Edward Lee: Dahmer's Not Dead

“Helen!” Tom greeted when she entered. She’d been ID’d a final time at the recept desk. “I would’ve thought you’d be home asleep.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she admitted. Intermittent nightshifts played havoc with her metabolism, but it must for Tom too. Nevertheless, he looked cheery and alert in his disposable autopsy blues. Helen had tried to sleep upon her return from the Farland call, but the pallid nightmare-face had kept hounding her. Waxlike, exsanguinated. When the cool, claylike hands had dipped to touch her bare breasts, she’d bolted awake and gave up on any further attempts to sleep.

“I’d come over there and kiss you,” he joked, “but, as you can see, I’m sterile.”

“What difference does it make to cadavers?”

“State regs, hon. Pretty soon the cadavers’ll be suing us—and winning. You got my message, I take it.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Say, what’s with all the heat? It was like trying to get into the Pentagon.”

“Aw, you know. Something like this, press fodder? I’ve even got a trooper guarding the back entry. They’ve caught six people already trying to sneak in here.”

“For what? ”

“To get a picture of the body. One guy tried to steal his inmate number off his prison coveralls, another guy said he wanted to steal one of his teeth.”

This was ridiculous. “Dahmer’s teeth? ”

“Sure,” Tom said, pulling out a box of Johnson & Johnson Morgue Swipes. Kills E. Coli and Other Morgue-Related Bacteria on Contact! Kills Herpes, Hepatitis B and HIV! the blue and white box bragged. “I’m amazed by the level of detail that the press has got their hands on. Christ, Columbus County Detent leaks like a sieve. Most of Dahmer’s teeth were broken; this guy says he heard it on the radio, thought he’d zip in here real quick and cop one of the teeth. They charged him with trespassing on state property and ‘morbid malfeasance.’“

“Jesus,” Helen dismissed. “They ought to charge him with being an asshole too, but I don’t think that one’s in the state books.”

“Not yet, anyway, but we can always hope.”

So that explained the undue police presence, which miffed her right off the bat. These cops had better ways to serve the public interest than guarding a corpse. Right now, on Clay Street, crack was being sold. Right now in the stan district, heroin tar was being cut. Right now, somewhere, a woman was being raped.

In the prep room, Helen at once found herself hemmed in by dented file cabinets, bookshelves, and a lot of computer equipment. One CPU, she noted, was a UNISYS 1500 latent datalink, which had state and federal mainframe access to every felon fingerprint in the country. A small, glass scan-pallet would digitalize the latent and feed it into the system. Cost per unit: $650,000. Too bad it crashed regularly. An equally expensive mass photospectrometer ticked in the corner like a cooling car engine.

A chuckle, then: “Mix you a drink?” Tom was mixing a formalin/alcohol mixture in several big translucent squeeze bottles: cadaver preservative. Helen hated the smell of formalin; it was the only thing that gave her a headache worse than tequila.

“So how’d that 64 go last night?”

“Terrible. It was a baby,” she finally told him. “Beck was there, as usual, and she was all over me. There was no way in hell that I could’ve written up for VCU. I don’t understand it. Beck hates me.”

Tom was wincing immediately, which mystified Helen. But before she could even ask, a figure appeared from the dressing room, dressed in the same disposable morgue blues. It was Jan Beck.

“I don’t hate you, Captain,” she said. “I was just bent out of shape last night, and I apologize.”

Good job, Helen! She felt like a perfect ass, but the scenario infuriated her. What the hell is Beck doing here! she wanted to shout.

“Jan’s doing the assist,” Tom explained. “I think I told you on my message, Greene’s on vacation as of last Sunday, went to Bowie, Maryland, or some hole in the wall town like that. I’ll bet he’s crapping his blues right now.”

Helen’s face screwed up. “What, autopsying Jeffrey Dahmer is a big deal?”

“My dear, in the world of forensic pathology, receiving the opportunity to perform the post-mortem on a world-famous serial-killer is a career event.”

Beck laughed. Helen rolled her eyes.

“I’ll be ready to roll in a few minutes,” Tom said more to Beck. “I’ve gotta let the instruments cook a little longer in the ‘clave.” His eyes gestured the Magna brand 260-degree autoclave percolating in the corner like an industrial washer. Helen thought it absurd to have to sterilize instruments that would be used on dead people. Tom had said the machine cost the state over $4000. I could do the same job with a boiling pot of water, Helen thought.

“Come on,” Beck implied to Helen, and a wave of hand. “Let’s go look.”

“Go look at what?” Helen replied.

“You know. The body.”

“I didn’t come here to see the body,” she insisted.

“Oh, yeah, then why are you here? Let me guess. You came all the way to the state morgue to ask Tom what he wants for dinner tonight?”

A brief impulse flared. First of all, Helen didn’t like the way Beck had so easily referred to Tom by his first name; second, she liked least the fact that it was common knowledge she and Tom were dating, an unwritten no-no for state employees. But then the good Dr. Sallee’s remonstrations kicked in, as they usually did. You’re so insecure, you’re paranoid. You over-react to everything. You have to work on this, Helen. You must, or you’ll never be happy.

She knew he was right, but it still ticked her off. All right, I’ll work on it…

“Uh-oh,” Tom said. “Look, she’s rubbing her locket. That means we’ve pissed her off.”

Helen hadn’t even been aware of it, but now that he’d mentioned this, she couldn’t help but notice how desperately she’d been rubbing her father’s large, silver locket. She dropped it and smiled coyly. “Fuck you very much,” she said.

“That’s the spirit!”

Helen shrugged it off. At least she was making some headway with her problems. “Come on, Jan. Let’s go gawk at Jeffrey Dahmer’s body. And you can tell Mack the Knife there he can have me arrested for morbid malfeasance.”

««—»»

“Oh my God, this is dis gust ing!” Helen exclaimed.

“No, no,” Jan Beck whispered in something very much like awe. “It’s fascinating.”

Yet another state goon had ID’d them both at the entrance of ANTEROOM #4. DO NOT ENTER. AUTOPSY IN PROGRESS. Of course nothing, right this instant, was in progress save for Helen’s abhorrence. The body lay there so candidly it seemed surreal, like one of Tom’s CD-ROM games—a spooky veil like tulle which somehow enhanced details instead of detracting from them. The body was not covered, and it lay on a stainless steel morgue platform which came equipped with a removable drain-trap, gutters for “organic effluence,” and a motorized height adjustment. The corpse’s image was blatant, like a surprise shout in the dark.

Fluorescent lights hummed over their heads.

“Christ Almighty,” Helen uttered, at once fingering her locket again. “Look at his face.”

There really was no face, not even a facsimile of anything that could be called a human face. It looked more like a blue-black poultice, covered by a crust of red-black blood. The corpse lay stretched out straight, in stained, nearly tourmaline-green prison coveralls, pocketless via typical county prison inmate regulations. A white patch over the right breast read 177252, the county corrections index. Over the left breast read simply this: