Conviction

TEN

"IT DOESN'T LOOK GOOD FOR YOU," MONK TOLD PAYTON. "No good at all."

Hands clasped in front of him, Payton said nothing. His eyes drilled Monk's from a tight, staring mask.

"We're willing to hear your side of the story," Ainsworth interjected. "But we know Thuy Sen died in your house. My friend and I keep wondering if you're covering for your brother."

Payton's grip on himself was so taut that Monk could see the tendons in his forearms straining. "Whatever you do," Monk said, "is fine with me. You can take your chances, or you can tell us what happened."

Payton's stare still locked Monk's, and then he slowly drew a breath. "Man," he answered with weary defiance, "I don't have to tell you shit."

"We know she was there," Monk said sadly. "We know it, and you know it."

Rennell shifted in his chair. His demeanor, silent and sullen and self-absorbed, reminded Monk of an adolescent being chastised for some minor offense.

"We found her fingerprints, Rennell. So tell me how they got there."

Rennell's gaze darted to a corner. Monk watched his fear grow like a living thing.

"She like your sound system?" Ainsworth asked.

Still Rennell did not answer. "Sometimes," Monk proposed, "like when you smoke crack, maybe things happen you didn't mean to happen. You think that's possible?"

Rennell's brow furrowed. "Sometimes," he responded to Monk's surprise.

"Is that what happened with Thuy Sen? Maybe 'cause you were smoking crack?"

Rennell stiffened, silent once again.

"Son," Monk said softly, "we know it was you who put her in the water."

Rennell looked up at him, mouth half open. "No way . . ."

"You carried her out," Monk continued. "Because the current was fast, and you were the strongest. And because your brother told you to."

Rennell's gaze broke. Eyes focused on the table, he shook his head with silent stubbornness.

"We know she was at your house," Monk said in a reproving tone, "and we know you dumped her body. It's time for you to say what happened in between."

Rennell was still now.

"I mean," Monk amended quietly, "what happened before you went to get Eddie Fleet."

The worry in Rennell's face was palpable. His gaze darted past Monk, as if searching the barren room for help.

"No one here but us, Rennell. No one but you can tell us why you did that with Thuy Sen. Not even Payton can tell us that."

Rennell shifted in his chair. At length he asked, "Payton, what he say?"

"Time for you to be a man, son. Time to tell us for yourself what happened."

Rennell crossed his arms, staring at the wall.

"You didn't want for her to die, did you?"

Still the big man did not respond. Then, slowly, he shook his head. "No."

Tense with anticipation, Monk prodded. "You just wanted her to make you feel good."

Rennell's eyes shut. In a dull monotone, he asked, "What Payton say?"

"Why does it matter?" Monk said coldly. "Was Payton the one who killed her?"

"No," Rennell answered with surprising swiftness. "No way."

"No," Monk agreed. "It was you. But you didn't mean for that to happen."

"No."

"I didn't think so," Monk said reassuringly. "You were holding her head down. When she started choking, you didn't know what to do."

Rennell bent forward. "I didn't do that little girl," he said with quiet vehemence. Then he just sat there, seeming gradually to detach himself, until Monk and Ainsworth left him alone.

* * *

"Did you begin to wonder," Terri asked sardonically, "if Rennell wasn't maybe a little slow?"

Over the rim of his second cup of espresso, Monk gave her a look of sour amusement. "How slow do you mean, counselor? So slow he couldn't remember what he'd done?" He put down the cup. "For sure Payton was what passed for the family brains. This boy wasn't swift, though mostly he was as scared as he had every right to be. But he knew what he'd done, and he sure as hell knew that 'doing that little girl' was a bad thing to admit to. Don't have to be Einstein to do murder."

* * *

"Let's pretend we're the defense," Lou Mauriani told Monk and Ainsworth. "Lay out what you've got."

It was their good fortune, Monk thought, that Mauriani was the Assistant D.A. tracking the case—gray-haired, round-faced, and congenitally affable, Mauriani had keen blue eyes and an equally keen sense of the absurd, coupled with lightning swiftness of thought and a deep seriousness about doing his work well. In twenty-seven murder prosecutions, Mauriani had never lost.

Monk set down his coffee mug on a corner of Mauriani's cluttered desk. "First, we've got Rennell pulling a girl dressed like Thuy Sen into the house, with Payton closing the door behind them—"

"By virtue," Mauriani interposed dryly, "of a cross-racial ID, from all the way across the street, by a scared old lady who hates them both. If I'm the defense, I'm thinking this pillar of Bayview's vibrant white community saw exactly what she wanted to."

"We went back to her," Monk responded without rancor. "She's as solid as anyone like that can be. The forensics bear her out."

"The fibers, hair, and fingerprints," Mauriani amended, "put Thuy Sen in the house. But only Flora Lewis makes her playmates Payton and Rennell."

Ainsworth nodded. "True. But we also found clothes which more or less match what she says they were wearing—"

"Uh-huh. Them, and every third guy in the neighborhood. So what happened inside the house between her and whichever two guys these were?"

"That's where they forced her to have oral sex," Monk answered. "We found semen and saliva."

"Whose semen? Whose saliva? Suppose Payton or Rennell says they've lost track of all the age-appropriate young women who've blown them in the living room. Saves on condoms, after all."

"Semen," Monk countered, "is what choked this girl to death. We've got Liz Shelton for that. And we know Thuy Sen was dead when she left the house."

Mauriani gave them a beatific smile. "Ah, yes, on the word of the honorable Edward Fleet. I can't thank you guys enough for the chance to share him with twelve of our fellow citizens. Let's see—crack selling, gun peddling, and a social life spent slapping women silly. No wonder he couldn't wait to help us out."

Ainsworth flashed a grin. "You've put on worse, Lou. We've brought you most of them ourselves."

"And proud of it." Mauriani's smile faded. "You know the problem, Rollie. Fleet's a dirtball, and he admits to helping them dump the body. The only reason he's talking is so we can help him save his ass. If I'm the defense, I go after his credibility like hell won't have it—maybe imply he's the one who did her, and we're kicking him loose. There's no forensics that tells us whose 'weapon' killed her for sure."

"We know that," Monk said patiently. "But we've taken Eddie through this, over and over. From beginning to end, his story makes sense. They needed a car; Fleet had one. We found semen and saliva on the carpet; Fleet saw drool coming from her mouth. He says Payton forced him to help dump the body; forensics puts her in Fleet's trunk. Fleet says Rennell dumped her by the tallow plant; the body washed up where the Coast Guard says it should have. Logic and the evidence corroborate his story."

"What about its internal credibility. Any cracks?"

"Nope. Fleet doesn't try to say too much, or to be too helpful—like telling us who asphyxiated Thuy Sen. He didn't see it, he says, and no one told him."

"That's also the missing piece. No confession, or no witness to her death."

Monk fought back his annoyance. "You need us to go back at the brothers again?"

"No. We've got more than enough to take them to the Grand Jury." Amusement surfaced in Mauriani's clear blue eyes. "After that, they'll have two defense lawyers—one dedicated to Payton's interests, the other to Rennell's. We'll let them sort out this last piece by themselves. Maybe they'll even play Cain and Abel."

* * *

"So Mauriani indicted him," Terri said. "Then the media got hold of death by oral asphyxiation, and made sure everybody in the jury pool knew everything about it."

"No help for that, counselor."

"No help to Rennell, for sure. Both brothers became these scary black predators, kidnapping the daughter of Cambodian refugees and using her for sex." Terri leaned back in her chair, studying Monk's expression. "I was in law school, and it felt like I saw Thuy Sen's face every day for weeks. And theirs, staring out from the mug shots with no expression in their eyes. I was planning to be a defense lawyer, and I hated them anyway."

And that was before, she did not add, what happened to Elena.

"Yeah," Monk retorted with an edge in his voice. "Pretty rough on those boys, people learning what they'd done. Kind of like it was for Thuy Sen's parents."

This silenced Terri. For a while, they both sat there without speaking, Terri fighting back the images of what had seared Elena's soul.

"Early on," Monk ventured at last, "you wanted to do defense work. When I was young, I thought about that, too."

"I guess you got over it."

"Not over what made me consider it. Being a black man, I'd had occasion to ponder the fact that life wasn't fair. I pondered it in Vietnam, watching black men sent by white folks to kill Asians and sometimes dying instead, and I pondered it when I came home and saw too many of my friends drifting into trouble for lack of much else life offered them. I thought maybe I could defend them, get some a fairer shake." His voice remained soft. "Maybe you didn't know I came from the Bayview."

"No," Terri admitted. "I didn't. So what changed your mind?"

Monk's gaze grew distant and reflective. "More like I recalibrated my thinking. A cop can make the judgment on whether something is a case or not, try to make sense of it all. Whatever notion of justice he has, without the cop there'd be no case.

"The people I grew up with were struggling in their world, trying to survive. I thought maybe I could make that world a safer and fairer place—make the righteous cases, and let the rest go. Maybe even save a few young men and women by steering them right." Pausing, Monk shrugged, gazing back at Terri. "Like a lot of notions, life complicated it some. The more I lived it, the less sure I became of what justice really was. You just do the best you can. Like you're doing now, I guess."

"What I'm doing now," she answered, "is trying to keep the State of California from killing someone else. That includes figuring out how Rennell Price lost the lottery." She gazed at Monk, curious. "That day with Mauriani, did you think Rennell would end up being sentenced to die?"

Monk gave her an ironic smile. "Not in San Francisco," he answered flatly. "That took some doing of its own. Payton's work, mostly. Maybe with a little help from the lawyer."