Conviction

EIGHT

"LIKE PULLING THE WINGS OFF FLIES," TERRI OBSERVED IN A clinical tone. But beneath this she felt a chill: at this point in Monk's narrative, Rennell Price's fate had already begun to feel inexorable. "You were pretty sure the brothers killed her, then."

Though Monk eyed the Italian delicatessen across the street with seeming idleness, his voice turned cool. "You mean, did I commit myself to their being guilty, then look for the evidence to match?"

"Something like that."

" 'Fraid not. All I was convinced of then was that they were scared of Eddie Fleet."

"Both of them?" Terri asked quietly. "Or just Rennell?"

Monk pondered this. "I didn't see the difference," he answered with a shrug. "Turns out they both had reason."

* * *

Monk and Ainsworth put the brothers in separate rooms, then worked on each in turn.

The questioning was taut now. Payton had nothing more to say; clearly fearful, Rennell kept repeating, "I didn't do that little girl." But each pause between denials seemed longer.

None of this mattered. All that mattered at the moment was happening before the nearest convenient judge. So when Monk offered the brothers a ride home, it was with an incongruous amiability.

* * *

They sat in the backseat, silent. "By the way," Monk said over his shoulder, "we just got a warrant to search your grandma's house. Hope she doesn't mind—it's the best way of checking out your story."

In the rearview mirror, he could see Rennell turn to glance at Payton, who kept staring at the back of Monk's head. As they stopped at a traffic light on Third Street in the borrowed squad car, some gangbangers on the corner gazed at Monk and the two brothers. By the time they reached Eula Price's house, the forensics team was already there—the neighborhood, Monk figured, would soon be humming with tension.

"We'll be talking with your grandmother," he told the brothers. "We'll get some other folks to hang around with you."

* * *

Monk seated Eula Price on the porch between Ainsworth and himself.

Worriedly, she turned her head from one cop to the other. She was a large woman with venous legs: though judging by her face she could not be much past sixty, her body seemed a burden on her heart. Her other burden in life, Monk perceived, was the brothers. She was clearly respectful of police, and he guessed that his visit tapped into some nameless but pervasive dread about what the boys would come to.

The sight of Thuy Sen's picture seemed to convert the dread to fear. "Ever seen this girl?" Ainsworth asked.

"Only on TV." She paused, then added softly, "That poor child."

"But you never saw her here?"

Eula Price's throat worked. "No."

"Where do you sleep?" Monk inquired.

Slowly, she turned to face him. "Upstairs."

"And the boys?"

"They sleep downstairs."

"Do you eat together?"

"We used to. Then they started keeping different hours." She hesitated, and Monk could hear the sadness in her voice. "I got the bedroom set up to cook my own meals."

Monk recalled Flora Lewis's image of this woman gazing out her second-story window. "When did the boys come to live with you?" he asked.

"When Payton was eleven," she answered quietly. "Rennell was only nine. But they both were trying so hard to be little men."

To Monk, her last phrase bespoke a long-ago tragedy. "How was it that they came to live with you?"

"Athalie, my daughter-in-law—she stabbed my son Vernon with a knife." She began gazing out at the street, at nothing. "They put her in an institution. Been there now for eleven years."

Monk could think of no response. "When did you move upstairs?" he finally asked.

Her eyes shut. "Four years back."

"Why was that, ma'am?"

"The boys got bigger."

Monk waited for a moment. Almost gently, he asked, "Do you know how they earn a living?"

She folded her hands in front of her. "Odd jobs, they tell me."

"Not selling crack cocaine?"

Eula Price was quiet and then turned to him, tears welling in her eyes. "My health just ran down," she said wearily. "Every day, I pray to the Lord to lead my boys down a righteous path. I tried so hard, and now I pray so hard . . ."

Her voice trailed off. In the silence, Monk heard other voices—the crime lab team, going through the first floor of what once had been her home.

* * *

After Monk watched her retreat upstairs, each step slow and painful to watch, he sought out the head of the three-man crime lab team.

"What you got?" he asked.

The man, small and lean and precise, adjusted his glasses as he took his mental inventory. "Some stuff just for the finding," he answered. "The makings for crack cocaine, some remnants in the sink. Condoms—good for crack whores." The man handed Monk two magazines. "Plus pornography for inspiration."

Monk riffled their pages. They were less than he had hoped for—long on sadism and aggression but devoid of photographs that might suggest a taste for children.

"What else?"

"Some clothes that more or less match your eyewitnesses' descriptions, though they're kind of generic. We think this room may be more interesting."

Monk paused to look around the living room—the green walls were dingy, the carpet and couch were worn and stained, and the sooty fireplace, which did not look like anyone used it now, was filled with empty beer and soft drink cans. The sole, incongruous remnants of what Monk supposed was Eula Price's more gracious household were the painting of a beatific, pale Jesus and a lacquered coffee table, which retained a dull sheen beneath its mars and nicks.

It also retained, Monk saw at once, fingerprints—on his hands and knees, a technician studied the dust he had scattered with a laser light. Nearby a plump female technician had put down her ultraviolet lamp and begun slicing out a rectangle of carpet.

"She found what looks like fresh semen stains," the crime lab guy told Monk.

* * *

"Semen mixed with saliva," Terri amended now. "I read the crime lab report. But without DNA technology, the most it proved is that someone had oral sex with someone else. There was nothing to link the semen to Rennell, or to Thuy Sen's strangulation." But Terri was not as impervious as she tried to seem—once more, she imagined her own daughter, and then, too vividly, the painful image merged with what had happened to Thuy Sen. And she had read the whole damning report.

Monk completed its narrative for her. "Black hairs consistent with Asian ethnicity. A green fiber which matched Thuy Sen's sweater. A partial of her fingerprint on one corner of the coffee table. All we had left to prove was that she'd died there."

"So you went back to Eddie Fleet."

Monk's laugh was short and unamused. "He angled his way back to us," he said with weary disdain. "Human nature."