“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…
Gollimar stared.
“It’s a—shit, man, it’s something from a gag shop,” he scoffed. They hung there absurdly. They couldn’t be real.
“The bed!” came Chase’s next bellow. “Look on the bed!”
Gollimar turned. Something wasn’t right. Suddenly his sweat was oozing and his mind fogged up. He looked down at the bed, which seemed covered with sheet plastic. Yes, he looked down and—
—stared.
These were no rubber party gags. They were real. They were severed limbs. And he knew now that the things he’d seen hanging in the closet—two severed hands wired together—were just as real. An arm on the bed looked as though the bicep had been filleted out of it. A glance higher in the closet showed him more darkened things sitting on the top shelf, but by then you could’ve put a gun to Gollimar’s head and he would not have moved forward for a closer inspection. Another glance, to the opposite corner of the bedroom, showed him a lidded 57-gallon industrial drum.
Drums, was all Gollimar thought.
“Holy shit, man!” Chase was yelling again. “There’s more stuff out here too! All over the place!”
This was no apartment, it was an interstice of hell. We’re in hell, Gollimar baldly thought. He did not know how to react. A psychic gag-reflex seemed to tremor in him while the little that was left of his professional instincts walked him out of the room.
“Keep your motherfucking hands in the air, you fucking son of a bitch, or so help me God, I’ll blow you clean into next year!” Chase was still bellowing from the other room.
Gollimar, shocked in only seconds, stumbled back amid the stench. Keep cool, keep cool. Don’t fall apart. “I gotta call for some back up. We got serious 64 material in there.”
“Tell me about it!” Chase cracked. “There’s a fucking head sitting in a box! Next to the refrigerator!”
There were, in fact, several more heads inside the refrigerator, a small 18.4-cubic foot Sears Kenmore. Gollimar, however, would never see those heads. His psyche would not allow him to pull open the door, nor would it allow him to look directly at the head in the box or even contemplate opening the Tappan chest freezer on the other side of the kitchen.
“I’m gonna kill you if you make one more move, you son of a bitch!” Chase yelled at the suspect.
Could a human spirit go numb? Gollimar floated more than walked deeper into the tiny, unkempt kitchen. He was about to pick up the phone and call District Six Dispatch when he noted the stove…
Something seemed to rumble there, a black, enameled pot. A lobster pot, he recognized. He and his wife had one; every Labor Day they went out back and cooked lobsters for their friends, a big party.
But this was no party.
Steam gently gusted from the pot’s lid. Gollimar would never have guessed in a thousand years that this same lobster pot would eventually be auctioned off nearly four years later for $2,500. It would be purchased by an aviation lawyer from Philadelphia. The refrigerator, on the other hand, would sell to a “private investor” from Reston,, Virginia, for 15.4. Many things in this self-same apartment, in fact, would sell for extraordinary sums solely due to the things which now occupied them.
Gollimar stared at the lobster pot. Then he lifted the lid with a pot-holder sporting a knit caricature of a Calico cat. Why he did this he would never know and always regret. He looked into the pot.
My God, he thought, but it was the palest and least sapient thought that had ever occurred to him in his life.
««—»»
“You all right?”
Gollimar, down on one knee, nodded with his forehead in his hand. The huge white van sat parked in the lot, a single light revolving. MILWAUKEE COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER read the side panel. Evidence was here too now, along with at least a dozen District Six cops. When Chase had seen what was in that lobster pot, he’d nearly lost his Double Whopper with Cheese. Gollimar had not been so lucky.
Two paramedics marched out of the apartment entry, bearing a stretcher topped by a number of plastic bags. A photographer from Ident reeled out behind them, his face pale as cream. More evidence techs entered the building, in rubber haz-mat suits and Scott Air-Pack respirators.
Gollimar’s voice sounded parched, only half alive. He rubbed his face and shivered. “What kind of a world is this?” he asked himself more than his partner.
“A fucked up world,” Chase answered just a listlessly. Every time he lit a cigarette, he spat it out. Everything seemed to taste the way the inside of that apartment smelled. He would have dreams of that smell for the rest of his life. Gollimar would resign in a year and a half, haunted too by dreams. Veteran street cops always expected the worst. But this?
This was worse than the worst could ever, ever be.
“An evil world,” Chase completed his response. A glance to the right showed him his PV, Two-Zero-Seven; in the back seat sat the suspect, handcuffed and waist-chained. Chase, as if summoned, approached the unit, shouldered past the surrounding phalanx of uniforms.
The day blazed, the sun high in a perfect sky. Birds chirped and swirled in elegant circles overhead. It was a beautiful day. So how could something like this happen? How could it?
Chase leaned over the half-opened back window. “Hey,” he said.
The suspect looked up. The pale face remained calm, calm as the July sky.
“How could you do something like that?” Chase asked in a voice like crumbling rocks.
The suspect returned Chase’s glance. The eyes set in the head looked dead.
“Thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven,” Jeffrey Dahmer said. “Yet thou shalt be brought down into hell—”
Good God Almighty, Chase thought.
“—deep into the pit.”
— | — | —
CHAPTER ONE
COLUMBUS COUNTY DETENTION CENTER, PORTAGE, WISCONSIN
NOVEMBER 28, 1994, 7:50 A.M.
“Come on, J.D., get the lead out, huh? You too, Rosser.” Detention Officer Wells wished for a smoke, a cup of coffee. He needed to find Perkins to get yesterday’s scores, which he himself had missed due to a preposterous argument with his wife. He cowed Dahmer, Vander, and Rosser into the Block C recreational unit. The three ragtag inmates shuffled along with their mops and buckets, all dressed in dark-green prison coveralls. Vander was a white supremacist, Wells had heard, and belonged to some KKK-like club full of silly bonehead nazis. Killed his wife and said two black guys did it. Rosser, black himself, stood close to 6’3”, all muscle and bad news, playing a Ganser game according to the prison psych staff. Terrifying to look at, murder and madness on two legs. The sides of his head were shaved—since the new detent rule that allowed convicts to have their hair any way they wanted. “A violation of the basic human right to self-expression,” some ACLU lawyer had insisted. Fine. They could shave their heads and shellack them for all Wells cared. Rosser, yes, had the sides shaved, with a fat plop of hair sitting on top. A new DO several months ago had made the mistake of offering personal comment. “Get that black buck Jiffy Pop shit off your head, you asshole,” he’d told Rosser. The DO had been fired the same day for racial traducement, even though the DO himself had been black. But that was fine with Wells too. In the slam, he did not perceive race, or convicts and their identical human freight. They’re all in this together, so the last thing any of them need are DO’s in their shit simply because of their color. Rosser had shot a guy in the head four times during a hold up in 1990, wasn’t up for parole till 2042. His Ganser was a God theme, not uncommon.