The Weatherman

by Steve Thayer

  At the south end of the lake, orange fencing surrounded open water. Ducks flapped about. But stalactites from the storm weighed down the fence, creating a dangerous situation. It was while he was looking toward the middle of the lake that Redmond noticed strange shadows, like the caller had reported. Almost surreal in the predawn dark of an icy world.

  A triangular sign stapled to a tree warned DANGER—THIN ICE. A yellow wood rescue raft hung from another tree. Redmond slid down the bank and onto the frozen lake. He was shivering. He pounded his gloves together. At sunset the temperature had been above freezing. By morning it had plummeted to near zero. Every winter he promised himself he’d dress warmer. He never did. He moved across the lake like an Egyptian mummy, bruised and aching from his slide down his stairs. Slowly and deliberately he half walked, half slid his way across the fresh layer of ice.

  The lieutenant was still a good distance away, but as he slid closer, the eerie shadows began to take shape and form. It appeared to be a man on his knees praying over something. Or maybe the fool was ice fishing. Where else but in this godforsaken land would a man be stupid enough to risk his life in the middle of a lake to catch a fish on Christmas morning? “Do you need help?” Redmond shouted.

  The apparition grew large and ominous, almost inflating like a balloon. The face remained dark and featureless, but its hair was icicles. Another shadow was left stretched across the ice. Redmond was startled. “Hold it there, sucker. I’m a police officer.” The police officer slipped and fell.

  The ghostly figure moved across the ice, away from him. The other shadow lay still on the frozen lake. Redmond’s chase instincts kicked in. He clambered to his feet. “Police, stop!”

  The big shadow seemed to have better footing. It ran off the lake and went north of the pavilion into the park. By the time Redmond stumbled off the frozen water the shadow was halfway up the steep hill beside a frozen waterfall.

  “Now why doesn’t he slip and fall?” The big cop started up after him. The shadow vaulted a chain link fence that protected the icy falls and disappeared over the top of the hill.

  Donnell Redmond grabbed onto trees and bushes jutting out of the ice and pulled himself up the hill a foot at a time. A walk bridge ran in front of the waterfall—a white icicle twenty feet high and a foot thick. A sign on the fencing read,

  PERSONS FOUND IN FENCE AREAWILL BE PROSECUTED.

  Redmond yelled, “You’re in big trouble now, Frosty!” He jumped the fence, grabbed onto trees, and struggled up the hill beside the waterfall. By the time he reached the top he was hurting and exhausted. He thought he saw the apparition melt into shadows in the woods below. He decided to do what they do in the movies. What the hell. He drew his .357 short-barrel. “Stop or I’ll shoot!” Then he fired a warning shot into the air. The gun sounded like a cannon, shattering the icy silence. The echo was crazy. But in the woods below, nothing moved.

  Donnell Redmond walked to a concrete picnic table half buried in the snow and stepped to the top. Off to his right, hills of ice rolled over the golf course. Before him the woods were dark and deep. The sun was starting up, but the shadows created by the slivers of dawn only added to the hiding places. Whatever it was, it had gotten away. The frustrated lieutenant slid his gun beneath his coat. He turned and started back for the lake. He was at the top of the frozen waterfall when he heard an order that could only come from a fellow cop.

  “Freeze, asshole, or you’re dead!” A St. Paul patrolman standing just off the walk bridge was pointing a gun up at him.

  “Don’t shoot—I’m Lieutenant Redmond.” He reached for his badge, but slipped on his ass and zipped around the waterfall and down the steep hill.

  The cop with his gun drawn jumped aside as what must have looked like a giant bowling ball coming at him slid by, flew over a retaining wall, and landed in a snow bank. The St. Paul patrolman lowered his gun. “Is that you, Donny?”

  “No, it’s Peggy Fleming, dumb fuck.” Redmond got to his feet, aching and cold, checking his body for broken bones.

  “I thought all you state boys had desk jobs.” He holstered his gun. “We heard a shot.”

  “I was chasing somebody.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  “I got hardly no look at him. Just a big old shadow moving across the ice like a snowman.”

  “You couldn’t have picked a worse morning to chase somebody."

  “What’d he do?”

  “Don’t know yet. Out on the lake.”

  The sun was coming up on a crystalline day. The sky was ice blue, sunsplashed but frigid. The earth was iced over. Como Park was an icicle fantasy. Ice sculptures decorated the entire lakeshore. Ice angels hung from tree branches over the frozen water. Streets around the lake were mirrored and deserted.

  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 it. 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.”

  The Victim

  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 and 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 risqué 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’s 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. I’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 earned, 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.”