“I want a lawyer,” Koop said. “Right now. You’re making a mistake, and I’m gonna sue your butts.”
“Sure. Step over this way, we’ll go out to the car,” the red-faced cop said.
They walked down a row of potato chips and bean dip and the black cop said, “Jesus, you sound like some kind of parrot. Polly want a lawyer?” but he grinned, friendly. His hand was hard on Koop’s triceps.
“I want a lawyer.” In the joint they said that after they warn you, the cops’ll get friendly, try to get you talking about anything. After they get you rolling, when you’re trying to make them happy—because you’re a little scared, you don’t want to get whacked around—then you’ll start talking. Don’t talk, they said in the joint. Don’t say shit except “I want a lawyer.”
They went out the door, a customer and the counterman gawking at them, and the red-faced man said, “My name is Detective Kershaw and the man behind you is Detective Carrigan, the famous Irish dancer. We’ll need your keys to tow your truck, or we could just pop the tranny and tow it.”
Two squad cars were nosed into the parking lot, one blocking the truck, four more cops standing by. Too many for a routine coke bust, Koop thought. “Keys are in my right side pocket,” Koop said. He desperately wanted to know why he’d been arrested. Burglary? Murder? Something to do with Jensen?
“Hey, he can talk,” the black cop said.
He slapped Koop on the shoulder in a comradely way, and they stopped while the red-faced cop took his keys out and tossed them to a patrolman and said, “Tow truck is on its way.” To Koop, Kershaw said, “That black car over there.”
While they opened the back door of the car, Koop said, “I don’t know why I’m arrested.” He couldn’t help it, couldn’t keep his mouth shut. The open back door of the car looked like a hungry mouth. “Why?”
Carrigan said, “Watch your head,” and he put a hand on top of Koop’s head and eased him into the car, and then said, “Why do you think?” and shut the door.
The two detectives spent a few minutes talking to the uniformed cops, letting Koop stew in the backseat of the car. The back doors had no inside handles, no way to get out. With his hands pinned behind him, he couldn’t sit easily, had to sit upright on the too-soft seats. And the backseat smelled faintly of disinfectant and urine. Koop felt another spasm of claustrophobic panic, something he hadn’t expected. The damn cuffs: he twisted against them, hard, gritting his teeth; no chance. The cops outside were still not looking at him. He was an insect. Why in the hell. . . .
And then Koop thought, Softening me up.
He’d done the same thing when there was a prison squabble that they had to look into. When the cops got back into the car, one of them would look at him, friendly-like, and ask, “Well, what do you think?”
The plainclothes cops spent another minute talking to the uniforms, then drifted back to the car, talking to each other, as if Koop were the last thing on their minds. A screen divided the front seat from the back. The black guy drove, and after he started the engine he looked at his partner in the passenger seat and said, “Let’s stop at a Taco Bell.”
“Oooh, good call.” When they got going, the red-faced guy turned and grinned and said, “Well, what do you think?”
“I want a lawyer,” Koop said. The red-faced guy pulled back a quarter inch on the other side of the screen, his eyes going dark. He couldn’t help it, and Koop almost smiled. He could play this game, he thought.
30
LUCAS AND CONNELL watched the arrest from a Super America station across the street, leaning on Connell’s car, eating ice cream sandwiches. Koop came out, Kershaw a step behind, with one hand on Koop’s right elbow. “I wanted to take him,” Connell said between bites.
“Not for burglary,” Lucas said.
“No.” She looked at her watch. “The search warrants should be ready.”
Carrigan and Kershaw were pushing Koop into the car. Koop’s arms were flexed, and his muscles stood out like ropes. Lucas balled up the ice cream sandwich wrapper and fired it at a trash can; it bounced off onto the pavement.
“I want to get down to the house,” Connell said. “See you there?”
“Yeah. I’ll wait until they open the truck—I’ll let you know if there’s anything good.”
LUCAS WANTED CRIME-SCENE people to open the truck. “We might be talking about a couple of hairs,” he told the patrolman with the keys. “Let’s wait.”
“Okay. Who was that guy?” the patrolman asked.
“Cat burglar,” Lucas said. “He sure went nice and easy.”
“He scared the shit out of me,” the patrolman confessed, his eyes drifting back toward the store. “I was in the door and he looked over toward me, like he was gonna run. He had crazy eyes, man. He was right on the edge of flipping out. Did you see his arms? I wouldn’t have wanted to fight the sonofabitch.”
Crime scene arrived five minutes later. A half-carton of unfiltered Camels sat on the front seat. A bag of mixed salt and sand, jumper cables, a toolbox, and other junk occupied the back.
Lucas poked carefully through it but found nothing. He pulled the keys Koop had produced. There were two truck keys, what looked like two house keys, and a fifth one. Jensen’s maybe. But it didn’t look new enough. They’d have to check.
“Got a nice set of burglary tools back here,” one of the crime-scene guys said. Lucas walked around to the back of the truck, where they’d carefully opened the toolbox. Unfortunately, burglary tools were nothing more than a slightly unusual selection of ordinary tools. You had to prove the burglary first. The crime-scene guy picked up a small metal file and looked at it with a magnifying glass, just like Sherlock Holmes.
“Got some brass,” he said.
“That’ll help,” Lucas said. Koop was cutting his own keys, by hand. “Anything like a knife? Any rope?”
“No.”
“Goddamnit. Well, close it up and take it down,” Lucas said, disappointed. “We want everything—prints, hair, skin, fluid. Everything.”
LUCAS DROPPED THE Porsche at the curb and started up the driveway to Koop’s house. The front and side doors were open, and two unmarked vans sat in the driveway, along with Connell’s anonymous gray Chevy. Lucas was almost to the front steps when he saw two neighborhood women walking down the street, one of them pushing a baby buggy. Lucas walked back toward them.
“Hello,” he said.
The woman pushing the buggy had her hair in curlers, covered with a rayon scarf. The other one had dishwater blond hair with streaks of copper through it. They stopped. “Are you police?” Neighbors always knew.
“Yes. Have you seen Mr. Koop recently?”
“What’d he do?” asked the copper-streaked one. The kid in the buggy was sucking on a blue pacifier, looking fixedly at Lucas with pale-blue eyes.
“He’s been arrested in connection with a burglary,” Lucas said.
“Told you,” Copper Streak said to Hair Curler. To Lucas, she said, “We always knew he was a criminal.”
“Why? What’d he do?”
“Never got up in the morning,” she said. “You’d hardly ever see him at all. Sometimes, when he put his garbage out. That was it. He was never in his yard. His garage door would go up, always in the afternoon, and he’d drive away. Then he’d come back in the middle of the night, like three o’clock in the morning, and the garage door would go up, and he’d be inside. You never saw him. The only time I ever saw him, except for garbage, was that Halloween snowstorm a couple of years ago. He came out and shoveled his driveway. After that, he always had a service do it.”
“Did he have a beard?”
Copper Streak looked at Hair Curler, and they both looked back at Lucas. “Sure. He’s always had one.”
One more thing, Lucas thought. They talked for another minute, then Lucas broke away and went inside.
Connell was in the kitchen, scribbling notes on a yellow pad.
“Anything?” Lucas asked.
; “Not much. How about the truck?”
“Nothing so far. No weapon?”
“Kitchen knives. But this guy isn’t using a kitchen knife. I’d be willing to bet on it.”
“I just talked to a couple of neighbors,” Lucas said. “They say he’s always had a beard.”
“Huh.” Connell pursed her lips. “That’s interesting . . . C’mere, down the basement.” Lucas followed her down a short flight of stairs off the kitchen. The basement was finished. To the left, through an open door, Lucas could see a washer, dryer, laundry sink, and a water heater, sitting on a tiled floor. The furnace would be back here too, out of sight. The larger end of the basement was carpeted with a seventies-era two-tone shag. A couch, a chair, and a coffee table with a lamp pressed against the walls. The center of the rug was dominated by a plastic painter’s drop cloth, ten feet by about thirteen or fourteen, laid flat on the rug. A technician was vacuuming around the edges of the drop cloth.
“Was that plastic sheet like that?” Lucas asked.
“No. I put it there,” Connell said. “C’mere and look at the windows.”
The windows were blacked out with sheets of quarter-inch plywood. “I went outside and looked,” Connell said. “He’s painted the outside of them black, so unless you get down on your knees and look into the window wells, it just looks like the basement is dark. He went to a lot of trouble with it: the edges are caulked.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” She looked down the sheet. “I think this is where he killed Wannemaker. On a piece of plastic. There’re a couple of three-packs of drop cloths in the utility room. One of them is unopened. The other one only had one cloth in it. I was walking around down here, and it looked to me like the rug was matted in a rectangle. Then I noticed the furniture: it’s set up to look at something in the middle of the rug. When I saw the drop cloths . . .” She shrugged. “I laid it out, and it fit perfectly.”
“Jesus . . .” Lucas looked at the tech. “Anything?”
The tech nodded and said, “A ton of shit: I don’t think the rug’s ever been cleaned, and it must’ve been installed fifteen years ago. It’s gonna be a goddamned nightmare, sorting everything out.”
“Well, it’s something, anyway,” Lucas said.
“There’s one other thing,” Connell said. “Up in the bedroom.”
Lucas followed her back up the stairs. Koop’s bedroom was spare, almost military, though the bed was unmade and smelled of sweat. Lucas saw it right away: on the chest of drawers, a bottle of Opium.
Lucas: “You didn’t touch it?”
“Not yet. But it wouldn’t make any difference.”
“Jensen said he took it from her place. If her fingerprints are on it . . .”
“I called her. Her bottle was a half-ounce. She always gets herself a half-ounce at Christmas because it lasts almost exactly a year.”
Lucas peered at the perfume bottle: a quarter-ounce. “She’s sure?”
“She’s sure. Damnit, I thought we had him.”
“We should check it anyway,” Lucas said. “Maybe she’s wrong.”
“Yeah, we’ll check—but she was sure. Which brings up the question, why Opium? Does he obsess on the perfume? Does the perfume attract him somehow? Or did he go out and buy some of his own, to remind him of Jensen?”
“Huh,” Lucas said.
“Well? Is it the perfume or the woman?” She looked at him, expecting to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Maybe he could. Lucas closed his eyes. After a moment, he said, “It’s because Jensen uses it. He’s creeping into her apartment in the dark, goes into her bedroom, and something sets him off. The perfume. Or maybe seeing her there. But the perfume really brings it back to him. It’s possible, if he’s really freaked out, that he used everything in the bottle he stole from her.”
“Do you think it’s enough? The beard being shaved, and the perfume bottle?”
He shook his head. “No. We’ve got to find something. One thing.”
Connell moved around until she was looking straight into Lucas’s eyes from no more than two feet. Her face was waxy, pale, like a dinner candle. “I was sick again this morning. In two weeks, I won’t be able to walk. I’ll be back in chemo, I’ll start shedding hair. I won’t be able to think straight.”
“Jesus, Meagan. . . .”
“I want the sonofabitch, Lucas,” she said. “I don’t want to be dead in a hole and have him walking around laughing. You know he’s the one, I know he’s the one.”
“So?”
“So we gotta talk. We gotta figure something out.”
31
KOOP GOT OUT of jail a few minutes after noon, blinking in the bright sunshine, his lawyer walking behind, a sport coat over his shoulder, talking.
Koop was very close to the edge. He felt as though he had a large crack in his head, that it was about to split in half, that a wet gray worm would spill out, a worm the size of a vacuum-cleaner hose.
He didn’t like jail. He didn’t like it at all.
“Remember, not a thing to anybody, okay?” the lawyer said, shaking his finger into the air. He’d learned not to shake it at his clients: one had almost pulled it off. He was repeating the warning for at least the twentieth time, and Koop nodded for the twentieth time, not hearing him. He was looking around at the outdoors, feeling the tension falling away, as though he were coming unwrapped, like a mummy getting its sheet pulled.
Jesus. His head was really out of control. “Okay.”
“There’s nothing you can say to the cops that would help you. Nothing. If you want to talk to somebody, talk to me, and if it’s important, I’ll talk to them. Okay?”
“No deals,” Koop said. “I don’t want to hear about no fuckin’ deals.”
“Is there any chance you can find the guy who sold you the stuff?” The lawyer looked like a mailman on PCP. Ordinary enough, but everything in his face too tight, too stretched. And though each of his words was enunciated clearly, there were far too many of them, spoken too quickly, a torrent of “I thinks” and “Maybe we’d bests.” Koop couldn’t keep up with them all, and had begun ignoring them. “What do you think, huh? Any chance you could find him? Any chance?”
Koop finally heard him, and shrugged, and said, “Maybe. But what should I do if I find him? Call the cops?”
“No-no. Nuh-nuh-no. No. No. You call me. You don’t talk to the cops.” The lawyer’s eyes were absolutely flat, like old pasteboard poker chips. Koop suspected he didn’t believe a word of his story.
Koop had told him that he bought the diamond cross and the matching earrings from a white boy—literally a boy, a teenager—wearing a Minnesota National Guard fatigue shirt, who hung around the Duck Inn, in Hop-kins. The kid had a big bunch of dark hair and an earring, Koop had said. He said he bought the brooch and earrings for $200. The kid knew he was getting ripped off, but didn’t know what else to do with them.
“How do we explain that you sold them to Schultz?” the attorney had asked.
Koop had said, “Hell, everybody knows Schultz. The cops call him Just Plain Schultz. If you’ve got something you want to sell, and you’re not quite sure where it came from, you talk to Schultz. If I was really a smart burglar like the cops said, I sure as shit would never have gone to him. He’s practically on their payroll.”
The attorney had looked at him for a long time, and then said, “Okay. Okay. Okay. So you’ve been out of steady work since the recession started, except for this gig at the gym, and you saw a chance to pick up a few bucks, took it, and now you’re sorry. Okay?”
That had been fine with Koop.
Now, with the lawyer following him out of the jail, babbling, Koop put his hands over his ears, pushed his head together. The lawyer stepped back, asked, “Are you all right?”
“Don’t like that place,” Koop said, looking back over his shoulder.
KOOP HURT. ALMOST every muscle in his body hurt. He could handle the first part of the detention. He could handle the bend-over-and-spread
-’em. But he could feel his blood draining away the closer he got to a cell. They’d had to urge him inside the cell, prod him, and once inside, the door locked, he’d sat for a moment, the fear climbing up into his throat.
“Motherfucker,” he’d said aloud, looking at the corners of the cells. Everything was so close. And pushing in.
He could have gone over the edge at that moment. Instead, he started doing sit-ups, push-ups, bridges, deep knee bends, toe-raises, push-offs, leg lifts. He did step-ups onto the bunk until his legs quit. He’d never worked so hard in his life; he didn’t stop until his muscles simply quit on him. Then he slept; he dreamed of boxes with hands and holes with teeth. He dreamed of bars. When he woke up, he started working again.
Halfway through the next morning, they’d taken him down to his lawyer. The lawyer’d said the cops had his truck, had searched his house. “Is this charge the only thing you see coming? The only thing, the only thing?” he’d asked. He seemed a bit puzzled. “The cops are all over you. All over you. This charge—this is minor shit. Minor shit.”
“Nothing else I know of,” Koop said. But he thought, Shit. Maybe they knew something else.
The lawyer met him again at the courthouse, for the arraignment. He waived a preliminary hearing at the advice of the lawyer. The arraignment was quick, routine: five thousand dollars bail, the bail bondsman right there to take the assignment of his truck.
“Don’t fuck with the truck,” Koop said to the bail bondsman. “I’ll be coming to you with the cash, as soon as I get it.”
“Yeah, sure,” the bondsman said. He said it negligently. He’d heard all this too many times.
“Don’t fuck with it,” Koop snarled.
The bondsman didn’t like Koop’s tone, and opened his mouth to say something smart, but then he saw Koop’s eyes and understood that he was a very short distance from death. He said, “We won’t touch it,” and he meant it. Koop turned away, and the bondsman swallowed and wondered why they’d let an animal like that out of jail once they had him in.