Edward Lee: Dahmer's Not Dead

Now Helen began to see the pieces fit. They were starting to form into the intricate human jigsaw that made this man named Campbell.

“So where does Tom fit into all of this?” she asked, and took another glance at his bound form in the other chair.

“How does he fit in?” Campbell replied. “By default, I’m afraid. I’m an opportunist, Captain. When I found out you were involved with him, I used that to my advantage, because I also new, through acquaintances in the life, that Tom was quite bisexual, which I guess you weren’t aware of until recently.”

“No,” Helen admitted. “I wasn’t.”

“I knew you were close, but I couldn’t let you get too close. I needed to throw you off track a little, and Tom was the perfect scapegoat. Bisexual, a high-ranking hospital staffer as well as a pathologist. And with access to and knowledge of succinicholine. You fell for that too, didn’t you?”

“Hook, line, and sinker,” Helen admitted.

“And as I’ve already said, I was the one who made the call to North’s new escort service, told them to send North to Tom’s address, knowing you’d find out via your surveillance, and then planting the succinicholine in his floppy disk files. Later tonight, I abducted him at the hospital when he was coming on duty, drove his car to North’s apartment, killed North, and then it was all set. Getting into your own apartment was doubly easy because Tom still had your keys.”

More pieces, then, fitting together exactly. But… How much time? Helen wondered in the most suppressed anguish. Her fingers nervously rubbed the locket. How much more time to I have?

Then she remembered more of what Sallee had told her. Campbell’s obsessive-reference disorder, and his X,Y,Y-Syndrome traits. Subjects are frequently male, and sexually abused by their father, or father figures… There was no evidence that Dahmer had ever been abused by his father, nothing incriminating about Dahmer’s father at all. But what about Campbell’s father?

“Tell me about your father,” she dared to ask.

Campbell stared at her, then, for so long she thought she’d lapsed into a dream. She could use a dream right now, couldn’t she? A nice dream, of pretty places and good people. A dream of a world where there were no killers…

Campbell’s voice sounded corroded now—rock sluiced by acid. “My father,” he said and paused again. “I—I suppose I owe it all to him.”

“In what way?”

“My father taught me, through his own methods, what life is really all about. He used to tell me that we all have to make our little marks on the world, and if we don’t, there’s no point to our lives. He’d tell me this almost every day.”

“Yes?” Helen goaded him.

“Yes,” Campbell answered. “Every day before he raped me.”

Helen gazed at him, tried to wonder what his life was like. But that was no real excuse. Abuse only sired more abuse—but that was no consolation to the victims. She felt sorry for him in the plight of what him must have experienced. But—

She still hated him, still wanted to kill him.

“It’s all about power,” Campbell explained. “Some people are users, some people are the used. Kussler loved me, and I used that to exploit him, to keep me in touch with Dahmer through his job at the prison. Kussler was weak; to maintain my power over him, I’d break up with him every few months, to keep him in a state of longing, and then I’d take him back.”

Just as so many battered wives return to abusive husbands, Helen thought. North had made the same point the first time she’d talked to him.

“I knew Kussler—he was a common mind. A patsy. Just like you.”

Helen closed her eyes.

“It’s all about power,” Campbell repeated, “and what greater power can there be than this? When the hunted destroys the hunter?”

Campbell’s silhouette stood up, took something unseen off the work desk. He appeared as a messiah just then, a knowing figure with hands outstretched in wisdom and truth—

Except in one hand he held a knife.

And next, he said, “Thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven. Yet thou shalt be brought down into hell, deep into the pit.”

Helen prayed to a god she didn’t even think she believed in.

“I won’t break my promise,” Campbell said. “I will be merciful and quick.”

Helen thought, I’m going to die now, but then she opened her eyes. And she saw—

She saw something—

—something she’d been waiting for.

“Let me say one last thing,” she bid. “You’re very smart, the letters, the phone calls and fingerprints, and especially the way you anticipated my surveillance of North.”

“You’ve already told me that. Please don’t beg for your life. It will soil my opinion of you.”

“But what you’re not considering is the fact that I anticipated something too.”

Campbell paused. The knife glinted. “What?”

“The state psychiatrist told me that serial-killers crave power rooted in fear, and the greatest display of that power eventually arrives when the killer seeks to kill those who’re after him, like what you just said: the hunter destroyed by the hunted. So it was logical for me to assume that you might try this.”

Campbell squinted at her.

“So I took a precaution,” she continued. “And when you were getting your…sandwich…I regained enough use of my arms to activate that precaution.”

Campbell peered. “ What? ”

Helen opened the locket on her chest. The picture of her father was long gone; instead it was replaced by something else.

A nickel shaped metal disk, with a gridded button on it.

“This is a direction-finding transponder,” she told him, “identical to the one I used on North’s car. Except this one has a distress frequency which relays back to state police headquarters. I was able to activate the distress switch when you went to the kitchen.”

“You’re…lying,” he murmured.

“Right now there are probably fifty tactical police officers surrounding this house,” Helen said.

— | — | —

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

“The last desperate trick of the animal in the trap,” he replied.

“Really, shithead? Turn around and look down. Turn around and look at your chest.”

Campbell hesitated, then turned. The gesture offered his chest to the window. And when he looked down at the front of his shirt, he saw—

“What are—”

—bright red illuminated dots.

“Those red dots on your chest,” Helen continued, “are emission points from laser sites. Right this second a half a dozen snipers have you in their crosshairs.”

Campbell’s gaze froze down. The red dots on his chest moved minutely.

“If you try to close those curtains, or if you make even the slightest threatening move toward me,” Helen promised, “those snipers will kill you in place. You won’t even have time to blink before you’re dead.”

Campbell’s neck remained locked down, his eyes glued to the neon-like dots.

“Don’t believe me?” Helen challenged. “Then make a move.”

Campbell didn’t move.

“Those guys out there can hit an apple from half a mile away,” she enlightened him. “How hard do you think it’s going to be for them to hit you from fifty yards?”

««—»»

Special Agent Eules had gotten the distress call from Wisconsin State PD’s Communication outfit less then twenty minutes ago. They’d scrambled fast from the Madison F.O., sirens and lights off, and arrived at the plat-grid along with about half the uniformed cops in Madison County. In less than two more minutes, Eules had posted snipers from four separate firing lanes in the opposing woods, and three Extraction Teams waiting for an “enter and clear” order. It was almost too easy.