Edward Lee - Dahmer's Not Dead

Dahmer’s Not Dead

by Edward Lee& Elizabeth Steffen

Kindle Edition

Necro Publications

2011

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DAHMER’S NOT DEAD

© 1999 by Edward Lee & Elizabeth Steffen

DEDICATION:

To Doris June and J-Fer.

Also, for Debra Miller, Patricia Bradley, Vette Myers and the rest of my federal and civilian friends who indulge me in my eccentricities and animal adventures. Thank you!

And for R.K.

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PROLOGUE

MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN, JULY, 1991

“PV-Two-Zero-Seven, do you copy?”

“This is Two-Zero-Seven, I read you. Go ahead.”

“PV-Two-Zero-Seven, are you 10-8?”

“Roger.”

“Proceed to AB on North 25th Street, Building 1055, Unit 213 for possible Signal 22. Investigate and report.”

“Roger, but what’s the scoop?”

“Possible domestic complaint. Standby for complainant descript via case number filed by PV-Two-Zero-Eight… Tenant’s name is Dahmer, Jeffrey, 31 years old, white male…”

««—»»

“10-4,” Chase groaned. “Two-Zero-Seven 10-6 to North 25th Street. Out.”

What a pain in the ass, he thought, hanging up the mike. He stubbed out a Winston and honked the cruiser’s horn. Kick me too, why don’t ya? In moments Chase’s partner, Sergeant Dallas Gollimar, returned to the patrol car with two coffees and a bag of Burger King Double Whoppers with Cheese. “What!” Gollimar snapped.

“We just got a goddamn call,” Chase complained.

“You’re jivin’ me, right? It’s twenty minutes before shiftchange!”

Chase started the shining white Dodge Diplomat, an old car but ever reliable. He and Gollimar were good cops, as far as street cops went. You gave them shit, they’d give it right back to you, but you treat them decent, they’d do the same. They’d seen their share of the tough stuff on this victor beat, and never balked. They knew what they were doing, and they knew the job. Only thing they hated was punt calls twenty minutes before they were off shift.

“We just got a Signal 22,” Chase said. “Christ, I don’t even know what the hell that is.”

“Unknown Trouble,” Gollimar told him, getting in, slamming the door. “I haven’t heard that one in years. Usually they turn out to be domestics.”

“That’s what dispatch said.” Chase lit another Wintson. “You ready for this? Two-Oh-Eight just copped some kid running down the street screaming. The kid had his hands cuffed behind his back, had bruises on him.”

“Two-Oh-Eight? Who’s that? That’s Beer Gut and Karp, ain’t it?”

“Right.” Chase pulled out onto the hot bright street; the traffic was a bitch, but you got used to it. Daylight raged across the windshield. “So they pick this kid up, and the kid tells them some guy tried to kill him in his apartment, some guy named Dahmer, North 25th Street. And we gotta check it out.”

“Bullshit!” Gollimar exclaimed. “It’s twenty minutes before we go off! Those fuckin’ guys are always punting their shit to us. Let them take the call!”

“Can’t. It’s in our loke, Weiser’s orders. Beer Gut and Karp are writing up the in-pross paperwork right now; they had to take the kid to the hospital. The kid had bruises, like I said, and claimed he’d been drugged.”

“Drugged? Oh, man. This sounds like a crock of shit. Somebody always drop-kicks their garbage calls on us. I’ll give you ten to one, Beer gut and Karp are both slugging coffee and donuts and laughing it up right now, those fat sons of bitches.”

Chase shrugged, cruised past The Pier Three Annex, a restaurant he’d never be able to eat at. On 32.5 a year and city taxes going up fifteen percent? Stuckey’s was more like it. And Burger King. But— A job’s a job, he realized. Things could be worse.

“Hey, man?” he asked. “Where’s my Double Whopper with Cheese?”

««—»»

“A terrible, terrible smell, all the time now,” the old lady told them. Chase and Gollimar had met her on the landing, not the super but some old crone in a shaggy robe. “And the noise! You boys wouldn’t believe it.”

“What kind of noise, ma’am?” Gollimar asked.

“Like…power tools or something like that. A big saw.”

Power tools? Chase wondered. Okay, so the guy’s building something. The only thing that smelled was this call. They got them all the time like this. A lover’s spat. The girl gets pissed, runs out, talks shit about her hubby or boyfriend, then has a change of heart. They kiss and make up. All charges dropped. Only difference here was the complainant was a guy, which either meant he was gay or he had one tough girlfriend with the first name Jeffrey. But what else had the old lady said? Something about a smell? “I don’t smell anything,” Chase observed.

“Neither do—”

“Ho!” Chase jerked back and nearly yelled just as they’d taken another step.

There was a smell, all right. Faint but pungent. Disgusting. It brought Corporal Jack Chase’s memory back to childhood days, when he and a friend named Lee had been rummaging around behind the old, closed McCrory’s in Newark. They’d stuck their gallant young heads right into that open BMI dumpster and seen what were probably the remnants of a dead German Shepherd that must’ve been rotting in the sun for days. The stench made them both flinch back and throw up in tall weeds…

“What is that?” Gollimar griped.

“It ain’t good, I’ll tell ya that.”

“What’s this guy’s name again?”

Chase checked his notepad. “Dahmer, Jeffrey, white cauc., 31 years old. Works nightshifts as the Wokina Chocolate Factory on Toback Boulevard.”

Gollimar rapped bare knuckles hard on the to Room 213. The smell seemed to treble.

“Shit, the guy works nights,” Chase reminded. “He’s probably asleep.”

“Yeah, you’re right. He’s probably—”

The apartment door clicked open. A sullen face seemed to hang there, perplexed. Unshaven, kind of pallid, straight light-brown hair.

Crazy eyes, Chase noted at once.

“Yes?”

“Jeffrey Dahmer?”

“Yes?”

“I’m Sergeant Gollimar of the Milwaukee Police Department, and this here’s my partner, Corporal Chase. Mind if we come in and have a talk?”

Chase’s eyes seemed to snag on a visual tick, peering over his sergeant’s shoulder.

“Actually, I do mind, Officer. I work midnight shifts and I’m very tired—”

“Yes, sir, I understand that,” Gollimar responded in what cops called “report-speak,” a cordial, polite tone of voice even when you weren’t feeling cordial or polite. “But we’ve been asked to investigate a complaint filed by—”

Chase’s eyes suddenly bloomed like shocked flowers. He wasn’t even sure what he was looking at when his instincts popped a hair-trigger in his mind. In a well-trained half-second move, he hit the thumb-snap on his holster, shucked his Colt Trooper Mark III, and bulled past Gollimar. He snapped the revolver into the tenant’s face, shouting, “Put your hands in the air right now, put your hands in the air!”

Gollimar recoiled. “What the hell are you do—”

“There’s something hanging in the closet and something really fucked up on the bed!” Chase shouted. “Check it out while I keep a bead on this guy!”

Sergeant Gollimar drew his own piece. “Hold him,” he said, moving cautiously into the foul, three-roomed apartment. The place was a dump, filthy, and the stench, now, was almost overpowering. What in God’s name… Then—

The closet. Jack said to check the closet…