Even Tom seemed to have the bug. What was the fascination? Perhaps it was Helen’s job that bored her on the topic; she saw death every day, and killers, to her, were all one in the same. They were the active statistics on a grim social spreadsheet, numbers that produced other numbers. She could think of it in no other terms: victims as well as perpetrators could never be humanized by the homicide investigator. Otherwise that homicide investigator would burn out in a year or two and wind up contemplating suicide every day. Last night’s 64 proved a case in point; if Helen thought of the decedent as a baby, a kid, a human child, etc., the freight of that humanity would wring her dry. It would wring anyone dry, she thought. To her, that baby could only be this: a homicide stat, a number on a very dark piece of paper.
It made her feel so cold, though, thinking about it at times like these. Maybe she was lying to herself; she’d done that a lot in her life. Acting one way but actually feeling another. How much longer could she pretend not to feel, if this were truly the case? She remembered the day Deputy Chief Olsher had barged into her office with a smile like a great, black pumpkin, and told her that Henry Longford had been diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. Longford had run a sophisticated point-network for the distribution of child pornography; Helen, working liaison with the Justice Department, had helped send Longford up to the Federal Max in Marion, fifteen years with no parole. “See, Helen?” Olsher reveled. “There really is a God. That sick piece of garbage’ll be dead before he’s even got five under his belt!” Helen’s initial reaction had been one of stoic nonchalance. She’d responded with something like: “Right now I’m too busy to even think about Longford.” Something like that, which sent Olsher away with the oddest expression. When she’d gotten home, however, she’d begun crying in fits, slowly but surely remembering the tiny, washed out faces in all those video masters, the nine-year-old thousand-yard stares. Eventually her sobs meshed with an hour-long paroxysm of manic laughter. It was strange what this job would do to people.
St. John the Divine Hospital was just south of Madison, and there, occupying half of its basement, was the Office of the Wisconsin State Medical Examiner along with the WSP Main Crime Lab. Tom’s workplace, and Beck’s. But Helen noted an immediate curiosity. Why bring Dahmer’s body here? she asked herself. Upon sentence, Dahmer had come into the correctional custody of the County of Columbus, whose own M.E. facilities were at South Columbus General just outside of Portage. Why call in the state M.E.?
Helen had to show her badge and ID three times just to get through the ER wing—she avoided the north entrance upon noticing an influx of news hawks and cameras—and three more times just to get downstairs. Why all the heat? There were cops everywhere: state troopers as well as a lot of Madison Metro PD. In the basement she first passed the lock-up wing, a little ICU prison for injured inmates and arrestees. PREPARE TO BE MAGNOMETERED UPON ADMITTANCE. LAW ENFORCEMENT EMPLOYEES CHECK WEAPONS IN WITH PROPERTY OFFICER HERE. Her high heels ticked across shiny tile; at the end of the corridor, another sign announced: WISCONSIN STATE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC HEALTH, MADISON SUBSTATION. Then, a final plaque: MORGUE.
“Helen!” Tom greeted when she entered. She’d been ID’d a final time at the recept desk. “I would’ve thought you’d be home asleep.”
“I couldn’t sleep,” she admitted. Intermittent nightshifts played havoc with her metabolism, but it must for Tom too. Nevertheless, he looked cheery and alert in his disposable autopsy blues. Helen had tried to sleep upon her return from the Farland call, but the pallid nightmare-face had kept hounding her. Waxlike, exsanguinated. When the cool, claylike hands had dipped to touch her bare breasts, she’d bolted awake and gave up on any further attempts to sleep.
“I’d come over there and kiss you,” he joked, “but, as you can see, I’m sterile.”
“What difference does it make to cadavers?”
“State regs, hon. Pretty soon the cadavers’ll be suing us—and winning. You got my message, I take it.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Say, what’s with all the heat? It was like trying to get into the Pentagon.”
“Aw, you know. Something like this, press fodder? I’ve even got a trooper guarding the back entry. They’ve caught six people already trying to sneak in here.”
“For what?”
“To get a picture of the body. One guy tried to steal his inmate number off his prison coveralls, another guy said he wanted to steal one of his teeth.”
This was ridiculous. “Dahmer’s teeth?”
“Sure,” Tom said, pulling out a box of Johnson & Johnson Morgue Swipes. Kills E. Coli and Other Morgue-Related Bacteria on Contact! Kills Herpes, Hepatitis B and HIV! the blue and white box bragged. “I’m amazed by the level of detail that the press has got their hands on. Christ, Columbus County Detent leaks like a sieve. Most of Dahmer’s teeth were broken; this guy says he heard it on the radio, thought he’d zip in here real quick and cop one of the teeth. They charged him with trespassing on state property and ‘morbid malfeasance.’“
“Jesus,” Helen dismissed. “They ought to charge him with being an asshole too, but I don’t think that one’s in the state books.”
“Not yet, anyway, but we can always hope.”
So that explained the undue police presence, which miffed her right off the bat. These cops had better ways to serve the public interest than guarding a corpse. Right now, on Clay Street, crack was being sold. Right now in the stan district, heroin tar was being cut. Right now, somewhere, a woman was being raped.
In the prep room, Helen at once found herself hemmed in by dented file cabinets, bookshelves, and a lot of computer equipment. One CPU, she noted, was a UNISYS 1500 latent datalink, which had state and federal mainframe access to every felon fingerprint in the country. A small, glass scan-pallet would digitalize the latent and feed it into the system. Cost per unit: $650,000. Too bad it crashed regularly. An equally expensive mass photospectrometer ticked in the corner like a cooling car engine.
A chuckle, then: “Mix you a drink?” Tom was mixing a formalin/alcohol mixture in several big translucent squeeze bottles: cadaver preservative. Helen hated the smell of formalin; it was the only thing that gave her a headache worse than tequila.
“So how’d that 64 go last night?”
“Terrible. It was a baby,” she finally told him. “Beck was there, as usual, and she was all over me. There was no way in hell that I could’ve written up for VCU. I don’t understand it. Beck hates me.”
Tom was wincing immediately, which mystified Helen. But before she could even ask, a figure appeared from the dressing room, dressed in the same disposable morgue blues. It was Jan Beck.
“I don’t hate you, Captain,” she said. “I was just bent out of shape last night, and I apologize.”
Good job, Helen! She felt like a perfect ass, but the scenario infuriated her. What the hell is Beck doing here! she wanted to shout.
“Jan’s doing the assist,” Tom explained. “I think I told you on my message, Greene’s on vacation as of last Sunday, went to Bowie, Maryland, or some hole in the wall town like that. I’ll bet he’s crapping his blues right now.”