Night Prey (35 page)

A moment later, the stringy teenager came back with a stocky dark-haired man, who looked closely at Lucas and then croaked once, querulously. Heavy oversize glasses with thick lenses made his eyes seem moonlike. He stood under the porch light, and the light made a halo of his long hair.

"I don't sign," Lucas said.

The blonde said, "No shit. So what do you want to know?"

"Just what he saw. We got a report with a license number, but the number was an impossible one. The state doesn't allow vulgarities or anything that might be a vulgarity, so there is no plate that says ASS on it."

The girl opened her mouth to say something, then turned to Johnston, her hands flying. A second later, Johnston shook his head in exasperation and began signing back.

"He says the guy at the police station is a jerk," the blonde said.

"I don't know him," Lucas said.

The blonde signed something, and Johnston signed back. "He was afraid that they might have messed up, but that jerk they had at the police station just couldn't sign," she said, watching his hands.

"It wasn't ASS?"

"Oh, yeah. That's why they remembered it. This guy almost ran over them, and Paul saw the plate, and started laughing, because it said ASS, and the guy was an ass."

"There aren't any plates that say ASS."

"How about ass backwards?"

"Backwards?"

She nodded. "To Paul, it doesn't make much difference, frontwards or backwards. He just recognizes a few words, and this ASS popped right out at him. That's why he remembered it. He knew it was backwards. He tried to explain all this, but I guess not everything got through. Paul said the guy at the police station was an illiterate jerk."

"Jesus. So the plate was SSA?"

"That's what Paul says."

Lucas looked at Paul, and the deaf man nodded.

Chapter
27

Lucas, on the phone, heard Connell running down the hall and smiled. She literally skidded into the office. Her face was ashen, bare of any makeup; tired, drawn.

"What happened?"

Lucas put his hand over the receiver. "We maybe got a break. Remember those deaf people? St. Paul got the license number wrong."

"Wrong? How could they be wrong?" she demanded, fist on her hips. "That's stupid."

"Just a minute," Lucas said, and into the phone, "Can you shoot that over? Fax it? Yeah. I've got a number. And listen, I appreciate your coming in. I'll talk to your boss in the morning, and I'll tell him that."

"What?" Connell demanded when he hung up.

Lucas turned in the chair to face her. "The deaf guy who saw the plate-the translation got screwed up. The translator couldn't sign, or something. I looked at that report a half-dozen times, and I kept thinking, how could they screw that up? And I never went back and asked until tonight. The plate was SSA -ass backwards."

"I don't believe it."

"Believe it."

"It can't be that simple."

"Maybe not. But there are a thousand SSA plates out there, and two hundred and seventy-two of them are pickups. And what I got from the deaf guy sounded pretty good."

Anderson came in with two paper cups full of coffee. He sat down and started drinking alternately from the two cups. "You get the stuff?"

"They're faxing it to you."

"There oughta be a better way to do this," Anderson said. "Tie everything together. You oughta get your company to write some software."

"Yeah, yeah, let's go get it."

Greave, wearing jeans and T-shirt, caught up with them as they walked through the darkened hallways to Anderson's cubicle in homicide. Lucas explained to him as they walked along the hall. "So we'll look at everything Anderson can pump out of his databases. Looking for a cop, or anybody with a prison record, particularly for sex crimes or anything that resembles cat burglary."

At four o'clock in the morning, having found nothing at all, Lucas and Connell walked down to the coffee machine together.

"How're you feeling?"

"A little better today. Yesterday wasn't so good."

"Huh." They watched the coffee dribble into a cup, and Lucas didn't know quite what to say. So he said, "There's a lot more paper than I thought there'd be. I hope we can get through it."

"We will," Connell said. She sipped her coffee and watched Lucas's dribble into the second cup. "I can't believe you figured that out. I can't see how it occurred to you to check."

Lucas thought of Weather's ass, grinned, and said, "It sorta came to me."

"You know, when I first saw you, I thought you were a suit. You know, a suit," she said. "Big guy, kind of neat-looking in a jockstrap way, buys good suits, gets along with the ladies, backslaps the good old boys, and he cruises to the top."

"Change your mind?"

"Partially," she said. She said it pensively, as though it were an academic question. "I still think there might be some of that-but now I think that, in some ways, you're smarter than I am. Not a suit."

Lucas was embarrassed. "I don't think I'm smarter than you are," he mumbled.

"Don't take the compliment too seriously," Connell said dryly. "I said in some ways. In other ways, you're still a suit."

At six o'clock in the morning, with the flat early light cutting sharp through the window like summer icicles, Greave looked up from a stack of paper, rubbed his reddened eyes, and said, "Here's something pretty interesting."

"Yeah?" Lucas looked up. They had seven possibilities, none particularly inspiring. One cop, one security guard.

"Guy named Robert Koop. He was a prison guard until six years ago. Drives a '92 Chevy S-10, red over white, no security agreement, net purchase price of $17,340."

"Sounds like a possibility," Connell said.

"If he was a prison guard, he probably doesn't have the big bucks," Greave said, as though he were thinking aloud. "He says he works at a gym called Two Guy's..."

"I know the place," Lucas said.

"And he declares income of fifteen thousand a year since he left the prison. Where does he get off driving a new seventeen-thousand-dollar truck? And he paid cash, over a seven-thousand-dollar trade-in."

"Huh." Lucas came over to look at the printout, and Connell heaved herself out of her chair. "Lives in Apple Valley. Houses out there probably average what, one-fifty?"

"One-fifty for a house and a seventeen-thousand-dollar truck is pretty good, on fifteen thousand a year."

"Probably skips lunch," Greave said.

"Several times a day," Lucas said. "Where's his license information?"

"Right here..." Greave folded over several sheets, found it.

"Five-eight, one-ninety," Lucas said. "Short and heavy."

"Maybe short and strong," Connell said. "Like our guy."

"What's his plate number?" Anderson called. His hands were playing across his keyboard. They had limited access to intelligence division's raw data files. Lucas read it off the title application, and Anderson punched it into the computer.

A second later he said, surprise in his voice, "Jesus, we got a hit."

"What?" This was the first they'd had. Lucas and Connell drifted over to Anderson to look over his shoulder. When the file came up, they found a long list of license plates picked up outside Steve's Fireside City. Intelligence believed that the stove and fireplace store was a front for a fence, but never got enough to make an arrest.

"High-level fence," Lucas said, reading between the lines of the intelligence report. "Somebody who would be moving jewelry, Rolexes, that kind of thing. No stereos or VCRs."

"Maybe he was buying a fireplace," Greave said.

"Couldn't afford one, after the truck," Lucas said. He took his phone book out of his coat pocket, thumbed through it. "Tommy Smythe, Tommy..." He picked up a telephone and dialed, and a moment later said, "Mrs. Smythe? This is Lucas Davenport, Minneapolis Police. Sorry to bother you, but I need to talk to Tommy... Oh, jeez, I'm sorry... Yeah, thanks." He scribbled a new number in the notebook.

"Divorced," he said to Connell.

"Who is he?"

"Deputy warden at Stillwater. We went to school together... He's another suit." He dialed again, waited. "Tommy? Lucas Davenport. Yeah, I know what time it is, I've been up all night. Do you remember a guard out at Stillwater, six years ago, named Robert Koop? Resigned?"

Smythe, his voice rusty with sleep, remembered. "... never caught him, but there wasn't any doubt. He was snitched out by two different guys who didn't know each other. We told him we were ready to bring him up on charges; either that, or get out. He got. Our case wasn't strong enough to just to go ahead."

"Okay. Any rumors about sex problems?"

"Nothing that I know of."

"Any connection with burglars?"

"Jeez, I can't remember all the details, but yeah. I think the main guy he was dealing to was Art McClatchey, who was a big-time burglar years ago. He fucked up and killed an old lady in one of his burglaries, got caught. That was down in Afton."

"Cat burglar?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah. Why?"

"Look, anything you can get from records, connecting the two of them, we'd appreciate. Don't go out in the population, though. Don't ask any questions. We're trying to keep all this tight."

"Do I want to know why you're asking?" Smythe asked.

"Not yet."

"We're not gonna get burned, are we?"

"I don't see how," Lucas said. "If there's any chance, I'll give you a ring."

Lucas hung up and said to the others, "He was selling dope to the inmates. Cocaine and speed. One of his main contacts was an old cat burglar named McClatchey."

"Better and better," Connell said. "Now what?"

"We finish the records, just in case we find another candidate. Then we talk to Roux. We want to take a close look at this Koop. But do it real easy."

They finished with eleven possibilities, but Robert Koop was the good one. They put together a file of information from the various state licensing bureaus-car registration, driver's license, an old Washington County carry permit-with what they could get from Department of Revenue and the personnel section of the Department of Revenue.

When he'd worked at Stillwater, Koop had lived in Lakeland. A check with the property tax department in Washington County showed the house where Koop lived was owned by a Lakeland couple; Koop was apparently a renter. A check on the Apple Valley house, through the Dakota County tax collector, suggested that the Apple Valley house was also rented. The current owner showed an address in California, and tax stamps showed a 1980 mortgage of $115,000.

"If the owner's carrying a mortgage of $115,000... let's see, I'm carrying $80,000. Jeez, I can't see that he could be renting it for less than fifteen hundred a month," Greave said. "Koop's income is coming up short."

"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."