“Not surveillance cops,” Helen corrected. “I planted an electronic device on North’s car, that could monitor his movements through our communications office.”
“Such technology!” Campbell exclaimed. “Big Brother just keeps getting bigger.” Campbell came away from the desk, approached her, and leaned over into her face. “But do you want to know about technology, Captain Closs? I can tell you all about it. Do you want to know about the dental match? Do you want to know about the DNA match in the hair, the handwriting match on the letters, and the fingerprints? Do you, Captain Closs? Are you ready to confess to me that I am your intellectual superior? Are you ready to admit to me that I had you, and everyone else, fooled all along?”
“No,” Helen grated. “Your plan was brilliant, I’ll admit that, and I’ll even admit that, toward the end, I actually went with the flow and believed that Jeffrey Dahmer was still alive. But he isn’t, is he?”
“Don’t be so sure, Captain,” Campbell went on in his coy tone. “Are you sure about that? Are you certain?”
He darted away, back to the room off to the right. Then a squealing sound was heard, like casters or something. In another moment, though, Campbell came back out, pushing before him a wheeled office chair.
Sitting in the chair was, his eyes opened and staring at her, was Jeffrey Dahmer.
A very dead Jeffrey Dahmer.
He looked like a raddled ghost at first, streaked white. But it didn’t take Helen long to understand that he’d been regularly dusted with ground limestone to cut back on the stench of autolysis and rot. His face was but a mask—a crushed mask—the red blood so oxydized that it had turned black as charcoal.
Helen tried again to gauge the use of her hands and arms, but—not much better than before. The succinicholine was wearing off, but Campbell had mentioned that it was a “half dose” of Trexaril that he’d administered as an antedote. Would much physical mobility would she regain, with a “half dose?”
The pieces were all here now—she only had to calculate the obscure ones. And she had to bide for time, to let more of the antidote work through her system before Campbell decided to kill her. And he was right. It would be glorious for him, when they found the body of the Captain of the State Police Violent Crimes Unit tortured and dead with Jeffrey Dahmer’s DNA, handwriting, voiceprints, and fingerprints all over the scene.
Kill time, she thought. Her arms struggled to flex. Kill time before he kills you.
“Dahmer really was murdered by Tredell Rosser, in the prison rec unit, on November 28th, wasn’t he?” she asked.
“Yes,” Campbell said.
“And you had been corresponding with him for some time before that, hadn’t you? That’s the only reason you pursued a relationship with Kussler. Kussler had access to Dahmer’s cell, and you used that access to maintain correspondence with Dahmer when he was alive, didn’t you?”
“Very astute, Captain,” Campbell admitted. “Yes.”
Helen remembered everything Dr. Sallee had told her about such people. Killer groupies. Obssesive-reference disorders. “Kussler would take your letters, leave them in Dahmer’s cell when he was on work detail, and take his letters to you out.”
“Yes.”
“But we never found any trace of your letters to him.”
“I wrote them on toilet paper,” Campbell informed. “Where they could be read very quickly and then effectively flushed.”
“So you planned all of this well beforehand.”
Campbell laxed back in his chair, thinking. “I did, yes, but not Jeffrey. Jeffrey would write to me frequently, citing his conviction that it was only a matter of time before some inmate in the prison murdered him. He was well aware of the number of enemies he’s accrued. The rest was me, my planning, my calculation.”
“You’re a very smart man,” Helen said.
Campbell’s own gaze bore down on her. “I’m a thousand times smarter than you, or any of the other government lackies on your three-ring-circus police department. If you’re so smart, how did I manage to arrange Jeffrey’s phone call to you? A phone call, mind you, that rendered a positive voiceprint?”
“Anyone with the right equipment could’ve done that,” Helen talked right back to him. “Dahmer was interviewed several times on tv. All you had to do was videotape the interviews, and then sound edit the words out to construct sentences which you later played over my phone. The second call I received, when you were already in my apartment waiting for me, was easily done with a call converter and automatic telephone dialer preset with a nominal dial delay. You were waiting for me in my apartment. You were watching out the window. When you saw me park my car in my lot, you called your own number, connected to the converter and auto-dialer, punched in an activation code, and hung up.”
Campbell nodded, not quite as enthusiastically as before. “Good thinking. That’s—well—that’s exactly what I did.”
“And the DNA verification tested in the hairfall? That was easy too. You already had Dahmer’s dead body. You merely left a few of his hairs at each crime scene. The dental match was a cinch—it was still Dahmer’s body on the slab when it was ID’d, before the switch. And the fingerprints? That was no big deal either, for the same reason. Before Dahmer’s print ridges rotted, you applied them to the Flair pen and all of the pieces of paper you used to produce the letters. You probably have a whole stack of blank sheets of paper here, with Dahmer’s fingerprints on them. And spatulas and knives and Flair pens too. You probably applied your own body sweat to Dahmer’s dead fingertips to make the impressions, because sweat doesn’t leave DNA.”
Campbell’s mouth twitched a bit. “A commendable speculation, Captain. And, again, you’re right. The amino acids left by fingerprint ridge patterns can last for years. I used Dahmer’s dead hands to leave prints on over a hundred pieces of blank paper, as well as kitchen utensils, to leave at future crime scenes.”
“So when that thing sitting in the chair rots down to a skeleton, you’ll still have latent evidence that he’s still alive and killing people.”
“Yes,” Campbell assented. “Right.” He paused, looked around in the dark. By now, though, Tom, bound and gagged in his own chair, had passed out. “You’re right about all of that, Captain, but any articulate person could make such speculations. The real instance of genius was the evidence that started it all. The handwriting evidence. Those letters left at the crime scenes were too specific to have been written by Jeffrey before his death. So how do you explain that? How do you explain the letters?”
“I’m not sure exactly how you pulled it off,” Helen said. “But it’s easy to guess how you did it in general.”
“Oh? And how is that?”
“You’re a computer expert. North told me that last week, and so did my tech at headquarters. I mean, Christ, you made a modem-based computer program from scratch that sideswiped all of Bell-Atlantic’s trace processors. Someone with that kind of skill could probably also find a way to duplicate Dahmer’s handwriting on a computer and then generate exact letters on a high-tech printer.”
“Again,” Campbell admitted. “I’m impressed.” The lit monitors behind him glowed like eerie static. A variety of printers sat to their side. “My secret correspondence with Dahmer provided me with an infinite inventory of his handwriting. I used a grid scanner, scanned each and every word into my CPU. It wasn’t easy, and it proved very time-consuming—quite different from traditional flatbed scanning. But eventually I had thousands of words, all written by Dahmer, that I could rearrange to say what I wanted, and then print.”