"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 Connelclass="underline" "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 routes 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."