Dahmer's Not Dead

over-wound spring—any moment it might snap. The hand continued gingerly to investigate her.

“Darling,” Tom whispered.

Helen lay in a momentary shock. A cloud passed the window, letting winter moonlight fall into the room, beaming on Tom’s face.

Tom…

Short of breath, Helen moaned. Tom had come back to her… She pulled him naked atop her. Her nipples swelled so thoroughly they ached; she felt the veins beat in her breasts. She sensed an earthy purgation, a primal flux of feelings that demanded to be loosed.

But had she ever felt so overjoyed? She looked up into Tom’s face, saw his unmistakable smile and the familiar love in his eyes. The clean sweat of passion made his flesh shine, his big bright eyes gazing right back into hers.

“I love you, Helen.”

“I-I…love you too.”

There. Is wasn’t so hard to say, was it? She knew she loved him, it was just that she’d said it so infrequently, it seemed uncomfortable.

“I’m sorry things got so messed up between us,” he whispered.

“Me too.”

“We’ll work them out.”

“Yes. I want to.”

And she did, she did. In spite of all the things that had happened, and all the things she didn’t understand— she wanted to work things out. She needed to.

The feel of his weight on her, and its immediacy, parched her voice. She opened her legs, pulled him tighter.

“Make love to me,” she pleaded.

“Mm-hmm.”

Helen winced. The voice was different now, and then came the impact: the stench, so familiar from being in Tom’s lab—

Formalin. Disinfectant. Embalming fluid.

Helen screamed.

The face was plain in the moonlight, despite its broken-toothed smile and crushed facial bones.

It was no longer Tom who lay atop her. It was Jeffrey Dahmer.

The paralysis of nightmare locked her down on the bed. She squeezed her eyes shut, so not to have to look at this abomination, but dead fingertips plucked them back open.

“Look, look. See?” the morgue-cold corpse said.

The corpse-face was gone, its ravagement smoothing over, its bruises and contusions dissolving like white sand pouring, until it had blended completely into the face she’d seen so many times in the nightmares of her of past. A blank white face smooth as a featureless mask. Then the knife-slit mouth leaned down to kiss her, the vaguest tip of a grub-white tongue slipping between the lips…

 Helen awoke thrashing, shrieking soundlessly. The winter moon remained in her window, the room remained warm and dark as the dream. Was it really over?

She nearly fell out of bed reaching for the lamp, then nearly knocked the lamp over turning it on.

And there she lay in the sweat of her own horror, her nightgown glued to her skin as she waited for her heart to beat down.

She didn’t sleep for the rest of the night.

««—»»

“I buy it,” Jan Beck said the next morning in the lab. Helen had just explained her theory: that Campbell was, without a doubt, the man who arranged Dahmer’s escape. “Can’t see why Olsher doesn’t, but you got to admit, he’ll never win any awards for speculative thinking. He’s brass. Brass can’t think past their noses.”

I’m brass too, Jan, Helen thought in response but said nothing. A tabloid lay on the counter; DAHMER WAS WRITING A COOKBOOK! the header boasted. Helen felt a quick twinge. “It’s still got plenty of missing pieces, though, and the only way I’m going to find them is to—”

“Find Campbell, sure,” Beck agreed. “No easy task either. You running his name?”

“I just started. It’s going to take a while. There are over 30,000 people in the state of Wisconsin named Campbell. I’m cross-reffing with prison and mental hospital releases going back three years, plus a general search on anyone named Campbell with a rap sheet for any sexually related crime. I haven’t got my hopes up, though. Sallee says guys this smart, and with this profile, probably haven’t been caught.”

Beck removed a bottle of Snapple from the lab fridge. “You run the name against hospital records, especially this hospital?”

“That’s the first thing I did—here and Columbus County General, where Dahmer’s so-called body was first taken. It came up zilch. There are two Campbells working here, and one there. None fit the mold.”

“At least you’ve got things cooking. You got a DF on North, and that will probably give you more leads down the road, you’ve got Central Programming running Campbell’s name. And while all that’s going on—”

“I have too fill in the holes,” Helen muttered, staring absently around the lab. She felt like she hadn’t slept at all, which was essentially true. The nightmare had bitten her deep. I’m turning into on of those proverbial obsessed cops. No life outside of the job. The case takes over everything, even your dreams. “I think that’s the main reason Olsher’s not taking me seriously. My theory doesn’t explain how Dahmer was positively ID’d via fingerprints. Repeatedly, his prints matched. One, after the beating at the prison, two, on arrival at Columbus County General for the first official pronouncement of death, and, three, after transport here. Three times those fingerprints matched, but then we dig up the body, and it’s Kussler.”

Beck shrugged as she tended a peripheral printer connected to a spectrographic point-processor. “Those prints matched because the guy being transported was Dahmer. He was switched with Kussler’s body after he arrived here. I don’t see any other explanation.”

Helen blinked at the hypothesis. It just sounded too far-fetched. “But the same body ID’d as Dahmer was pronounced dead repeatedly, Jan. The prison physician, the chief of ER at Columbus County General, and several more doctors here.”

“And Tom too,” Beck reminded off the top of her head.

Yeah, Tom too. The name soured her mood at once.

Beck drew on, “In other words, you don’t understand how Dahmer could’ve been pronounced dead when he was really alive? That’s the easy part.”

Helen peered at Beck. “How is faking death easy?”

“You’re forgetting one of this case’s most unique constituents, Captain. Succinicholine sulphate.”

“A deadly poison.”

“A deadly poison is certain doses, yes. But the doses Dahmer used on Arlinger and Dumplin weren’t high enough to be fatal. I’ve already explained that in my tox reports. Those two guys died as a result of torture and extreme physical trauma. It wasn’t the succinicholine that killed them. All that did was paralyze them.”

Helen listened hard, strained her perceptions. “I don’t think I’m following you.”

Beck looked exasperated. “Captain, that’s the key word here—paralysis. Dahmer’s paralyzing his victims with a neurological agent. It stands to reason that Dahmer used the same neurological agent on himself, to feign his death after the beating at the prison.”

“Would that…work?”

“With succinicholine sulphate? Of course it would work. The right dose would lower Dahmer’s respiratory rate and pulse sufficiently enough to fool a standard check for vital signs.”

Helen hadn’t thought of that. “Wow,” she muttered. “You’re right, it does make sense. But that would mean someone would’ve had to procure the succinicholine previously—”

“Sure, Campbell,” Beck suggested. “He had to have been the one who ripped it off from that ambulance jacking.”