TWENTY-FOUR

On the sidewalk I decided to add one more element to my disguise.

I looked around under the trees, found a small piece of bark, then removed my left shoe and laid the bark inside. I put the shoe back on and took a couple of uncomfortable practice steps. The limp was perfect. Made me look shorter and a lot less threatening, but even more importantly it suggested I was handicapped, and people are taught from childhood to turn away.

I clutched my bag, leash, and pooper-scooper, then headed for the van. Limped toward it in a soft zigzag pattern, pantomiming “here boy, here boy” gestures, like Marcel Marceau in a Redskins cap as I drew closer and closer. At the driver’s window, I bent to look under the van for the dog that by now even I was beginning to think might actually exist. I reached into the bag for the transmitter, stretched my arm under the van and used the transmitter to probe for solid steel. A moment later I heard a solid clunk as the magnet grabbed hold. I tugged at it but the radio beacon held fast.

Still crouched underneath, I grabbed my strips of fingerprint tape, straightened up slowly and used one of them on the driver’s side window frame, one on the area around the keyhole in the door, the last one on the window itself. There wasn’t enough light to see what I’d come away with, but unless Jerry Crown had wiped down the car I should have something. Unfortunately—my luck running the way it was—the only thing it might turn out to be was dirt.

I limped away from the van, shaking my head with the exasperation of a man who’d left his bed for another one of Fido’s goddamned nocturnal prowls. I shuffled over to the other side of the street, peering, staring, whistling softly, moving my mouth as though yelling but trying not to wake up the neighborhood at the same time.

Fido, you son of a bitch, where are you?

I gritted my teeth against the pain in my shoe, limped a little faster as Brodsky’s car came into view at the other end of the street.

“Haven’t got a scanner in that car of yours?” I asked when I got there. “And a fax machine?”

“Not in this car. We put them in the cruisers last year, but I don’t have either one.”

“Kinko’s, then,” I said. “Do you need a transmittal form?”

“Got a couple in my briefcase.” He stared at me. “Get in the car, Monk. I can’t stand watching you limp around like that. I’ll drop you off at your car on my way.”

The sheriff was back even quicker this time. He sixty-nined me again, spoke in a voice barely above a whisper.

“Take the bureau a couple of hours, they told me. I gave them your cell phone number for callback.”

I looked down the street toward the van. “I think we can back off a while. Why don’t you go grab a bite to eat.”

Which was surveillance code for the opportunity of using a real bathroom for a change, for emptying one’s storage bottle without resorting to pouring it in the gutter, an act guaranteed to get somebody’s attention at a time when you can’t allow that to happen. He nodded. I glanced at my own bottle in the back seat, but there was no question of asking him to take it along. A fisur man—physical surveillance man—holds his own water, one way or the other. What a fisur man never does is ask somebody else to schlepp it for him.

“Nothing?”

I stared out into the darkness as I tried to make sense of what the Identification Division was telling me ninety minutes later. “Nothing at all? Not even in the civil files?”

I listened as the woman on the other end of the phone at the bureau’s fingerprint center in Clarksburg, West Virginia, told me again that the latent fingerprints Brodsky had submitted by fax from Kinko’s matched nothing in her records. I thanked her and hung up, then called the sheriff.

“Doesn’t make sense to me, either,” he said. “I’ve never had anything come back from Clarksburg ‘no record.’”

“Sure as hell not for this kind of maniac.”

“Nothing wrong with your lifts, I know that for sure. Four perfect fingers, didn’t even need a glass to read them. Three ulnar loops, a tented-arch on the little finger.”

“Gotta be a mistake. Crown can’t possibly be clean.”

I checked the clock on my dash panel. Nearly six in the morning, not yet dawn this time of year. The rapid beeps from radio station 638 continued to indicate the van hadn’t moved. The rain on my roof joined in to make a sort of syncopation that was almost musical. Drum-beep-drum-beep-drum-beep … something like that.

“What’ve we got here for range?” I asked Brodsky. “How far away can we get and still be sure of catching him moving?”

“A mile at least, out where I come from, but in the city with all the traffic and electronics maybe four or five blocks. Far enough he’ll never spot us.”

“What if we were up off the ground, up in a building maybe?” I had a very specific building in mind.

“It’s a line-of-sight process, but we can lay significantly farther back the higher the elevation. Any chance you can get a plane up?”

“If we had a week maybe, to get my request okayed.” A request that as a suspended agent I couldn’t even make, although I didn’t bother to tell Brodsky that. “I was thinking of something a bit lower. The Hilton is just down the way at T Street. Won’t be higher than thirteen stories”—by statute no building in Washington could be—“but we should be able to use it as a command post.”

“What kind of budget have you got? I’m working a murder case, but the county will never pay for the Hilton.”

“I’ll put it on my credit card.” What was left of it. “We can work it out later.”

“I’ll hold my position here until you get us settled in. You better get something to eat while you have the chance.”

I hung up and started for the hotel. The odometer clicked off seven-tenths of a mile before I pulled into the parking lot and nodded. This was a good break. A room at the Hilton would give us the one thing we couldn’t possibly go without. Rest, proper rest, not the hunched-over-the-steering-wheel catnaps that pass for sleep in surveillance work. In the kind of work that often turns real violent real fast, rest is a weapon as valuable as a gun. Without it you can end up dead.

In the lobby, I signed a Visa chit for the cheapest single room on the top floor of the tower facing north. A mere four hundred dollars a night, the clerk told me over the top of his nose as he grabbed the card and slammed it through his machine. I hustled upstairs and straight to the portable radio/alarm clock on the nightstand, tuned it to 638 on the AM dial, heard the quick and steady beat from our transmitter and nodded again. We were still a long way from pulling this off—the two of us by ourselves—but the playing field was for the first time starting to level.

We did it in shifts.

Two hours on, two off.

The sheriff and I watching the bastard stay in his apartment, both of us hoping the killer hadn’t decided to take early retirement. That his big gray van wouldn’t just sit there until the wheels rusted. It wasn’t likely, but in fisur work nothing is impossible. Just because he refused to move didn’t mean we could take our eyes off him. Doing so would violate the first rule of the game, and the consequences were pretty damned predictable.

The protocol is a simple one.

The target does absolutely nothing for days and days, sometimes months and years. The watchers—always undermanned, underrested, underfed, and overwhelmed—watch without blinking for all that time, then turn away for ten seconds to work the cramps out of their shoulders, at which point the target disappears. It’s happened to me, it happens to everybody at least once, from energetic young agents to burned-out old bastards who spend their shifts endlessly scribbling on long yellow pads, recalculating to the last penny their retirement pay.

But not this time, Brodsky and I agreed.

This time we had the advantage. This time we had the Hilton on our side. After a two-hour shift, we could come back to a soft bed and a real toilet. We didn’t have to get our rest in the back seat of the same car we hadn’t left for twelve hours, legs drawn up, trying to sleep, trying to ignore the monstrous odor of rotting fast-food, old newspapers, and our own dreadful gas.

It’s hard to explain to outsiders why FBI agents put up with it, allow ourselves to be treated worse than the Taliban infantry, and I don’t have an answer, either. Maybe it’s like the guy who shovels elephant poop at the circus. Maybe we just plain like the smell.

“Stand by, Monk. He’s on the move.”

Brodsky’s call came just after twelve o’clock noon on Thursday, just as I was leaving the hotel parking lot to relieve him.

“Out the front door,” he continued, “toward his van. I have the eye, but you better hurry.”

“Three minutes,” I told him. “Call him out and I’ll join up with you.”

I turned up the commercial radio in my dashboard. AM 638 was loud and clear, the beeping from the transmitter slowing as the van began to move away from my position.

“South on Florida,” Brodsky told me. “I think we’ve got ourselves a pro here. He’s looking around, checking his mirrors. I can’t hold him much longer.”

I hung a U and shot south on Seventeenth, made a quick left on T Street, and caught the van just as it turned north on Connecticut. I fell into the traffic out of his sight line, listened to the steady beeping of the tracking device from my car speakers.

“Got him,” I told Brodsky. “North on Connecticut. I’ll call the streets.”

I called out the streets, one after another, all the way up Connecticut to Rock Creek Park, over the park to the Duke Ellington Bridge. “Right turn,” I said. “East on Calvert …the Ellington Bridge. Come ahead, I’m going by.”

“Got him.”

In the rearview mirror I saw Crown swing right onto the bridge, then Brodsky’s dark green Buick sedan make the same turn two cars later. I took a quick right, another right, and was once again ready.

“East on Calvert,” Brodsky said. “Left turn signal blinking … first street is … first street is Adams Mill Road … looks like a left into Adams Mill Road.” He paused. “That’s it. Left turn Adams Mill. I’m going straight on Calvert.”

“I’ve got him,” I said. “Get back in line.”

I followed Crown for thirty seconds—conscious of the steady beeps from the radio—until he signaled for another left turn.

“Left signal again,” I told Brodsky. “Turning left, but it’s still Adams Mill Road. I’ll go right on Quarry.”

I watched in my mirror as Brodsky slid into place and I made the right turn, then did another U and got back to the sheriff in time to see Crown slow along Adams Mill before swinging left into the parking lot at the National Zoo. He stopped at the booth and paid the fee. Brodsky and I did the same thing—flashing badges would have saved us the money, but you never know who’s watching at a time like that—then followed Crown past the long parking lot at the north end and along the narrow road skirting the park until we got to the southernmost end, where Crown turned in.

Brodsky continued past the lot. I pulled into it but stayed as far away from Crown as possible while the killer found a place and put the van into it. He opened the door, got out and stood for a moment, looking around the half-empty lot as though searching for someone.

I grabbed my binoculars from the passenger seat, swung them up in time to get a good look at his face. His nose was healing, I saw, but still pretty ugly. I hoped it hadn’t stopped hurting, as he began to walk toward the zoo entrance.

“I’ve got an eye on the van,” Brodsky told me from somewhere beyond our position, “if you want to take him inside.”

I grabbed a straw hat from my surveillance bag, slapped a quick brown goatee on my chin.

“I’m on my way. I’ll call you if I lose him.”

I mingled the best I could in the straggly pedestrian flow, past the series of small ponds on our left on the way to the nearby south entrance, but made sure to keep Crown in view. Except on TV or in the movies, losing sight of the package is almost always the end of the surveillance, and people can do the damndest things when you aren’t watching.

This time the problem was speed.

Crown’s long legs were gobbling up the pavement much faster than the meandering bunch I was using as a shield. I had to pick up my pace as well, even if it meant risking him noticing. Fortunately the walkway stretching into the park was a wide and straight one, and I could see Crown easily from thirty yards behind him. He’d hurried past the information booth on the right without a glance, which was no great surprise. He knew where he was going, of course, and I was pretty sure he hadn’t come to see the animals.

We passed the big restaurant on our left and made straight for the monkey island about two hundred yards dead ahead. I hung back a little farther, careful not to jam up with him if the monkey exhibit was his destination.

It wasn’t, I saw a moment later.

Crown made a right turn toward the Think Tank—the animal-cognition center—at the east edge of the zoo. I had to hustle to catch sight of him as he veered right again and strode to the great cats exhibit on Lion-Tiger Hill. This time he did stop, and so did I, a couple dozen yards away and safely screened from his view by a thicket of bamboo and a small grove of Himalayan pines.

Thank God for the evergreens, I thought. At this time of year the skyscraper oak trees were completely bare, offered me no protection at all. Crown stood directly in front of the low wall dividing the lions from those the big cats wouldn’t mind eating. He was joined by scores of tourists attracted to the power and beauty of the beasts as they lounged beyond their pondlike safety moat.

I watched as one of the cats—a male huge through the shoulders—strolled along the other side of the moat, swinging his eyes from side to side as though counting the house for this afternoon’s performance. His golden-brown head stopped as he seemed to recognize Jerry Crown, one predator to another.

Crown turned and walked to the small plaza directly across from the lions, an area filled with tables and chairs. Every table was occupied. He moved to the nearest one, stood like the lion as he stared at the family seated there. The father looked up, then gathered his wife and two small children and hurried away. Jerry Crown took the father’s chair, sat and stared at the lions. Waiting, I hoped, for the someone who pulled his strings.

I wedged myself into the three-deep crowd still gawking at the lions, out of Jerry Crown’s sight line. The blue-black sky began to drizzle. Around me umbrellas popped open, a few at first, then a forest of them. Another break for me. Even someone searching for me would have no chance to get a look at my face. I peeked past a red, yellow, and blue golf umbrella. Jerry Crown was still alone.

I raised the collar of my rain jacket, glanced at the same lions Crown was looking at. Unlike his fascination with Crown, the big male showed absolutely no interest in me. I moved a step or two closer to Crown’s table and waited for something to happen.

Three and a half minutes later it did.

A second man walked past Jerry Crown’s table, paused for an instant to pull his gray fedora closer to his eyes against the suddenly slanting rain, before moving on. As he walked away, Crown rose and followed him. I couldn’t see the other man’s face, but there was something about his rigid posture and the way he walked that I recognized. A moment later the back of my neck began to tingle as I realized why it was so familiar.

It couldn’t be, I told myself. It can’t possibly be.

I stepped back a few feet, ready to hurry to a position the two of them would have to pass to get wherever they were going.

I saw Crown following the second man, neither of them in an apparent hurry, just a couple of guys enjoying a day at the zoo. A dozen steps farther on, the second man stopped and turned back in the direction of Crown without actually looking at him. In that moment I had a perfect view of the newcomer’s face, directly into his eyes. I flinched away from the unexpected contact, but Kevin Finnerty did not appear to notice.