Night Prey

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.”
    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