Millennium S1E12: "Loin Like a Hunting Flame"

You've come back for another story, haven't you? Think I'd better start charging for this...

...Well! That'll do just fine. You have excellent taste in bourbon. Yeah...This looks like a damn fine year.

All right. Sit down and let's share a drink. This one comes from Boulder, Colorado. It was a pretty weird case, in that "familiar" kind of weird. In many ways, it reminded me of the one with the Frenchman. So there was this pharmacist...

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"Two souls, alas,

are housed within my breast."

                                                               --Faust

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The 'Group sent me out to Boulder's glorious botanical garden. I tell you, it was just like walking through the Garden of Eden, because there were trees that the voice on the PA system said were authentic to those which grew around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

It even had its very own Adam and Eve, and they certainly didn't belong on this side of paradise. 

A young couple, both in their twenties, as naked as the day they were born, save for the large leaves draped over his and her circumstances. The tableau was beautiful and eerie at the same time.

Boulder PD called in the 'Group that day. Agent Maureen Murphy and I were sent to work with Detective Thomas: middle-aged, cigar-chomping, overworked type.

We introduced each other, and I learned that Thomas had come from LAPD's homicide taskforce. "It wasn't my idea to squeal for help," he sighed. "Not now. Probably not ever." I've heard it so many times before. They only involve us when things get too out-there.

I crouched down and examined the bodies while Maureen asked Thomas a few questions. A flash: I saw them as their killer must have seen them: a little older; a little sexier; about to make love before the camera. Fade to white, and they reverted back to their more youthful selves.

Meanwhile, another detective found an apple with bite marks elsewhere within the garden. I only needed a quick glance at it: "The victims' teeth are going to match the dental patterns on the apple. You'll find pieces of it in their mouths, but nothing in their stomachs."

"What makes you say 'victims’?” Thomas scoffed. "Could have been one of those moony, calf-love teen suicide pacts."

"They were killed somewhere else, then brought here and posed. I've never seen a double-suicide done like this." Maureen chimed in: "The Garden of Eden, the apple with two bites, the nakedness covered--it's atypical, meticulous," "Which is why I think it's a double homicide," I stated.

We quit the conservatory. "So," Thomas grudgingly began, "double homicide. State your case."

"I think killing's new for our perpetrator," I explained. "He's lost his innocence. He's ashamed."

Wanting to quell a battle of wits before it began, Maureen distracted Det. Thomas. "Have you seen anything like this before, detective?" He thought back for a moment. "Couple abducted in a bar. Mighta' been doped. Abductor had 'em..." The tough-guy exterior cracked for a moment. It seems our killer isn't the only one who's ashamed. "...perform sexually," he finished. "It was nothing like this. No murder, no staging." I thought about asking their names, but reconsidered. It sounded like a dead end, anyway.

Later, at the morgue, we joined the young man's parents in an observation room.

"Here's how it's going to work," Thomas explained. "I'm going to tap on the glass. Blind's going to open, and you'll see the face and shoulders." The father was valiantly fighting back the tears. "If...if it's Mel..." he said, shakily.”...Then you just nod and I'll close the blinds." He wasn't putting on an act. He hated doing this just as much as the parents hated being there.

Tap-tap. The blinds opened. They saw his face and broke down in tears. Thomas closed the blinds. "I'm so very, very sorry," he sighed as he pulled out a contact card. "If there's anything I can do for you, here's my number.”

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About 11:30 the next morning, Thomas and I set out for the University of Colorado. Mom and Dad--Mr. and Mrs. Dodd, I should say--told us his name was Mel, and he lived on campus.

"Pathology got the results back," Thomas began as we walked down a hall. "They both took an Ecstasy hybrid orally, unusually pure. Can't tell us what, if anything, was injected into them."

We rounded a corner. "Tell me something, Frank," he continued. "Are you comfortable working a case like this with a woman?" I shot back, “I’m not comfortable working a case like this.” He pushed the matter: “For what it’s worth, they don’t understand male sexuality worth a damn, any more than we do theirs.”

There, in front of us, was the Apache Hall Student Residence. Someone held a door open for us, and we made our way inside.

Dorm number 25. Former residence of Mel Dodd. Thomas pushed the door open, and we were greeted by the sight of two lovebirds on the bed. The former tenant just died a few days ago! Little respect, no?

Obviously, this wasn’t Mel Dodd. Thomas grilled him about Mel’s whereabouts, and the boy told him that Mel and his girlfriend had gone to a club. Didn’t know what it was called. This wasn’t good enough for either of us, so Thomas played the strongest card he knew. “Say, suppose you and your girlfriend were found dead. Would you want Mel to try to remember where you’d gone?”

Turns out the place was called the Rave Zone. We paid them a little visit that night. The owner, clad in a red robe, wasn’t at all happy to see either of us. He freely admitted that he rented the place and paid for all the hoohah, but never sold any drugs. “It’s just a business. It’s safe. If they wanna get high and sex out, hey, it’s their lives. But it’s my living.”

While they got better acquainted, I headed down to the floor. Late teens, early twenties, all writing and dancing and covered in neon paint. Neither of us belonged here, so I took Thomas to one side.

“The person we’re looking for, he provides opportunity, drugs.” Clearly he wasn’t going to get anywhere with Red Robe. “He gives them a window into sexuality, or at least the way he sees it. Perfect, uninhibited, guiltless. His actions’ll follow the development of his fantasies.”

Saturday. A little after nine in the morning. Last night someone was hosting quite the party. Swinger’s party, or so I’d heard. Maureen Murphy and I were in Thomas’ office, where he was grilling a couple of the husbands. Seems their wives had gone out to get some champagne and hadn’t come back from the liquor store that was about a half-mile away from the house.

Poor bastards were pretty embarrassed to ‘fess up like this.

“Wife swapping,” the detective concluded. “Group sex. You two are proud of that, huh?”

“Pride’s not the issue here, detective,” I interjected. Didn’t do a lick of good, though—he was riled up.

“Please. We just want our wives back,” one of them protested. “So you can trade up,” Thomas snapped. I swear, this guy…

“That’s enough,” I finally declared, very quietly. “Cut ‘em loose, Thomas. They need some time. Their wives are most likely dead.”

You’ve been coming here long enough, listening to me prattle on. You know by now, I hate being right. Sure enough, some poor soul found the two ladies, one blonde; one brunette, both dead but exquisitely posed at a bench so that they were sitting together, their heads just touching. I was sitting in the driver’s seat of a black-and-white, when a vision came to me: A man, dressed as a cop, approaching their car with a flashlight…their interaction with him…finally, as he saw the two of them, engaged in a tryst that signified a little more than friendship.

Det. Thomas interrupted my reverie with a rap on the window. He was tapping with—I kid you not—a ball-gag, like the kind found in some pervert’s toy box. It was an image that no amount of drink can ever quite erase.

“Penny for your thoughts,” he said, indicating the…device.

“I don’t think that’s important,” I replied. “Same guy as the club—pulled them over, impersonating a police officer. Might want to call Maureen to see what she thinks.”
“I don’t want to know what she thinks,” he huffed.

Back at the station, that afternoon, Red Robe from the rave was sitting with a sketch artist, describing our killer. From what I’d been hearing, this fella was perceptive.

“I know it’s what I described, but it’s not how I described it,” he sighed.

“You’re going to have to go back and start again,” I told him. “I know it’s tedious.”
“This guy’s a jerk,” Thomas whispered to me. “He doesn’t have a clue.”

“The man he’s describing is unremarkable,” I protested. “That’ll make him harder to find. He could look like anybody. See, his victims are unreal to him—erotic figments to be manipulated. He kills them so they won’t exist outside his fantasies.”

Maureen added to this: “Until the two women, the targets were heterosexual couples, conventional activities.”

I saw in Thomas a shade of red I hadn’t seen on a human face in a while. “Wh—bu—You think doping these people, watching them have sex, and then murdering them is…is…conventional?!” he spluttered.

“Maureen is referring to the expansion of his interests into possible gay and lesbian activities.”

“All right, that’s it. This conjecture sounds worse than useless. Tell you what: I’m going to take that lousy description and compare it with all known sex offenders. That’s what we should have been doing all this time.”

Maureen and I went down to the morgue that afternoon. Who should be there before my startled eyes but my friend and colleague, Peter Watts. He’d been doing some toxicology on the two ladies.

“So. We found, in addition to the synthetic ecstasy, trace amounts of triphetamine and dilavtin. Those were so slight as to suggest an inadvertent combination of the three…or deliberate. In the injection, there were some unusual metabolites. Our tentative conclusion: succlynocide. He’d have given them a lethal dose, but, because of how the body breaks it down, it’d be hard to detect.”

“Pretty fancy shooting,” Maureen mused. “He’s a marksman,” I pronounced.

A couple of detectives had tracked us down and asked us some questions. Watts reassured them that a mere bathtub chemist couldn’t have produced these drugs, and that the killer had legal access to them.

“I think he takes them himself,” I offered. “He could have a drug-related paraphilia.” Maureen had to explain to a nonplussed detective that “The violence is drug-related. They allow him to act on recurrent, intensely-arousing sexual fantasies…and then he makes them real. He’s moving toward the consummation of an act that he’s incapable of assuming with anyone, not even his wife.

Thomas expressed genuine wonder at the possibility that this guy could be married. “Possibly for many years,” Maureen continued. “His wife probably blames herself for their lack of sexual consummation. She’s deferential, attentive, supportive, values other qualities in him. Dependability, say…kindness.”

On Sunday morning, Thomas went to a corner pharmacy. Maureen, Peter, a detective, and I followed in a car. He stepped out of the pharmacy, walked across the street, and shared what he’d found.

“Pharmacist’s name is Art Nesbitt. He’s married, and he bought this place eight years ago.” As our detective got out of the car and checked the place out, Thomas asked me what I’d found so far. “We’ve run the names that dispensed dilatvin and triphetamine by pharmacy,” replied I. “Eleven hits so far, but nothing conclusive.”

Watts chimed in: “Nesbitt’s taken receipt of both four times, but hasn’t filed the proper paperwork with the FDA for dispensation by prescription.”

The detective came charging out of the pharmacy. “He left sick this morning. The kid filling in for him thinks he went home.”

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

We paid a visit to the house. Ever had that thrill you get when everything just folds neatly in on itself? It felt like we were weaving the net tighter and tighter, but we couldn’t have done it without Art’s mistake.

Karen answered the door and allowed us inside. Thomas led off, informing her that there was a paperwork error at the pharmacy, and that we were just here to clarify a few things.

She paused for a moment to collect herself and provide an answer. “Well, if Art was here, I’m sure he could straighten this out right away. My husband is a very methodical man. Meticulous, really. Almost to a fault. I think I know my husband. We’ve been married 18 years.” Maureen expressed her admiration at this staying power, and I…I could tell in Karen’s stilted speech-patterns that she was ill at ease. While Maureen had her occupied, Peter and I slipped away inconspicuously.

He went upstairs, and I went to the garage. It was all very neat in there, but I noticed a six-pack of something labeled “ZUX” on top of a cabinet. Could be interesting. I filed it away for later. Meanwhile, Maureen and Karen were otherwise occupied. 

“…and does he have any hobbies?”

“Hobbies? No, no, I don't think he has time with work. Um, we, we watch TV, periodically. And he used to work on the car sometimes. He changed the motor by himself once. A long time ago.”

“How often have you been having relations with your husband, Karen? It’s important.”

“We were going to try again to make it right.”

I sidled in and handed to Karen what Peter had found in the toilet tank: a copy of Snazz magazine, a tawdry jack-rag he’d probably bought at 7-Eleven. The headline next to a leather-clad babe trumpeted: “Tantalizing Tatiana—The Snazz Babe Of The Month.” Except this was from 1978, and it was the only one we found anywhere in the house.

“That’s when we were married,” Karen sobbed. “He’s done something horrible, hasn’t he?” She looked like she had just experienced a genuine emotion for the first time in a long time.

“Do you have any idea where we can find him?” I asked. She replied, “He’s at work. Isn’t he?”

It wouldn’t be the first time I found myself lost for an easy, reassuring answer. My gift can only carry me so far. We had to wait for another lead.

Later that evening, at almost 8:30, Thomas joined Maureen and me at Delmonico’s Restaurant. It was a family-style road diner, pleasant enough, but the three of us were determined to sully the gentle atmosphere. Thomas especially.

“…Did he know we were on to him?” he asked. “He can’t have. So he must have, uh, took himself off for work for another reason. Did he grab someone? Where the hell does this guy go to?”

Maureen tried to quietly excuse herself, but the seating was too tight. She had to discreetly get our portly friend’s attention so that she could make an exit.

He cradled his head in his hands. His next admission didn’t come easily.

“I think I got off on the wrong foot with you. Well, well, with both of you. I mean, I can see that she’s a pretty good investigator. I mean, I can see that.”

A long pause.

“I…haven’t exactly been comfortable working this case. Worked a lot of sex crimes when I was on the job in LA. Some of that stuff got pretty rough. I was….I was married then.”

“But no more.”

“I felt…uh…contaminated or something. And then, uh, and then I found out that I couldn’t make love to my wife. It started driving me nuts. She didn’t say anything about it…”

Another pause, this one almost too long.

“…and then, you know, I started going to, uh, porno movies and such, trying to cure myself. It got worse. I got a divorce, and then I moved here. We don’t get much sex crime here.”

For all I cared, he could have been listing a recipe for chocolate chip cookies. My mind was elsewhere—not because he was boring, but because I’d just thought of something. I’d just put the pieces together when Maureen came back to our table. “Something Karen Nesbitt told you about her husband,” I said to her, “they hadn’t had sex for the last eighteen years, and now he wants to try again.”

“Do you think he’s going back there?” she asked.

“I hope so,” Thomas interjected. “I’ve got men all over the area.”

I shook my head ‘no.’ “I think he’s way ahead of us.”

We left the restaurant, not having actually ordered anything, and made like a Formula One driver back to the Nesbitt house.

Maureen explained her theory: “It all fits. His anniversary’s functioning as a stressor.”

I translated for Thomas: “He’s recreating sexual experiences he feels he should have had before marriage. He killed, froze his victims in death at what he believes to be the happiest, most perfect moment of their lives.” I glanced at Thomas as the headlights’ glare faded to black. “I know that look, Thomas. ‘What makes you think he’ll be here?’ Well….I don’t know where else he’d go if he’s trying to make his marriage work.”

We opened the side garage door to find Karen’s car, as cold as a car with nowhere in particular to go. My hunch told me he was here, but his car wasn’t. Why not? I wondered.

Of course. The old trap-door trick. I grabbed a bottle of something from a countertop and poured right where I was standing. The liquid pooled on the ground, dripping into a crevice. Finding a crowbar within arm’s reach, I hacked at the concrete until I found an iron loop. Immediately picking up on the clue, Thomas handed me a big iron hook attached to a winch. I threaded the hook through the loop and gave him the go-ahead.

Crank, crank, crank. The trapdoor—a wooden pallet with a concrete covering—led to a narrow tunnel. There, I saw a teenage boy trying to revive his girlfriend. Both were naked.

“We’re going to need an ambulance.”

Maureen shined her light, prompting him to cry out, “Let us go! Please! Let us go.” He thought we were his captors.

“It’s all right,” I said, calmly, as I climbed down the ladder. “You’re safe. We’ll get you out. No-one’s going to hurt you now.”

When I finally reached them, I checked the girl’s neck for a pulse. Weak but steady.

“She’s alive. You two are freezing.”

“He—He gave us pills. We thought we’d die here.”

A flash. I could see Art behind his camera, forcing these two to re-enact a scene of two high-school sweethearts after prom night. “Call him Art. Call her Karen.” Even with the drugs he’d given them, it must have been too surreal to comprehend.

I found two blankets on a shelf. As I wrapped them around him, he told me it had been an hour since he saw Nesbitt. “There’s a door over here,” he added. Sure enough, there was a door. “It’s an old bomb shelter. He probably added the tunnel on. This must lead to the house.”

Maureen and I found Detective Kent in the living room. “Call Thomas,” she ordered him. “Nesbitt’s upstairs.”

I kicked in the bedroom door to find Art and Karen, seemingly in marital bliss. Seemingly because he was about to put a syringe into her neck. Pure instinct kicked in as I slapped the syringe out of his hand and pulled Karen away from him and toward Maureen.

His eyes and voice were full of a mixture of panic and fury. “No! No! You don’t understand! That is my wife! I am married now!”

He grabbed the syringe and stabbed it into his thigh. As the yellow poison coursed through his femoral artery, it looked like he’d found heaven at last.

“Karen…I’ll be there. I’ll wait for you. I’ll be faithful. We’re married now……”

He was beyond hope even before he’d put the plunger in. He’d been beyond hope for over eighteen years. Poor Art…He was no deviant. If anything, he was too good, too pure, so much so that it spilled over into murder.

Thomas took me back to the motel I was staying at.

“So Maureen’s staying a few days,” he mused. “She married?”
“Why don’t you ask her?” Nope, nope. Playing matchmaker is above my pay grade.

“I didn’t tell you everything about working in LA. Besides my marriage breaking up and all, I had this reaction to the squalor, the carnage of the work. Instead of working up a drinking problem like any normal guy, I had a nervous breakdown.”

I’d consider the nervous breakdown to be the more normal of the two. It’s the sign that tells you something’s very, very wrong, and the drinking’s what you do to silence that, but that just makes it worse.

“Something’s wrong, Frank. You know, in this day and age, people are carrying on as wild as ever, maybe more so. Regular folks, they’re doing drugs, acting nuts.”

“Sex and death have commingled in one inseparable impulse,” I rejoined. “Risk feeds sensation. Sensation makes risk acceptable. We’re heading toward……..something perhaps we’d do better to avoid.” I stepped out of the car when it had reached the motel.

“Take care, Thomas.”

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COMMENTARY

A mixed bag, this one! I can’t say I particularly enjoyed watching it or coming up with the Narrative entry, because the episode felt a little pedestrian. “Hunting Flame” does get the show going in style with the opening and that striking reinvention of Adam and Eve, but then it meanders.

The idea of the pop-up rave was inventive as a concept, but somewhat risible in execution, and not nearly as well-done as the Mardi Gras setting of Dracula 2000, in which it served a point of contrast between the vampires and the revelers. Here, it just seemed there to go “HEY, LOOK! IT’S THE MID-NINETIES!”

Thematically, the episode is heady. Det. Thomas, the lawman, and Art Nesbitt, the “heel” of the story, are linked by the common thread of sexual shame. Typical network TV of the time usually presents sexuality—tawdry strip clubs, seedy bars, and such—as a background for evil, but Millennium quietly takes the opposite tack: Repression of sexuality leads to greater evil. Art Nesbitt is so repressed and so ashamed that he can’t make love with his wife, so he looks elsewhere for a vicarious thrill in his unsuspecting victims, whom he then kills in order to preserve the fantasy. Unusually, his victims never suffer: He gives them a swift, peaceful death, but never once does he stop to think about the ones who are left to suffer and grieve.

His inverse is Detective Thomas, who as a vice cop indulged so heavily in the seedy, sexual underground of society that he found himself repulsed by it, and this shame led to him becoming a  moral crusader. Neither extreme is healthy, and both men suffer imbalanced lives for repressing their shame.

One thing’s for sure, society is to blame this time. Judging from Art’s dialogue within the episode, he seems to have bought the usual marriage/honeymoon/happily-ever-after fairy tale that’s spoon-fed to us from childhood on, and has found disappointment when the mundane realities of life entered. He turns out to want the happily-ever-after so badly that he’s willing to poison himself and his wife in order to attain it. 

I thought he was too nice, too sweet, too normal to carry the episode, yet that’s precisely the point: Sometimes they’re not Silence of the Lambs material. Sometimes they’re quite average people with misapplied gifts. If, for example, Art Nesbitt had channeled his shame and emotion into a direction that didn’t involve drugging people, he’d have made quite a name for himself as an artistic photographer. I tip my hat to him for the Adam and Eve display at the beginning: The lengths he went to took real talent and a unique eye.

Detective Thomas is right when he says things are getting worse, but not for the reasons he thinks: Shame and loneliness make people turn to drugs, turn to sex addiction, turn to something to feed that emptiness, but it never stops being empty.

(EDIT, 1/11/22: Having re-read this entry, I only just realized the "This Side of Paradise" pun. I wish I'd thought of it the first time 'round!)

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(Millennium copyright 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.)