Dahmer's Not Dead

dragging her tail down here to do a tox screen.”

“Just…please. I’d appreciate it.”

Tom shrugged in lackadaise. “Sure, Helen. Whatever floats your boat.”

“Thank you.” An impulse urged her to turn and leave, but something hitched at her. “So, what about those rumors?’

Tom chuckled. “You just got done telling me you don’t care about rumors.”

“All right, I lied. I’d like to hear the rumors about Rosser.”

Tom snapped on the overhead, began to draw the y-section on Rosser’s muscular chest with a white paint pen. “It’s the prison grapevine, I guess. They’re saying Rosser was really friends with Dahmer, that he beat the crap out of Dahmer’s face at Dahmer’s request, as part of the escape scam. And they’re saying someone on the outside was in league with Dahmer too—some guy you’re calling Campbell. That it was some multiplayer conspiracy to get Dahmer out of prison alive so he could go on committing murders. Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard?”

Helen’s joints locked in place for a moment. She didn’t offer any answer, electing instead to turn and leave. But before she made her full exit from the morgue, she refaced Tom. “What’s so ridiculous about it, Tom? We know Dahmer’s alive. How did he get out? A ‘multiplayer conspiracy’ is the only answer.”

“Yeah, well—”

“And it’s quite ingenious, don’t you think? That Dahmer orchestrated a friendship with Rosser, and only maintained the premise that they were enemies? And Campbell, the outside conspirator, manipulating Kussler to keep him in contact with Dahmer? I don’t think there’s anything ridiculous about any of it. I think it holds water, Tom. In fact, I even think that maybe Campbell isn’t the only conspirator.”

Tom stared at her over the slab controls.

Helen went on, “Or maybe, just maybe, Campbell is an alias.”

“An alias?”

“Yeah. For someone else.”

And it was at that precise moment that Helen turned and left.

««—»»

“So what is that thing, anyway? Some kind of good luck charm?”

Hendrix playing rare blues eddied from the jukebox. “A red house over yonder…” What had brought her here, not to mention twice in the same week? The Badge, the cop bar. Right now it was half-full of the kind of people she least wanted to be around. Cops. And here was Nick, the Metro PD narc, divorced and lost and left with nowhere else to go to find companionship, to find anything remnant at all of something that might be called a life.

And here I am sitting right next to him.

“What was that?” she asked. “A good luck charm?”

Nick swigged his mug of Bud, and coarsely pointed at her bosom. “That silver locket around your neck. You’ve been rubbing it since you walked in here.”

Damn. He sounded worse than Dr. Sallee. And, yes, now that she thought of it, she’d been pressing it between her thumb and index finger, probably, for hours. “Yeah, Nick. It’s a good luck charm, and, believe me, right now I need all the luck I can get.”

“Tough case, huh? The Dahmer thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let me tell ya, I’ve had my share of bad cases, and…” Nick’s snide cop voice faded, bringing Helen back to her thoughts.

The whole scene with Tom back at the state morgue: what could’ve been more rigid and uncomfortable? The screw-up with the composite, and Olsher’s sudden lack of support only made it worse. And now I’m sitting in a boring-as-hell cop bar, next to a boring-as-hell cop named Nick, and I’m getting plastered. Talk about someone without a life.

“…and then those kooky rumors.”

Helen perked up. “What rumors?”

“Oh, yeah, I keep forgetting, you’re the gal whose name is in the papers every day but she doesn’t bother to read ‘em.”

“I hate newspapers, Nick.”

“Hey, I hear ya. Bunch’a liberal rubberneck schmucks who don’t know real life. Let ‘em get mugged once or twice, let ‘em get car-jacked by a crackhead at a traffic light. Let ‘em find out it’s their own sons and daughters getting addicted to rock by playground pushers. Then maybe they’ll sing a different tune. You know. When it happens to them.”

Helen didn’t care in the least with Nick’s sociological views. “The rumors, Nick. What’s that about the rumors?”

“Oh, yeah, guess I got off track, ya know. The evening Tribune says that guy Rosser died in his cell, you know, the guy—”

“The guy accused of killing Dahmer.”

“Yeah, but since it’s obvious now to anyone with half a brain that Dahmer’s still alive, the rumor mill is talking up this shit about Rosser being in on it. That Rosser did the face job on Dahmer because Dahmer asked him to, just to get Dahmer into the infirmary.”

“Let me ask you something, Nick. Do you think that’s preposterous or far-flung?”

“Me? Hell, how do I know? I mean, if I wanted to bust out of a secure detent like Columbus County, probably the only way is through the infirmary. Get real sick or something, and they transport you to the hospital. Then you escape because security’s not as tight. But, Christ, they’re saying Dahmer had no vital signs when they checked him at the prison infirmary, so how can that be?”

Because the part about the succinicholine sulphate wasn’t in the papers, that’s how, Nick. “But I mean the ‘conspiracy’ angle. Forget about anything else.”

“Well, shit, Helen—pardon my French—I ain’t exactly a Harvard grad, but Dahmer must’ve had help to get out. And it had to be several guys helping him, not just one.”

Helen looked into her beer. Even Nick buys it. So why doesn’t Olsher? Why doesn’t the Police Commissioner?

All of a sudden, her head seemed to roll. Christ, I’m drunk. Her fingers ached from squeezing the locket, and her mouth tasted like a malt factory.

“You’re empty,” Nick pointed to her glass. “Hey, chief, the lady needs another mug’a suds.”

“No, no, Nick—thanks for the offer, but—”

“What’s’a’matter?”

Helen shrugged. “I gotta go home. I’m drunk.”

“Ah, well lemme tell ya something. I’m not drunk—serious, I only had three beers, and you had five or six just since you walked in.”

Helen felt groggy, wobbly. “What are you saying, Nick?”

“Best to let me drive you home. I mean, that wouldn’t look to good in the papers for a state police VCU captain to get pinched on a DWI, would it?”

No, no it wouldn’t.

“So, hey. Can I drive ya home, Helen?”

Her brain, suddenly, was reeling, and she thought she might throw up. “Yes, Nick,” she said. “I’d appreciate it.”

««—»»