Shit, Helen thought.
««—»»
She remembered Sallee’s words, as she was leaving the hospital for the frigid parking lot. I’m an ostrich… She’d deliberately left via the basement, where the morgue was.
Where Tom was.
I’ve got to try to fix things up, she thought.
She stood in front of the door. She paid no mind to the security guard at the sign-in desk.
“Can I help you, ma’am?”
“Uh, uh, no,” she said.
One last glance through the chicken-wire glass showed her Tom milling about inside.
Helen lost her nerve and left the building.
— | — | —
CHAPTER TEN
Helen spent the next day interviewing one correctional staff face after another, until the faces all seemed to blur together. Of Dahmer, they all related similar if not identical versions of his makeup. Introverted, docile, full of remorse. And completely ingenuous.
“Was he suicidal?” Helen asked the prison’s psychologist, an unenlivened if not dull woman named Bernice Willet.
“Not actively,” the demure, dark-skinned woman replied. A mane of coal-black hair draped her shoulders over a nougat cashmere sweater. “He did have an active death wish, though.”
“To what degree of detail?”
There was a hint of an accent Helen couldn’t place. “He believed that he deserved to die for his crimes.”
So did the rest of the world, Helen thought.
“But guilt reversions such as this are quite common,” Willet continued, “among incarcerated serial-killers. The uncommon thing about Jeffrey was the absolute certainly with which he believed he was going to die.”
“You’re saying he predicted his own death?”
“In a sense, yes. Jeffrey was well aware that quite a few inmates wanted to kill him. This was well-known throughout the center’s inmate population, that someone, eventually, was going to get to him. This is the only aspect of Jeffrey that can be likened to a suicidal tendency. It was a passive one. He knew he was a marked man, yet he went out of his way to qualify for a domiciliary transfer from protective custody to the general prison block.”
This was interesting. He knew someone was going to get him eventually, Helen paused to think. Could he have…
“How vengeful was he?”
“Vengeful? Jeffrey?” The psychologist nearly smiled. “He wasn’t vengeful or aggressive at all. If anything, he was close to narcoleptic.”
Helen tried to focus. What was she thinking? “How smart was he, then, how creative?”
“That’s two completely different questions, Captain. Jeffrey had a higher than average IQ, but he scored very poorly on all the creative assembly batteries. The TAT, the Weschler Revised Adult Intuition Scale, the Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test—Jeffrey scored shockingly low on them all.”
“Maybe he did it on purpose,” Helen considered.
“No, no, what you don’t understand is that these tests can’t be faked. Even if an inmate wrote down deliberately contradictory answers, the score scales would pick that up at once.” Willet took a moment to assess Helen’s questions. “Why do you ask, though?”
“I want to know if Dahmer was possibly devious enough to fake his docility.”
“No,” Willet responded. “Ask anyone who knew him. But that’s a strange suspicion, I must say. Why would Jeffrey wish to fake something like that?”
I wonder, Helen thought.
««—»»
“…so I’d like to know what you think about that, Father,” Helen was asking her next interviewee, Father Thomas Alexander, the prison chaplain. This was the man who’d performed the famous “baptism” of Dahmer, in the prison’s whirlpool. “The word is you were Dahmer’s only real friend and confidant.”
“Well that’s true,” the religious man answered. “I was his confessor.” Alexander seemed slightly stiffened behind his industrial gray desk, as though he had a back problem. Salt and pepper hair, a lean face that seemed weathered more by sarcasm than by age. Helen couldn’t quite say why, but there was something about the man that caused an immediate dislike.
“I need to know about Dahmer’s visitors and correspondents,” Helen was next asking. A bumper sticker adhered to the front of the desk read CHRIST ROCKS! And another: THE POWER OF JESUS IS INFINITE. Helen noticed this at the same instant a power fluctuation briefly dimmed the office lights. Too bad Jesus doesn’t run Madison Gas & Electric.
“Power flux,” Alexander observed. “For some reason we get them all the time, anywhere on the prison’s east sector. And in response to your questions, Jeffrey was a Level Five inmate. It’s a federal categorization scale, only goes up to Seven, Seven being the most critical, One being the least. The average inmate is a One.”
“So as a Five,” Helen speculated, “Dahmer was deemed significantly more dangerous than most inmates?”
“Yes and no,” the priest answered. But that fuddled Helen. Was he a priest? Or a reverend, or a minister? She wasn’t sure. But he went on, “Dangerous isn’t a word I would use to describe Jeffrey, in spite of the crimes he committed.”
Helen made an assenting nod. “Ms. Willet just got done telling me he was introverted, even docile.”
“Exactly. But he got the Level Five tag due to the nature of his crimes. It’s based on committed acts, not personality makeup, a bad rap for Jeffrey actually.”
Helen had a hard time commiserating. Poor Jeffrey. The big, bad government slaps him with a sensitive prison status.
“But getting back to what you were asking,” Alexander said, “as a Level Five inmate, Jeffrey was allowed no outside visitors other than direct blood relatives unless otherwise authorized by the Director’s office. His mother was the only one who ever came to see him, and the only exceptions I’m aware of were a few news interviewers.”
“Which the Director authorized?”
“Yes, but this was very rare. Two, three times. The only reason Dipetro allowed it, I suspect, was because he knew Jeffrey would speak positively of the center.”
Dipetro. The prison’s warden. A mover and shaker who liked to play hardball was what Helen had heard, and who was bucking to run the state’s department of public safety come the next election. “All right,” she said, “so Dahmer had no visitors other than his mother. What about correspondents?”
“That’s where the criteria is even more unjust,” Alexander told her, “based on the Level Five tag. Jeffrey was not allowed to send or receive mail. Period.”
Helen squinted. “Why?”
The minister shrugged, made a denigrating turn of his mouth. “I haven’t a clue. It’s unconstitutional if you ask me.”
“So is murdering and cannibalizing seventeen people,” Helen couldn’t resist saying.
“For one thing, you’ve been listening to too much right-wing press. Jeffrey didn’t cannibalize all of his victims,” Alexander defended.
“All right. But even if he only cannibalized one of them, why are you so quick to defend him?”
“Because the defenseless need defenders.”
“Defenseless?” Helen wanted to laugh. “He premeditatedly drugged and murdered innocent young men to pursue a sexual dementia.”
A frown drew deep lines into Alexander’s face. “On the outside, true, Jeffrey fell sway to the relegations of evil. But God forgave him of all that. And it’s inexcusable for persons such as yourself to maintain this right-wing, Pat Buchanan, lynch mob mentality.”