The Weatherman (22 page)

“No, we called you right away.”

“Let’s keep this a state secret. We don’t want the press getting ahold of something like this.”

“I understand.”

“It’s snowing. I’d better start back.”

But the girl’s father stopped him. He and his despondent wife were the victims murderers leave behind. “Captain Angelbeck, in many ways our princess was quite blessed. She sometimes said things, saw things we couldn’t explain.” His last words to the old cop were “Be careful-it’s easy to get lost out here.”

Les Angelbeck had the car radio turned to
WCCO-AM
. The Good Neighbor, they called themselves. He remembered how they had sat listening to
WCCO
that tragic Armistice Day so many years ago.

“Your father’ll be fine. If the weather holds.”

For the hundredth time the Good Neighbor announced the winter storm warning. Blizzard conditions. Six to ten inches of snow. Thirty-five mph winds and a rapidly dropping windchill. Treacherous driving. Only the brave and the foolish should venture outdoors. “Welcome to winter,” said the voice on the air. “We got off easy last year.”

“Merry Christmas to you too,” Les Angelbeck replied. He was feeling more foolish than brave. Conditions in Afton were near whiteout. The headlights were useless. He coughed his guts up, then wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his parka. He’d reluctantly made a doctor’s appointment. He could breathe in okay, but exhaling was becoming increasingly difficult.

Angelbeck started the unmarked squad car down a steep road. There was no blacktop to see, only a mean ocean of white running along the tree line. No other cars kept him company. He steered a middle course. Visibility was nearing zero. So was the temperature. He knew the interstate was only a mile north, but the roads in Afton didn’t run north-south. They were serpentine, rolled up and down and wound around. He was lost No sooner had he reached that conclusion than he had another coughing attack. The big Chevy tilted right. Angelbeck violently jerked the steering wheel away from the fall. The car fishtailed off the road and stopped with the snap of a whip. He floored the gas pedal. The tires spun in circles until he could smell the burning rubber. He was stuck!

Les Angelbeck sat behind the wheel and recaptured his breath. He was not one to panic. He turned down the heater and cracked open his window, smoked a cigarette, and watched the snowstorm raging around him. He recalled what he’d heard on Channel 7 the night before.

“El Nino,” Dixon Bell had told his viewers. “That’s Spanish for ‘the Child.’ It’s an unexplained buildup of warm water in the Pacific Ocean just off the coast of South America. We call it the Child because it usually occurs around Christmastime. When El Nino occurs, the effects can be dramatic. It nudges the jet streams off course and disrupts weather patterns around the world. Here in the Midwest the result is heavier than normal precipitation. Snow! And that’s what we’re in for tomorrow night, folks. A megastorm. A gift from El Nino. So stay home. Or wrap up your Christmas Eve early and get home!”

Good advice. Angelbeck took a deep drag on his cigarette. His mind raced over the case. His Calendar Task Force was not without leads. In fact, it had too many leads. Besides the partial fingerprint and now this strange letter, thousands of phone calls poured in from around the country. Every tip had to be written down, so many tips they could only check out the hot ones-those from other police departments or reliable sources. They had filled 150 three-ring binders with facts. They fed the facts into computers and supercomputers that spit out even more facts. They interviewed every lunatic in the five-state area. As year-end approached it was estimated the state had spent nearly two million dollars on the investigation, surpassing the amount of money spent on the Wakefield kidnapping.

An
FBI
agent who specialized in serial killers flew in from Quantico and joined the task force. The task force interviewed scientists at the University of Wisconsin who were studying the effects of the atmosphere on human behavior. They talked at length with a professor of climatology at the University of Minnesota. Angelbeck himself had interviewed the chief meteorologist at the National Weather Service Severe Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City. Everybody they’d spoken to was cooperative and informative. But they were of little help.

On another front, Les Angelbeck met with Glenn Arkwright that morning. “Of the fifty-nine names
APIS
spit out,” the fingerprint expert told him, “we’ve eliminated half of them. Of prints we can’t be sure about, we’ve tracked down twenty of them. Eight of them have already died, and the other twelve have never set foot in our fair state. One guy from New York did confess to visiting Wisconsin Dells. He thought that was in Minnesota. Concerning our request for classified fingerprints …
CIA
said no way. Naval intelligence said no sir. The Army sent us more forms to fill out. And much to my surprise, the Air Force okayed a limited search … decommissioned officers of the Vietnam era only. There’s just one catch-it’ll take them six to eight weeks to declassify them before we can run them.”

The Marlboro Man extinguished his smoke in the ashtray. He cleared his sore throat. It was time to see how bad. He breathed as deep as he could. He zipped up his heavy green parka and pulled on his gloves.

As soon as he stepped from the squad car, Old Man Winter’s icy hand slapped his face. Angelbeck slammed the door closed to save the heat. He spit with the wind. He trudged to the rear of the car. The back end was hanging over a ravine. Drifting snow was up to the fender. The rear tires were buried. He had neither the strength nor the willpower to shovel his way out. He’d have to radio for help. But where exactly was he? From what he could see through the storm, a stone canyon blocked the east. A forest lay to the west. A wild river of tumbling snow wound down the hill.

The captain cleared the snow away from the tailpipe so carbon monoxide wouldn’t back into the car. He hugged the snowbound vehicle and made his way back to the front door. But the door had locked-the keys in the ignition, the engine running. A cold pang of fear shot up his back. The window wasn’t cracked open enough to get even his pinky through. The back door was locked. He slogged around to the passenger’s side. The gusting wind pelted his face with snow and ice. The doors were locked. Though not a man to panic, he felt foolish. The snow blitz was bone-chillingly cold and painful. He plodded back to the driver’s side of the car and tried to smash a window, but he lacked the muscle and the means. Les Angelbeck clenched his teeth.

Across the road, snow-draped evergreens bowed in his direction. The howling wind was gusting up to 50 mph, churning the snow and burying the car. Ice chips battered his face. Snow tumbled into his overshoes. Rich people lived out here, but they lived a mile apart. “Stay with the car.” He said it aloud so he wouldn’t do anything else foolish. “Stay with the car.”

The old cop took a seat in the swiftly accumulating snow. He leaned back against the front tire on the street side, where he could catch the warmth of the engine and watch the roadway. Soon another car would pass and see the headlights. He tucked his gloves into his armpits and tucked his boots under his legs. And there he sat, remembering what had happened to his father.

Les Angelbeck was still in high school during the Armistice Day Blizzard. November 11, 1940. His father had gone out hunting that morning in his shirtsleeves. Sixty-degree weather. He’d asked his son to come along, but he declined: he was at that awkward age when a boy wants to do less with his parents, not more. Two days later the awkward boy helped sheriff’s deputies pull his father’s frozen body out of a snow bank. The blizzard had slammed into Minnesota so fast and so furious that no warning was possible. Snowdrifts ended up twenty feet high.

In Belgium he had marched through a snowstorm like this, just another GI with a cigarette dangling from his lips. But he was young and healthy then, and there was a war to be won. Now he was old and foolish. He’d locked his keys in the car with the engine running. He could hear the anchorman on TV telling everybody about family history repeating itself, about the elderly cop who had perished in a blizzard just like his father. Only he’d been warned. He was just too damn stubborn to stay at home where he belonged on a night such as this.

On Christmas Eve, while Captain Les Angelbeck was sitting in the middle of the blizzard, Sky High News reporter Andrea Labore was sitting on the couch in her warm Golden Valley apartment, feeling as cold and lonely as the snowbound cop. The lights were out. An empty bowl of popcorn sat on the table. A snow-white TV screen was pulsating in front of her. Her blue bathrobe embraced her like an old friend.

It was this night a year ago she had toured the governor’s mansion and then fell asleep in the arms of Per Ellefson. Now all she had to hold on to was a check he’d written her and a new bottle of pills.

“Take three pills a day for the first three days. Call us if there’s any fever or bleeding. ”

Perhaps she should have waited until after the holidays, but she had wanted it over with. No pills could swallow her guilt. Andrea once thought those kinds of clinics were for naive teenagers, for the poor and the irresponsible. When the governor asked her how much it would cost, she told him. He wrote her a check for the exact amount. “Put this in your account,” he instructed her, “but pay them in cash.”

Andrea Labore sat in front of the blank TV screen practicing something Rick Beanblossom had taught her-for every answer you get, come up with three more questions. How could a governor so full of good be so cold? Would a good man have been seeing her at all? And what of all those speeches about the sanctity of life? He didn’t seem to have any qualms about the death penalty when he wrote that check.

And what of the child? What might the child of a tall, handsome governor and a beautiful television reporter have grown up to be? She held the check in her hand. In the light of the TV screen the governor’s signature stared up at her like a veto. Tears welled up in her eyes.

A polar wind slammed a horde of snow and ice into her patio window. Andrea was startled, turned to look. God was furious. She had the haunting feeling that if she threw open that window she’d be sucked into the storm-all the way to hell.

Andrea Labore got up and fixed herself a drink. She poured brandy into a Diet Coke and zapped it in the microwave. She returned to the couch. Her apartment was something of a fluffy pigpen. It was too hot. Her hands were dry. Her plants were wilting. She popped one of the pills and chased it with the brandy. She swallowed a diet pill. Vitamin pills followed. She tightened the bathrobe around her shrinking figure. The Christmas Eve blizzard raged outside her window. But Andrea ignored the sinister weather and returned to watching the snow on her television set.

The wind-driven snow was still coming down. Waves of the drifting white stuff rolled through the ravine. Across the way a tree snapped in two and toppled in slow motion. Snow blanketed his lap. His face was stone red. Glistening icicles dangled from his eyebrows. His teeth were chattering. He couldn’t stop the shakes. Les ached for a ciearette. but thev too were locked in the car. Then the car’s engine died. A half-hour later the headlights died. The specter of death took flight overhead. Another victim of the Calendar Killer.

It wasn’t the ghost of his father that haunted him this Christmas Eve. It was those seven women that were circling overhead. What did they feel when their time was up? Did they know they were going to die? Did they see a face? Did they cry out for their mothers? Their fathers? Did you really know the name, Princess? Only one person knew all of the answers. It was this night a year ago the killer struck on Como Lake. Might even be out there tonight in search of a winter kill. Never had the Minnesota police captain felt so helpless.

The elderly and smokers are the most susceptible to the snow and the cold. Any man who knows the weather knows that. Les Angelbeck knew the weather. He wanted to finish his career as the cop who had collared the Calendar Killer. He wanted to see capital punishment restored and justice done. But he was a detective, a man of cold reasoning and hard logic. He wasted precious little time on fantasy. There would be no cars passing by. Travel was impossible. He would finish his career a crippled old man in a crippling snowstorm. The elderly take the slow road to the grave. All things considered, hypothermia wasn’t a bad way to go. It was good enough for Daddy. The family curse.

Resigned to his icy fate, the freezing policeman began to pray. The peace that passed all understanding snowed over him. The pain stopped. His hands and feet went numb. His swollen chest settled down. His face went flush, actually felt warm. Les Angelbeck felt himself dozing off, believing in his heart he would never wake up.

In the end it was just like they said it would be. The whistling wind took on a joyful harmony. He was sure he could hear children singing Christmas carols. Everything was white and beautiful. Then he saw it-a bright light at the end of a tunnel. He still couldn’t move, couldn’t go towards the light, but it didn’t matter, the light was coming towards him. It was a shiny blue light and it descended like a savior through the swirling clouds. As it floated closer, he saw an angel below the light-a beautiful orange angel, with giant wings the color of the sunset. Closer still, he could see that the angel was carrying the blue light. This messenger from heaven was swooping down on him, as if to wrap him in its giant wings and take him away. He was ready to fly. Seemed a good day for it. But the angel suddenly stopped, the giant orange wings hovering over him. The blue light twirled in circles.

Then the strangest thing happened. The most mortal of beings stepped out of the clouds and bent over his face. He was wearing a ski mask. “Are you okay, mister?”

“I know you.” Instinctively the barely alive captain tried to reach for his badge, but his brittle bones wouldn’t bend. “I’m a police captain,” he muttered.

The snowplow driver chuckled, a bit concerned. “I don’t think Old Man Winter is impressed with your rank. I’m going to put you in the cab, it’s nice and warm there.”