quickly, amid an awful racket, cranked off the top of the grave liner with a gasoline-powered joint spreader, revealing a plain, veneered coffin lid. Then—

“Stand clear!” the Bureau’s Special Agent in Charge yelled. “Watch for gas!”

Another quick rev of the spreader forced open the coffin lid. And then…

Perfect silence.

Helen’s breath filtered through the blue surgical mask, turning white. With more than a little distaste, they all looked down into the opened coffin, and at the rigored, embalmed, and very pallid cadaver within.

««—»»

I don’t know how she does it, Helen thought, her gaze wide over the top rim of her mask. Jan Beck didn’t bat an eye climbing down into that hole. One of the field techs from the Bureau joined her and patiently raised first the cadaver’s right hand, then left, as Beck, just as patiently, inserted a hypodermic needle under each fingertip and injected several cc’s of glycerin, this to distend the pad of each finger and reverse any shrinkage due to desiccation. Then the dead hands were cleaned with isopropanol, sprayed with a clear, oil-based conductant, and printed on shiny mylar scan cards, which Beck had told her about just the other day. The oil- impressions against the mylar replicated the ridge patterns of the fingerprints much more accurately than ink and paper. The Bureau tech took the first set, then Beck, then someone from the prison. After which all three sets of cards were taken to the commo van.

In the meantime another state employee, also wearing an air pack and mask, got into the hole and began taking hair samples. Then he took several rather unpleasant tissue samples—much like coring for a soil sample—by inserting large gauge needles into the chest cavity, the abdomen, and the left thigh. When the employee climbed out of the hole, he paused a moment to glance at Helen, his eyes glaring at her through the plastic faceshield.

It was Tom.

Hundreds of pictures were taken in the interim; one F.B.I. tech even pried open the cadaver’s broken mouth with a pair of special retractors, to take macro photos.

For the entire procedure, however, Helen couldn’t take her eyes off the corpse’s face, which looked the same as the first time she’d seen it in the morgue: A horror-show mask encrusted with blood that had turned almost completely black.

««—»»

Helen, as all of them, seemed to measure time in their exposure to freezing cold air. Eventually the back of the commo van divided open, and the F.B.I. boss emerged with a trail of tractor-feed computer paper. A cluster of heavily jacketed humans crushed toward the rear of the van. “Give me some room, will you? Stand clear. All right, people, my name is Steve Eules. I’m the Special Agent in Charge of the Madison Field Office, F.B.I. We have a positive ID on the decedent—a digital match in triplicate. The decedent, by the way, is not—and I repeat—he is not Jeffrey Dahmer.”

Helen felt buried in a grave herself. One just as cold, just as deep.

“Goddamn it, Helen,” she heard Olsher grumble.

Special Agent Eules continued, his face as emotionless as a carving on a stone escarpment. “The satellite uplink to Washington fed us back the ID of the corpse, through a Wisconsin State Occupational prefix.” Eules peered at the flowing trail of computer paper. “Columbus County Physical Plant Department, Columbus County Department of Corrections—”

“Shit!” Dipetro audibly remarked.

Eules continued without pause: “White male, age: 35 years old. Name: Kussler, Glen, middle initial A.”

Dipetro yelled from his crowd: “What the fuck!” as the rest of the crowd filed back to their cars. More than a few glares were shot toward Helen, like lances, but she didn’t see them. All she could think was this:

I interviewed Kussler two days ago!

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