I remember an old friend of mine, name of James Horn. Detective at Portland PD; married, with a son. We tracked down the "Dead Letters Killer" a while back. Haven't heard from him in a while...I wonder what's happened to him.
Oh, just so we're clear: I've never much cared for that name, the "Dead Letters Killer." It's a little too sensationalized for my tastes, but it has a ring to it, so I'll not object too loudly.
"For the thing I greatly feared has come upon me. And what I dreaded has happened to me, I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest, for trouble comes."--Job 3:25-26
Jordan woke me up this morning because she was having a bad dream. I let her in and reassured her that everyone has bad dreams...and then my pager went off. No time to help my little sweetheart see it through--I was needed elsewhere.
The Group directed me to an animal center in Portland, Oregon. Awful place, full of trapped animals, wild and domesticated alike...I think I can safely say that they didn't take kindly to me at all. Considering that their exposure to humans has only been of masked municipal trappers, I don't blame them at all.
Before I hit the door, I saw in my mind's eye...the letters "Y," "R," and "Y," and they looked like they'd been written on Scotch tape. Weird, but whatever. So long as it's not a guy with his eyes and mouth sewn shut or something like that, I'm not complaining.
Another grisly scene. I'll say this much: She's not half the girl she used to be...literally. Meanwhile, I'm getting next week's "Jumble" in my head. This time it's "R," "R," "Y," "I," and "I."
The next morning, I went to Molly's Coffee Shop for breakfast and a way to make sense of all this. It's pretty much "Scrabble meets Mastermind," and if I could work this into a game, I'd be filthy rich. Problem is, it's not going anywhere. I've tried "IRREVOCABLY," "RITUALLY," "RISKY"...nothing.
So engrossed was I that I didn't hear the bell on the door ring. A big guy took a seat next to me. One look at him, and I recognized him as Jim Penseyres, from the 'Group.
We shot the breeze for a while, and he told me that a couple of his colleagues didn't want to take on the Portland case at all, while a few others thought we should just wait a while. He agreed with the second, and tried to pull Holmes' serial-killer criteria on me--specifically, the one which said that they usually wait 30 days between kills. I stopped him right there. "Look," I said, "This guy isn't going to wait around. I give him ten days before he starts again."
Jim wondered why I wanted to take on this case so badly. "He left a message," I said. Shaking his head, Jim realized I wasn't going to take no for an answer, and directed me to a one James Horn, who works with Portland PD, and who helped bring San Diego's "Highway 8 Killer" to justice.
As soon as I got to his office, I sensed that all was not right in his world. Sure, he was a good host and all, but it looked and felt like a mask he was putting on. I made friendly-like for a while, and he let his guard down. Admitted--more to himself--that there were problems at home. He was quick to change the subject, and I was quick to oblige. Better not tear that Band-Aid off too soon.
We looked at a file on the killer. You'd think most of these guys kill for sexual gratification, but no, not this one--the girl's body showed no signs of violation. It's entirely possible that this guy has never had sex in his life. There was another detail, one that I've never seen in any other killer: He put duct-tape all over her face. James and I could only guess that our killer shows remorse afterwards...
We headed for the scene of the crime--the animal shelter. The victim was a "parking enforcement officer" named Karen Anderson. We took a look around the lab itself, or rather, I looked for that message while James went into "man-of-action" mode. My first observation: This guy's got a short fuse. Likes to have things done a certain way. We're going to have a lot of fun working together...not. Before we got into a barroom brawl right then and there, our pagers went off at the same time. We were wanted elsewhere, at the post office. Remind me to thank the warden later for that stay of execution.
We hit the post office. I saw a sign marked "DEAD LETTERS OFFICE," and couldn't help but chuckle at the irony. Got another vision: "A," "Y," "R," and then "A," "I," "I." We stepped inside.
Another victim, cut in half just like the first. Her remains were shrouded in black plastic, and she had duct tape over her face. Something about that duct tape...I asked a techie for some Scotch tape and a couple of sheets of acetate. After pressing the clear tape against the duct tape, and transferring it to the acetate, I got this result: "HAIR TODAY GONE TOMORROW."
As if by instinct, I pondered my own thinning hair.
The next day, back at James' office, we hashed out a basic profile. He thinks our killer is an ex-cop. I think his theory is valid, but he's got a few loose screws. Suddenly his son comes charging in, happy as a clam. Daddy's not so happy--in fact, he's really mad. I don't think I would ever snap at Jordan the way he snapped at his kid. His wife--Cindy, I later learned her name was--immediately gave him what-for. She told him that T.C., their son, wanted to surprise him by coming in early, and he was expecting them to show up at 4:00.
Cath and I thought we should invite Jim, Cindy, and T.C. over for dinner the next day. We could all get to know each other outside the confines of the job. Naturally, Jordan and T.C. made fast friends...how nice to be young and innocent. Jim--I think I'll call him that from here on--said that he really didn't want a divorce, that he was terrified of failing his son, of becoming nothing more than "a face covered in gray tape." I took one look at Cath, and I could tell what she was thinking from her expression: "With a mug like Frank's, gray tape would only be an improvement."
This guy's troubles reminded me of something Dostoevsky wrote: "There's nothing more sad that a life that ends, and no-one knows or cares." I realized that our little madman feels like he's faceless, so he covers his victims' faces. He feels like a dead letter at the post office, so he kills. Women and sex make him feel even worse, so he murders women. He feels remorse after he kills, so he leaves clues. He's trying to get himself captured, believes he needs to be punished. I agree with him on that, but I'm kind of worried that Jim'll get to him before I do. I'm no glory hound; don't get me wrong...I just believe that they're still people in desperate need of help, and Jim's going the other way. To him, they're nothing more than monsters. If he keeps going down that path, he's going to destroy himself and everyone close to him. I've got to get through, somehow.
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A couple of days later, we learned that he killed again. This time, it was an orderly at St. Joseph's Hospital, in the parking garage. We're guessing from the blood-prints we found that he has some kind of a vehicle--the prints are moving away from the scene. Two important clues: A broken lens from a pair of glasses and another message. "NOTHING VENTURED, NOTHING GAINED."
True to form, Jim blew his top. I noticed a press-gang behind us, cameras at the ready, and I told him he'd better watch himself. "That's just what he wants," I said. Jim's taking the bait like a good little trout, and with a hothead like him on the case, I have to make the smart moves.
Press-gang...That gave me an idea. We fed the newspapers a bald-faced lie, that the killer misspelled "VENTURED" as "VENTERED." Now we're throwing out the bait.
That night, there was a candlelight vigil outside the hospital. We set up a heavy police presence well away from those who came to pay their respects. Sure enough, Jim was champing at the bit for a piece of the action. Before I could placate him, our squawk-boxes blared. They found a suspicious-looking character.
Jim leapt into action like Bulldog Drummond. He tackled the guy and...I can't even describe it.
Worse yet, it wasn't even our killer. Just a head-case who escaped from his floor, he wanted so badly to say goodbye. After the cops took him back to his room, I gave Jim a good chewing-out. He didn't even try to apologize. Instead, he pulled that old "what if it was your wife or family?" card. "Look," I said, "He's not about to go after our wives and families." And then I got his problem: He's trying to get inside their heads, when he should be trying to put them into his head. The way he's going about it is going to drive him crazy at this rate.
And then I realized something. We handed out 30 pins to be left on a board at the memorial. I just counted 31. He was here, hiding in plain sight.
Jim and I put out flyers in the hopes that someone might recognize one of the faces on it. One of them had to be a match. We got a call from a young woman at an eyeglass-lab in Woodburn, a saleslady. She tried to calm him down when he lost his cool earlier that day. I "saw" him reach out and slap her hard...bastard.
Our last option was clear: Set up a stakeout and wait for him to get his glasses.
One of Portland's "dames in blue" volunteered to be a decoy for our little operation. We had about 20 officers backing us up in case things got out of hand. Everything was picture perfect, except for Jim. I told him to go home, take a load off. The last thing we need is a loose cannon to make things worse.
Come to find out that he didn't go home. Instead, he found our man, and I found Jim beating the tar out of him. The coppers came and put the nutjob in handcuffs, and Jim realized that he just ruined our chances of putting him away. Because of his rage, his fear, his loss of control, all the stuff in that van would be inadmissible in court. About all we could hope for was the stuff found at his house: DNA samples, personal effects taken from his victims, hair clippings. The DA said it should be plenty.
Bigger things than our case were damaged. That little outburst cost James whatever chance he had of getting into the Millennium Group.
And there you have it: James Horn, the detective who couldn't.
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"Dead Letters" marks the point at which Millennium loses its apocalyptic leanings and takes a step back toward an average, run-of-the-mill procedural...or so I thought when I first watched it. The episode disappointed me at first because it lacked any of the first two episodes' apocalyptic leanings, but, after a second viewing, I concluded that it's a lot more interesting the second time around, and there's a lot more going on under the surface than I thought.
First things first, let's talk about what the episode is. "Pilot" and "Gehenna" set up the formula; "Dead Letters" confirms one of the series' main rules: The killers and madmen themselves are less important than their effect on society itself and on Frank Black and those around him.
Halfway through the story, we meet a "reflection" of Frank in the persona of James Horn, the buff, macho detective and potential Millennium candidate. It's telling that he once answered to "Jim," the more friendly and informal shortening of his given name. "Jim Horn" has two neat syllables, as does "Frank Black."
At first, he's set up to be Frank's equal and perhaps his competition, but when he insists on the more formal "James," he instead becomes a dark mirror for our hero. Everything in James' life has gone wrong: his work has overwhelmed him, his wife has separated and taken their son with her, and he feels like he's slowly and inexorably drowning in his own masculinity.
In any normal show, the main protagonist would take the bait and start a pissing contest, but Frank isn't that kind of hero. Instead, he displays a more sensitive, more empathetic nature, and in so doing, he reveals James' bravado for the farce that it really is. Unfortunately, this farce has destructive consequences, as we see in the "memorial" scene, in which James shakes down and brutally beats an innocent hospital patient who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. (To be fair, though, even I was fooled: The way the scene was shot did set him up to be the killer.) James even went as far as pulling out the old "what if it was your family?" card, which I've seen in use among the more aggressive parts of Facebook and the rest of the internet. Frank, to his credit, responds, "He hasn't killed our wives or families."
Now we see the effects of that bravado: James has been taking his work too personally for too long, and it's driving him off the deep end. We see a little bit of that in the episode's climax: He starts to perceive everyone walking down the street to look like the killer on the flyer, and almost every car passing down the road to be an orange VW van.
I'll say it again: Were this any other cop show, Jim's no-holds-barred assault of the (real) killer would be shot, edited, and presented as justice dispensed. Here, it's nothing more than a man losing control of himself.
The resolution is an anticlimax, the villain disposed of with a few words about the evidence against him. Justice is beside the point--this resolution is about the consequences of police brutality. James Horn, the cowboy cop, loses whatever chance he has of getting into the Millennium Group.
The ending has some more subtle, more horrifying implications: It leaves us with the feeling that Jim's been doing this for quite some time, and only now is he learning that it's doing him no good. With that in mind, we start to wonder: Has he been acting up at home? It's possible. Will he start acting up at home? It's possible, but less likely.
Jim Horn started out as a possible rival to Frank, but ended up serving as a glimpse into what might have been...and a warning of what might happen in the future.
Frank ought to watch himself, lest he end up like his colleague. Will this pan out later on? We shall find out as we go through Series 1. Come back next time for "Kingdom Come!"
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(Millennium copyright 1996, Ten Thirteen Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. All screenshots are property of Ten Thirteen Productions and 20th Century Fox Television. All rights reserved. Special thanks to Millennium--This Is Who We Are for episode transcripts, which helped me adapt the episodes.)
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