The Weatherman (18 page)

to feed it into their new five-million-dollar fingerprint computer if they ever get the damn thing up and running. Can’t you just hear the taxpayers screaming if it spits out blanks? So who has he nailed, that news director guy?” “So far, a couple interns who want to be on TV.” “Does Dixon Bell have a girlfriend yet?” “None that I know of.” “I hear he’s hot for Andrea Labore.” “I don’t keep tabs on our weatherman’s love life.” “I wanted to be a TV weather girl when I was in college. I even interned for it at Channel 9. That was years ago.”

“So what happened?”

“Nobody would let me on the air because I’m fat.” “I guess you and I are just lucky that way.” “How about you, lover? Who are you hot for?” Rick stared into the dead, purple face of Tamara Livingston. “I’m a writer. We live sad, lonely lives.”

“You know there are rumors in police circles about that Andrea Labore.”

Rick looked up. “What kind of rumors?” “Show me your face?”

“I think you’ve done too many autopsies, Freddie.” “Yeah, five hundred a year can make you a real sicko.” “Let’s have a look at those brains.” They left Tamara Livingston naked and alone on the table, only the hanging victim to keep her company. Freddie led Rick Beanblossom into the storage closet off the examination room. Round white buckets lined the floor, all labeled with names and dates. A human brain lay drying inside each bucket. They were green and white with the texture of cauliflower. “We’ll pull her brain out tomorrow and let it sit in here for about three weeks, until it’s dry and crunchy. Then we can cut it up for chemical analysis.”

Rick pointed. “That small one there, is that a baby?” “No, that’s a TV reporter.” Freddie broke up laughing. She clapped her hands together. “Boy, that Channel 7 must be a lively place to work. Kind of wish I’d stuck with television.”

“It’s a news show, Freddie, it’s not a soap opera.” “Oh, it is to me.”

Another page fell from the calendar. The hunt for the monster who killed with the seasons continued into February. The winter weather remained mild. Clouds over the
IDS
Tower were dark and gray, but they were still being perceived as nonthreatening. In the Sky High newsroom red hearts were pasted to the desks and walls. Little cu-pids with their bows and arrows were dangling from the ceiling. It was St. Valentine’s Day. On the assignment board Gayle listed a live shot from a greeting-card store. Same story as last year-different store, different reporter. There were fresh flowers on Rick Beanblossom’s desk, but then there always were.

“So what have you done for me lately?”

“That’s my line. Talk to me.” With the phone to his ear Rick pulled a new legal pad from his desk drawer and plopped it down in front of him. He picked up a pen.

“What do you want to hear?”

The producer reached up and killed the sound on his monitor. “Tell me you’re leaving to arrest the Calendar Killer and I get to come along.”

“What happened to my story on the death penalty?”

“I said I’d write it if it gets out of committee. It doesn’t look like they have the votes. Any progress on that fingerprint?”

“There’s a glitch in the computer. We haven’t been able to run it yet.”

“You spent five million dollars on a computer and it comes with glitches?”

“[_ do have an unrelated tidbit of news for you. You know that Andrea Labore you’ve been working with?”p> _]

“What about her?”

“She’s the governor’s girlfriend.”

The news was a kick in the groin. Rick wanted to double over. He didn’t want to believe it. “How could you possibly know something like that?”

“State patrol. They guard the mansion. Tell her they should be a little more discreet.”

Dateline went dead.

Rick hung up the phone and grabbed his aching stomach. He was furious. How could a woman with so much brains do something so incredibly stupid? She was at her desk. He reached for his painkillers. What to do? He could wait until spring and murder the bitch. Blackmail was an erotic possibility.

Newly arrived flowers along with a small stack of valentines lay on her messy desk. She was examining notes. The beginning of a news story was glowing on her computer screen. A soap opera was showing on her monitor. She was wearing a red dress that matched the glow in her cheeks. She had no business looking so cheerful. Rick hovered over her like a lion over its prey. He waited until she glanced up from her notebook. “Hi,” she said, unconcerned. She held up a videotape. “This Livingston interview is powerful stuff.” She picked up another tape, “And get this, an Andrea Labore exclusive-they gave me some home video of Tamara opening presents at her aunt’s house just hours before she was murdered.”

Rick Beanblossom remained stone cold.

“What’s wrong?”

“Let me ask you something, brown eyes. Do you want that anchor chair up there, or do you want to end up-the bimbo from the Scandinavian scandal?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You know goddamn well what I’m talking about.”

Andrea read the news in his eyes. She tossed the videos on the desk. “How did you find out?”

“A source. A deadly reliable source.”

She turned to her computer. She could see his mask reflected in the screen. “That’s what I need now, trouble from you. Just when I thought our relationship was starting to thaw.”

Rick stuck his mouth almost to her ear and spoke in a whisper so intense, so wrought with anger and frustration she was visibly shaken. “We do not have a relationship.

We have a working partnership-two investigative reporters in search of a killer who preys on women. A killer some theorize may actually be a woman. Now I find out that my woman partner, a woman 1 was just coming to trust, is literally fucking around with the governor of the state.”

She rubbed goose bumps from her arm. “Stop it, Rick. Sometimes you scare me.”

He raised his voice. “Why? What do you think I’m going to do to you?”

People glanced their way. “Let’s find an edit room,” she said.

Andrea grabbed at her notebook and the two videotapes. They marched down a narrow hall leading out of the newsroom and entered Edit Room 3. Rick slid the glass door closed. Andrea dropped into a chair in front of the controls. She popped one of the videotapes into the edit machine. Rick stood over her shoulder.

The parents of murder victim Tamara Livingston appeared before them on three different monitors. Members of an ecumenical group of born-again Christians whose roots lay in Catholicism, they were talking to Andrea about their opposition to the death penalty, the debate now raging in the Minnesota state legislature. They asked proponents of capital punishment to please stop invoking their daughter’s name.

Rick thought it was good stuff, but he didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. He and Andrea argued over the sound, Andrea talking at the television monitors, refusing to turn and face him. Finally, almost in exasperation, she said, “It’s not just sex. We’re in love. Okay? It just happened. You can’t choose who you fall in love with.”

Rick felt a new kind of rage stirring inside of him. “Love? Is that your idea of love? No, what you’ve got going is a little romance. Do you know what romance is, Andrea? It’s a suspension of reality. Because the reality is you can choose who you date. You can choose who you jump into bed with. And you can choose to end a relationship, for love or a lack of love.”

Andrea turned, fury in her eyes. “And what the hell would you know about reality or love, you asshole? You use that mask to hide from both. You hide everything in there. You hide in this newsroom during the day. Then at night you run home and hide in that obscene slab of concrete over the lake. You’re like those Indians who used to build those holes in the cliffs so their enemies couldn’t get to them. Well, some of us have to face the real world.”

On the video Mrs. Livingston broke down crying. Andrea instinctively jotted down the numbers from the time counter display. Television 101-if you can get them crying, televise it.

Rick fought to control his breathing. He still stuttered when he got upset. “And in the real world where do you think this secret relationship of yours is going to go? Is he going throw his wife and children out of the governor’s mansion, marry you, and make you the first lady of Minnesota? Oh, hell, let’s play it out. He’s probably going to run for President just to make Andrea Labore the first lady of the United States of America. Or just maybe he’s going to fuck your lights out until he gets tired of you? Or is one of you going to go public with your love and destroy the other? Or is a certain gossip columnist for the Star Tribune going to find out about it and destroy both of you?”

“Shut up,” said Andrea. “Just shut up for two seconds.” She ejected the video and popped in a second. Ta-mara Livingston appeared on the monitors, kneeling before a Christmas tree. Rick had seen her in death; now he was seeing what she had looked like in life. She was unwrapping a gift. It turned out to be a nightgown, a skimpy, slinky nightgown. There was no audio, but from the laughter in her face it was obvious jokes were being made about how sexy it was.

“What happened to the nightgown?”

“What?”

Rick pointed to the monitors. “The gift? She would have been walking home with it.”

“They told me it hasn’t been found.” The tape played out. Tamara Livingston was gone. The screens turned snowy white.

Locked in a glass booth, the silence between Rick Beanblossom and Andrea Labore crackled with electricity. Rick broke the spell, speaking now with more passion than anger. “You’re still fairly new to news, Andrea, so let me offer you some advice. There’s only one other profession that more uses people and more hurts people than we do. That’s politicians. If it comes down to you and him, and eventually it will, he’ll hang you from a tree limb. He’ll line you up against a wall and shoot you himself. He’ll do it to save his own ass, or he’ll just do it out of spite. And all of the love in the world won’t stop him.” Andrea spoke with a passion all her own. “Get a life, Rick. I mean a real life. And stay out of mine.”

When the long-range forecasters at the National Weather Service huddled in the fall to predict the winter weather, they all came to the same general conclusion. Harsh! Temperatures below normal. Precipitation above average. But three months later Old Man Winter limped out of town with emphysema, destined for obscurity in the archives of climatology. The ninety-day winter forecast was the least accurate ever issued by the National Weather Service. These winter forecasts are watched closely by commodities brokers, travel agents, snow-equipment manufacturers, and farmers. Nobody at the National Weather Service would comment on the remarkably accurate winter forecast made by a TV weatherman in Minneapolis. By March 21, the ice was out on the lakes. It was raining steadily. The last stubborn patches of snow were washed away. Winter was history.

The first day of spring, Captain Les Angelbeck and Lieutenant Donnell Redmond sat in their unmarked squad staring at the walk path. Rain pounded the roof. Angelbeck smoked a cigarette. The windshield was fogging up. Redmond didn’t give a damn. Both men were speechless.

The trees were still bare. The grass was thick with thatch. A pair of frightened deer peeked out of the woods along Nine Mile Creek. The two cops watched as the big Chevy Suburban from the county medical examiner’s office backed over the curb and rolled over the grass to the edge of the path.

The news photographers formed a semicircle in the cold, hard rain. The ME personnel removed the plastic tarp from the Bloomington woman’s body. They lifted the sodden sweat suit, placed it in a shiny green body bag, and pulled the zipper tight. Then victim number five was loaded into the back of the van. Angelbeck flinched at the muffled sound of the slamming doors.

The photographers had the shot they’d been waiting for. They ran back to their own vans.

Donnell Redmond tapped a finger on the steering wheel. “Those TV people are going to crucify us.”

Mild winter-wild summer. The heat was back, and in more ways than one. Just before midnight on May 21, the Minnesota state legislature adjourned for the year. The night air was still a sultry 78° as lawmakers left the Capitol. The paleoconservatives who now pulled the strings were awarded their cherished tax cut, but much of their right-wing social agenda went frustratingly unfulfilled-mostly because of the moderate sitting in the governor’s office.

Per Ellefson rose from the stiff couch and walked to the bulletproof window. He stood buttoning his shirt before the green-tinted glass, gazing out across the Capitol approach. The Cathedral of St. Paul was dark. The stars above the dome seemed to have lost their twinkle. Other than the high ceiling his office was small and stark, a disappointment to a man accustomed to the executive suites of corporate America. The only light in the office this night was the flickering flame above an antique candle holder.

“What time is it?”

The governor looked at his Rolex. “Almost midnight. You’d better get dressed.”

“Are you glad they’re going home?”

Ellefson pulled on his socks and slipped into his shoes. After the March murder in Bloomington the roar to do something about the killings had grown louder than spring thunder. “I’ve never seen anything like this. First the state supreme court kills my idea of putting television cameras in the courtrooms, a damn good idea, and then the death penalty comes within two votes of escaping the house. You know how I feel about capital punishment, Andrea. It’s not only morally wrong, it’s morally bankrupt. Yet every statewide poll shows the vast majority of Minnesotans support the death penalty-and that was before we had a serial killer on our hands.”

“These murders are destroying the state’s image. Now the Office of Tourism says the killings are hurting business.”

Per Ellefson tucked his shirt into his pants. “Most tourist dollars are spent outside the metro area. There’ve been no killings up there. It’s still a summer playground.” He shook his head at the misperception. “These are the kind of crimes that destroy careers. The fallout from something like this is frightening. The thing of it is, this man, this monster, whatever, renders me powerless. If he were a politician or a businessman I’d know how to fight him. About all I can do is stand back and let the police do their job.”