Campbell stepped back into view. “I case you’re wondering, I just injected you with half a cc of Trexaril, a half dose. It blocks all sulfer-based cholinergic agents. You’ll be able to talk in a few minutes. You’ll even be able to move a little.”
Move, she thought. Something in her mind froze. Move a little.
But would it be enough?
“Jeff?” he called out. “We’re back, and I’ve got her. Start getting ready, okay?” Then Campbell sat a his work desk, revolved around on the chair to face her. “North, obviously, told you my name, but I guess there are quite a few Campbells in the Wisconsin phone book, hmm? Even if you’d located me from my job, my employer has a phony address in my records file, and I’m sure you also know that my fingerprints aren’t on file, either. No doubt you dusted Kussler’s apartment.”
Helen’s throat tightened through a wallow. Then…she was able to nod. The injection was working—already she could tip her head around and minutely move her fingers and toes.
And when she tried to talk:
“Where do you work?” she slurred. “At the hospital?”
“Of course.”
Her mouth felt like wet clay as she struggled to continue speaking. “We record-checked everyone at every hospital in the state…and none of the Campbells match the prints you left at Kussler’s apartment.”
“Of course they didn’t,” Campbell informed her. “All state and county hospital employees are fingerprinted upon employment.”
“Then how could you possibly beat it?”
“Because, unlike Kussler, I work for a private contractor. Custodial services—a drab job, I know—but one that gave me access to the hospital without an ID on file.”
How simple, yet effective. Most hospitals did contract out for janitorial and maintenance services—to private sector contractors. Therefore a name-check would come up negative because Campbell wasn’t a hospital employee, he was a sub-contractor employee who worked for the hospital.
“Which,” he went on, “and as I’m sure you’ve already figured out, gave me access to most of the premise. Janitor’s have key access, to any wing on the maintenance roster. Nightshifts, less staff, less security, less patient/treatment traffic. And, yes, it was rather easy getting into the main nurses’ station to switch Rosser’s meds with a fatal dose of succinicholine. Getting Jeff out of the morgue before the autopsy and putting Kussler’s body in his place—well, that was a bit more difficult.”
Just then Helen’s ear felt pricked. She heard a sound, a tiny clatter, coming from another room.
Dahmer, she thought. She leaned up in the chair. “You killed your own lover. You used him as a body to make the switch.”
Campbell chuckled, a silhouette before his lit monitors. “I used him for quite a bit more than that, Captain. The perfect dupe, the perfect patsy. Kussler’s love was like a woman’s. He was weak, manipulable. He was absolutely pathetic.”
Helen staid a more proper response. Her fingers were moving almost freely now, and her forearms twitched too, when she tried to move them. If she could only have full use of her hands… “But you had help,” she contested. “There was no way you could’ve gotten Dahmer out of the hospital and left Kussler’s body in his place at the morgue on your own. It was Tom, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, Tom was very helpful indeed,” Campbell replied. “A deputy medical examiner, he was the highest ranking staff member on duty most nights.”
Helen wasn’t absolutely sure she caught his meaning. Much more important, she knew, was regaining the use of her hands without letting him realize it. If I could use my hands, she realized, then I could…
“You used Tom too, didn’t you?” she suggested, “just like you used Kussler. For your own end. Once you didn’t need Tom anymore, you killed him, didn’t you?”
Campbell’s voice leveled in its tenor. “As I’ve said, it’s all about power, Captain Closs. I use people—yes—to suit my own needs. And I make no apologies for it.”
Her eyes struggled to reckon him, to see the machine behind the madness…
“But it’s time now, isn’t it?” Campbell’s silhouetted form stood up before the flanks of monitors and CPU chasses. “It’s time you met Jeff.”
Campbell disappeared, a spirit in a dark breeze. Helen used his absence to test her muscle response. Her fingers turned into claws and her teeth ground as she strained to move her forearms. They moved, perhaps, two inches before they fell back down.
Shit…
She took fast, deep breaths, to raise her heart-rate and cycle more of her blood through her metabolism, worked the Trexaril faster through her system. But as she did so—
My…God…
Her eyes wandered, strayed to the kitchen, then stopped and stared. A plastic drum, like the big industrial drums Dahmer had used to dissolve flesh off bones with mercuric and sulphuric acid, sat beside the entry next to the counter. A black lidded pot simmered gently on the range. Helen could’ve sworn she smelled the aroma of something like pork chops. Then—
She squeezed her eyes shut.
Hanging on a pegged towel rack was—
Jesus Christ!
—something she at first took to be a tan chamois or dish towel. But a closer squint showed her what it realy was:
A large, irregular cutting of human skin, complete with abundant chest hair, and tiny shrunken nipples.
click
A door-latch opened. Helen jerked her gaze to the right. A dark doorway now stood before her, and in that doorway, two figures took slow, deliberate steps. “Come on,” Campbell’s voice insisted. “You can do it. She wants to see you…”
Helen’s eyes felt pried open by surgical stitches as she stared. Campbell attentively assisted his slow-stepping companion.
“That’s it, that’s it,” he said. “One step at a time.”
It’s him, she thought. It’s really him… I’m about to meet Jeffrey Dahmer…
Campbell aided his companion toward the long work desk, then sat him down in the silhouette shadows cast by the monitors. Helen’s eye peered forward, unblinking, as the shadow seemed to stare back at her. She could feel its black gaze on her face, she could sense the vision on her.
Campbell moved toward a lamp. “Captain Helen Closs, I’d like you to meet—”
The light snapped on.
Helen’s eyes bulged at the sight of the person sitting in the chair.
“—Tom Drake,” Campbell finished. “Tom, say hello to Captain Closs.”
In the light now, Tom’s face tremored, his eyes bulging at hers. His hands were bound in front of him by the wrists, a gag tied through his teeth.
“Tom’s a dupe just like most people,” Campbell announced. “Naturally you’d suspect him of complicity since it’s well know amongst my clan that he sometimes prefers the company of a man. The magazine article about your fetid relationship only tipped me off to what I already had heard. And he was the perfect pawn to draw you off of me.”
Tom’s face strained toward her, tears in his eyes, terrified as he sat helpless in the chair.
Campbell continued, “I planted the succincholine in Tom’s apartment, which I knew you’d eventually find. Never trust a bisexual man, hmm? And it was me who made the phony call to North’s new escort service and sent North to Tom’s address. Why? Because I knew you’d have surveillance cops watching his every move.”