The Weatherman (17 page)

They worked their way back to the parking lot. Another St. Paul patrolman was standing beside a squad car,

its tires wrapped in chains. He had a bag of doughnuts. “Who’ve you got there?”

“It’s Donny Redmond.”

“Really? I thought all those state boys had desk jobs. Do you want a doughnut, Donny?”

Donnell Redmond was physically aching and disgusted. “Do you know what those things do to our image?”

“Who cares? They’re still warm.”

Redmond stuck his hungry nose in the bag. “Got any lemon?”

“What a morning, huh? Looks like Disney on Ice. Who’d you shoot at?”

Redmond bit into a lemon doughnut and limped toward the lake. “Frosty the Snowman,” he answered with his mouth full.

The two patrolmen followed him. They slipped and slid across Como Lake, trying to keep their balance while munching doughnuts.

Redmond shielded his eyes and squinted. The rising sun off the ice made everything orange and yellow.

They were almost on top of the body before they realized what it was. And what it was was something out of a Poe tale. The three cops stood as silent as the arctic morning. Finally one of the patrolmen muttered, “Jesus Christ, she has to have been dead for hours.”

“Must’ve killed her last night in the rain.”

She was a blonde, perfectly preserved in ice. Murder in a bottle. Her twisted neck was ripped at the shoulder. Her face was frozen in terror. Her golden hair glimmered through the glaze, reflecting the morning sun. Her deathbed had been a frozen lake, colder than a grave. Her coffin was an ice cube.

The two patrolmen chattered nervously in the cold. “He about tore her head off.”

“Looks to me like those parking ramp murders Minneapolis had last summer.”

“The shit’s gonna hit the fan now.”

Lieutenant Donnell Redmond stood freezing in the sunlight, strangely quiet. He wiped the lemon from his lips and saw the glare of a windshield as it approached the entrance gates. A Channel 7 News van crawled slowly and cautiously out of the park, probably monitoring police calls. But then the vehicle turned away from the crime scene and rolled away.

“Let’s keep this off the radio,” Redmond finally said. “There’s a phone on the promenade. Call dispatch. Tell ‘em to wake up the Marlboro Man. It’s our case now.”

When the elevator door slid open, he saw a corpse stretched across a wheeled gurney. The penis was shriveled up like a snail. The torso and limbs were waxen white, but the dead man’s head was a grotesque purple color, almost like a Vikings football fan who’d painted his face. An attendant inside the elevator pushed the gurney to the side. “Ain’t you Beanblossom?”

“Yes, I am.” The masked newsman stepped into the elevator. “I’m here to see Freddie. Who’s your friend?”

“He hung himself. Stupid way to go, man. Use drugs, much more dignity.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

When the elevator door slid open again, Rick Beanblossom was in the basement of the Ramsey County Morgue in St. Paul. It was chilly. With the exception of the ice storm it had been a wimpy winter, but on this day the January temperature was hovering near zero. Rick was wearing his brown leather bomber jacket. He carried his gloves in his hand.

He found Freddie alone in a corner office, paging through the latest edition of the National Enquirer. “Show me the victim?” he asked.

“You just want to see a naked woman.” Dr. Freda Wilhelm was a forensic pathologist and the county’s chief medical examiner. She was a big, robust woman, almost six feet tall and over two hundred fifty pounds. Her dark hair was more frizz than curls, having been permed too many times. She wore a military nurse’s uniform, much like the Navy vice-admiral uniform worn by the U.S. surgeon general. She had designed it herself. It was white with blue-striped shoulder boards and a gold-braided infantry rope looped ceremoniously over her right shoulder. Rick had never seen her dressed in anything else.

The pretentious uniform and her imperious demeanor made the doctor an easy target for the media. Especially the columnists. She hated the bastards. Rick Beanblossom had been the first newspaperman to write a decent article about her-told of her extensive training, that she was one of the few women in the country working in forensic science. Her overbearing personality and her risqu6 sense of humor helped her cope with the constant pressure she was under. Besides taking care of St. Paul and its suburbs, Ramsey County also provided forensic services to more than thirty rural counties in the Upper Midwest. When Freddie began the job she was doing three hundred autopsies a year. Guns, drugs, and
AIDS
had pushed that number past five hundred.

Even as Rick Beanblossom was writing her story she suspected he was only priming her as a future source. Still she loved him for it.

“Probably been a long time since you’ve seen a naked woman, huh, lover?”

“Are you done with her?”

“For the most part. Took damn near three days for her to thaw out. We’ve sliced her open, but
BCA
wants more toxicology exams. Meanwhile her family is screaming bloody murder for the body so they can bury her.”

They walked down the white linoleum hall towards the cooler. “It’s freezing down here,” said Rick.

“The way I like it.”

“Really? I would have thought you’d prefer the summer months.”

“Are you kidding? Do you know what the heat does to a woman my size? I’d be wheezing up a storm. Say, is Andrea Labore going to get the anchor job? That Charleen is getting old-what is she, forty now? And who’s that weekend anchor? Wasn’t he in sports? God, he’s terrible. Why take a bad sports guy and make him into a bad news guy?”

“It’s a news show, Freddie, it’s not a soap opera.”

“It is to me.”

While the police were busy tracking down the killer, the TV stations in town kept busy tracking the overnight ratings. After the Como Lake murder the public outcry and the media feeding frenzy sent newsroom decibel levels to record heights, even louder than the parking ramp murders and with more saturated coverage than the Wakefield kidnapping.

SERIAL
KILLER
STALKS
TWIN
CITIES!

Police Admit Killings Linked

Pursue Calendar Killer

With no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in a televised football game, whatever TV station promised new information or a new angle on the serial killings won the nightly ratings war. It was that simple.

Freddie threw open the cooler door. It automatically closed behind them. The temperature was just above freezing. The dead, a dozen of them, were laid out on gurneys along the walls, covered with white sheets. The room smelled like a bait shop. Insects scurried across the floor and climbed the walls.

“Don’t you people ever spray in here?”

“Doesn’t do any good,” Freddie told him. “They come in with the bodies. The cold gets most of them. We put plastic bags over the dead heads to keep them out. Bugs love the heads-so many points of entry, and it’s warm in there.” The woman knew death. She had four years of college, four years of medical school, five years of residency, and two years as a fellow in forensic pathology. Her salary was half of what most doctors earn, but she loved her job.

Freddie pulled a gurney into the center of the cooler, then grabbed a clipboard from the wall. “This is her.” She read from the form. “Case number 91-1868 … homicide … Livingston, Tamara … female… twenty-three … single … St. Paul, Minnesota … last seen, December twenty-four, walking south on Lexington from aunt’s home … found December twenty-five in a frozen state on Como Lake.” She looked up at Rick. “Hold the door, lover, we’ll push her down to the E room.”

In the examination room Freddie pulled the sheet from the body. Rick Beanblossom grabbed the feet and they lifted her onto the porcelain table. The room was white and sterile with the redolence of antiseptic and formaldehyde. The lights were bright. Glass cabinets and aluminum sinks lined the walls. In neat rows on aluminum shelving above the sinks were hundreds of bottles of the formaldehyde, each clear glass jar keeping alive the tissue specimen or body part of a dead person. Freddie removed the clear plastic bag from the victim’s twisted head. “If you love a good mystery, this is the place to work.”

She looked a lot like the suicide he had seen in the elevator, blond hair on a purple face. But the golden hair had been matted in the freezing rain. A Y incision ran from her belly button to her shoulders. “Tell me about her,” Rick said.

“Well, pretty as she was, she never won a beauty contest. Not with those tits.” Freddie belted out a good laugh. “Do you have sex?”

“You’re a real trip, Freddie. Excluding the killer, the only person who would know as much about this case as the police would be the person who examined two of the victims. Talk to me.”

“Typical newsman-all take and no give. After all the info I’ve fed you over the years I think a little quid pro quo is in order.”

“Such as?”

“Show me your face.”

“Has the
FBI
examined any of the victims?”

“What’s the harm? With all of the mutilated stiffs I’ve seen, it’s no big deal. Just flip up that mask for two seconds. Show me your face, lover, and I’ll let you see the brains.”

“What physical evidence ties these murders together?”

“There’s only one way to hurt news people-deny them access to the news.” Freddie clammed up.

The attendant Rick had met in the elevator wheeled in the hanging victim with the shriveled penis and laid him out on another table. Freddie paid him no attention. “
CNN
is opening an office here,” Rick told her, “and one of those tabloid TV shows is going do an episode on the killings.”

Freddie snickered. “I could read that in the newspapers.”

Rick Beanblossom circled the table, examining the woman’s body. He had seen so many bodies over the years. In Vietnam. At the hospital in Japan. On the police beat. Still, he couldn’t get over how fragile the naked and the dead look. Tamara Livingston was almost sticklike. Frost-white skin. There was a tear in her neck exposing muscle fibers. Rick pulled up next to Freddie, the gossip hound from hell. He put his hands on his hips and shared with her the sleaziest aspect of television news. “Our news director, Jack Napoleon … he bugged his own office. He has a hidden camera in there. He tapes himself seducing women.”

Freddie’s eyes lit up. “Really? Do you have any of the tapes?”

“I might.”

“
FBI
doesn’t want anything to do with this case. They jumped into the Wakefield kidnapping with their so-called task force and they got burned. Zilch. Squat. Nada.”

“Physical evidence?”

“Oh, that’s the beauty of this guy. He’s in and out like the wind. Other than that fingerprint at the first murder, he’s left nothing behind. It’ll be hard to convict him for one murder, much less four. He uses a choke hold. Quick, clean, and decisive. Marines, cops, wrestlers, the martial arts, they all know it.”

“No struggle? Scratch marks? Blood?”

“Nope. I figure he wears a nylon jacket or a raincoat, depending on the weather. They can’t get a grip on his arm that way. Hasn’t left any fibers or skin under their nails. Not even a hair.”

“Might our killer be a woman? A big, strong woman?”

She laughed. “You mean like me?”

“Why not? You’re a tough broad.”

“No, this is a man’s work. Serial killers are predominately white males. They prey on white females. This is a powerful man. He gets his victims in the crook of his arm, lifts them right off their feet. Three of them, like this cutie pie here, he breaks their necks. The Hudson case, he just strangled and dropped her, then did that hair thing. The MO is the same on all of them.”

“No rape, no mutilation,” Rick reminded her.

“He’s killing for other than sexual reasons. Hate. Jealousy. Voices in his head. He’s not out to commit the perfect crime. He expects to get caught. It’s part of his sick plan. The crimes. The arrest. The media circus. The trial.

The sentence. Then he’ll play the role of the martyr, swearing he’s innocent right up to the day he dies.”

“What does he look like?”

“He’s over six feet tall, more than two hundred pounds. If you believe the Hudson description, he has dark, curly hair, like mine.”

“I could get that from the newspapers. Keep talking.”

“He knows the media. He plays you guys like a fiddle. That’s part of the thrill, like the politician who runs home to watch himself on the news. How come you people named him the Calendar Killer? I’d have called him the North Star Strangler. Sounds better on television.”

“He’s killing one woman every season. I wanted to call him ‘A Killer for All Seasons,’ but it was too many words for the TelePrompTer.”

“The first two victims were killed last summer,” Freddie reminded him.

“Wrong,” Rick told her. “They were both killed in June. One was murdered before June twenty-first, the other after the twenty-first. Spring and summer. He’s killing with the calendar. He got number three over in Hudson in autumn. This is his winter kill. If they don’t catch him, he’ll kill again in the spring. Each murder precedes or occurs during some significant weather event. Even the Hudson murder. Dixon Bell checked with the National Weather Service. The day the Indian girl was killed on the St. Croix River, the Twin Cities airport recorded one hundred percent sunshine. It was the last day of one hundred percent sunshine before winter.”

Freddie scoffed at the weather theory. “That would make sense if he had killed her in the evening, but he killed her in the morning. How did he know there was going to be one hundred percent sunshine all day? How did he know the tornado was coming? How did he know we were in for record rainfall?”

“I don’t know yet, but these murders are seasonal and they’re weather related. Weather buffs are a dime a dozen in this state. What do you know about that fingerprint from the first murder?”

“You mean from the parking ramp where you park your car, Masked Man?” She smiled, a wicked smile. “Relax. My police sources tell me so far it’s a bust. It’s only a partial print, and a lousy one. The
BCA
is going