Dahmer's Not Dead

But Helen’s coffee didn’t even have time to get cool before she was up and out. It took two hours with the police artist and IdentiKit technician to get a good digital composite on what she remembered of Campbell’s face. Another hour at the Police Commissioner’s Office to process a press-release request for the composite to be published in the papers. And yet another hour at the assistant district attorney’s office getting North’s active charges dropped in place of probation before judgment. And after all that, the day was almost done. But she still had one more thing to do, didn’t she?

She had an appointment, with Dr. Sallee.

««—»»

“I’m sorry, Helen. I remember telling you psychiatrists were only right ninety-nine percent of the time. Well, here’s the one percent. I called it wrong.”

“So did I,” Helen said. Only now, in Sallee’s office, did she feel wound down from all the rigors of the day. The office was tranquil, blissfully sedate. Sallee’s voice gave her solace.

“I was convinced, as you, that Dahmer was genuinely dead, and that the perpetrator was a copycat,” he said. “But at least, in your discoveries today, you have a positive link to the accomplice. A name, a face, all in one day? That’s fast work.”

“Not fast enough. It’s only a last name, and a sketched composite face. Not a whole lot in the thick of things.”

“There you go again, as always, Helen. Downplaying your skills, self-effacing the efforts of your own ingenuity.”

Helen audibly moaned.

“Any more dreams?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Resolved anything with Tom?”

The name made her feel distant from herself, as though she were looking at herself in a tiny window very far away. “No.”

Sallee seemed to sense that she didn’t want to talk about herself today, she wanted to talk about—

“Campbell, then,” he said. “And it’s typical. Everything North told you about Campbell fits the basic profile of the accomplice, even before we knew his name. If I were you, I’d keep a close eye on North.”

“That’s what I’m doing,” she explained. “I have a direction-finder on his car. Central Commo will follow and copy any places in the city grid that North drives to.”

“Good thinking. A log of North’s associates will give you more names of persons who may have been acquainted with Kussler, and perhaps even Campbell himself.”

Helen nodded sluggishly. Suddenly she felt exhausted. God, I wish I could just go to sleep right here in his office.

“And just as I was telling you several days ago, the so-called ‘killer-groupie’ phenomenon—obsessive- reference disorder,” Sallee said. “It’s precisely what you predicted.”

“You predicted it, Dr. Sallee. I simply followed up on it.”

Obsessive-reference disorder, she thought. Great. If it’s not technical gobbledegook, it’s clinical gobbledegook.

“—very very common for certain sexual extroverts to become fascinated with and obsessed by serial killers. They regard them as heroes, they even admire their deeds. And a good many of them are X,Y,Y-Syndrome candidates, as I’ve previously mentioned. What North disclosed, I mean—not only Campbell’s obsession with Dahmer, but his other sundry interests: sadistic sex, explicitly brutal videos, snuff films—”

“He also said Campbell played excessively violent computer games, not the popular games, but the underground ones.”

Sallee nodded. “I remember the Senate hearings. There’s an entire subculture of people who patronize these games. They order them through the mail, and over the Internet by use of privileged down-loading codes. There’s a flurry of such games—depicting rape, torture, murder and mutilation from the player’s perspective. It’s a sick world, Helen, but I don’t have to tell you that.”

Yeah…

“And just more verification as to Campbell’s psycho-sexual, obsessive profile,” Sallee continued.

“But still, it’s Dahmer who’s doing the killing, and I need you to refresh my memory. Whatever that rare syndrome is that could make Dahmer change.”

Sallee fiddled with piles of papers on his desk as he spoke, a fuss-budget. “Yes. A conative-episodic break. I wouldn’t have counted on something like that at all—it’s just so rare. But it’s equally obvious. With Campbell’s assistance, Dahmer is indeed committing new murders, via a new modus, and that new modus can only be explained by an episodic break, or something similar.”

“But what kind of things could cause such a mental break?”

“Chiefly?” Sallee said. “A memory flashback. Sometimes flashbacks are triggered by sudden hormonal imbalances, a readily accessible cause for a personality reversal in someone like Dahmer, someone with an introverted psychological mein. Another incidental that’s interesting is the statistical age-group. Psychopaths and sociopaths who experience this sort of episodic break are almost always in the same age margin: thirty to forty. Dahmer is now thirty-four. And the actual clinical incident is statistically identical too, due to a natural increase in certain neurotransmitters in the brain. Certain mentally unstable persons, due to irregularities in brain chemistry, experience an increase in specific neurotransmitters, whereas a healthy person would experience a decrease due to aging, in particular a neurotransmitter called L-dopamine. This upsurge can effect a sudden memory improvement, often digging up memories previously buried via childhood trauma. One more thing: inadvertent memory flashbacks are sometimes caused by sudden dietary changes, the same kind of change one might experience going from a lifetime of learned eating habits to a pre-designated prison diet. I suppose it’s possible, too, that one of the prison psychiatrists attempted a ‘flooding,’ ‘memory-regression,’ or ‘desensitization’ technique as part of Dahmer’s therapy, and a memory flashback occurred through one of those means. But those are really the only documented instances of a triggering of a conative-episodic break. Some… catalyst… that causes the subject to remember previously buried traumatic experiences from childhood…”

««—»»

—and suddenly he remembers it all. It had been years, hadn’t it, and he’d never remembered his father, and what his father had done to him. Only very recently—a year ago?—when the show he’d seen it on Geraldo, about adults experiencing a resurface of childhood memories, and it had thrown him into that awful trance—

««—»»

“Upon the initial catalytic recollection,” Sallee told her, “the subject often describes a situation triggering a formal memory—a memory buried since childhood—and then experiences a sort of retrogressive trance—”

««—»»

—that brought it all up like pus in a boil. Everything his father had done to him as an innocent, terrified child, and everything he’d said afterward. Like “Fear is power, son. Real men take life by the balls. They take what they need, and they become powerful in the fear they hold over others. When you’re older, you’ll understand. You’ll thank me for this. You’ll see that I’m doing this for you…because you’re the same way…”

««—»»

Helen didn’t remember a whole lot of her abnormal psych from college. “A retrogressive