Edward Lee - Dahmer's Not Dead

Helen tried to figure. “In other words, the regs are a good idea because they prevent an inmate from influencing, and possibly inciting, these ‘killer groupies’ on the outside?”

“Well, sure, that’s part of the reason,” Edwards agreed. “Remote obsessional codependents are mentally unstable to begin with. A lot of these nuts will regard a particular killer as something like a god. But another reason is simple good taste. It doesn’t make a prison system look good when a killer’s letters wind up on the street. Look at what happened with Gacy. Now that he’s dead, his letters have a street value of over a hundred dollars each to collectors. Bundy’s letters go for three or four, and Manson… Anything with his signature on it can cop up to a thousand dollars. Can you imagine what a letter signed by Jeffrey Dahmer would be worth to some groupie or collector?”

“Now I get your point,” Helen admitted. It was something she hadn’t even considered.

“So that’s why Dipetro was smart to bar Dahmer from ingoing and outgoing mail. The whole thing’s just a bad move that makes everybody look bad. This center’s received literally tens of thousands of letters addressed to Dahmer. He was never allowed to see a single one.”

Helen agreed with the notion, but it was her bad luck, too. “That pops my balloon real fast,” she said, eyeing Edwards’ pack of Marlboro Box.

“Would you like one?” he offered.

“I’d love one but I can’t. I quit a year ago.”

“Good for you. And what do you mean it popped your balloon?”

“I’m sure you read about the ‘Dahmer’ letter found on P Street the other night.”

“Sure. And I think I just read today that handwriting experts verified it as Dahmer’s writing.”

“That’s right. But I don’t believe for a minute that Dahmer committed the murder. It’s a copycat, and the letter was written well before the murder.”

“Ah, I see,” Edwards said. “And you want to know how Dahmer’s handwriting got out of the prison. Well, I can tell you, we’ve already been all over that.”

“Enlighten me.”

“It had to have been written before he came here, either before he was caught, or during the short time he was in Milwaukee County pending trial.”

Helen had already tried to give that speculation some credence. “I don’t think so. The nature of the letter was religious.”

“But Dahmer had some minor religious fixations before he was even caught.”

“Right,” Helen agreed. “And the major biblical quote in the P Street letter was something Milwaukee PD overheard him say on the day he was arrested. All that was in the papers, sure. But whoever leaked the contents of the letter to the press didn’t quote it entirely. The letter also made a brief reference to Dahmer’s ‘baptism.’“

“Holy shit!” Edward exclaimed. “You’re kidding me? Dahmer wasn’t baptized until last May.”

Helen rubbed her chin in disgruntlement. “Right, and that can only mean that the letter was written sometime after last May, and how can this be, since Dahmer hasn’t been allowed to send any letters since the day he got here?”

Edwards leaned back in his gray, upholstered chair. He eyed her with something akin to amused sorrow. “Looks like you’ve got a hell of a problem on your hands, Captain.”

Helen sighed. “Tell me about it.”

««—»»

James J. Dipetro ran the slam; he’d been the Director of the Columbus County Detention Center for ten years, and for ten years there hadn’t been so much as a single escape. An action guy who didn’t fool around. They sent him in here to do a job, and now that he’d done it, he was up for a high-level post in the local government. Helen could imagine his outrage at the multitude of accusations suddenly leveled against himself and his facility. Right now this guy’s got about as much chance of making Director of Public Safety, Helen thought, as I’ve got of making the Olympic Figure Skating Team.

“You want what? ” Dipetro asked. Hyper-tensive, Type-A all the way. A big beefy man with a trimmed beard and light-brown hair thinned by worry and stress. And a derisive glare sharp as an icepick.

“Access to your maintenance logs and personnel rosters,” Helen repeated. She’d gotten nowhere in the Records and Admin offices. “I want to cross-reference them, see which employees had any kind of regular contact with Dahmer.”

“What the hell for?”

“To verify a conspiracy theory.”

“That’s all I need,” Dipetro griped. “As if the goddamn press isn’t bad enough telling everyone that Dahmer’s still alive. Now I got the state cops wanting to tell them it was one of my people who helped get him out.”

This guy was going to be a tough case. “That’s what I’m trying to disprove, Mr. Dipetro. I don’t believe that Dahmer’s alive anymore than you do. But this entire furor in the press revolves around the letter left at the crime scene. Your upper staff have assured me that Dahmer was barred from maintaining outside correspondence because of his federal status rating—”

“That’s right,” Dipetro hastened to agree. “That asshole hasn’t sent or received a single letter since the day we locked him down.”

“—therefore it must’ve been someone working inside the prison who was forwarding mail for him. This whole schmear in the papers revolves around the P Street letter; that’s how they’re able to maintain the assertion that Dahmer escaped. If I can prove that one of your employees was smuggling out correspondence for him, then the lid gets slammed shut on the press and you’re off the hot seat.”

“Oh, well—”

“And furthermore, if I’m lucky, it’ll probably lead me to the real killer, who’s probably some kind of psycho groupie, a guy who paid one of your employees to exchange correspondence under the table.”

Dipetro’s pit-bull demeanor changed quick when he realized that Helen was on his side. “Right. Great. So tell me exactly what you want.”

Helen gave him a card with the state police data-processing batch/search-code on it. “Tell the people in your records office to transfer all prison maintenance logs and duty rosters to my computer. Then I can run a cross-check.”

“You got it, but…” Dipetro grumbled through a pause. “I can tell you right now, all the DOs on transport and escort duty have a revolving schedule. Same in any prison, for obvious security reasons. And as for the rest, contractors and maintenance personnel are never allowed in the cells unless the inmate is on detail somewhere else in the center.”

Helen felt certain she was on the right track. “Fine, Mr. Dipetro. But let’s just do this my way, okay?”

“Sure, sure,” he mumbled and picked up the phone. “Right now I’d sell my soul to get these newspaper assholes off my back.”

««—»»

Two hours later, back in her own office, Helen had a name.

— | — | —

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Merrimac, just off Route 12. About halfway between Madison and the Correctional Center in Portage, and only a twenty-minute drive for Helen. A decent middle-class suburb, with blocks of apartment complexes on the outskirts. And the building in question, in some odd way, reminded Helen of Dahmer’s building on North 25th Street in Milwaukee.

“Mr. Kussler?”

A timid face showed in the door’s chained gap. “Uh, yes?”

Helen held her ID up. “Helen Closs, State Police. May I have a word with you, please?”

Back at HQ, even Helen’s marginal data-processing skills had gotten her what she wanted. It had only actually taken a few minutes for Dipetro’s Records technicians to copy the logs and rosters to the State Police Macro Analysis Computer. From there, Helen had input a simple search and retrieve command identifying Dahmer, Jeffrey as the proximity subject. There had to be a human common denominator in there somewhere, some person during the course of prison duties who came in regular contact with Dahmer or Dahmer’s cell. Helen would’ve guessed it was a detention officer, but she was wrong. What the computer handed her instead was this: