The Weatherman (37 page)

“That’s ridiculous. Did I give him the heart attack, too?”

“No, God did that.”

“Why all of the questions about Andy?”

Rick Beanblossom began to pace the small cell like a caged tiger while the Weatherman remained seated on the floor. “I’ve run it through my mind a hundred different ways and it frustrates me to no end. Andy had access to everything in the weather center, including your schedule, your diary, your computer, and your home address. Even your fingerprints.”

Dixon Bell couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “My God,” he muttered. “Can you plant a fingerprint?”

“I don’t know. I got a source to check Andy’s fingerprints against the transformer print. It’s no match. Andy’s blood type was O positive. That matches the blood found

beneath the fingernails of Officer Sumter, but it’s a common blood type of millions. His shoe size was thirteen, close to the size of the prints found in the snow, but a clandestine search of his Edina home turned up no athletic shoe called Alacrity.”

” ‘Clandestine search’?”

“Andrea and I broke into his house last night. Well, Andrea broke in. I followed. Ex-cops make great burglars. Anyway, we found love letters written half a century ago, but no letter from that murdered retarded girl in Afton. You know, victim number seven, I think she was. The one that watched you every night.”

“Karen Rochelle,” the Weatherman reminded him.

“Yes, Karen Rochelle. We found no letters that belonged to you. No newspaper clippings of the murders. No threats. No clues. Nothing more than the dusty house of an old man, filled with memorabilia. A proud man who starred in college, who went to war, who married a local girl and raised a family while building a career in television … then bitterly watched it all slip away, one precious memory at a time.”

“You don’t think he did it, do you?”

“I don’t want to hurt his son and daughter with potshot allegations. My police sources think the theory is bunk. Andrea is skeptical, to say the least.”

“Andrea thinks I murdered those women, doesn’t she?”

Rick stopped his pacing and peered through the little window. “Are you going to take the witness stand?”

“You saw me in court the other day. Stacy says it was bad. How bad?”

Rick Beanblossom moved away from the window, allowing the light from the hallway to spill across the bitter face of Dixon Bell. “You looked like a madman. You looked like the kind of man who would strangle seven women. Or maybe eight.”

“Did you see her?” he asked Rick in a plaintive voice. “I believe in God now, because when I left high school I prayed he’d get her. I mean, in my most malicious dreams Lisa was never fat.”

“Tell me about her.”

The cell was damp and chilly, but the Weatherman’s hands were sweating. He tried to rub them dry. “You read my diary, or, as Mr. Fury would say, ‘the sentimental ramblings of a psychopath.’ For near thirty years that girl haunted me. I was in Nam when my friend Bobby Conn wrote me that she’d gotten married. As the years rolled by I was able to go for months at a time without thinking about her. Once a whole year passed-I swear, not a thought of the bitch. But then it would happen. She would come to me in a dream. These dreams hurt like hell and I would wake up in tears. Then the dream would bother me for days on end. Drive me out of my skull. Sometimes the dream was about her wedding. I lost count of how many times I attended that fucking wedding. I skipped my ten-year reunion ‘cause of her. I wanted to go home for my twenty-five-year reunion, but I still couldn’t bring myself to deal with the specter of the lost cause. You see, in my mind-and that was the only place I ever saw her-Lisa Beauregard never aged. All those years she remained the epitome of the eighteen-year-old southern belle. Even after I fell in love with your precious Andrea, the Mississippi Queen would show up in a dream to remind me that I’d been down this road once before.”

“So what should have been written off as a high-school crush instead became a lifelong obsession.”

“You are so insightful, Mr. Beanblossom.”

“Oh, my insights go much deeper than that, Mr. Bell.” He let that hang in the air a moment. “Davi Iverson,” Rick said to him, “the bank teller with the secret lover. The witness nobody believed. She quit her job and moved away. Ridiculed right out of town. But to me she’s been the most credible witness in the whole trial. I still can’t bring myself to believe you murdered those women … but you were the stranger in the night who came for sex with that girl. How many others were there, Weatherman?”

“The masked asshole strikes again. Say what you want about him, the boy has a leather nose for news. I never hurt any of them women. And I sure as hell didn’t kill anyone.”

A train passed below, and both men were shaking with the walls. The light in the hallway was flickering, blackening off and on the face of Dixon Bell. “Now y’all want a story you can use?”

“It would help.”

“Even as my sanity continued to deteriorate, my knowledge of meteorology and the earth sciences continued to

grow, to the point where Dixon Graham Bell became one of the most admired and most controversial men in his field.”

“And the most popular man on local TV,” Rick added.

“That’s right. It’s warming much too fast out there.”

“You’ve been locked up too long, Weatherman. It’s freezing outside.”

“That’s part of the problem.” Dixon Bell tried to explain the inexplicable. “When I’m upset like this, my mind locks onto the weather. I’m like the idiot savant. It’s warming too fast in the West. The jet stream is retreating north in a straight westerly flow. Way-above-normal temperatures are headed this way. Record snowfall melting. Heavy rains. You can expect major flooding along the St. Croix River, the Minnesota River, and the Mississippi. St. Paul right below us here and your old hometown of Stillwater should bear the brunt of it. Should crest around Easter. Nobody will believe me anymore. But they’ll believe you. Y’all been warned now.”

On Easter Sunday the St. Croix River in Stillwater, Minnesota, crested at 695 feet above sea level, 20 feet above normal. To save Main Street the decision was made to build an emergency dike of sand and sandbags along the east side of the town, from Elm Street on the north to the south end of Lowell Park. On Good Friday the downtown business district had been sealed off from Second Street to the river, and one thousand volunteer workers labored day and night to lay down five thousand feet of sand to stop a raging river that was rising one foot every twelve hours.

National Guard troops were called in. High school was canceled and students rushed to help out on the dike. The warden at Stillwater prison offered several dozen trustees. Two generator units were set up which provided six thousand watts of power to maintain a lighting system. Volunteers worked under floodlights during the night hours. Women and children walked along the makeshift dam providing refreshments and food. Helicopters and mini-cams beamed the rising disaster back to their newsrooms.

At the interstate lift bridge, the iron necklace across the valley, water surged over the roadway and up to the railings. With giant ice chunks ramming its tower legs at high speeds there were doubts the landmark could be saved. River blasting was undertaken to break up the ice jams and relieve pressure on the old expanse.

“I’ve lived here all my life. I never thought I’d see anything like this again. This is worse than ‘65. We didn ‘t get much warning, did we?”

It was like that up and down the state. The Mississippi River and its tributaries were gobbling up valuable land from near the headwaters in Itasca State Park to Hannibal, Missouri. People became riverfront property owners overnight. A month earlier the region had battled snowdrifts twenty-five feet high. Torrential rains in early April were the crowning blow. According to the Red Cross, more than twenty thousand people from Minnesota and Wisconsin had been driven from their homes. Fifteen people had died in the flood waters, half of them children playing. The preliminary damage estimate topped one hundred million dollars. The city of St. Paul was in a state of emergency as the Mississippi River crested at twenty-seven feet above normal. The detention center was flooded. After viewing the angry rivers from an Army helicopter the President of the United States declared forty-eight counties disaster areas.

By the time the daylight hours had slipped away on Easter Sunday, Stillwater’s Main Street looked like a flooded battlefield. Soldiers patroled the streets. Ice literally exploded upriver. Flashes of lightning in a steady drizzle added to the warlike scene. Strong southeast winds were making the situation critical.

The first leaks appeared on the northeast end of the city, then spread to the middle section of the dike back of Hooley’s Supermarket. Water was seeping through the soaked earth to the railroad tracks. An antique locomotive parked in Lowell Park was surrounded by several feet of river. Underground water pressure broke up Chestnut Street in front of the interstate bridge and sent manhole covers rolling down the sidewalks. Pumps were put into action to stem the flow. Truck drivers were finding it increasingly difficult getting loads of sand into critical areas. The rampaging St. Croix banged against the dam, already halfway up the sandbags.

Rick Beanblossom was up to his knees in the brown water on the north end of the dike near Hooley’s. He and a group of prison workers were throwing sandbags on top of sandbags as fast as they could, piling the eight-foot dike even higher. Rick’s frayed and fading fatigue jacket was sodden with mud. But the stenciled
USMC
could still be seen on one side of his chest,
BEANBLOSSOM
on the other side. His leather gloves were soaked to his skin. His waterproof boots didn’t work as advertised. His mask was a darker shade of blue, almost black in the rain. He was exhausted. He’d been working at the dike day and night since Good Friday.

This night an old man in a life jacket and yellow slicker was working feverishly alongside him. Rick thought he recognized him from the Weatherman’s trial. “If it holds tonight, I think we’ve got it licked,” Rick said, worried about the man’s health.

“Been watching this ole river flow for more’n thirty years.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jesse. The boys just call me Old Jesse.”

A woman passing out sandwiches was staring at them.

“Well, Jesse, I think we could all use a break.”

Another dynamite bomb exploded upriver. Rick instinctively covered his head. His heart skipped a beat or two. He turned to watch. Chips of ice fell slowly to the river through the wide beams of the floodlights. The lift bridge held its ground.

The woman who had been staring at them handed the old man a sandwich and poured him a cup of coffee. Rick was too tired, too jumpy to eat. He turned his back to them and waded up the tracks to the locomotive.

“Excuse me, are you Rick Beanblossom?”

Rick turned. It was the sandwich lady. He wiped sand from his jacket and pulled off his gloves. “Yes, I am.”

She was a fortyish woman with a round, smiling face and a healthy figure under her rain gear. She selfconsciously tried fixing her dark hair in the filthy weather. “I don’t expect you to remember me, Rick.” She extended her hand. “Leanne Sutler. Leanne Olsen when we went to high school.”

In his mind he said, “You’re not Leanne Olsen. She was young and beautiful. I dated her in the tenth grade, used to ride my bicycle over to her house. Her mother fixed us tacos.” But it was Leanne all right. He could still see the teenage girl in the warm eyes and the welcoming smile. Sentimental memories came back in a flood. He had seldom seen high-school friends after the war. A few, Leanne among them, had come to see him upon his return home. But nobody ever came back. He avoided reunions. “Hello, Leanne.” Rick Beanblossom embraced his old friend, kissed her cheek. He thought he saw a tear in the corner of her eye. Maybe it was the rain.

“We used to read you in the Star Tribune, then you won that Pulitzer Prize, and now we watch Channel 7 all the time.” She was trying to talk too fast. “I thought it was you over here. Well, of course it’s Rick, I said to myself. He’s like the rest of us, he’s not going to let the old hometown go under. My two boys are sandbagging down the line. They’re in high school now-the new one, of course.”

“You look wonderful,” he told her. And he meant it.

Again she brushed back her hair. “Oh, God, Rick, I look like a sandbag.”

“And your husband?”

“He’s an engineer. He’s parading up and down the dike with a walkie-talkie. His back is bad and he can’t do any heavy lifting. Did you ever marry, Rick?”

It was the first time he wasn’t bothered by the question. He stuck his hand in his jacket pocket and squeezed the small velvet case that housed the diamond ring. He seldom went anywhere without it. “No,” he told her, “but maybe soon. Nothing’s official yet. In fact, she should be coming down here tonight.”

“Oh, I hope it works out for you, Rick.” She rattled off names he hadn’t heard in years. Rick asked about classmates he was genuinely curious about; but like the antique locomotive, she couldn’t say what had become of the rest of the class, what track their lives had taken. Leanne kissed him good-bye. Made him promise a dinner visit. “Bring your friend.” Then she returned to the line and disappeared into a thousand bodies that swarmed over the dike.

Only when he had these few moments to pause and reflect did Rick Beanblossom marvel at how accurate had been the Weatherman’s forecast. With him in jail, and Jack Napoleon resigned, and Andy Mack dead, Sky High News had warned of the flooding threat in the most cautious of terms-looking back, too cautious. Even so, Channel 7 had been sounding the alarm days ahead of the competition, and river miles ahead of the National Weather Service.

The Minnesota weather had passed into the realm of mysticism. It was almost as if an incensed Mother Nature were conspiring to stop the trial of Dixon Bell. The Ramsey County jail was inundated with water, the prisoners moved to the upper floors, forced to double and triple up in cells. The sheriff asked the judge for time to make new security arrangements. When court finally resumed, Judge Lutoslawski denied the mistrial motion and the state rested its case. Then Stacy Dvorchak began her defense, one murder charge at a time. The passages she chose to read from the Weatherman’s diary were markedly different from those of the prosecution. The psychiatrists she called to the witness stand concluded Dixon Bell was nothing more than an angry but harmless, sentimental fool who found it a lot easier to deal with science than with society.