The Weatherman (19 page)

“I admire the way you’ve handled this. Most people do. But what if he kills again?”

The governor sighed. “The old cop in charge is in poor health. I may have to replace him. Or I could ask the
FBI
for a federal task force like the Wakefield kidnapping and hope for better results.”

Andrea Labore finished buttoning her blouse and straightened her skirt. “God, I hate the thought of having to interview the family of another victim. It’s the worst assignment in news.” But she did it, actually volunteered to talk with the family. Since being assigned the stranglings there had been a marked change in her reporting. Andrea had come to realize that in TV news diplomas are worthless. She never mentioned her master’s degree again. She scoured the small neighborhood newspapers for story ideas. She volunteered overtime and weekends. She did a crime story whenever she could, learning how to ask the tough questions. She began listening to her photographers more. And whether it was right or not, she hit the governor up for news tips, being careful when and how she used them. For example, it was Andrea Labore who reported that the governor’s office had a lot more to do with the death of the death penalty bill than was publicly believed. Ellefson had sent his supporters in the state legislature a clear message: “See to it that bill doesn’t reach my desk, or kiss your tax cut good-bye.”

Andrea was proud of her professional growth, but as she stepped into her shoes and brushed the wrinkles from her skirt, she looked long and hard at her lover. In the early months of their affair Per Ellefson seemed completely obsessed with her face, with her body, physical attraction only, but slowly their passion seemed to melt into love-a dangerous kind of love.

The governor dropped a noose-knotted tie around his neck and pulled it tight. “Does that weatherman bother you anymore?”

“No, but I think he still has a schoolboy’s crush on me. He’s hard to read.”

“He seems like such a great guy.”

Andrea pulled a mirror and a hair brush from her purse. “He may be or he may not be. It’s one of the problems with television. It doesn’t unmask the people who work in it.”

“We had him in the office here last winter to present him with a plaque for his children series. Remember that? He turned right around and gave me this electronic weather station for my desk.” Ellefson picked up the weather instrument. “This thing must be worth a thousand dollars. He told me, ‘No matter how wrong you are, Governor, you’ll always be right about the weather.’ Damned if I’m not checking this thing every day. Maybe you should have gone out with him.”

She shrugged. “My problems in the newsroom aren’t with our weatherman. There’s a news producer who knows about us … Rick Beanblossom.”

Ellefson set the weather station back on the desk. “That burn-victim guy who won the Pulitzer Prize?”

“Yes. He’s been with us for two years now. I’ve been working with him on the killings. He has a lot of police sources. I think that’s how he found out.”

The governor stiffened.”Would he use it against us?”

“Rick’s got a lot of integrity, but it’s kind of a ruthless integrity. Like a million other reporters, he’s writing a novel. God only knows what he’d put in that book.” Andrea paused, took a deep breath, then said slowly, “Why, are you getting tired of me?”

“Why do you ask such a thing?”

She didn’t look at him. “Men get tired of me. That’s been my experience.”

Per Ellefson returned to the couch. He took the brush from her hand. He slowly undid her blouse again, exposing a breast. The governor cupped her breast in his hand and kissed her on the lips. “I love you, Andrea, understand that. I’m trying to make the best of a difficult situation.”

Andrea pressed his hand over her heart. “Sometimes I wonder if the risk is too much of the excitement.”

He flopped on his back, his head in her lap. “Andrea, my love, we can’t have this conversation now.”

“I know, it’s late.”

“Yes, it’s late.”

Andrea Labore took her manicured fingernails and ran them up the governor’s pant leg, over his zipper. There she stopped. “Since it’s so late anyway …”

The heat wave intensified in June, as did Captain Les Angelbeck’s investigation into the five murders. In a larger metropolitan area, New York or Los Angeles, the killings could have been unrelated, or copycat killings. But in the quiet, quaint Twin Cities this type of crime was unheard of. For the first time in his life, and perhaps the last case of his storied career, he was hunting a serial killer.

“Isn’t the fingerprint the calling card of every criminal?”

Nothing in police work had changed more dramatically over Les Angelbeck’s long career than fingerprinting. It used to be a thousand cardboard boxes stuffed with fingerprint cards and a couple of folding tables in a basement storage room. The new and much-delayed
BCA
computer center he was now standing in had cost the state more than five million dollars. The captain twirled an unlit Marlboro between his fat yellow fingers. He cleared his throat and waited for an answer.

“Yes, but your chances of scoring a hit with this calling card are slim. It’s not even a good partial print. I think the best we can hope for is a list of probables, and I can all but guarantee you they’ll all be rated low probability.”

Identifying criminals by their fingerprints had been routine since the turn of the century, when Scotland Yard pioneered its systematic use. When only a fingerprint led police to a suspect it was called a “cold make.” On TV cop shows it happened all the time. In reality, a cold make was as rare as snow in June. Then in the 1970s the
FBI
assigned computers the giant task of classifying its massive fingerprint collection. By the, 1980s, fingerprints

around the world were being converted to digital form using so-called points of minutiae, and the Automated Fingerprint Identification System was born-
APIS
for short.
APIS
was the most revolutionary advance in law enforcement since radios were put into patrol cars. Cold makes became as routine as spring rain. But partial prints still posed a problem.

“Looking at it, my guess is it’s the left index finger. But I got nothing when I ran that. I tried the right index next. Nothing. I’m working on the left middle finger now.”

His name was Glenn Arkwright. He was a fingerprint expert, or a computer expert, Angelbeck wasn’t sure. His sleeves were rolled up, his tie was loose. Arkwright stuck his hands under his glasses and rubbed his weary eyes. The image of the partial fingerprint taken off the transformer atop the Sky High parking ramp was glowing on the display screen.

The computer kept asking questions. Arkwright kept punching in the answers. The cursor sped across a crazy road map of what they believed was the killer’s fingerprint. To Angelbeck it seemed like a boring video game.

“A good fingerprint has a hundred digits,” Arkwright told him. “This one has only seven.” He hit the returm button, folded his arms, and waited. The computer worked its magic, but the printer remained silent. “There is the possibility that your boy has never been fingerprinted.”

“What if it’s a woman?”

Arkwright laughed, a hopeless laugh. “Then you’re piss out of luck. Few women get arrested, few women serve in the military, so few women ever get fingerprinted.”

“And this new computer will check all ten prints on every card?”

“Yup, every one of them. It would take a man thirty years to conduct a search like this.”

“How many cards are we talking about?”

“The
FBI
has twenty-three million fingerprint cards on file, and they receive an additional twenty-five thousand cards every day.”

The technology to examine those kinds of numbers baffled the veteran cop. “What, if any, recorded fingerprints wouldn’t be in their computer files?”

“The classifieds.
DBA
personnel,
CIA
, military intelligence, that sort of thing.”

“And how would we get those?”

Glenn Arkwright sighed at the thought. “We’d have to petition each agency and each branch of the military separately. We’ve done it in the past. It’s a bureaucratic nightmare with mixed results.”

The printer jumped to life. Arkwright ripped off the paper as if it were routine. It was. He glanced at it, then handed the printout to the police captain.

“Kesling, Jerome John. Louisville, Kentucky. Who’s this?”

“Just a man who was once fingerprinted.” Arkwright pointed at the printout. “Do you see those columns of numbers? That’s a very low probability rating. With a partial like this, we could get a hundred names like that.”

Les Angelbeck coughed into his fist. So much for the greatest advance since police radios. He checked his watch, then looked around the sterile computer room. “Is there a television in here? My daughter is flying in from California. I want to see if this weather is going to hold.”

Dixon Bell fitted his earpiece and checked his microphone. The burst of fire in the sky was so bright it was blinding. He slid on his sunglasses. The steamy air smelled of beer and bratwurst. The thunder was deafening, the thunder of race cars.

If Minnesota is a summer playground, then the small town of Lake Country is Minnesota’s summer capital. Two and a half hours northwest of the Twin Cities, Lake Country has had a reputation as Sodom and Gomorrah in the north woods since the 1930s, when Hollywood movie stars and Chicago gangsters rented cabins on the shores of the area’s pristine waters. But like many a popular vacation spot, Lake Country fell victim to the relentless advance of the chainsaws. Lakes born of a glacier and surrounded by woodland were now surrounded by golf courses and condominiums. Nightlife had replaced wildlife. And at no place during the overheated summer weekends was nightlife wilder than at Lake Country

International Raceway, a five-hundred-acre facility with a sprawling campground located smack dab in the middle of the road-race track.

The Weatherman bent over his scorching notes. A high-pressure system was entrenched over the central plains states. The National Weather Service would not confirm his numbers. He wiped sweat from his brow. The temperature was still above 100°. During a live shot too many things can go wrong, so Sky High News bought satellite time from 5:00 P.M. until 5:25, just to be safe. The engineer in the truck checked his coordinates. The photographer was having trouble with the sound. Noise from the race track was maddening.

It was the Fourth of July weekend, and record temperatures and record crowds were zeroing in on Lake Country. One hundred thousand of the rowdiest racing fans in the Midwest descended on the resort community for an all-American celebration of hot cars, cold beer, steamy sex, and the waving of the Stars and Stripes. Four hundred dragsters were competing for $500,000 in prize money. In a much lesser event, notices for a wet T-shirt contest were posted on trees, along with sign-up sheets. A thousand dollars in cash would be shared by the best-breasts winners.

“Can you hear the studio?” asked the photog.

“No,” shouted Dixon Bell, adjusting his earpiece.

“They’re getting you fine. You’ll get it from Ron at the top of the show, then throw it to the new guy when you’re done. One minute away. When I drop my arm, just start talking.”

Dixon Bell shook his head in disgust. The grass was trampled to dust. He felt filthy. The echo of the PA announcer was giving him a headache. He swore into the microphone. “Whose stupid-ass idea was this? It’s the hottest day in history and these motorheads have been drinking since sunrise.”

At the Minneapolis Grain Exchange commodity brokers tuned their television sets to Channel 7. During the corn-and-soybean-growing season the weather forecasts of Dixon Bell had become a local market phenomenon. They could spark wild bursts of trading as brokers tried to key in on the volatile weather in the Midwest that can make or break a crop. On the exchange floor there was

speculation that Dixon Bell dabbled in commodities trading, or that he was running a consulting business on the side. He vehemently denied these rumors, saying it would be unethical. He did admit to being offered high-paying jobs by private forecasters such as Cropcast, Pennsylvania-based AccuWeather, and Knight-Ridder Global Weather Services. The Weatherman turned down these offers, telling suitors he was happy at Sky High News and that he was more interested in developing new educational programs for television.

The photographer raised his fist to the sun. “Stand by!”

Dixon Bell put on his happy face. The photog dropped his arm. The Weatherman looked up at the relentless summer sun and smiled. “We did it, Ron. The hottest recorded temperature in Minnesota history. At 1:58 this afternoon the mercury up here in Lake Country topped out at one hundred and fifteen degrees, breaking the old record set in Moorhead back in 1936.”

When Dixon Bell wrapped up his record-breaking forecast, he tossed it to the new guy on the other side of the race track, who reported on the record number of heat strokes brought on by too much sun and too much beer. A reporter back at the station followed with a report on global warming.

Dixon Bell went live from Lake Country at six o’clock and ten o’clock that night. When it was all over, he felt like a dirty wet T-shirt. The photographer and the engineer were heading for an air-conditioned bar in town. Dixon Bell excused himself. Much of the crowd was moving north toward the grandstands to watch the fireworks display. Others headed south for the campgrounds to watch the wet-T-shirt contest. For a minute the Weatherman stood by himself in the oppressive heat. An ambulance circled the race track, lights flashing. Then Dixon Bell bought a cold beer and set out south.

This sprawling campground in the middle of the track was known among racing fans as the Zoo, an island of lawlessness in an ocean of beer. Police were nonexistent. Security was a joke. Between the tents and the campfires super car stereo systems pulsated with hard rock-the dirtier the lyrics, the louder the music. Roadsters and motorcycles dragged up and down the dirt roads that crisscrossed the campgrounds. Dixon Bell had never seen anything like it, and he had seen a lot in his life. Everybody in sight was half-naked with a beer in their hand.