“There was a—a fire or something. I was rushing to put it out.”
“Were you naked?”
Helen popped brow. “Yes.”
“And you weren’t particularly afraid or the fire, were you?”
“No, no I wasn’t. But how did you—”
“Go on.”
Flustered, she tried to remember. The water hose… “The fire was burning, so I ran to get a hose to put it out, but when I turned it on, no water came out.”
“And the fire continued to burn,” Sallee said rather than asked.
“That’s right.”
“But I must say, Helen. That’s a very sexual dream.”
Her eyes squinted up. “How so?”
“Look at the symbology and then look at yourself. Your greatest fear is that menopause will kill your sexuality, and hence make you less attractive to men. The fire in the dream represents your sexual self—a woman still quite sexually capable, a sexual yearning that needs to be quenched. Fires are quenched by water, correct? But you couldn’t get the water to come out of those hose… Correct?”
Suspiciously, she nodded.
“And let me guess,” Sallee went on, “sometime previously you’d had sex with Tom. You were excited, even orgasmic. Am I on track?”
Now she actually blushed. “More than you realize.”
Sallee held a finger up, in further postulation. “But Tom himself, he experienced some sudden sexual dysfunction.”
He lost his erection, she shamedly remembered. He couldn’t come. But Sallee’s “guesses” began to mildly infuriate her. It was as though he was picking her brain against her will. “How can you possibly know that?”
“It’s a terribly common dream, Helen,” Sallee replied and nearly chuckled. “No water came out of the hose, symbolic of Tom’s inability to complete the act. It’s a dream of clear paranoia: Tom gave you pleasure but experienced none himself, so, paranoically, you blame yourself, you feel you failed in being able to satisfy him as he satisfied you, so know you’ve developed this ideation that he’s cheating on you, that’s he’s seeking some other woman.”
Helen threw her hands up. There was no use. “But that’s where you’re wrong. I’m pretty sure he is seeing another woman.”
“Pretty sure? Not totally?”
“Well—” She faltered. “Not totally, but—’
Sallee cut her off yet again. “And even if he is, Helen, there’s no relevant reason for you to blame yourself for every incompatibility, is there?”
“No, but…that’s just how I feel, I guess,” she admitted, now fighting to hold back tears. “I can’t help it.”
“Of course you can. You can by acknowledging yourself before others, Helen. That’s the root of all your problems. You judge yourself by over-reacting to the people close to you, which, in turn, creates an erroneous judgment. We’ll continue to work on it, okay?”
Her eyes remained on the floor as she nodded.
“And another thing I think you should do is go and talk to Tom. You just said yourself that you don’t know for sure that he’s seeing another woman. More than likely, you’ve jumped to conclusions, like you frequently do.”
“I know,” she peeped.
“So go and find out, go talk to him. You’ll regret it if you don’t, and you may very well be surprised if you do. Are you going to do that?”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“And I want you to come and see me again, okay?”
“Yes, I will.”
“All right, then. Try to feel good about yourself, because you’re a good person and you should feel good. And quit rubbing that damn locket.”
Now, at least, she was able to spare a smile.
“I’ll see you soon, Helen, and good luck with the case.”
“Thank you,” she said and got up. Her mind swam, she knew he was right. I am a good person, goddamn it! Why can’t I get that into my thick head?
She stopped at the door to gaze over her notes one last time, a police instinct. A final check to see if she was forgetting anything. And one of the last lines snagged her.
“There was one thing you mentioned,” she said. “Something about a break. Let’s just say for one minute that Dahmer is alive and that he did get out of prison and murder Alringer on P Street. What could account for the change in his behavioral profile?”
“Oh, yes, but that’s a very rare and obscure syndrome,” Sallee told her. “We call it a conative-episodic break. Its the only clinical phenomena that could account for an existential costive like Dahmer to enter into an X,Y,Y-like mental state.”
Helen highlighted that part in her notes. “But what are the actual chances of that?”
Sallee belittled the possibility with a brief snort. “The chances of that happening, Helen, are literally one in a million.”
— | — | —
CHAPTER NINE
“Is that real scripture you’re quoting, Mr. Rosser,” Helen asked, “or are you just making it up?”
“What’choo think?”
“I think it’s genuine scripture that you’ve memorized in order to fake a religious delusion.”
“‘Mercy and truth shall be met together.’ ‘God’s truth shall be my shield and buckler.’ ‘Thou trusteth in the staff of this broken reed.’”
Helen peered at the man. She tried to avoid looking at him too closely, but found she couldn’t resist it, like trying to resist running your tongue over a chipped molar.
“What do you do here all day, Mr. Rosser?”
“Read in my cell, watch TV. The bulls they lets me watch TV in the day room a couple hours a day.” The convict’s grin shined bright as the tungsten light. “Wearin’ these, a’course.” Then he clicked up on his cuffs, which were linked to a heavy-duty Peerless waistchain.
Tredell Rosser, County Correctional Ident # 255391, presented a shocking visual contrast. He sat, shackled and waistchained, in a stark-white precaution cell, a white floor and white ceiling, four white walls. A white blanket atop a white-sheeted cot, and a white porcelain sink and toilet to the right. White fluorescent light glared down.
Rosser himself, sitting on his cot, was dressed appropriately: baggy white in-patient pants and a sleeveless white t-shirt. The obsidian darkness of his skin made him, at first, appear disembodied—two black arms and a black face hovering in this cold, white scape.
Three psych orderlies and the security guard—all very big men—had led her down the central hall of the wing; Helen felt like a quarterback behind a flying wedge. A quick glance into a wire-glass med station showed several female nurses bickering back and forth. Several patients in blue robes and sponge slippers stared dully at television in the day room; two more patients played ping pong with the dexterity of zombies. A sign hung at the end of the halclass="underline" PREVENTION OF ELOPEMENT IS EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS. Then:
A security plaque warned, CLASS III PRECAUTION, DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT ESCORT, beneath which was mounted a tiny slide sign with Magic Markered letters:
ROSSER, T.
Helen’s energy hadn’t waned even by 9 p.m. She’d driven straight from Dr. Sallee’s to St. John the Divine’s Hospital. Might as well make good use of my time, she reasoned. She wasn’t the least bit tired, despite having had almost no sleep last night. Tredell Rosser had been court-ordered to the psych wing at the hospital the day of Dahmer’s death. The state’s Special Prosecutor’s Office had fought like dogs to prevent this, but to no avail. Since then Rosser had repeatedly waived all rights to counsel and had confessed to the bludgeoning murder of Jeffrey Dahmer no less than four times. Helen wanted to have a talk with him, feel out his mental state, trip him up if possible.