by Gene Riehl
Brodsky drove west toward where Seaton emptied into Florida Avenue. I set up where Seaton hit Seventeenth. We were in good position, as good as we were going to manage with only two men and two cars. Jerry Crown could drive up and down Seaton all day long, but he wasn’t going anywhere else without us tagging along.
Day turned to evening, evening to night, and beyond.
“Blue Cadillac heading your way,” Brodsky said over his cell phone at three o’clock Wednesday morning, the sheriff’s voice still strong despite the hour. He described the sedan turning into Seaton Place. “Single occupant. Woman. Let me know if she doesn’t come past you. I’ll do a drive-by to see where she stopped.”
I did see her, a few seconds later, as the Cadillac slid past me and turned south on Seventeenth. I told Brodsky, then asked him for the drive-by anyway, just to make sure the van hadn’t somehow slipped past us. A couple minutes later he called to report that nothing had changed, but this time he added something new.
“Just a feeling, but this is beginning to concern me.”
I had to smile at his better and better manners. Another FBI agent would have put it a little differently. You’ve got to be fucking kidding! Just because the van’s still there doesn’t mean shit! We’re just gonna sit here and pretend he hasn’t already left it behind?
No matter how kindly he’d said it, Brodsky had a good point.
With only two of us out here, we couldn’t follow any of the dozens of vehicles that had passed. Jerry Crown might have walked out the door and caught a ride with a friend fifteen hours ago. We could sit for days without ever seeing him again. It happens.
“I’m thinking IAFIS,” I told him, referring to the bureau’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. “And I have a latent kit in my glove compartment.”
“Tricky,” Brodsky said, “especially in the middle of the night. Worth the trouble, though. Gotta be more effective than just sitting here. At least we’d get his real name.”
The sheriff was right about that, too. Technology had at long last made it feasible. IAFIS had changed a system that once took weeks to identify a set of latent fingerprints into a process now measured in minutes. Even better, it didn’t give a damn about phony names. Jerry Crown, Benjamin Allard, Robert Bennett—the killer had chosen the names for his own purposes—but to the bureau’s supercomputer his identity was just another string of 0’s and l’s. All I had to do was lift a readable fingerprint from the van, send it to IAFIS, and let the tiny world of quantum physics do the rest.
“Problem’s the streetlight,” Brodsky said. “Can’t very well shoot it out. It’ll be tough to dust the van for prints right underneath it.”
“Prints’ll be greasy, especially on window glass. My special tape might work without dust.”
“Still gotta have a reason to be out there.”
“Maybe I’m just looking for my dog.”
“Got a leash?”
“Has to be an all-night Rite Aid around here someplace.”
“Gotta be.”
“Pick up a couple of plastic bags while you’re at it, and a scooper. Give me a second to get into place before you take off.”
I kept our phone line open while I drove into Seaton Place and got myself positioned as far from any streetlight as possible to watch the van.
“Okay, go,” I told Brodsky. “I’ve got the eye.”
He hung up without responding, and I slouched in the driver’s seat, head low in the darkness, all but invisible as I waited for him to return. The back of my neck began to tingle and I welcomed the sensation as a sign not only of readiness but of a gambler’s awareness as well. I loved this—I’d known that forever—and despite the cold and the rain and the fatigue and the bottle of piss in the backseat, I couldn’t imagine a better place to be.
And the proximity to our prey made me feel even better. Just the thought of getting another crack at him warmed me enough to turn down the heater. I’d already crushed his nose, but that was nowhere near enough punishment for the bastard who’d tried to kill the woman I might love. The son of a bitch who now lay cozy in his bed, warm and comfortable while I sat out here in the freezing rain. My hands ached with the urge to attack him. To race up his stairs, crash through into his apartment, and settle the score. To feel the crunch of reshaping his nose again. To smell his blood and taste my satisfaction.
Brodsky was back.
I started the car and drove to him, pulled the Caprice up to his Buick sedan, the front of my car toward the rear of his, driver-side windows only inches apart. A position cops call “sixty-nining.” I zipped my window down and he handed me what he’d bought. A six-foot leather leash with a big fat collar on one end. A handful of plastic grocery bags. A bright green plastic gardening scoop. Then something I hadn’t ordered.
“I didn’t mention it before,” he whispered, “but I brought something else from my office.”
I looked at the stuff he’d passed through my window, recognized the black metal object he’d included with the dog gear. A magnetized transmitter not much larger than a pack of cigarettes, but more than powerful enough to grip the Ford van through hell or high water. Not state of the art, but plenty good enough for our needs.
“Might not get a better opportunity to put it on,” Brodsky added.
“Where’s the other half?” A transmitter wasn’t much good without a receiver.
“Don’t need a receiver. Just tune your commercial radio to AM 638, you’ll hear the sound. Single sharp beeps, but intermittent. Staccato when the target’s stationary, slower when he moves, real slow when he approaches the edge of transmitting range.”
I nodded. We parted to return to our original stations, but I couldn’t help glancing in my rearview mirror at the sheriff’s car and the man sitting behind the wheel. He was a pro, no question about it, but why wouldn’t he be? Despite the history of rancor between us and them, the L.A.P.D. was world-class in every respect. Far better than we were in keeping the street scum from taking over. As a homicide dick, Brodsky represented the cream of the crop. He was a hard-ass but I was damned lucky to have him along.
Moments later I was back under the darkness of a score of overhanging evergreens. I reached into the back seat, selected a Redskin’s cap and a mustache, glanced at myself in the rearview mirror, then took the cap off and brushed my hair down toward my eyes, put the cap on again, this time pulled the bill even further downward. Jerry Crown had seen me only once and he’d been too busy kicking my ass to study my face. This time he wouldn’t even see that much.
I grabbed the bags and scooper, leash and transmitter, tied the plastic bags around the handle of the scooper, dropped the heavy little radio beacon into one of them, then reached into the glove compartment for my latent fingerprint tape. I tore off several six-inch strips of the special tape that I hoped would work without dusting, put them in the same bag, then left the car and locked it up before hitting the street.
TWENTY-FOUR
On the sidewalk I decided to add one more element to my disguise.
I looked around under the trees, found a small piece of bark, then removed my left shoe and laid the bark inside. I put the shoe back on and took a couple of uncomfortable practice steps. The limp was perfect. Made me look shorter and a lot less threatening, but even more importantly it suggested I was handicapped, and people are taught from childhood to turn away.
I clutched my bag, leash, and pooper-scooper, then headed for the van. Limped toward it in a soft zigzag pattern, pantomiming “here boy, here boy” gestures, like Marcel Marceau in a Redskins cap as I drew closer and closer. At the driver’s window, I bent to look under the van for the dog that by now even I was beginning to think might actually exist. I reached into the bag for the transmitter, stretched my arm under the van and used the transmitter to probe for solid steel. A moment later I heard a solid clunk as the magnet grabbed hold. I tugged at it but the radio beacon held fast.
Still crouched underneath, I grabbed m
y strips of fingerprint tape, straightened up slowly and used one of them on the driver’s side window frame, one on the area around the keyhole in the door, the last one on the window itself. There wasn’t enough light to see what I’d come away with, but unless Jerry Crown had wiped down the car I should have something. Unfortunately—my luck running the way it was—the only thing it might turn out to be was dirt.
I limped away from the van, shaking my head with the exasperation of a man who’d left his bed for another one of Fido’s goddamned nocturnal prowls. I shuffled over to the other side of the street, peering, staring, whistling softly, moving my mouth as though yelling but trying not to wake up the neighborhood at the same time.
Fido, you son of a bitch, where are you?
I gritted my teeth against the pain in my shoe, limped a little faster as Brodsky’s car came into view at the other end of the street.
“Haven’t got a scanner in that car of yours?” I asked when I got there. “And a fax machine?”
“Not in this car. We put them in the cruisers last year, but I don’t have either one.”
“Kinko’s, then,” I said. “Do you need a transmittal form?”
“Got a couple in my briefcase.” He stared at me. “Get in the car, Monk. I can’t stand watching you limp around like that. I’ll drop you off at your car on my way.”
The sheriff was back even quicker this time. He sixty-nined me again, spoke in a voice barely above a whisper.
“Take the bureau a couple of hours, they told me. I gave them your cell phone number for callback.”
I looked down the street toward the van. “I think we can back off a while. Why don’t you go grab a bite to eat.”
Which was surveillance code for the opportunity of using a real bathroom for a change, for emptying one’s storage bottle without resorting to pouring it in the gutter, an act guaranteed to get somebody’s attention at a time when you can’t allow that to happen. He nodded. I glanced at my own bottle in the back seat, but there was no question of asking him to take it along. A fisur man—physical surveillance man—holds his own water, one way or the other. What a fisur man never does is ask somebody else to schlepp it for him.
“Nothing?”
I stared out into the darkness as I tried to make sense of what the Identification Division was telling me ninety minutes later. “Nothing at all? Not even in the civil files?”
I listened as the woman on the other end of the phone at the bureau’s fingerprint center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, told me again that the latent fingerprints Brodsky had submitted by fax from Kinko’s matched nothing in her records. I thanked her and hung up, then called the sheriff.
“Doesn’t make sense to me, either,” he said. “I’ve never had anything come back from Clarksburg ‘no record.’”
“Sure as hell not for this kind of maniac.”
“Nothing wrong with your lifts, I know that for sure. Four perfect fingers, didn’t even need a glass to read them. Three ulnar loops, a tented-arch on the little finger.”
“Gotta be a mistake. Crown can’t possibly be clean.”
I checked the clock on my dash panel. Nearly six in the morning, not yet dawn this time of year. The rapid beeps from radio station 638 continued to indicate the van hadn’t moved. The rain on my roof joined in to make a sort of syncopation that was almost musical. Drum-beep-drum-beep-drum-beep … something like that.
“What’ve we got here for range?” I asked Brodsky. “How far away can we get and still be sure of catching him moving?”
“A mile at least, out where I come from, but in the city with all the traffic and electronics maybe four or five blocks. Far enough he’ll never spot us.”
“What if we were up off the ground, up in a building maybe?” I had a very specific building in mind.
“It’s a line-of-sight process, but we can lay significantly farther back the higher the elevation. Any chance you can get a plane up?”
“If we had a week maybe, to get my request okayed.” A request that as a suspended agent I couldn’t even make, although I didn’t bother to tell Brodsky that. “I was thinking of something a bit lower. The Hilton is just down the way at T Street. Won’t be higher than thirteen stories”—by statute no building in Washington could be—“but we should be able to use it as a command post.”
“What kind of budget have you got? I’m working a murder case, but the county will never pay for the Hilton.”
“I’ll put it on my credit card.” What was left of it. “We can work it out later.”
“I’ll hold my position here until you get us settled in. You better get something to eat while you have the chance.”
I hung up and started for the hotel. The odometer clicked off seven-tenths of a mile before I pulled into the parking lot and nodded. This was a good break. A room at the Hilton would give us the one thing we couldn’t possibly go without. Rest, proper rest, not the hunched-over-the-steering-wheel catnaps that pass for sleep in surveillance work. In the kind of work that often turns real violent real fast, rest is a weapon as valuable as a gun. Without it you can end up dead.
In the lobby, I signed a Visa chit for the cheapest single room on the top floor of the tower facing north. A mere four hundred dollars a night, the clerk told me over the top of his nose as he grabbed the card and slammed it through his machine. I hustled upstairs and straight to the portable radio/alarm clock on the nightstand, tuned it to 638 on the AM dial, heard the quick and steady beat from our transmitter and nodded again. We were still a long way from pulling this off—the two of us by ourselves—but the playing field was for the first time starting to level.
We did it in shifts.
Two hours on, two off.
The sheriff and I watching the bastard stay in his apartment, both of us hoping the killer hadn’t decided to take early retirement. That his big gray van wouldn’t just sit there until the wheels rusted. It wasn’t likely, but in fisur work nothing is impossible. Just because he refused to move didn’t mean we could take our eyes off him. Doing so would violate the first rule of the game, and the consequences were pretty damned predictable.
The protocol is a simple one.
The target does absolutely nothing for days and days, sometimes months and years. The watchers—always undermanned, underrested, underfed, and overwhelmed—watch without blinking for all that time, then turn away for ten seconds to work the cramps out of their shoulders, at which point the target disappears. It’s happened to me, it happens to everybody at least once, from energetic young agents to burned-out old bastards who spend their shifts endlessly scribbling on long yellow pads, recalculating to the last penny their retirement pay.
But not this time, Brodsky and I agreed.
This time we had the advantage. This time we had the Hilton on our side. After a two-hour shift, we could come back to a soft bed and a real toilet. We didn’t have to get our rest in the back seat of the same car we hadn’t left for twelve hours, legs drawn up, trying to sleep, trying to ignore the monstrous odor of rotting fast-food, old newspapers, and our own dreadful gas.
It’s hard to explain to outsiders why FBI agents put up with it, allow ourselves to be treated worse than the Taliban infantry, and I don’t have an answer, either. Maybe it’s like the guy who shovels elephant poop at the circus. Maybe we just plain like the smell.
“Stand by, Monk. He’s on the move.”
Brodsky’s call came just after twelve o’clock noon on Thursday, just as I was leaving the hotel parking lot to relieve him.
“Out the front door,” he continued, “toward his van. I have the eye, but you better hurry.”
“Three minutes,” I told him. “Call him out and I’ll join up with you.”
I turned up the commercial radio in my dashboard. AM 638 was loud and clear, the beeping from the transmitter slowing as the van began to move away from my position.
“South on Florida,” Brodsky told me. “I think we’ve got ourselves a pro here. He’s looking aroun
d, checking his mirrors. I can’t hold him much longer.”
I hung a U and shot south on Seventeenth, made a quick left on T Street, and caught the van just as it turned north on Connecticut. I fell into the traffic out of his sight line, listened to the steady beeping of the tracking device from my car speakers.
“Got him,” I told Brodsky. “North on Connecticut. I’ll call the streets.”
I called out the streets, one after another, all the way up Connecticut to Rock Creek Park, over the park to the Duke Ellington Bridge. “Right turn,” I said. “East on Calvert …the Ellington Bridge. Come ahead, I’m going by.”
“Got him.”
In the rearview mirror I saw Crown swing right onto the bridge, then Brodsky’s dark green Buick sedan make the same turn two cars later. I took a quick right, another right, and was once again ready.
“East on Calvert,” Brodsky said. “Left turn signal blinking … first street is … first street is Adams Mill Road … looks like a left into Adams Mill Road.” He paused. “That’s it. Left turn Adams Mill. I’m going straight on Calvert.”
“I’ve got him,” I said. “Get back in line.”
I followed Crown for thirty seconds—conscious of the steady beeps from the radio—until he signaled for another left turn.
“Left signal again,” I told Brodsky. “Turning left, but it’s still Adams Mill Road. I’ll go right on Quarry.”
I watched in my mirror as Brodsky slid into place and I made the right turn, then did another U and got back to the sheriff in time to see Crown slow along Adams Mill before swinging left into the parking lot at the National Zoo. He stopped at the booth and paid the fee. Brodsky and I did the same thing—flashing badges would have saved us the money, but you never know who’s watching at a time like that—then followed Crown past the long parking lot at the north end and along the narrow road skirting the park until we got to the southernmost end, where Crown turned in.
Brodsky continued past the lot. I pulled into it but stayed as far away from Crown as possible while the killer found a place and put the van into it. He opened the door, got out and stood for a moment, looking around the half-empty lot as though searching for someone.