Night Prey ld-6

by John Sandford

  “Nothing much from the NCIC,” Anderson said. “He shows prints from Stillwater, and another set from the Army. I’m working on getting his Army records.”

  The phone rang and Lucas picked it up, listened, said, “Thanks,” and put it back down.

  “Roux,” he said to Connell. “She’s in. Let’s go talk.”

  They got Sloan and Del to help out, and a panel truck with one-way windows, equipped with a set of scrambled radios from intelligence. Lucas and Connell rode together in her car; Sloan and Del took their own cars. Greave and O’Brien drove the truck. They met at a Target store parking lot and picked out a restaurant where they could wait.

  “Connell and I’ll take the first shift,” Lucas said. “We can rotate out every couple of hours; somebody can cruise it while we’re moving the truck to make the change… Let’s give him a call now, see if he’s around.”

  Connell called, got an answer, and asked for Mr. Clark in the paint department. “He’s home,” she said when she’d rung off the cellular phone. “He sounded sleepy.”

  “Let’s go,” Lucas said.

  They cruised past Koop’s house, a notably unexceptional place in a subdivision of carefully differentiated houses. They parked two blocks away and slightly above it. The lawn was neat but not perfect, with an artificially green look that suggested a lawn service. There was a single-door, two-car garage. The windows were covered with wooden blinds. There was no newspaper, either on the lawn or porch.

  Lucas parked the truck and crawled between seats into the back, where there were two captain’s chairs, an empty cooler, and a radio they wouldn’t use. Connell was examining the house with binoculars.

  “It looks awful normal,” she said.

  “He’s not gonna have a billboard out front,” Lucas said. “I had a guy, a few years ago, lived in a quadruplex. Everybody said he was a great neighbor. He probably was, except when he was out killing women.”

  “I remember that,” Connell said. “The mad dog. You killed him.”

  “He needed it,” Lucas said.

  “How do you think you would’ve done in court? I mean, if he hadn’t gotten shot?”

  Lucas grinned slightly. “You mean, if I hadn’t shot him to death… Actually, we had him cold. It was his second attack on the woman.”

  “Was he obsessed by her?”

  “No, I think he was just pissed off. At me, actually. We were watching him, and somehow he figured it out, slipped the surveillance and went after her. It was almost… sarcastic. He was crazier than a shithouse mouse.”

  “We don’t have that good a case on Koop.”

  “That’s an understatement,” Lucas said. “I’ve been worried about it.”

  They talked for a while, slowly ran down. Nothing happened. After two hours, they drove around the block, traded vehicles with Sloan and O’Brien, and walked up to the restaurant and sat with Del and Greave.

  “We’re talking about going to the movies,” Del said. “We all got beepers.”

  “I think we should stay put,” Connell said anxiously.

  “Say that after you’ve had fifteen cups of coffee,” Greave said. “I’m getting tired of peeing.”

  Del and Greave took the next shift, then Lucas and Connell again. O’Brien had brought his Penthouse with him again, forgot it in the truck. Halfway through the shift, Connell fell to reading it and looking at the pictures, occasionally laughing. Lucas nervously looked elsewhere.

  Del and Greave were back on when Koop started to move. Their beepers went off simultaneously, and everybody in the restaurant looked at them. “Doctors’ convention,” Sloan said to an openmouthed suburbanite as they left.

  “What do you got, Del?” Lucas called.

  “We got the garage door up,” Del said. “Okay, we got the truck, a red-and-white Chevy…”

  They first saw Koop when he got out of his truck at a Denny’s restaurant.

  “No beard,” Connell said, examining him with the binoculars.

  “There’s been a lot of publicity since Hart,” Lucas said. “He would’ve shaved. Two of the Miller witnesses said he was clean-shaven.”

  Koop parked in the lot behind the restaurant and walked inside. He walked with a spring, as though he were coiled. He was wearing jeans and T-shirt. He had a body like a rock.

  “He’s a lifter,” Lucas said. “He’s a goddamned gorilla.”

  “I can see him, he’s in a front booth,” Sloan said. “You want me inside?”

  “Let me go in,” Connell said.

  “Hang on a minute,” Lucas said. He called back to Sloan. “Is he by himself?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t go in unless somebody hooks up with him. Otherwise, stand off.” To Connell: “You better stay out of sight. If this drags out and we need to keep you close to Jensen, you gotta be a fresh face.”

  “Okay.” She nodded.

  Lucas went back to the radio. “Sloan, can he see his truck from where he’s at?”

  “No.”

  “We’re gonna take a look,” Lucas said. They’d pulled into a car wash. “Let’s go,” he said to Connell.

  Connell crossed the street, pulled in next to Koop’s truck. Lucas got out, looked across the roof of the car toward the truck, then got back inside.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “What?” She was puzzled. “Aren’t you gonna look?”

  “There’s a pack of Camels on the dashboard.”

  “What?” Like she didn’t understand.

  “Unfiltered Camels,” he said.

  Connell looked at Lucas, eyes wide. “Oh my God,” she breathed. “It’s him.”

  Lucas went to the radio. “Sloan, everybody, listen up. We sorta have a confirmation on this guy. Stay cool but stay back. We’re gonna need some technical support…”

  CHAPTER

  28

  They tracked Koop while they talked at police headquarters, laying out the case. Thomas Troy, of the county attorney’s criminal division, declared that there wasn’t enough, yet, to pick him up.

  He and Connell, sitting in Roux’s office with Roux and Lucas and Mickey Green, another assistant county attorney, ran down the evidence:

  – The woman killed in Iowa told a friend that her date was a cop. But Koop never was, said Troy.

  – Hillerod saw him in Madison, said Koop recognized his prison tattoo, Connell said. Sounds like ESP, Troy said, and ESP doesn’t work on the witness stand. Besides, Hillerod can’t remember what he looked like, Green said, and Hillerod’s just been arrested for a whole series of heavy felonies, along with a parole violation, and has a long criminal record. The defense will claim he’ll tell us anything we want to get a deal. And, in fact, we’ve already negotiated a deal.

  – He was seen dumping a body by two witnesses, Connell said, who described both him and his truck. The witnesses’ descriptions conflict, even on the matter of the truck, Troy said. They saw the guy at night at a distance. One of them is an admitted crack dealer, and the other guy hangs around with a crack dealer.

  – Camels, said Connell. There are probably fifty thousand Camel smokers in the Cities. And probably most of them drive trucks, Troy said.

  – Shape was right for the man who attacked Evan Hart-big and muscular. Tall, big, and muscular, is what the witnesses said, Troy replied. Koop is distinctly short. Besides, the attack on Hart isn’t necessarily related to the attacks on the women. The man who attacked Hart had a beard and wore glasses. Koop is clean-shaven, shows no glasses requirement on his driver’s license, and wasn’t wearing glasses that morning. The witnesses hadn’t been able to pick his photo out of a display.

  “You’re working against us,” Connell fumed.

  “Bullshit,” said Troy. “I’m just outlining an elementary defense. A good defense attorney will tear up everything you’ve got. We need one hard thing. Just one. Just get me one, and we’ll take him down.”

  Koop spent the first day of surveillance in his truck, driving long complicated rou
tes around the Cities, apparently aimlessly. He stopped at Two Guy’s gym, was inside for two hours, then moved on, stopping only to eat at fast-food joints, and once to get gas.

  “I think he must’ve made us,” Del called on one of the scrambled radios as they sat stalled in traffic on I-94 between Minneapolis and St. Paul. “Unless he’s nuts.”

  “We know he’s nuts,” Connell said. “The question is, what’s he doing?”

  “He’s not scouting,” Lucas said from a third car. “He’s moving too fast to be scouting. And he never goes back. He just drives. He doesn’t seem to know where he’s going-he’s always getting caught in those circles and dead ends.”

  “Well, we gotta do something,” Del said. “‘Cause if he hasn’t made us yet, he will. He’ll get us up in some of those suburban switchbacks and we’ll bump into him one too many times. Where in the hell is tech support?”

  “We’re here,” the tech-support guy said on the radio. “You stop the sonofabitch, and we’ll tag him.”

  At three o’clock, Koop stopped at a Perkins restaurant and took a booth. While Lucas and Connell watched from outside, Henry Ramirez from intelligence slipped under Koop’s truck and hooked up a remote-controlled battery-powered transmitter, and placed a flat, battery-powered infrared flasher in the center of the topper. If Koop climbed on top of the truck, he’d see it. Otherwise, it was invisible, and the truck could be unmistakably tracked at night, from the air.

  At nine o’clock, in the last dying light of the day, Koop wandered out of the web of roads around Lake Minnetonka and headed east toward Minneapolis. They no longer had a lead car. Leading had proven impossible. The trailing cars were all well back. The radio truck followed silently, with the tracking plane doing all the work. From the air, the spotter, using infrared glasses, said Koop was clear all the way, and tracked him street by street into the Cities.

  “He’s going for Jensen,” Lucas said to Connell as he followed the track on a map.

  “I don’t know where I am anymore.”

  “We’re coming up on the lakes.” Lucas called out to the others: “We’re breaking off, we’ll be at Jensen’s.”

  He called ahead to Jensen’s, but there was no answer at her phone. He called dispatch and got the number for the resident manager: “We’ve got a problem and we need a little help…”

  The manager was waiting by the open door of the parking garage, the door open. Lucas pulled inside and dumped the car in a handicapped space.

  “What do you want me to do?” the manager asked, handing him a key to Jensen’s apartment.

  “Nothing,” Lucas said. “Go on back to your apartment. We’d like you near a telephone. Just wait. Please don’t go out in the hallway.”

  To Connell: “If he comes up, we’ve got him. If we get him inside Jensen’s place, that ties him to the stalking and the Camels on the air conditioner across the street. And the knife attack ties him to the other killings and the Camel we found on Wannemaker.”

  “You think he’ll come up?” she asked as they hurried to the elevators.

  “I hope so. Jesus, I hope so. That’d be it.” At Jensen’s apartment, they let themselves in, and Lucas turned on one light, slipped his. 45 out of his shoulder holster and checked it.

  “What’s he doing?” Lucas asked.

  “Moving very slowly, but he’s moving,” the spotter called. “Now, now, we’ve lost him, he’s under some trees or some shit, wait, I got a flash, I see him again, now he’s gone…”

  “I see him,” Del called. “I’m parked in the bike shop lot, and he’s coming this way. He’s moving faster, but he’s under trees, he’ll be out in a sec…”

  “Got him,” the spotter said. “He’s going around the block again. Slowing down…”

  “Real slow,” Del called. “I’m on the street, walking, he’s right in front of the apartment, real slow, almost stopped. No, there he goes…”

  “He’s outa here,” the spotter called a minute later. “He’s heading into the loop.”

  “Did he see you, Del?”

  “No way.”

  Connell said, “Well, shit…”

  “Yeah.” Lucas felt like a deflated balloon. He walked twice around the room. “Goddamnit,” he said. “Goddamnit. What’s wrong with the guy? Why didn’t he come up?”

  Koop continued through downtown to a bar near the airport, where he drank three solitary beers, paid, bought a bottle at the liquor store down the street, and drove back to his house. The last light went off a few minutes after two o’clock.

  Lucas went home. Weather was asleep. He patted her affectionately on the ass before he went down himself.

  Koop resumed the driving the next day, trailing through the suburbs east and south of St. Paul. They tracked him until one o’clock in the afternoon, when he stopped at a Wendy’s. Lucas went on down the block to a McDonald’s. Feeling dried out, older, bored, he got a double cheeseburger, a sack of fries, and a malt, and ambled back to the car, where Connell was eating carrot sticks out of a Tupperware box.

  “George Beneteau called yesterday, while we were out,” Connell said when they’d run out of everything else to talk about.

  “Oh, yeah?” She had a talent for leaving him short of words.

  “He left a message on my machine. He wants to go out and get a steak, or something.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “Nothing.” She said it flatly. “I can’t deal with it. I guess tomorrow I’ll give him a call and explain.”

  Lucas shook his head and pushed fries into his face, hoping that she wouldn’t start crying again.

  She didn’t. But a while later, as they escorted Koop across the Lake Street bridge, Connell said, “That TV person, Jan Reed. You guys seem pretty friendly.”

  “I’m friendly with a lot of media,” Lucas said uncomfortably.

  “I mean friendly-friendly,” she said.

  “Oh, not really.”

  “Mmm,” she said.

  “Mmm, what?” Lucas asked.

  “I’d think a very long time. This is one of those things where, you know-I suspect you’re just a suit.”

  “Not quite bright,” he said.

  “Took the words out of my mouth,” Connell said.

  Koop stopped at a Firestone store but just sat in the truck. The surveillance van, watching him from a Best Buy store parking lot, said he seemed to be looking at a Denny’s restaurant across the street.

  “He ate less than an hour ago,” Lucas said. They were a block away, parked in front of a used-car lot, a bit conspicuous. “Let’s go look at some cars.”

  They got out and walked into the lot, where they could watch Koop through the windows of a used Buick. After ten minutes in the Firestone lot, Koop started the truck, rolled it across the street to the Denny’s and went inside.

  “He’s looking for surveillance,” Lucas said. On the radio: “Del, could you get in there?”

  “On my way…” Then, a few seconds later, “Shit, he’s coming back out. I’m turning around.”

  Koop walked out with a cup of coffee. Lucas caught Connell’s arm as she started toward the car, and brought the radio to his face. “We’re gonna stay here a minute; you guys tag him. Hey, Harvey?”

  Harvey ran the surveillance van. “Yeah?”

  “Could you put a video on the front of that Denny’s see who else comes out?”

  “You got it.”

  “He wasn’t in there long enough,” Lucas said to Connell. “He talked to somebody. Not long enough for a friend, so it must have been business.”

  “Unless his friend wasn’t there,” Connell said.

  “He was too long for that…” A moment later he said, “Here we go. Oh, shit, Harvey, cover that guy, you remember him?”

  “I don’t…”

  “Just Plain Schultz,” Lucas said.

  Del, on the radio, from tracking Koop: “Our Just Plain Schultz?”

  “Absolutely,” Lucas said.

  Schultz got in a red
Camaro and carefully backed out of his parking slot. “C’mon,” Lucas said to Connell, hustling her down to the car.

  “Who is he?”

  “Fence. Very careful.”

  In the car, Lucas tagged a half-block behind Schultz and called in a squad. “Just pull him over to the curb,” he told the squad. “And stand by.”

  The squad picked Schultz up at the corner, stopped him halfway down the block, under a bright-green maple. Lucas and Connell passed them, pulled to the curb. A kid on a tricycle watched from the sidewalk, the flashing lights, the cop standing inside his open door. Schultz was watching the cop in his rearview mirror and didn’t see Lucas coming from the front, until Lucas was right on top of him.

  “Schultzie,” Lucas said, leaning over the window, his hands on the roof. “How you been, my man?”

  “Aw, fuck, what do you want, Davenport?” Schultz, shocked, tried to cover.

  “Whatever you just bought from Koop,” Lucas said.

  Schultz was a small man with a round, blemished face. He had dark whiskers a razor couldn’t quite control. His eyes were slightly protuberant, and when Lucas said “Koop,” they seemed to bug out a bit farther.

  “I can’t believe that crazy motherfucker belongs to you,” Schultz said after a moment, popping the door to get out of the car.

  “He doesn’t, actually,” Lucas said. Connell was standing on the other side of the car, her hand in her purse.

  “Who’s the puss?” Schultz asked, tipping his head toward her.

  “State cop,” Lucas said. “And is that any way to talk about the government?”

  “Fuck you, Davenport,” Schultz said, leaning back against the car’s front fender. “So what’re we doing? Do I call a lawyer, or what?”

  “Schultzie…” Lucas said, spreading his arms wide.

  “That’s just plain Schultz,” Schultz said.

  Thomas Troy wore a blue military sweater over jeans. He looked neat but tough, like a lieutenant colonel in the paratroops. He was shaking his head.

  “We don’t have enough on the killings, by themselves, even with him cruising Jensen’s place. We could fake it, though, and put him away.”