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9:15AM Goetz and Foutch told me they had picked up
the trail of the weather station the night before. They knew it had
been bagged, and that some g-men were hopping mad about it. The g-men
had written a report on
the crime. In it, they claimed that because of the heist, which had
been orchestrated by some other g-men at NOAA, the great City of Los
Angeles had been denied it’s due: A new rainfall record year of
2004-2005. Worse than that, the temperature of the city was going down.
I’d heard about this station. It was ugly, it was dirty, it was perched on a rooftop, and it was on the wrong side of town, out by the City Department of Water and Power,
just south of the Santa Ana freeway. It hung out with utility trucks
and those little red street racers the punks around here drive. There
was only one single photo of it. It wasn’t the kind of pristine weather station you’d take home to introduce to your mother.
10:05 AM I knew this was going to be a tough case
to crack without hard as nails proof, so I decided to setup
surveillance. I called in a favor from a chopper pilot named Barney
that I used to share a beat with. I asked him to get aerial photos,
lots of them. He asked why. I told him it was because nobody would
believe that a City of Los Angeles official weather station had been on
a rooftop of a parking garage and now was a shell of it’s former self
sitting over at the USC campus.
I told him that when they moved it to a cool park at USC, they
killed the heart and soul of the city’s temperature record with it. And
worse, they not only moved the station, but they replaced the man who
had sweated and toiled on the rooftop in the hot LA smog and sun to get
that weather data with one of those sissy robot contraptions. They call it an ASOS, and it has a sleek look about it, but it could never do a man’s job.
12:01 PM So Barney sets me up with the aerial
surveillance from this morning. He sends the photos. I took them down
to the lunch counter of corner drugstore to develop them on my laptop.
I had a cup of coffee while I did that. It cost 25 cents, and included
pie. Read rest
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