The Weatherman

by Steve Thayer

  His fifth-floor room at the Hennepin County Medical Center was as bright and cheerful as the weather was gloomy. He suspected it was a room for women having babies. A green oxygen tank stood next to the bed. His walking cane was next to the door. The television hanging from the ceiling was going, but the sound was dead. Andrea Labore was mouthing the noon news. The front page of the Star Tribune flashed on the screen. Les Angelbeck ignored the TV and continued dressing until the Weatherman appeared. Then he picked up the remote and pushed the mute button.

  “Dixon, I know this is Tornado Awareness Week, but what exactly is a mock tornado drill?”

  “Well, Andrea, according to the National Weather Service that’s when a mock has actually been sighted.”

  Les Angelbeck broke up laughing, but it was a laugh choked with phlegm. He grabbed hold of his aching side. He muted the sound again after Dixon Bell had given the forecast. He was slipping into his shoes when Donnell Redmond walked into the room, carrying a brown envelope.

  “So, how did your biopsy go?” asked the lieutenant.

  “It was benign.”

  “So you’re only dying of one thing instead of two?”

  “At this point, yes.” Les Angelbeck swallowed the choke in his throat and smiled. “Donny, it was the damnedest thing I’ve ever heard of. They call it videoscope surgery. The doctor cut this small incision in my side and then he pushed in this long probe with a telescopic lens attached to this tiny video camera. Then my insides showed up on a television the doctor was watching. The whole operation was done on a television screen. Doctor never took his eyes off it. I had the procedure done yesterday, and I’m going home today.”

  Redmond looked up at Andrea Labore, her lips moving but no sound coming out. “Maybe they should put your insides on regular TV.”

  “Maybe.” Les Angelbeck slipped gingerly into his suit coat. He draped a tie around his neck. “Did you check on her?”

  “No change,” Redmond reported. “Her granddaddy is sitting down there beside her. They got her head locked into this big metal halo so she looks like a dead angel. There’s tubes shoved up her nose and more tubes stuffed down her throat. Her jaw just hangs open, like those retards you see in those nuthouse movies. She has one eye open real spooky-like and she’s strapped into this electric bed that rolls back and forth so she don’t get bedsores. And that one eye just stays put as she rolls from side to side.”

  “Everybody in the hospital refers to Officer Sumter in the past tense,” Angelbeck sadly noted.

  “I pray she dies. Lord Jesus, forgive me for what I say, but I pray she dies. She’ll be at peace, and we can fry that sucker for what he did to her.”

  “We have to catch the sucker first,” Angelbeck reminded him, tactfully forgetting the lieutenant’s testimony before the judiciary committee.

  Donnell Redmond noticed the newspaper lying on the pillow. “Did you read it?”

  “Yes, I read it.”

  “Did our boy write it?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Angelbeck. “There’s a few non sequiturs, but the killer wrote it.” He picked up the morning copy of the Star Tribune. “What did you find out about it?”

  “There were some lawyer hassles,” said Redmond, filling him in. “They finally handed it over late last night. At first look, it was written on paper from a reporter’s notebook. The editor told us newsrooms order them in bulk through a mail-order house. Used a Bic pen. Black. Medium point. Killer is probably righthanded and printed the letter using the left hand.”

  Les Angelbeck unfolded the newspaper and once again read the letter on the front page.

  I WILL STOP NOW

  FOR EVERY SEASON THERE IS A WOMAN. A WOMAN TO BE BORN AND A WOMAN TO DIE. AND FOR EVERY MAN A SEASON TO KILL AND A SEASON TO STOP KILLING. I WILL STOP NOW.

  YOU HAVE NO EVIDENCE. NO WITNESSES. I APPEAR OUT OF THIN AIR. IF YOU WAIT MUCH LONGER IT WILL ALMOST BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR YOU. I WILL BE ONE OF YOU. I WILL PASS YOU ON THE STREET. SIT NEXT TO YOU AT THE BASEBALL GAME.

  MINNESOTA YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE SO MUCH BETTER THAN US. NOW YOU ARE JUST LIKE THE REST OF US. DON’T THINK I DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW YOU FEEL BUT I'm SORRY YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND HOW I FEEL. I GUESS THINGS NEVER HAPPEN THAT PLEASE EVERYONE ENVOLVED. BUT I DIDN’T MEAN TO HURT YOU . . . HONEST.

  The hard-to-retire captain tossed the paper onto the bed. “The poetry isn’t much better than the spelling. But in a way, maybe our killer is right. We finally got around to lowering our standards to the national level. What else did you find out?”

  “We know it’s not a ghost. It bleeds and it has big feet.” Donnell Redmond rattled off the latest clues. “The blood we scraped from Sumter’s fingernails is O positive. It’s one of the most common blood types in America, but it’s something. The tracks found in the snow were made by a size fourteen athletic shoe with ‘Alacrity’ carved in the heel. It was a cheap shoe made in Korea. The company went out of business years ago and the shoe was never on sale in the Midwest. It’s sticking to its ways. Attacked her the same time of the morning that I chased it through Como Park. It was the last day of winter. It was foggy.”

  The noon news was over. Andrea Labore smiled good-bye. Les Angelbeck picked up the remote control and killed the television. Andrea faded away. The old cop’s fat, shaky fingers worked a knot into his tie. “And what is that you’ve got there?”

  Donnell Redmond had forgotten about the brown envelope in his hand. He shrugged his big shoulders. “Ain’t looked at it yet. Glenn Arkwright tossed it to me on his way out the door. Had to pick up his kids at day care or something.” Redmond pulled a computer printout from the envelope and examined it. “It’s more of that fingerprint mumbo jumbo,” he told Angelbeck. “Looks like AFIS spit out two more names. One is a new print from FBI files and the other one is from those declassifieds the Air Force sent to us.”

  “Tell me one of them is from Minnesota,” begged the captain. “Dream on, Marlboro Man. West Covina, California, and Vicksburg, Mississippi.”

  The Marlboro Man had a coughing spasm, his death rattle. He wiped his watery eyes. “Well, add them to the list, anyway.”

  “Ain’t that funny,” said Redmond, studying the printout. “Unless I’m reading these numbers wrong, and I might well be, this man from Mississippi is rated

  higher than all the others.”

  Angelbeck tightened the noose in his tie. “Really? What’s his name?” The lieutenant unfolded the printout. “Bell, Dixon Graham.” Les Angelbeck went cold.

  “Dixon Bell?”

  Donnell Redmond read the AFIS printout again. “Yeah, that’s what it says here. Dixon Graham Bell. Vicksburg, Mississippi.” The lieutenant looked into the

  horrified eyes of Captain Les Angelbeck. “Ain’t he that TV weatherman?”

  BOOK TWO

  TWO YEARS INTO THE STORM

  “I’ll be judge, I’ll be jury,” said cunning old Fury; “I’ll try the whole cause and condemn you to death.”

  —Lewis Carroll

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  The Arrest

  "And then the policeman comes and they done take the Weatherman away."

  Les Angelbeck was furious. The arrest was a media circus. They hadn’t even begun to make their case when events spun out of control. At the booking center he pushed and cajoled his way to the front of the pack—a pack of his own kind. His leathery face was almost up against the glass that viewed the garage. The big metal doors at the top of the ramp rolled open. A squad car pulled in, followed by a blue van, then two more squads. The motorcade rolled down the ramp and into the sally port. When the two metal doors dropped closed behind the prisoner’s parade, on popped a red light. A platoon of cops piled out of the vehicles.

  “Um, he was at our school talking to us about things we could do to help keep the air clean, ya know, when a bunch of policemen showed up in the doorway . . . and they wanted to talk to him. Then he never came back.”

  More than forty thousand tips. Three hundred
investigators. A thousand interviews. Eight thousand written pages of reports. Whole computer programs. And some damn good gumshoeing. No, police didn’t get lucky. They did it the old-fashioned way; they earned it. They were almost sure they had their man.

  The infighting began almost immediately. The BCA literally had ahold of him. They made the arrest. The governor’s office had a man at the scene. Hennepin County had the most rights to him—four murders. But the Hennepin County jail in Minneapolis was medieval and hopelessly overcrowded. So the decision was made to house him at the Ramsey County jail in downtown St. Paul. The facility was modern, below capacity, and not far from BCA offices. Meanwhile, the task force was blaming the governor’s office for alerting the media. And this was no tip; this was an air raid.

  “We ran to the windows ’cause we could see all of your television trucks and stuff outside . . . and we saw them bring The Weatherman out of the school in handcuffs and put him in the police car. He had his head bent down really far . . . but you could tell he was crying.”

  The detention center fell ghostly quiet as they led the Weatherman through the electronically controlled doors and into the brick booking area. Dixon Bell’s puffy face was ash white. His eyes were bloodshot. His suit coat was off. The tie around his neck was askew. His shirt was coming untucked. The shiny steel handcuffs on his wrists looked like obscene jewelry. Lieutenant Donnell Redmond had him by the arm.

  The lieutenant walked Dixon Bell over to a small table. He unlocked the cuffs and turned the prisoner over to the booking officer, a bear of a man in a brownand-tan deputy sheriff ’s uniform. The Weatherman was asked to empty his pockets into a metal box. Each valuable was recorded on paper. Then the deputy led him over to a machine with two video monitors for eyes. It resembled an instant cash machine. The army of cops followed.

  “What is this thing?” Dixon Bell asked in a soft, shaky voice. “It’s a fingerprinter,” the deputy told him. “It’ll record your fingerprints.”

  “How does it work?”

  “I’ll just roll your fingers across the glass plate one at a time, and you can see your print on the TV screen there.”

  “You mean there’s no ink?”

  “No ink. I’ll show you. Give me your hand.”

  Dixon Bell reluctantly held out his big left hand. The deputy took hold of it, and as the fingers rolled across the lighted glass the black lines of his fingerprints appeared on the monitors, where they were recorded for analysis. The Weatherman forced an ironic smile. “I’m glad television is finally being put to some good use.”

  The deputy smiled too. His gruff looks were deceiving. “This contraption has made my job a hell of a lot easier.”

  Fingerprint expert Glenn Arkwright brushed by Les Angelbeck. He stepped forward and leaned into the deputy. “Do the left index finger again.”

  The deputy was mad. “I know my job, thank you!”

  Dixon Bell was perplexed by the outburst. For the first time since being dragged through the electronic doors he took a slow look around the room at the convention of law-enforcement officials. The place was wall-to-wall cops. “Sure are a lot of people interested in these fingerprints,” he said. Looking up, he found himself staring at Les Angelbeck, who was standing in the front, leaning on his cane, forever clearing his throat. A veil of betrayal fell over the Weatherman’s face, and he turned his back on the old cop. Captain Les Angelbeck had first met meteorologist Dixon Bell in Peavey Plaza, a sunken gathering place of concrete steps and water fountains alongside Orchestra Hall on the Nicollet Walk. It was where the old cop requested they get together and talk. Only two days had passed since his biopsy and he still felt weak, but the cool fragrance of a spring breeze worked wonders on his emphysema. The morning chill had yet to lift. The skies were overcast. Man-eating puddles left over from the snowy winter stretched across the plaza. Along one of the concrete steps someone had spray-painted, WHY IS IT OPEN SEASON ON WOMEN? The semiretired cop gazed up at the sturdy blue IDS Tower and wondered which one of the windows below the bramble of TV antennas belonged to the Weatherman.

  It was the second time in the investigation that Dixon Bell’s name had come up. Angelbeck remembered victim number seven, the little retarded girl from Afton who had a crush on the Weatherman and that letter she wrote. I saw u on TV. I no u r the killer.Did she mail him that letter? Then came the fingerprint. The Weatherman also fit the description given by the jogger in Hudson, Wisconsin, on the morning of that murder. But the Hudson description was of a person’s back from a distance. Also, they’d have to conduct a search of Bell’s office and home in hopes of finding the girl’s letter. And that fingerprint was only a controversial partial. FBI experts in Washington were saying the print belonged to Dixon Bell. Minnesota’s own expert, Glenn Arkwright, wouldn’t go along with them. He wanted more time. So did Les Angelbeck. But circumstantial evidence was mounting, and the governor’s office wanted an arrest.

  Angelbeck saw the tall, husky weatherman loping across the street towards Peavey Plaza. He’d been watching him on television since his arrival at Channel 7. Before that he used to watch the avuncular, and somewhat reliable, Andy Mack. Like most loyal viewers, he was upset about the switch. But also like other viewers, he was won over by Dixon Bell—won over by his knowledge, his accuracy, and good oldfashioned southern charm.

  He stood to greet him. “Dixon Bell, I’m Captain Les Angelbeck. I’m with the Calendar Task Force.”

  They shook hands. “Hello, Captain. Why did you want to meet down here?”

  “Cops and newsrooms don’t go together.” He lifted the pack of Marlboros from his coat pocket. “Mind if I smoke? Nasty habit of mine.”

  “Do it while it’s still legal.”

  Donnell Redmond had seen a Channel 7 News van leaving Como Park minutes after he’d lost the frosty monster in a foot chase. At the time the lieutenant figured they’d heard the strange call on their police band. Now he was asking Angelbeck why a news crew couldn’t see three cops standing over a body in the middle of a frozen lake on a sunny morning. A source in the Channel 7 newsroom told Angelbeck the take-home policy on news vans was very loose. They needed permission from the assignment desk, but the written records of who took what van when were sloppy at best.

  They took seats on the concrete steps. The air grew cool. “You’re a veteran, aren’t you, Dixon?”

  “Yes. Air Force. Twenty years and out. And you?”

  As they spoke the BCA was busy perusing the Weatherman’s military records. Dixon Bell’s blood type was the common O positive, the same blood type Officer Shelly Sumter had drawn from the killer’s hands.

  “Army,” Angelbeck told him. “World War II. Not many of us left.” He lit his cigarette and pointed at the Weatherman’s face. “I noticed the scar. Wounded?”

  Dixon Bell passed a finger down his cheek. “Saigon. Took a beating over a girl.”

  “Vietnam, the television war.”

  “Yes, the television war. But I don’t think you called me down here to swap war stories, Captain. What can I do for you?”

  Angelbeck turned away and coughed. He wiped his mouth and caught his breath. “I’m sure you’ve heard something about it, media has been drumming it up, about these murders being seasonal and weather related. Maybe it’s silly, but we check out every angle.”

  “Not so silly. We know human behavior is affected by the weather. They’ve been doing some interesting studies on it at the University of Wisconsin.”

  Angelbeck nodded. “That’s in Madison, right? Didn’t I read you lectured there a couple of autumns ago?”

  “I’ve lectured there several times.”

  “The thing of it is,” Angelbeck went on, “some of these murders are happening before these big storms. Now is that possible?”

  “Sure. There are dramatic changes in the atmosphere ahead of a storm.”

  “How much ahead?”

  “Usually hours, but in some cases days.”

  “If I remember right, you pred
icted every one of those storms.” “I don’t predict the weather, Captain. I read the weather.”

  The police captain pointed his cane at the low gray ceiling of clouds drifting over the TV antennas atop the IDS Tower. “What kind of clouds are those?”

  Dixon Bell bent his head skyward. “Those are from the cumulus family. They’re flat, so they’d be stratocumulus. Elevation . . . about six-thousand feet. Lead gray in color. Unsettled. If they fuse, they’ll bring us some more drizzle tonight.”

  “And this wonderful breeze in my face?”