31

It had been more than a week since the Green Man had seen DeeDee Kipp in Mankato, and during that week, the two cold case investigators he’d been tracking hadn’t left Minneapolis.

Campbell’s office maintained contacts with The Get List production staff. Nothing from that source indicated that the investigation had picked up on DeeDee Kipp. The Green Man told Campbell to have his office contact the director of the BCA’s Cold Case Unit to ask how the investigation was going. That query had come up dry as well.

All indications were that there was nothing to worry about. The tip had been too vague to suggest any meaningful connection to Andrea Bergstad. The only real danger, as he saw it, would be if someone made a connection between the death in Vermillion in 1987 and that a tip had come in from Vermillion linking Bergstad and DeeDee Kipp. Nothing suggested that had happened.

The Green Man was getting restless. Patience was essential to a successful sniper, but patience needed to be combined with potential to be justified. He wasn’t seeing any potential. More and more it was feeling like things were under control on this assignment. And he had two active assignments with other clients that needed his attention.

It was time to move on. He could wait another six months, a year, and then arrange for DeeDee Kipp to have an accident.

But moving on was hard to do on this assignment. He had a nineteen-year history of things going wrong. He’d be damned before he’d be beaten by another teenager.

That line of thinking, he told himself, was emotional. It was not a rational response to his present situation. Emotions could beat you. Every bit of rationality he possessed told him he could spend the rest of his life waiting for the cold case investigators to connect with DeeDee Kipp without anything happening. He needed to move on. He’d close his Minneapolis operation that night and get a flight out first thing in the morning.

That decision made, he slipped back into the daily routine he’d followed since coming to Minneapolis. Then he drove to the small office building on University Avenue near the Minneapolis-St. Paul border to remove the Global Positioning monitors he’d installed on the two investigators’ vehicles.

He turned into the driveway that led to the parking lot at the rear of the building, drove into the lot to make a U-turn—only to find his exit blocked by a car that had come into the lot behind him.

Another goddamn teenage girl, parked by the building’s entrance, blocked the driveway to the street. He honked his horn, but the girl was focused on the door. Then, just as he was about to get out of his car and have a word with the girl, three people came out of the building.

He recognized the two adults from The Get List program. Marshall Bahr and Jeanette Frisch. The girl with them took his breath away.

DeeDee Kipp.

A simultaneous flash of heat and cold washed over him.

What the hell! And again, the reflexive fear that she would recognize him. In the next instant, he remembered that she didn’t know him. None of them knew him. Nonetheless, it violated every principle of his training, every innate instinct within his soul, to be visible to his targets.

Bahr, the only one of the three conscious that they were blocking the driveway, turned toward the Green Man’s car to give a signal of apology. The Green Man pulled down the visor to shield Bahr’s view of his face. Then he forced himself to concentrate on what he was seeing.

The only thing he was certain of was that something had gone seriously wrong with his information sources. It was difficult to believe that nothing would have come to him through Campbell’s office if the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension management and The Get List producers knew that DeeDee Kipp was related to the case. If he was right about that, it had to mean that Bahr and Frisch were keeping the details of their investigation quiet. Did that mean they suspected Campbell? If they suspected Campbell, had that prevented them from passing information to Campbell’s office?

Was it possible they knew of his involvement—that they knew of his thirty-two-year involvement with Campbell? If they did, they were much, much more dangerous to him than he had anticipated.

He wanted to leave the parking lot, but he didn’t want to draw attention to himself by honking again. DeeDee Kipp was taking something out of the backseat of the parked car—a windbreaker and a baseball cap. Still talking to the driver, she dropped the hat on her head, pulling the brim down. She bent over, leaning into the front seat, and embraced the driver, then walked backward, away from the car. She was staying with Bahr and Frisch.

As the car reversed, then pulled forward to leave the parking lot, Bahr turned toward the Green Man, holding his arm up in a casual wave to acknowledge the waiting car’s patience.

The Green Man lifted a hand in return, then drove slowly past the three of them and back out onto the street. After a block, he turned onto a side road and parked, keeping his eyes on the GPS monitor.

Within minutes, two blips began to move, heading toward downtown Minneapolis. The Green Man pulled out, following the direction the vehicles were taking on the monitor. He needed to be sure DeeDee Kipp was with them.

When he saw the silhouette of DeeDee Kipp in the car with the Frisch woman, the baseball cap still on Kipp’s head, he pulled over again. He watched the monitor for almost fifteen minutes until the blip for Bahr’s vehicle stopped moving. Within another five minutes, Frisch’s blip was motionless.

He recognized the location where the vehicles had stopped from previous surveillance. Bahr’s vehicle had entered the garage at his downtown Minneapolis condominium. Frisch’s vehicle was parked on the street, approximately a block from the condo.

Which was where the Green Man headed as soon as he was sure the target vehicles were no longer moving.

Now, it was a waiting game.