The Snowman Chpt 5 (end) < WildBob > A creepy christmas tale

Chapter V

I started my morning the same as always when I smelled the coffee brewing. I got up and started a fire in the wood stove. I looked outside. It was still snowing but the wind had gone way down. The TV stations had all gone off the air last night when the storm blew down one of their antennas. We had watched family videos and played games feeling warm and secure in our home.

I put on my boots to go outside and get the paper. Our snowman had accumulated a small layer of snow last night. I grabbed the plastic covered newspaper. I was about to go back inside but instead I went over to the snowman and brushed off the excess snow. “There that’s better,” I said to the snowman. “Now you look as good as new” I have to admit, he did. In fact, he might have looked better than when we made him. There seemed to be more expression in his face and a little more definition on his body.

I went back inside and grabbed a cup of coffee. I sat by the woodstove and opened up the paper and was shocked by the headlines. 17 DEAD IN WORST MURDER SPREE IN HISTORY OF CITY screamed the headlines. The details were sparse. The storm had been so bad that the news media had trouble getting too many details.

They covered the shooting in the apartment complex the most because the body count had been the highest there. The murders had all taken place in an apartment that was know for its gang activity. Most people had been indoors when it occurred. No one could describe the murderer or murderers. The most popular theory seemed to be that it was drug related. The killer had stopped at the apartment after killing a couple of people. He either killer the people in the apartment to get drugs or killed them after getting drugs then continued on with his murder spree. The details were pretty gruesome. What an awful thing to happen so close to Christmas.

Detective Madison had spent the night at the police station. He called his wife and explained that all officers had been called back to the station to try to find the killer. He did manage to catch a little sleep at his desk. As dawn broke, more police were coming in to work. They hadn’t been able to travel during the peak of the storm.

Sergeant Peters gently shook Madison’s shoulder. We got an ID on the first victim. Madison shook himself awake. “So who was he?”

“We’re not exactly sure of his name. We ran his fingerprints and they came up connected to a series of murders in Florida. He was a serial murderer.”

“We still need to find out who he was,” I said. “I guess sometimes the good guys get a break”

As the day wore on more details emerged on the murders. Most had been know gangsters and drug dealers. The CIA contacted me late in the morning and were in my office before lunch. They wanted all the evidence on the murder of the young woman. We were to give out no information at all about her. I wasn’t going along with this until they explained the situation. She was a graduate student at the University where she was also a cheerleader. She studied microbiology. The CIA had been tracking her for months. They wouldn’t say where they had gotten their information but she was about to sell some deadly forms of bacteria to an eastern government. I called my Captain in to deal with them. All the records were just gone by the following day.

For the next few weeks, the carnage continued. Every time there was a storm the police couldn’t keep up with murders. Of course there were eyewitness accounts. They all said the same thing. A huge man wearing a scarf and a funny hat had committed the murders. We pursued it as hard as we could but we just didn’t have enough to go on. We even had some video from surveillance cameras. Man, that guys costume was good. He really did look like a huge snowman, but we didn’t know who he was.

Bumper stickers started showing up about a week after the first murder. “PROTECTED BY FROSTY” “FROSTY 44 AND COUNTING” “FROSTY ROCKS”. They weren’t sure who was responsible for killing all the bad guys but for once they thought justice was being served. People started building snowmen everywhere. Sometimes there were several snowmen in front of a single house. People put up signs “Neighborhood watched by FROSTY”

The more people that got killed, the more bad people fled the city. It was pretty apparent who was being hunted. The rumor amongst the criminals in town was that the police had formed a hit squad and they just used the snowman as a cover story. They fled in droves.

By mid January we lived in a crime free town. There were no drugs because all the drug dealers had fled. There was no more gang violence, in fact there didn’t seem to be any body interested in joining a gang. The recreational drug users thought better about their choices and chose life. Wife beaters stopped. People were much more polite to each other. It really was a Christmas miracle.

Detective Madison never did solve the crime and he worked on it for a long long time.

I went out to get my paper one morning and looked up at our snowman. He still looked great. The weather was sure to warm up soon and I hated to think that he would just melt. I was looking at him and wishing there was a way to protect him from the coming spring thaw. It was almost like he was lost in thought. “If only we lived farther north, then you’d never melt,” I thought to myself.

When I came out to get the paper the next morning he was gone. In his place was an arrow made of snow. It pointed towards the North.

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