Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse

“Why?” I said.

“Because people are real touchy and stupid about ’em. They’ll risk their lives for their wedding rings.” He looked at Monk. “I’ve never seen anyone do it for a Ralphs Club Card.”

“The savings really add up,” Monk said. “Did you notice anything unusual about Breen?”

“He was in a big hurry, couldn’t wait to give me his stuff,” the mugger said. “And he smelled like smoke, like he just ran out of a burning building or something.”

Monk called Stottlemeyer and, while he was filling him in, a black-and-white the captain sent showed up and two officers jumped out to take care of the mugger. I took the phone from Monk, called my neighbor Mrs. Throphamner, and begged her to take care of Julie for a couple hours while we followed up on what the mugger told us. Ever since I started working for Monk, Mrs. Throphamner has become used to my frantic calls for emergency babysitting.

We were just finishing up giving our report to the officers when Stottlemeyer showed up and motioned us into his car.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I think it’s time to have another chat with Lucas Breen,” Stottlemeyer said. He made some calls and found out that Breen was still at his office, just a few blocks away.

When we got to the building, Stottlemeyer used the guard’s phone to call up to Breen’s office. He spoke to the secretary and asked if Breen would come down to the lobby to meet with us. When the secretary said that Breen refused, Stottlemeyer smiled.

“Fine,” he said. “Tell him we can have the conversation about Lizzie Draper at his house in front of his wife.”

Stottlemeyer hung up, then motioned to the Boudin Bakery. “Can I buy you a cup of coffee while we’re waiting for Breen to come down?”

I took Stottlemeyer up on his offer and convinced him to sweeten the deal with a fresh sourdough baguette. Monk settled for a warm bottle of Sierra Springs water from my bag.

Five minutes later Lucas Breen emerged from the elevator alone and joined us at our table.

“What’s so important you had to drag me out of my office?” Breen said.

“You didn’t have to come down,” Stottlemeyer said. “But I guess you didn’t want the missus hearing about your affair with Lizzie Draper.”

“I’ve never heard of her.”

“She’s your mistress,” Stottlemeyer said.

Breen grinned with smug self-confidence and tugged at the cuffs of his monogrammed shirt. “Is that what she says?”

Stottlemeyer shook his head.

“I didn’t think so,” Breen said.

“We know you bought her a bouquet of flowers from the florist in this lobby,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Do you? I buy lots of flowers from Flo. I buy them for my wife, my secretary, my clients, and to beautify my office. How do you know her bouquet came from me? It could have come from anybody in this building. The woman could even have bought the bouquet here herself.”

“You bought it for her,” Monk said. “Probably the same time you left her your shirt. She was wearing it when we met her. The buttons are monogrammed with your initials.”

“My wife donated some old clothes to Goodwill,” Breen said. “She always hated that denim shirt. Perhaps this woman you talked to enjoys shopping for bargains at secondhand clothing stores.”

“How did you know it was denim?” Monk asked. “We didn’t tell you what kind of shirt she was wearing.”

“The buttons,” Breen said quickly. “Only my denim shirts and short-sleeved sportswear have my initials on the buttons instead of the cuffs.”

“How do you know we weren’t talking about one of your short-sleeved shirts?”

“I’m a happily married man and faithful to my wife, but even if I weren’t, adultery isn’t a crime.”

“But murder is,” Monk said. “You killed Esther Stoval.”

“That’s laughable,” Breen said. “I had no reason to want her dead.”

“Esther knew about your affair and was blackmailing you,” Monk said. “On Friday night you slipped away from the fund-raiser, smothered Esther, and set fire to her house.”

“You’re forgetting that I didn’t leave the Excelsior hotel until midnight,” Breen said.

“Yes, you did, and we can prove it,” Stottlemeyer said. “You were mugged on the street a block away from the hotel. We have the mugger, and we know you reported your stolen credit cards to your bank. But here’s the odd thing: You didn’t report the mugging to the police. Gee, I wonder why.”

Breen sighed wearily. “I briefly stepped out of the hotel for a smoke, and that’s when I was mugged. It hardly qualifies as ‘leaving.’ ”

“Then why didn’t you tell anybody about it?” Stottlemeyer said.

“Because I promised my wife I’d quit smoking. If she knew I was still smoking cigars, she’d have my head.”

“That’s why you didn’t report the mugging? Because you were afraid your wife would find out that you were still smoking?” Stottlemeyer said, incredulity dripping from every word.

Breen absently tugged again at the cuffs of his handmade shirt. I don’t know if it was a nervous habit, or if he just wanted us all to admire his cuff links.

“I don’t appreciate your tone, Captain. I didn’t tell the police because I knew the press would pick up on it and the mugging would be all over the news. The last thing I want to do is create the impression that the neighborhood is a hotbed of crime. I have an ownership interest in the Excelsior. We’d lose room bookings, weddings, and convention business. But it’s more than that. I love San Francisco. I don’t want to do anything that might hurt the city’s image or cause a decline in tourism.”

“That’s a good story, and we’re all moved by your civic pride,” Monk said. “But here’s what really happened. You left something behind in Esther’s house. So you stole a firefighter’s coat and helmet in order to go back into the house and get it. But you didn’t know the firehouse had a dog, and when he came at you barking and growling, you killed him with a pickax.”

“Now you’re accusing me of murdering a dog, too?” Breen said. “This is outrageous. Do you have any proof to back up this fantasy of yours?”

“The mugger said you reeked of smoke,” I said.

“Reeked? He sounds like my wife. My God, everybody is antismoking now, even the muggers. Like I said before, I was having a cigar. That’s what he smelled. The wonderful aroma of a Partagas Salamones.”

Breen looked past me, something outside catching his eye. I glanced over my shoulder and saw a bum walking past the window. It was the same bum whom Monk had gifted with a couple dozen Wet Ones, shuffling by in his overcoat, pushing a rickety grocery cart overflowing with garbage. He saw me watching him and flipped me off.

Breen turned to Stottlemeyer, and when he spoke, his tone was much harder than before. “You’ve taxed my patience long enough with this inane inquiry. Make your point and get it over with.”

“Monk is right. You killed the lady and the dog, and you’re going down for it. All four of us sitting here know that,” Stottlemeyer said. “The thing is, since you’re such a booster of the police department and all, I thought I’d give you the chance to cut a deal before we both spend a lot of needless time and expense on this.”

“I heard you were a rising star in the department, Captain, and that you, Mr. Monk, were a brilliant detective. Obviously I was misinformed. I’m deeply disappointed in both of you. We’re done here.”

Breen rose from his seat, acknowledged me with a tip of his head, and walked back to the elevator.

“He’s disappointed in us, Monk.” Stottlemeyer finished his coffee. “I’m crushed; how about you?”

“He’s going to make life hard for you, Captain,” Monk said.

“Not as hard as I’m going to make it for him,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’ll get search warrants tonight, and we’ll ransack his home and office for that little item he went back to Esther’s house to get—just as soon as you tell me what that little item is.”

“Something very, very incriminating.”

“Which is . . . ?” Stottlemeyer said.

“Something that points directly, irrefutably, and conclusively to him as the killer.”

“Yes, I get the concept of incriminating,” Stottlemeyer said. “But what is it, exactly, that I should tell the judge that we’re looking for?”

Monk shrugged.

Stottlemeyer looked at Monk, then at me, then back to Monk. “You don’t know?”

“Something so unbelievably damaging to him that he’d literally walk through the red-hot flames of hell to get it back.”

“Well, there go my search warrants,” Stottlemeyer said. “So what you’re basically saying is, we’ve got bupkis.”

“Actually,” Monk said. “It’s probably less than that.”

13

Mr. Monk Does His Homework

Stottlemeyer drove us back to the Excelsior and used his badge to get my car out of the parking lot for free. It must be nice to have a badge and be able to park wherever you want without worrying about fees or tickets.

I made Monk promise not to say anything to Julie about the attempted mugging. She’d lost her father, and I didn’t want her worrying every time I left the house with Monk that she might lose me next. If Monk had a problem with my lie of omission, he didn’t say anything.

When we got home, lugging in our Pottery Barn purchases, Julie was at the table working on her homework, and Mrs. Throphamner was on the couch watching TV. Mrs. Throphamner’s dentures were on a napkin on the coffee table, facing the TV so they, too, could enjoy Diagnosis Murder.

I introduced Monk to Mrs. Throphamner. “He’s staying with us for a few days.”

She popped her teeth back into her mouth and offered her hand to Monk. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

Monk took one look at her hand, which was covered with blisters, and shook the air between them instead.

“Yes, it certainly is,” Monk said, shaking the air enthusiastically. “What happened to your hands?”

“I’ve been tending my roses,” she said. “It’s hard work, but I love it.”

I paid Mrs. Throphamner twelve dollars for babysitting. She stuffed the bills in her cleavage, blew a kiss to Julie, and went home in a hurry so she wouldn’t miss a second of Dick Van Dyke’s sleuthing.

“Mrs. Throphamner’s such a sweet woman,” I said after she left.

“She’s a witch,” Monk said. “Did you see those gnarled hands and her puckered, toothless face?”

Julie giggled happily. She happened to share Monk’s opinion. I thought they were both being cruel.

“She’s old and lonely; that’s all. Her husband spends most of his time lately at their fishing cabin up near Sacramento. She’s had nothing to do the last few months except tend her garden and watch TV.”

Of course, that was also very good for me, because it coincided with my newfound employment with Monk and made her available almost anytime for babysitting. I liked to believe that Mrs. Throphamner and I were doing each other a favor.

I heated up a frozen pizza for dinner, set the table with paper plates, and talked to Julie about her day at school while Monk disposed of the napkin Mrs. Throphamner had rested her teeth on. He put on rubber dish gloves and used a pair of barbecue tongs to pick up the napkin and take it to the fireplace, where he incinerated it. Then he disinfected the coffee table and the air around it with enough Lysol to eradicate every germ within a square mile. I had to open the window in the kitchen so we wouldn’t be eradicated, too. Julie watched him closely, amused and fascinated at the same time.

“I can still smell her,” Monk said.

“It’s her flowers you’re smelling,” I said. “I opened the kitchen window. She spends so much time tending her garden that she picks up the fragrance of her roses.”

He studied me, trying to discern whether I was telling the truth or not, then decided to believe me and put away the Lysol and threw out the gloves. I would have washed the gloves and used them again, but I’m not Adrian Monk.

As soon as the pizza was ready, Monk cut it into eight even slices. We sat down to eat, and I gave Julie an edited account of our day, leaving out the mugging and the identity of Sparky’s killer, but said we were close to getting the culprit. I know that was being overly optimistic, but I had a lot of faith in Monk.

After dinner, Julie went back to her homework while I unpacked and washed all the new dishes and silverware. I know Monk would have been glad to do the washing for me, but Julie had other plans. She asked him if he’d help her with her homework.

“That’s very nice of you,” Monk said. “But I don’t want to intrude on your fun.”

“You think homework is fun?” Julie said.

“Homework was my second favorite thing about school.”

“What was your favorite?” Julie asked.

“The tests, of course. You know what was almost as much fun? Deducing days in advance exactly when the next surprise ‘pop’ quiz was coming up. The teachers pretended like this irritated them, but it was really their clever way of encouraging me to challenge myself. Boy, does this bring back memories. I used to love aligning the rows of desks each day. Do you ever do that?”

“No,” Julie said.

“You aren’t being aggressive enough,” Monk said.

“I don’t think that’s what it is.”

“The trick is getting to school an hour early, before some other enterprising student beats you to it. Not that anyone ever beat me to it.”

“Are you sure anyone wanted to?”

“Yeah, right. Next thing you’ll tell me nobody competes to get an even-numbered locker. You’re such a kidder.” Monk turned to me. “Isn’t she a kidder?”

“She’s a kidder,” I said. “And a josher.”

“So,” Monk asked her, “what are you studying tonight?”

“A bunch of stuff. But there’s something I thought you might know a few things about,” Julie said. “In Life Sciences, we’re learning about infectious diseases.”

“You’re talking to the right man,” Monk said, reaching for her Life Sciences textbook. “When I was in junior high, I taught the teacher a few things about the subject.”

“I’m not surprised.” She opened the book and pointed to a page. “We’re doing this project tomorrow.”

Monk read it aloud. “ ‘Everyone in class should shake hands with two people and record their names—’ ” He stopped midsentence. “How can they put children through this? Don’t they realize how dangerous it is? Didn’t they send home permission slips for this?”

“Uh, no,” Julie said. “Why should they?”

“Why? Why?” Monk turned to me. “Tell her.”

“It sounds innocent enough to me,” I said.

“It does? Well, you won’t think so after you hear this.” Monk read again from the textbook: “ ‘Now shake hands with two different people, take their names, then shake hands with two more.’ What kind of teachers are these? Are they insane? I suppose they tell the kids to run around the classroom with scissors, too.”

“It’s just a practical exercise that teaches kids how diseases are spread,” I said.

“By having them spread diseases themselves?” Monk said. “What’s next? Having the kids drink cyanide-laced fruit juice to see how poison works? I can’t imagine how they teach sex education.”

“I have an idea.” Julie took the book from Monk and closed it. “How about if you quiz me for the test instead? Here are some of the questions.”

She handed Monk a piece of paper.

“I hope you plan on bringing extra gloves and disinfectant wipes to school tomorrow,” Monk said.

“Extra?” she said.

“You do take gloves and disinfectant wipes to school, don’t you?”

Behind Monk’s back, I nodded vigorously to Julie, and she got the message.

“Yes, of course, who doesn’t?” she said. “I just thought what I usually bring would be more than enough. So are you going to quiz me?”

Monk sighed with relief, nodded, and glanced at the paper. “Okay, here goes. What are pathogens?”

“Organisms that cause disease,” Julie answered, a confident smile on her face.

“Wrong,” Monk said.

Her smile faded. “That’s the right answer. I know it is.”

“The correct answer is everything.”

“Everything?”

“All organisms cause disease. Name four sources of pathogens.”

Julie bit her lip, thought for a moment, then ticked off the answers one by one on her fingers. “Another person, a contaminated object, an animal bite, and the environment.”

“Wrong,” Monk said. “The correct answer is everything.”

“Everything?”

“The entire world is a pathogen. Next question: What are the four major groups of pathogens?”

Julie tapped her fingers on the table. “Um, viruses, bacteria, fungi, and protists.”

“Wrong,” Monk said. “The correct answer is—”

“Everything,” Julie interrupted.

“Correct.” Monk smiled and handed the paper back to her. “You’re going to ace this test.”

“But what about the other study questions?”

“There’s only one answer for all of them.”

“Everything?”

Monk nodded. “Life is simpler than you think.”

Julie finished her homework and went to her room to IM her friends. I put away everything, expecting Monk to join me at any moment to lecture me on the proper arrangement of pots and pans or something, but he didn’t show.

The phone rang. It was Joe.

“We didn’t get a chance to talk when you came by,” Joe said. “And then you went across the street and didn’t come back. I kept waiting for you to come back.”

“Oh,” I said. Brilliant answer, huh?

There was an awkward silence, the likes of which I hadn’t experienced since high school.

“You missed all the excitement,” Joe said. “A bunch of people from the city engineer’s office and the Public Utilities department were here. Turns out Dumas has a tunnel under his house to the sewer and another one from the sewer into our basement.”

“I know; Mr. Monk was the one who figured it out,” I said. “Dumas has been digging up Roderick Turlock’s treasure of stolen gold coins.”

“Did he kill Sparky?”

“Afraid not,” I said. “Mr. Monk is still working on that one.”

“What about the mystery of your disappearing panties? Are you having any luck with that one?”

I almost said he could help me solve that mystery himself, but caught myself in time. Instead I said, “I’m really looking forward to seeing you Wednesday night.”

I supposed that could have been interpreted as conveying almost the same thought as what I didn’t say, but not so brazenly.

I don’t know how he interpreted it, because suddenly I heard the fire alarm bell go off at the station.

“Me, too, Natalie. I’ve got to run,” Joe said.

“Be careful,” I said, and we hung up.

My heart was racing, but for a whole lot of different reasons. One, I was excited. Two, I was nervous. And three, I was terrified, and not about our date. It was that alarm. It meant Joe was going to be rushing off to some fire. I knew that was what he did for a living—he was Firefighter Joe, after all—but the thought of him charging into some inferno made me queasy. I hadn’t felt that kind of queasiness since Mitch used to go off on his tours of duty. I felt it every time until the one mission when he didn’t return.

I went down the hall on my way to my room and walked past the open door of the guest room. I saw Monk lying on his bed, staring at the ceiling, his arms folded across his chest as if he were resting in a coffin.

I went into his room and sat on the edge of the bed. “Are you okay, Mr. Monk?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting,” he said.

“For what?”

“The facts to fall into place.”

“Is that what they do?”

“Generally,” he said, sighing.

“And you just wait.”

He sat up and leaned back against the head-board. “What’s frustrating about these murders is how simple they are. We know how they were done and we even know who did them. The challenge is finding evidence where none appears to exist.”

“You’ve had bigger challenges than this before,” I said. “You’ll figure it out.”

“This is different,” Monk said. “I usually have a lot more space to think.”

“Space?”

“I start and end my day in an empty house. There aren’t any people or distractions. Everything is in its place. Everything is in order. All that’s left is just me and my thoughts, and sometimes my LEGOs. And that’s when the facts of a case fall naturally into place, and the ones that don’t point me to the solution of the mystery.”

“And that’s not happening now,” I said.

“I’m still waiting.”

In other words, our messy house and our messier lives were too much for him. He longed for the peace, solitude, and sterility of his house. He was homesick. And my house was about as unlike his as it was possible to get.

“Would you like me to find you a hotel room, Mr. Monk?” I tried to make the offer as nicely as possible, so he wouldn’t think I was angry or offended, which I wasn’t.

“No, of course not,” he said. “This is great.”

At first I thought he was being dishonest, but then I wondered if, compared to the alternatives, staying with us really wasn’t so bad.

A hotel could be even worse. Maybe he’d hear the TV next door, or a couple making love upstairs, or kids playing in the room below. Even if he didn’t hear anything, maybe just knowing so many people were in the building would be enough to distract him. Or, worse, what if he couldn’t stop thinking of the hundreds of people who’d stayed in his room, slept in his bed, and used the bathroom? And if that wasn’t enough stuff to distract him, what about the horror of mismatched wallpaper?

Compared to all of that, our guest room must have felt like a padded cell—in a good way, if there is such a thing.

So what he was really talking about was me and Julie. We were the ones creating all the distraction.

I got up from the bed. “I’ll leave you alone to your thinking.”

“No, no, I’ll go with you,” he said, getting up.

“But what about all those facts that need to fall into place?”

“They’ll fall later,” Monk said. “The problem with having so much space is that I never get a chance to help someone with their homework.”

I smiled to myself. As afraid as he was of human contact, it was nice to know that even Adrian Monk still needed it.

14

Mr. Monk and the Rainy Day

When I got up at six on Tuesday, Monk was already showered, shaved, and dressed, and the bathroom tub was clean enough to perform surgery in. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he spent the night in the bathroom just to make sure he got to it first. If so, it’s a good thing neither Julie nor I got up in the middle of the night to pee.

The three of us had Chex cereal for breakfast in our brand-new bowls and swapped sections of the Chronicle among ourselves. There was an article on a back page about a warehouse fire last night, and how the roof caved in and sent two firefighters to the hospital. My throat went dry. Could that have been the fire Joe was called to? What if he was one of the firefighters who was hurt?

It was seven thirty, too early to call the fire station, unless I wanted to wake everyone up. I’d call later. Or maybe it would be better, I thought, to call now.

I was yanked out of my worries by the sound of a car horn outside, signaling that Julie’s ride to school had arrived.

Julie shoved all her books into her backpack, grabbed her sack lunch, and was heading out the door when I stopped her.

“Don’t forget your raincoat,” I said, taking it off the coat tree by the door.

She hated wearing her raincoat. She would rather get soaked from head to toe. The thing is, just a year earlier she had needed that raincoat more than anything else on earth. It was what everyone was wearing, and without it she would have been shamed out of adolescent society. The raincoat cost $100 at Nordstrom, but I found one for less than half that much on eBay. It was probably stolen, or a knockoff, but it saved Julie from disgrace, and she wore it every day, whether there were clouds in the sky or not. And then something happened, some great cosmic shift in society and culture. Raincoats were out; getting drenched was in.

“Mom,” she whined. “Do I have to?”

“There’s a sixty percent chance of rain,” I said. “Just take it with you. It’s better to be prepared.”

“So I get wet,” she said. “Big deal.”

“Take it,” I said.

“It’s only water,” she said. “It’s not like it’s acid.”

I didn’t have the time or patience to argue. I unzipped her backpack, rolled her raincoat into a ball, and shoved the raincoat inside.

“You’ll thank me later,” I said.

“You sound like him.” She motioned to Monk. It wasn’t meant as a compliment.

I was about to scold her for her rudeness, but he didn’t notice her disrespectful behavior. He was sitting straight up in his chair, lost in thought, and shrugging his shoulders as if neither one fit in its socket quite right.

Julie marched off and slammed the door behind her, but by that point her drama was wasted on me. I was watching Monk. I knew what all that shifting around in the chair meant—the facts were falling into place.

He knew what Breen left behind.

And I couldn’t help noticing that his breakthrough didn’t happen in some blissfully sterile environment of solitude, cleanliness, and order. It happened in my messy kitchen in the midst of a typical breakfast-table squabble between a sane, reasonable, rational mother and her deranged, unreasonable, irrational daughter.

“Do you have a computer with an Internet connection?” Monk said.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s not like we live in a cave.”

I regretted the comment right away, because I knew he’d take it as a dig. I didn’t mean it to be one; I just forgot for a moment that Monk doesn’t have an Internet connection at his house. He’s afraid of catching a computer virus, which is also why he doesn’t have a computer.

I went back to my room, got my laptop, and brought it to the kitchen table. I have a technogeek neighbor who designs Web sites for a living out of his apartment. He took pity on us and let us piggyback on his wireless network to use his high-speed connection. I was up and running and surfing the Net in seconds.

“What do you need?” I asked Monk.

“Can you get me detailed information on what the weather in San Francisco was like on Friday night?”

That was too easy. I was hoping for something a little more challenging so I could show off my Web-surfing prowess.

I quickly Googled my way to a site that tracked weather patterns, zeroed in on Friday night in San Francisco, and showed Monk his options. He could check out the temperature, rainfall, humidity, dew point, wind speed, direction, and chill. He could peruse satellite photos, Doppler radar, and 3-D animated views of the fog patterns and the movement of the jet stream.

“Can you show me when it was raining, hour by hour?” Monk said.

It wasn’t as impressive as watching the fog roll in and out in 3-D, but sure, I said, I could show him the rainfall, which was tracked in a straightforward graph. Bor-ing. The least they could have done was jazz it up with a few animated rain-drops rolling down the screen.

“Look,” he said excitedly. “There was intermittent drizzle and rain until about nine thirty, then it let up until about two A.M.”

How thrilling, I thought. But what I said instead was something along the lines of, “What does it mean?”

“I’ll show you,” Monk said. “Could you search the Web and bring up the photos of Lucas Breen taken at the ‘Save the Bay’ fund-raiser that Disher showed us?”

I did a quick Google search that gathered about a dozen photos from the “Save the Bay” home page, various newspaper Web sites, and a couple of snarky gossip blogs (one of which speculated that Mrs. Breen’s trip to Europe the morning after the party was for “another facial refreshening” at a plastic surgery resort in Switzerland).

The photos were the same ones we had seen before of Breen arriving at the Excelsior in the rain with his wife and then the two of them leaving at midnight with the governor.

Monk pointed to the screen. “When Breen arrived, it was raining. You can see that he’s huddled under his umbrella and wearing an overcoat.”

Then Monk pointed to the picture of the Breens leaving the party. “But here, his umbrella is closed under his arm and he’s not wearing his overcoat.”

“Because it’s not raining anymore.”

“So where’s his coat? Why isn’t he carrying it?”

Good question. In light of everything that happened, I could think only of one answer.

“He left it in Esther Stoval’s house,” I said.

“According to the weather report, we know it didn’t stop raining until nine thirty, so he must have been wearing his overcoat when he slipped out of the hotel to see Esther,” Monk said. “She probably asked him to take it off and hang it up when he came in. Then they talked for a minute or two.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because of where her body was found. She was sitting on the far corner of the coach, facing the chair where he sat,” Monk said. “She said or did something that provoked him. He flew out of the chair and smothered her with the pillow. After that, all that was on Breen’s mind was covering up the crime, staging the fire, and getting out of that house as fast as possible. It wasn’t raining when he left, so he probably didn’t realize he’d forgotten his overcoat until he was halfway back to the hotel.”

Which would have put him right smack in front of the empty fire station.

“Breen couldn’t risk the possibility that any part of his coat might survive the fire,” Monk said. “If it was like the rest of his wardrobe, it was handmade and had monogrammed buttons. It would point right back to him. He had to go back and get it.”

I bet it was while Breen was standing in front of the fire station, staring in panic at the empty garage, that he came up with the bright idea of how to save himself. When he ran in to get the gear, I’m sure the last thing he expected was that some barking, snarling dog would come charging at him. Wasn’t it enough that he left his coat behind? Did fate have to add a dog to his misery, too?

But Breen survived unscathed, and things went much smoother after that. He slipped into the burning house in his firefighting gear unnoticed by the other firemen, snatched his overcoat, and got out again. He returned the firefighting gear to the station without being seen and without having to fight off any more ferocious animals.

He must have thought the worst was over. And then he got mugged.

Unbelievable. His luck was so bad, I might have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t killed a woman and a dog and if he weren’t such a pompous jerk. Despite all his incredible misfortune, he made it back to the party without being missed. I’m sure he went straight to the bar and knocked back a few. I would have.

It was hardly the perfect murder, but I doubt anybody would ever have known what he did if it weren’t for a twelve-year-old kid hiring a detective to find out who killed a dog.

But I was getting ahead of myself. Breen wasn’t caught yet. We didn’t have enough evidence. We didn’t have the coat.

“So assuming he got his overcoat back,” I said, “what did he do with it?”

“We have to assume the overcoat was burned or damaged by the smoke and that he ditched it somewhere between Esther’s house and the hotel.”

“What about Lizzie Draper’s house?”

Monk shook his head. “Too risky. What if she stumbled on the overcoat before he had a chance to get rid of it? He wouldn’t want her, or anybody else, to be able to connect him to the fire. He ditched it somewhere else, somewhere between the fire station and the hotel.”

Then I knew where we should start looking.

I had an ulterior motive for wanting to start at the fire station. For one thing, I didn’t want to pay for parking at the Excelsior. For another, I wanted an excuse to drop by and see if Joe was okay.

But when we got to the station, it was empty. They were out responding to a call.

“I’m sure he’s okay,” Monk said. We were standing outside the firehouse.

“Who?”

“Firefighter Joe. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

“No, we’re here to retrace Breen’s steps and look for places where he might have ditched the overcoat.”

“That would be the hard way,” Monk said. “I called Disher before we left the house and asked him to see if the mugger remembers whether Breen was carrying an overcoat or not.”

“Then we didn’t have to come all the way down here,” I said. “We could have waited at home to hear from Disher.”

Monk nodded. “But you wanted to check on Firefighter Joe ever since you read about the warehouse fire in the paper this morning.”

“How did you know?”

“You never read past that article,” Monk said. “And the whole time we were talking, you kept looking furtively at the phone, debating with yourself whether it was still too early to call.”

Sometimes I forget that Monk is a detective. I also forget that when he’s not being the single most irritating person on the planet, he can be a very sweet man.

“Thank you,” I said.

My cell phone rang. It was Disher.

“We had to make a deal with Marlon Tolliver to get Monk the information he wanted,” he said.

“Who is Marlon Tolliver?”

“Your mugger. He got himself a pretty good public defender. We had to agree to drop the assault-with-a-deadly-weapon charge against him in return for his testimony about his dealings with Lucas Breen.”

“So he gets away with putting a knife to my throat?”

“To get him to talk, we had to give him something, and that was all we had,” Disher said. “It was the best we could do without you here crushing his cojones.”

“I’ll be glad to come down and do it,” I said.

“The deal is done, and here’s what he told us,” Disher said. “Breen was holding his overcoat when Tolliver mugged him.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Could you do me a favor?”

“Of course; that’s why I’m here, to do all of Monk’s legwork for him.”

“This is a favor for me,” I said.

“You want me to knee Tolliver in the cojones for you?”

“There was a warehouse fire last night and some firefighters were hurt. Is there some way you could find out if one of them was Joe Cochran?”

“No problem,” Disher said. “I’ll call you back as soon as I know something.”

I thanked Disher and told Monk the news. “Breen still had the coat when he was in the alley outside the hotel.”

“Then that’s where he ditched it,” Monk said. “Somewhere in the alley.”

We walked to the hotel. It was faster than finding another parking spot and cheaper, too. We passed a few homeless people who, after seeing us the other day, knew better than to ask Monk for a handout. I was glad we didn’t run into the guy who had flipped me off.

The streets were crowded with people, but I still approached the alley cautiously, just in case there was another mugger hiding in the darkness. Monk was also being cautious, only for different reasons. He was trying very hard not to step in anything dirty, which isn’t easy in a filthy, smelly alley.

We walked slowly, looking for places where Breen might have disposed of the overcoat. It soon became obvious to both of us that there was really only one place he could have stashed it out of sight—in one of the trash bins near the hotel service exit.

Without saying anything to Monk first, I climbed up on one of the Dumpsters. Monk freaked out.

“Step away from the Dumpster,” Monk said. “Very slowly.”

I stayed where I was. “It’s a Dumpster, Mr. Monk. Not a bomb.”

“Don’t be a hero, Natalie. Leave it for the professionals.”

“I’m not an expert in police procedure, but I don’t think Captain Stottlemeyer is going to be able to get a forensics team down here to search this Dumpster based only on your hunch.”

“I’m not talking about the crime-scene investigators; they aren’t equipped to handle a situation like this,” Monk said. “This requires professionals who deal with garbage every day.”

“You want me to call a garbage man?”

“That’s a pejorative and sexist term. They really prefer ‘sanitation technician.’ ”

“How do you know?”

“I talk to them,” Monk said.

“You do? Why?”

“They’re people, too, you know.”

“Who hang around with garbage,” I said. “I’d think you’d want to be as far away from them as possible when they show up.”

“I take precautions,” Monk said. “Gloves, surgical mask, goggles. But I have to be there to supervise.”

“You supervise your trash collection? Why?”

“I have special needs.”

“Believe me, I know, but what does that have to do with your trash?”

“I have to make sure my trash isn’t being mixed with the other trash,” Monk said.

“Why? What terrible thing could possibly happen?”

“It could get dirty.”

“It’s trash, Mr. Monk. It’s all dirty, even yours.”

“No, mine is clean dirty,” Monk said.

“Clean dirty,” I said. “What is that?”

“For one thing, each of my discarded items is placed in an individual airtight bag before being put in the mother bag.”

“So it won’t get the other trash in the ‘mother bag’ dirty.”

“Not everyone is as conscientious as I am,” Monk said. “It’s the sad truth.”

“But your bags get tossed in the back of the truck with everybody else’s trash anyway.”

Monk shook his head. “My bags ride up front with the drivers.”

“It doesn’t make a lot of difference in the end,” I said. “It still goes to the dump.”

“My garbage goes in zone nine.”

“Your trash has its own zone?”

“All the really clean trash goes there.”

I groaned, handed him my purse, and climbed up the rest of the way onto the trash bin.

“Wait, wait,” Monk protested. “You’re exposing yourself.”

I stopped. “Are my pants riding down on my butt?”

“Hell, no,” Monk said.

“Then what am I exposing?”

“You’re exposing your body to deadly toxins,” Monk said. “You haven’t had your shots. You aren’t wearing gloves. You aren’t using a respirator. It’s suicidal.”

“Mr. Monk, I’m only going to lift the lid,” I said.

“And God only knows what you’ll release into the atmosphere,” Monk said. “If you’re not going to think about yourself, think of humanity, think of your daughter, but most of all, think of me.”

I lifted the lid. Monk screamed and leaped away as if he expected the Dumpster to explode, spraying its shrapnel of decaying food, broken glass, old shoes, and soiled diapers all over him. It didn’t.

I looked inside. The bin was nearly empty, with only a few bulging “mother bags” of trash at the bottom. I knew that couldn’t have been all the garbage the hotel had tossed since Friday. I slid along to the end of the bin and climbed over to the next one. I lifted the lid. It was empty. So was the next one.

If the overcoat had been in one of the bins, it was gone now, along with any hope we had of proving Lucas Breen was guilty of murder.

I looked over my shoulder for Monk, but he wasn’t behind me anymore. He was standing on the street twenty yards away, holding a handkerchief over his nose and mouth.

I had to yell the bad news to him.

“We’re too late,” I said.

15

Mr. Monk Visits His Trash

It took me thirty minutes to convince Monk it wasn’t necessary for him to call a hazardous materials emergency response team to come and decontaminate me, the alley, and the rest of the block.

But to do that, I had to assure him I was clean, which meant I had to wipe my hands and face with Wet Ones about fifty times, and use the hotel restroom to brush my teeth, wash out my eyes with Visine, and clean my sinuses with nose spray.

Even then, as we drove to the city dump, Monk sat as far away from me in the car as he could without riding outside on the luggage rack.

All of the city’s nonrecyclable garbage is taken to the San Francisco Solid Waste Transfer Center, which is a fancy way of saying “a garbage dump with a roof over it.” The trash is collected there until it can be transported by bigger trucks to the Altamont Landfill in Livermore, about sixty miles east of San Francisco.

The transfer center is an enormous hangar-like building next door to Candlestick Park, which these days is called Monster Park, and not because it’s an amusement park full of dinosaurs. It’s also not named after the killer winds that swoop in off the bay—the winds that blew Giants pitcher Stu Miller off the mound during the 1961 All-star game and that tossed the entire batting cage into center field during a New York Mets practice. Nor is the stadium named for the fact that it’s upwind from an enclosed garbage dump.

It’s named for Monster Cable, some company that makes computer cables and paid the city millions of dollars for the right to plaster their name on the stadium. I think the city should have also let the cable company put their name on the transfer station at no charge. They could’ve called it “Monster Dump,” since that’s what it smelled like and since the name is a lot catchier than “San Francisco Solid Waste Transfer Center.”

It’s a testament to Monk’s determination to get Breen that we were there at all. You know what his reaction was when I merely lifted the lid of a trash bin, and now here he was at the heart of darkness itself—the city dump.

Monk didn’t want to get out of the car. He just sat in his seat, staring in horror at the enormous warehouse and the line of trash trucks going in and out of the building. So I had to call Chad Grimsley, the facility supervisor, and ask him to come out and meet us.

Ten minutes later, Grimsley scooted out of the warehouse in a golf cart. He was a thin, little man with a trim goatee, and he wore a yellow hard hat that seemed five sizes too big for his head.

Grimsley pulled the golf cart right up to the passenger’s side of the car. Monk rolled down the window a quarter of an inch and held a handkerchief to his face.

“I’m Adrian Monk and this is my assistant, Natalie Teeger.” Monk motioned to me in the driver’s seat. I waved at Grimsley. “We’re working with the police on a murder investigation. I’d like to talk to you about a trash pickup outside of the Excelsior hotel.”

“Your assistant mentioned that on the phone,” Grimsley said. “Why don’t you come up to my office and we can discuss it?”

“I’d rather not,” Monk said.

“I can assure you it’s perfectly safe to step out of your car,” Grimsley said. “You don’t even notice the smell after a few minutes.”

“You don’t notice radiation either,” Monk said. “But it’s still killing you.”

Grimsley looked past Monk to me. I shrugged.

“The trash in the neighborhood around the Excelsior was picked up at approximately seven this morning,” Grimsley said.

“Where would it be now?” Monk asked.

Grimsley pointed to the warehouse. “In there. It was dumped about two hours ago.”

Monk showed Grimsley one of the pictures of Breen wearing his overcoat that we’d printed out before we left the house.

“We’re looking for this overcoat. If you could grab it for us, put it in an airtight bag, and bring it out here, we’d appreciate it.”

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple. It really would be better if I could show you.” Grimsley pointed to the office building adjacent to the transfer station. “Those are the executive offices. You could drive right up to the lobby door and run inside. It’s only about five feet from the curb to the door so you can hold your breath the whole way.”

Monk closed his eyes and nodded to me. I drove up as close to the lobby doors as I could get. He took a deep breath, opened the door, and ran into the lobby.

I got out, met Grimsley at the door, and walked in. We took the stairs up to Grimsley’s office on the fifth floor. One entire wall of his office was a window that allowed him to look over the transfer station floor.

The warehouse was the size of several airplane hangars and was dominated by a mountain of trash that dwarfed the trucks emptying their loads and continuously adding to its bulk. Tractors loaded the trash into a complex maze of conveyor belts that sorted and fed the garbage out to larger, long-haul trucks that lined the far end of the facility.

“Twenty-one hundred tons of solid waste pass through this station every day,” Grimsley said. “It takes one hundred ten trips per day to move it all from here to the Altamont Landfill.”

“I see,” Monk said weakly, putting his hands against the window to steady himself. The sight of so much garbage was making him dizzy. “And where is zone nine?”

“Zone nine?”

“Where you keep the special trash.”

“Recyclables go to a separate facility; so does construction and demolition debris.”

“I’m talking about the zone for the really clean trash. Like mine,” Monk said. “I’d like to visit my trash.”

Grimsley motioned to the mountain of garbage. “That’s the only zone we’ve got. Be my guest.”

Monk blanched. He looked like a child who’d just found out there was no such thing as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy all at once.

“You mix all the trash together?” Monk said in disbelief.

“As it comes in, we just dump the new on top of the old,” Grimsley said.

“My God,” Monk muttered.

“So where could we find the trash that was picked up from the Excelsior?” I asked.

“On the leading edge of the pile, right in front here,” he said. “It’s still early, so your overcoat may only be under twenty or thirty tons of solid waste at the moment.”

“Twenty or thirty tons?” Monk said.

“You’re very lucky,” Grimsley said.

I asked Grimsley if he could reroute the rest of the trash deliveries to another end of the facility and essentially lock off the twenty or thirty tons where the overcoat might be buried until they could be searched. He said he could.

We left Grimsley’s office and went downstairs in silence. Monk was in a daze, so much so that he didn’t ask for a single wipe after leaving the office. He didn’t say a word on the way to the police station, either. It was a nice break and gave me a chance to worry about Joe without any distractions.

I don’t know what unsettled Monk the most; the discovery that his trash was mixed with everybody else’s, or the realization that the key piece of evidence he needed was buried somewhere under tons of garbage.

I tried to reach the captain at the station, but was told that he and Disher were at the scene of a homicide on Mount Sutro. The officer manning the phones knew Monk and me, so he gave us an address on Lawton Street and that’s where we headed.

The rows of tightly packed apartments clung to the wooded slopes of Mount Sutro like mussels on a wharf piling, a tide of thick fog lapping up against them. As we wound up Lawton, the street curved and I glimpsed the massive base of Sutro Tower above the roofline in a shadowy blur that could just as easily have been a mirage.

The three-story apartment buildings climbed the mountain in steps, forming a stucco corridor through the trees, with the forest on one side and the cliff on the other. A dozen police vehicles were parked in front of one of the buildings, creating a bottleneck on the narrow street, not that it really mattered. We were the only traffic on the road, if you don’t count the squirrel that leisurely crossed in front of us.

I found a space two blocks up from the crush of police cars and we walked downhill to the apartment building where Stottlemeyer and Disher were working a murder investigation.

The building was a charmless, architecturally featureless block of human cubbyholes constructed in the seventies to provide basic shelter and a view of the asphalt flatlands of the Sunset District and, on the rare clear day, the Pacific Ocean beyond.

The activity was in a spartan, ground-floor apartment with a view of the building across the street. I couldn’t see the point of living way out here, away from everything, for the opportunity to look out the window at another generic apartment.

The interior was every bit as bland and unremarkable as the exterior. A subdivided, eight-hundred-square-foot box. Off-white walls. Off-white countertops in the kitchen. Off-white linoleum on the floors. Brown carpet. White popcorn ceilings.

The victim was a man in his forties, who was now lying faceup on the entry-hall floor with a neat little bullet hole through the Ralph Lauren logo on his blue dress shirt. He went into the afterlife in a state of astonishment at his demise, his dead eyes still wide-open in permanent surprise.

I’m not a detective by any stretch, but even I could tell by where the body had fallen that he was shot by whoever was behind the door when he answered it. There was a crocheted pillow discarded beside his body with a hole blasted through the center, the cotton stuffing frosting the dead man like snow.

Simply walking into the crime scene seemed to revive Monk, snapping him out of his garbage-induced stupor. Seeing the corpse had the opposite effect on me. I didn’t shut down, but I felt awkward and depressed. Awkward because I didn’t really belong there and I didn’t have anything to contribute and I was always in the way. Depressed because there was a dead body in front of me and, even though I didn’t know him, anytime I see a corpse I can’t help thinking that whoever he was and whatever he did, someone loved him. The dead always reminded me of Mitch and of the suffering I felt when I lost him.

But I felt something else this time, too. Fear. It was like a barely audible hum, but it was there. It was irrational, of course. The killer was long gone and I was surrounded by armed police officers. But the atmosphere in the room was still electrified by the recent violence.

Maybe my fear was a visceral, instinctive reaction to the smell of blood, to the scent of cordite. Murder was in the air, and every one of my receptors, physical and psychological, was picking up on it.

Between my awkwardness, my sadness, and my fear, I was feeling pretty uncomfortable. I wanted to run right back to the car, lock the doors, and turn up the radio until the music drowned out what I was feeling.

But I didn’t. I soldiered on. Brave and stalwart, that’s me.

The officer at the door told us that Stottlemeyer and Disher were in the bedroom. As we made our way through the apartment, Monk stopped to study the body, examine the matching living room and dining room sets, and squint at the framed prints on the wall. I felt like I was in a hotel room instead of someone’s apartment.

Stottlemeyer was standing in front of the open closet, where four perfectly pressed pairs of slacks and four matching Ralph Lauren shirts were hanging.

Disher was in the bathroom looking at the medicine cabinet, which was filled with wrapped bars of soap, shaving cream, cologne, and razors.

“Hey, Monk, what brings you down here?” Stottlemeyer said.

“I think we may have a breakthrough in the Breen case,” Monk said.

“That’s great; tell me about it later,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’m busy here.”

“What do you think happened?” I asked him. Now that we were away from the body, I was feeling a little better. I could almost forget someone was murdered here. Almost.

“Looks to me like a professional hit,” Stottlemeyer said. “The dead man is Arthur Lemkin, a stockbroker. Maybe he was skimming funds or somebody didn’t like the way he invested their money. There’s a knock at the door; Lemkin opens it and gets popped. Nobody heard a thing. The hit man used a small-caliber gun and a pillow to muffle the shot. Very slick, very simple.”

“We need your help,” Monk said.

“Monk, can’t you see I’m working a crime scene here? One murder at a time, okay?”

Monk shook his head. “This really can’t wait.” “This was a guy you would have liked, Monk,” Disher said, emerging from the bathroom and leaving the medicine cabinet open behind him. “He kept himself real clean and wore identical shirts every day. And have you seen the rest of his apartment? Everything matches, all nice and symmetrical.”

“Not really. The paintings on the wall aren’t quite the same size.” Monk turned to Stottlemeyer. “Captain, please, all I need is for you to take a few minutes to listen to what I have to say and then a few more minutes to make a phone call or two.”

“I need to gather the evidence here while it’s fresh,” Stottlemeyer said. “You know how important the first few hours in an investigation are. Give me a couple of hours and then we can talk, but not now.”

“His wife killed him,” Monk said. “Now can we move on?”

Stottlemeyer froze. We all did.

“You’ve just solved the murder,” said Stottlemeyer in such a way that it managed to be a statement and question at the same time.

“I know I should have solved it five minutes ago, but I’m a little off my game. I’ve had a rough morning,” Monk said. “You know how it is.”

“No, Monk, I don’t,” he said wearily. “I wish I did, but I don’t.”

“How do you know his wife did it?” Disher asked. “How do you even know Lemkin has a wife?”

“Because he wouldn’t need this love nest if he didn’t,” Monk said.

“Love nest?” Stottlemeyer said.

“It’s a place used only for having affairs with women who are not your wife.”

“I know what a love nest is, Monk. What I don’t know is how you figured out that’s what this is.”

I didn’t know, either.

“All the furniture is rented—that’s why they are matching sets—plus I saw the tags underneath the pieces.”

“You looked underneath the furniture?” Disher said.

“He does that everywhere he goes,” Stottlemeyer said.

I knew that was true. In fact, I’d even seen him do it at my house. There might be something under there and he can’t stand not knowing. What if there is lint building up? The thought was too much for Monk to bear.

“The big clues are the clothes and the toiletries,” Monk said. “Lemkin kept four matching pairs of pants and four shirts in the same color so he could change into fresh, clean clothes after each illicit rendezvous without his wife knowing he’d ever changed clothes. He stocked up on soap and cologne because he was careful to take every precaution to make sure that she’d never smell another woman on him.”

I should learn to trust my own instincts, or at least how to interpret them. From the moment I walked into the apartment, it felt like a hotel room to me. But I hadn’t bothered to think about what had given me that impression. Monk did. He was acutely aware of the things that we took for granted, that we saw without seeing. That was one of the differences between Monk and me. Here’s another: I don’t have to disinfect a water fountain before taking a drink and he does.

“Okay, so he was having affairs,” Stottlemeyer said to Monk. “How do you know it was his wife who shot him and not some outraged husband or spurned lover or a hired killer?”

“All you have to do is look at the body,” Monk said, and headed for the living room.

We all followed him. As soon as I saw the corpse, all my trepidation and discomfort came rushing back, hitting me with a wallop. That low hum of fear increased in volume.

But Monk, Stottlemeyer, and Disher crouched beside the corpse as if it were nothing more significant than another piece of furniture. Whatever I was feeling, they were immune to it.

“Lemkin was shot once in the heart,” Monk said. “Why not the face or the head? He was shot in the heart because of the heart he broke. You can’t ignore the symbolic implications.”

“This isn’t a high school English class,” Disher said. “This symbolism stuff is a stretch even for you.”

“Not when you notice the killer also took Lemkin’s wedding ring,” Monk said, pointing to the band of pale flesh around the victim’s ring finger. “It was obviously for the sentimental value.”

“Or the cash value,” Disher said.

“Then why didn’t the killer take the Rolex, too?” Monk said, motioning to the big gold watch on the victim’s wrist. “There’s more. The killer used a small-caliber gun, traditionally a ‘woman’s weapon.’ And look at what the killer used for a silencer—a crocheted pillow. Something she knitted during all those hours he left her alone to be with other women. The unintended symbolism is practically a confession.”

I was suddenly aware that I was crouching, too. All the awkwardness and discomfort I felt before was gone. In trying to understand Monk’s reasoning, I’d begun to see Lemkin’s corpse the same way that they did: not as a human being, but as a book to be read, a puzzle to be reassembled, a problem to be solved.

“My freshman English teacher was right: The C I got in his class did come back to haunt me.” Stottlemeyer stood up and looked at Disher. “Find Lemkin’s wife, Randy. Charge her with murder one and bring her in.”

“Yes, sir,” Disher said, and hurried out.

Stottlemeyer turned back to Monk and smiled. “So, Monk, what was it you wanted?”

We stepped outside, and Monk spent the next ten minutes explaining to Stottlemeyer how he figured out that we needed to find Lucas Breen’s overcoat and where he thought it might be now.

“You want to search thirty tons of trash for an overcoat that may have been tossed in one of the Excelsior garbage bins,” Stottlemeyer said.

“I’m sure that it was,” Monk said. “If we don’t recover it now, before more trash is added to the pile and it’s all hauled to the landfill, we never will.”

“A search like that is going to require a lot of people and a lot of man-hours. I don’t have the authority to approve that kind of expense. I’ve got to take the request directly to the deputy chief and make a case for it.”

“Can you do that now?” Monk said.

“Sure, it’s not like I’ve got anything on my plate at the moment,” Stottlemeyer said. “You took care of that in the apartment.”

“It was nothing,” Monk said.

“I know,” Stottlemeyer said. “I can’t tell you how inadequate that makes me feel. Sometimes I’m not sure whether to thank you or shoot you.”

“Did you know they don’t have a zone nine?” Stottlemeyer shot a quick glance at me, then looked at Monk and tried to appear genuinely surprised. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I was shocked, too. All the trash just gets mixed together; can you believe it?”

“That’s difficult to imagine,” Stottlemeyer said.

“It’s a breach of the public trust,” Monk said. “There should be an investigation.”

“I’ll be sure to bring that up in my discussion with the deputy chief,” Stottlemeyer said. “Wait for me at the station. I’ll meet you there as soon as I’m done with him.”

16

Mr. Monk Shakes His Groove Thing

We waited in Stottlemeyer’s office. I browsed through a well-thumbed old copy of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue that came with 3-D glasses. It was either that or last month’s Guns and Ammo. Monk busied himself reading the open case files on the captain’s desk.

I put on the 3-D glasses and opened the magazine. Dozens of supermodel breasts burst out of the pages at me like cannonballs. It was startling. I tried to imagine what my breasts would look like in 3-D instead of 1-D. I doubt anybody could tell the difference. There’s nothing remotely D about my bosom.

Disher came into the squad room escorting a handcuffed woman I assumed was Mrs. Lemkin, even though she didn’t look anything like I imagined she would. Since her husband was stepping out on her, and she was spending her time crocheting, I pictured her as a homely, pale woman in a plain dress with her hair pulled back tightly in a bun. But Mrs. Lemkin wasn’t like that at all. She must get out a lot for jogging and aerobics, and she knew how to wear makeup (a skill I’d never mastered). She was clearly proud of her trim body and showed it off in a sleeveless T-shirt and tight jeans, her long black hair tied back in a pony-tail that she looped through the back of a pink Von Dutch baseball cap.

Our eyes met for a moment, and what I saw in hers was pride, anger, and not a hint of remorse.

Disher handed her off to a uniformed officer for booking, then motioned for me to come out to talk with him.

“Was that Mrs. Lemkin?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” Disher said. “We found her sitting at her kitchen table, in front of her laptop, going on an eBay buying binge.”

“What was she bidding on?”

“Porcelain dolls,” Disher said. “Nothing like shopping to ease the pain of gunning down your husband.”

“She didn’t look like she was in much pain to me.”

“Maybe it’s because of the glasses,” he said, motioning to my face.

I had forgotten I was still wearing them. I took them off and grinned to hide my embarrassment. “I was just reading some of the articles in Sports Illustrated.”

“Those glasses certainly help the words spring off the page, don’t they?”

“And a lot of other things too,” I said. “If these glasses worked on all magazines, I bet men would read a lot more.”

“I certainly would,” Disher said. “I meant to tell you back at the crime scene that I did that favor for you. Joe Cochran was one of the firemen who got hurt last night.”

I know this is a cliché, but it felt like my heart dropped down to the floor. I guess people use that expression a lot because that’s the only way to describe what bad news feels like. Tears started to well up in my eyes. Disher must have noticed, because he quickly spoke up again.

“He’s fine, he’s fine,” Disher said. “It was just a mild concussion and a few bruises. They sent him home this morning.”

I was relieved and wiped the unspilled tears from my eyes, but I still felt a tremor of worry. What would happen the next time he ran into a burning building? Would he be so lucky? That was his job, and if I kept seeing him, I would have to get used to it.

“Thank you,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

“By the way,” Disher said, lowering his voice to a whisper and opening his notebook, “his record is clean, no arrests or outstanding warrants, but he does have three unpaid parking tickets. He’s never been married, at least not in this country, but he lived with a woman three years ago. Her name was—”

I interrupted him. “You ran a background check on Joe?”

Disher nodded proudly. “I figured as long as I was checking his health, I’d check out everything else.”

“I don’t want to know about everything else.”

“But everything else is who he is.”

“Which is why he should be the one to tell me about it,” I said. “Or I should discover it for myself.”

“That’s taking a big risk, Natalie. I’ve been burned too many times,” Disher said. “I never go out on a date anymore without knowing everything about a woman.”

“That’s why you don’t go out on dates anymore,” I said. “Every relationship needs a little mystery. Discovery is half of romance.”

“That’s the half I don’t like,” Disher said.

I made him rip out the pages that contained the details of Joe’s past from his notebook and tear them up. Disher wasn’t pleased but I didn’t care. Even though I wasn’t the one who snooped into Joe’s past, I felt guilty for violating his privacy.

Disher looked past me and noticed, for the first time, what Monk was reading. He rushed in and snatched the case files from Monk.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Disher said.

“Passing the time,” Monk said.

“By reading confidential case files of open homicide investigations?”

“You didn’t have the latest issue of Highlights for Children,” Monk said. “You really should renew your subscription.”

“We never had one,” Disher said.

“I love to spot the hidden objects in the drawings,” Monk said to me. “It keeps me sharp.”

Disher started to put the files back on the desk one by one.

“Wait,” Monk said and pointed at the file in Disher’s hand. “The gardener.”

“What?” Disher said.

“The gardener is the killer,” Monk said. “Trust me on this.”

“Okay, we’ll keep that in mind,” Disher said dismissively, set the file down and started to put down the next one.

“The mother-in-law,” Monk said.

“You read the file just once and you know that for a fact?”

“Definitely the mother-in-law,” Monk said. “It’s a no-brainer.”

Disher set another file on the desk.

“The twin brother,” Monk said.

And another.

“The shoe-shine man.”

And another.

“The bike messenger.”

Disher plunked down the rest of the stack on the desk all at once.

“The beekeeper, the long-lost aunt, and the podiatrist,” Monk said in a rush. “You dropped a file.”

Disher bent down and picked it up.

“The nearsighted jogger,” Monk said. “He couldn’t possibly have seen the woman in the window. He wasn’t wearing his glasses.”

“I hope you were taking notes,” Stottlemeyer said as he entered the office with a scowl on his face.

“Didn’t have to,” Disher said, tapping his forehead. “It’s all right here.”

“Write it down,” Stottlemeyer said.

Disher nodded, took out his notebook, and started writing.

“How did it go with the deputy chief?” Monk asked.

“It didn’t,” Stottlemeyer said. “He won’t let me authorize the search.”

“Why not?” Monk asked.

“Because he doesn’t think we have a case,” Stottlemeyer said. “In fact, I’ve been ordered to stop harassing Breen, a respected member of the Police Commission, with baseless and offensive accusations. I’ve been told to start looking in other directions.”

“He got to them,” Monk said.

“Big-time,” Stottlemeyer agreed, then looked up at Disher. “Randy, have the crime lab go down to the firehouse and check the firefighting gear on the off chance they might find Breen’s fingerprints or DNA remaining on whatever coat, helmet, boots, or gloves he borrowed.”

“Sir, we don’t even know which ones Breen used.”

“I’m aware of that,” Stottlemeyer said. “But we can at least eliminate the ones that the on-duty firemen were wearing the night of the fire.”

“But another shift has come on since then, so there’s a good chance that all the gear has been used and cleaned more than once since the murder.”

“I didn’t say it was going to be easy. It’s a long shot and a hell of a lot of work, but that’s how you, and me, and everybody who isn’t Adrian Monk break cases. It takes sweat and dogged determination.”

Monk stood up. “Lucas Breen killed Esther Stoval and Sparky the dog. If we don’t find that overcoat, Breen will get away with murder. Captain, we have to search that garbage.”

“I can’t,” Stottlemeyer said. “But there’s nothing stopping you from searching the trash.”

“Yes, there is,” Monk said. “There’s me.”

“My hands are tied. Of course, all of that could change if you were to stumble on, say, a scorched overcoat that belongs to Lucas Breen.”

“It could take us weeks to go through all that garbage,” I said.

“I’d really like to help; you know that. But I can’t,” Stottlemeyer said. “You’re on your own.”

Before we left Stottlemeyer’s office, I shamed the captain into calling Grimsley at the dump and asking him to hold the thirty tons of trash for a couple of days so we’d have a chance to search it. Stottlemeyer was careful, though, to say it wasn’t an official request but more along the lines of a personal favor.

Grimsley said he was he was glad to do whatever he could to help the police in their investigation.

But we weren’t ready to go out to the dump that afternoon. Monk had an appointment with his shrink, Dr. Kroger. Facing the likelihood of having to dig around in a mountain of trash, Monk really needed some help with his anxieties, so canceling the session was out of the question.

I had some anxieties of my own. I don’t have Monk’s aversion to germs, but I certainly wasn’t looking forward to spending a day wading in other people’s garbage.

I called Chad Grimsley and told him we’d be out in the morning.

While Monk was having his session, I waited outside the building and gave Joe a call at home. He answered on the first ring, his voice full of energy and good cheer.

“How can you sound so peppy after a burning warehouse collapsed on your head?”

“It’s just another day at the office,” he said.

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

“You’re doing it,” he said. “How’s your investigation going?”

I told him the broad strokes, but I left out Lucas Breen’s name and occupation. I didn’t want Joe doing something stupid like beating the crap out of Breen.

My subtle omission of key details wasn’t lost on Joe. “You’ve neglected to mention the name of the guy who killed Sparky and who belongs to that overcoat.”

“I did,” I said.

“You don’t trust me?”

“Nope,” I said. “But I mean that in the nicest possible way.”

“What happens if you don’t find that overcoat?”

“The killer gets away with killing Sparky and the old lady.”

“If that happens,” Joe said, “will you tell me his name then?”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You’re a smart lady,” he said. “And pretty, too. Are we still on for tomorrow night?”

“I am if you are,” I said, “And if you don’t mind being with someone who has spent the day in thirty tons of garbage.”

“Stop,” Joe said. “You’re getting me all excited.”

I laughed and so did he. It had been a long time since I’d met a man who made me laugh with him instead of at him. Even so, I felt a tickle of anxiety in my chest as I flashed on the image of him charging into a fire.

It’s just another day at the office.

We agreed to meet at my house the next night for our date, and then we said our good-byes.

I parked the Jeep in the driveway. Monk and I got out and saw Mrs. Throphamner on the other side of my low fence. She was in her backyard, kneeling on a rubber pad in the wet mud, toiling over her patch of vibrant roses. They were blooming, and the fragrance was overwhelming.

“Your roses are beautiful,” I told her.

“It’s hard work, but it’s worth it,” she said, holding a little shovel in her hand.

“They smell wonderful.”

“Those are the Bourbons,” she said and pointed her shovel at the large, raspberry-purple flowers. “The Madame Isaac Pereire variety. They’re the most fragrant rose there is.”

I opened up the trunk, we got out the groceries we bought on the way home, and we carried them into the house.

“Do roses bloom all year?” Monk asked me.

“They do in her yard,” I said. “Mrs. Throphamner constantly switches them out since she started her garden a few months ago. She likes lots of color all the time.”

While I unpacked the groceries, Monk got the water boiling and insisted on making dinner for the three of us. I didn’t argue. It’s not often I get a night off, and besides, I knew he wasn’t going to leave a mess for me to clean up.

When Julie got home, I helped her with her homework at the kitchen table while Monk prepared what he called his “famous” spaghetti and meatballs. Pretty soon, though, Julie and I were too captivated by Monk’s unusual preparations to pay any attention to textbooks.

The sauce was out of a jar from Chef Boyardee (“Why bother competing with the master?” Monk said), but he made his meatballs by hand (gloved, of course, as if performing surgery), carefully measuring and weighing them to ensure that they were perfectly round and identical.

He boiled the spaghetti noodles, poured them into a strainer, and then selected individual noodles, laying them out on our plates to make sure they were equal in length and that we had exactly forty-six noodles apiece.

When we sat down to dinner, Monk served us our spaghetti on three separate plates: one for the noodles, one for the sauce, and one for our four meatballs each. We barely had room on the table for all the plates.

“Aren’t the noodles, sauce, and meatballs supposed to be mixed all together?” Julie asked.

Monk laughed and shook his head at me. “Kids—aren’t they precious?”

And then he took a noodle on his fork, wound it around the prongs, stabbed a meatball, then dipped it all in the sauce and put it in his mouth.

“Mmmm,” Monk said. “That’s cooking.”

After dinner, we each relaxed in our own way. Julie went to the living room to watch TV. I sat at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of wine and leafing through an issue of Vanity Fair. And Monk did the dishes.

I like reading Vanity Fair, but I’m thinking of canceling my subscription anyway. There are fifty pages of ads before you even get to the table of contents, it sheds an endless number of subscription postcards all over the house, and the magazine smells like a cheap hooker. Not that I’ve ever smelled a hooker, cheap or otherwise, but I imagine they’re drenched in perfume.

“The night is young,” Monk said. “Let’s party.”

I was sure I’d misunderstood him, dazed as I was by the wine and perfume.

“Did you just say you wanted to party?”

“Call Mrs. Throphamner; ask her to come over and watch Julie.” Monk pulled off his apron and tossed it on the counter in a show of devil-may-care abandon. “We’re going clubbing. I mean that in the party sense, not the baby-seals sense.”

I set down my magazine. I couldn’t imagine why Monk would want to go somewhere filled with loud music and writhing people pressing their sweaty bodies against one another.

“You want to go dancing?”

“I want to go to Flaxx and talk to Lizzie Draper, Breen’s mistress,” Monk said.

“You sure you don’t just want another look at her enormous buttons?”

“I think I can turn her,” Monk said.

“You really believe Lizzie is going to help us get her super-rich lover?” I said.

“It’s worth a try,” Monk said.

I knew what was really going on, and I told him so. “You’re desperate to try anything that could help you avoid rummaging through mountains of trash tomorrow.”

Monk gave me a look. “Hell, yes.”

The interior of Flaxx was industrial chic—lots of exposed beams, air ducts, and water pipes against sheets of brushed aluminum, corrugated metal, and scored steel. The spinning, multicolored lights in the ceiling reflected wildly off the silver surfaces, creating a kind of retro psychedelic effect.

Lots of twentysomething men and women, trying their best to look disaffected and cool, lounged on deeply cushioned, brightly colored divans the size of king-size beds. They’d come here straight from their offices and cubicles, dressed for success but with their garments loosened to show off the cleavage, piercings, or tattoos that proved they were still bad boys and girls. They came to escape one grind by indulging in another; that much was clear by the way some of them danced and made energetic use of the divans.

Monk tried to avert his gaze from the grinders and the gropers, but it wasn’t easy. If he looked away from the dance floor, he saw the divans. If he looked away from the divans, he saw the flat-screen monitors on the walls, which showed music videos that featured a lot of coy, soft-core, girl-girl action. I didn’t find it very shocking. Lesbian sexuality has become a very stylish and hip marketing tool to sell everything from lingerie to underarm deodorant. In the process, it has lost its shock value and edgy eroticism. Well, at least to me. Certainly not to Monk.

The music was loud and percussive and pummeled my body and ears. I liked it and found myself swaying instinctively with the rhythm, but Monk winced as if each beat were a beating.

“This is a bad, bad place,” Monk said.

“It seems pretty tame to me,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? Take a look at that.” He motioned to a bowl in the middle of one of the tables.

“What?”

“Mixed nuts,” he said gravely, implying all manner of danger.

“So?”

“Cashews, walnuts, peanuts, almonds, all in one bowl. It’s a crime against nature.”

“We can call the Sierra Club on our way out.”

“That’s bad enough, but to put them out in a bowl for people to share . . .” He shivered. “Think how many hands have been in that bowl, strange hands that have been”—that’s when his gaze fell on one of the couples on a divan—“God knows where.”

Monk quickly looked away from that shocking sight and back to the bowl. He gasped and staggered back.

“What?” I said.

He couldn’t bring himself to gaze again at whatever had offended him. All he could do was jerk his head in the general direction of the table.

“The bowl,” he said, whispering as if it might hear him and take offense.

“I know, mixed nuts,” I said. “A crime against nature.”

He shook his head. “Look again. Tell me I didn’t see crackers and pretzels in that bowl,” he said, adding with dire significance, “with the mixed nuts.”

I glanced at the bowl, knowing even before I did that he was right. Nut and crackers cohabitating.

“It’s a trick of the light,” I said.

He started to look again but I stopped him. “Don’t torture yourself. Remember what we’re here for. Focus.”

Monk nodded. “Right. Focus. Wet Ones.”

I handed him several packets of wipes, and we made our way toward the bar, which snaked along the back of the room and looked more like a stripper’s catwalk than a place to elbow up for a brew. The gleaming poles at either end of the curving bar, and the men pressed up against it, tongues barely in their mouths, added to the effect.

We managed to find a space at the bar, though it meant we were shoulder-to-shoulder with the people beside us. Monk squirmed and crossed his hands in front of his chest so they didn’t touch anything or anyone.

I didn’t have his phobias, but I did the same thing. The way the guy beside me was bumping into me, his arm brushing against my breast, I was certain he was doing it on purpose to cop a quasi-feel. One more time, and he was going to feel my elbow in his kidney.

Three bartenders, all women, all enormously endowed, all wearing bikini tops and short skirts, danced to and fro as they prepared drinks. One of the bartenders was Lizzie. At least Monk wouldn’t have any buttons to fixate on this time. Name tags on the other two women identified them as LaTisha and Cindy.

Lizzie stopped in front of us, still swaying to the beat. “You again,” she said to Monk. “The button man.”

“I need to talk to you about Esther Stoval’s murder,” Monk said.

“I already told you,” she said. “I don’t know anything about it.”

“You know the murderer,” Monk said.

LaTisha rang a big bell on the wall, jacked up the volume on the music, and suddenly jumped up on the bar. The crowd of men roared with approval. All except for Monk.

“Does she have any idea how unsanitary that is?” Monk yelled into my ear. “People eat and drink on the bar.”

“They don’t seem to care,” I said, gesturing to the men around us, who were whooping and hollering.

“What do they know?” Monk said. “They eat mixed nuts.”

Lizzie jumped on the bar right in front of us and, along with LaTisha, began dancing, thrusting her pelvis into Monk’s face.

“It’s Lucas Breen,” Monk said to her feet.

“Can’t you see I’m working?” she said.

“I’m trying not to,” Monk said.

Cindy tossed a long-necked bottle of tequila up to Lizzie, who caught it and spun it around like a baton. LaTisha also caught a bottle and matched her move for move. This number was choreographed and was probably repeated a dozen times every night.

“We know you’re having an affair with him,” Monk said.

“If you want to talk to me, get up here,” Lizzie said.

“What?” Monk said.

“You heard me.” She gyrated in front of him a few more times, her huge breasts swaying. The men around us scrambled forward to shove dollars under the waistband of her skirt, jamming us against the bar.

“Do that again,” a guy yelled to her. He was on the other side of the man who kept brushing against me.

She put a foot on the yeller’s shoulder, leaned down, and poured tequila on his head. He lifted his face up to her and opened his mouth to receive the liquor like a chick in a nest eager to be fed.

Faced with the prospect of getting splashed with tequila, Monk quickly climbed up on the bar and then stood there stock-still, with Lizzie dancing in front of him and LaTisha dancing behind him.

“Shake your groove thing,” Lizzie said.

“I don’t have one,” Monk said.

“Everybody has a groove thing,” LaTisha said.

“Then I’m fairly certain mine was removed at birth,” Monk said. “Or when I had my tonsils taken out.”

The bartenders started flinging their bottles to each other on either side of Monk. He drew his arms in against himself and closed his eyes. I don’t know whether he was afraid of getting hit with a bottle or a drop of tequila.

“Dance or I won’t talk to you,” Lizzie said as she juggled the bottles back and forth to LaTisha. “Do you know how much any of those guys would pay to be up here instead of you with me?”

“I’d pay them.”

“Dance,” she said.

Monk tapped a foot and snapped his fingers and rolled his shoulders.

“That’s dancing?” Lizzie said.

“If it’s too hot for you, get out of the kitchen,” Monk said. “We know Esther Stoval was blackmailing Lucas Breen about your relationship. That’s why he killed her.”

“I didn’t say we had a relationship.” She tossed her bottle down to Cindy, who caught it and expertly flipped it back on the shelf.

“You were wearing his monogrammed shirt when we met.”

“I got it at Goodwill,” she said. “Maybe I have one of yours, too.”

“A man who has killed once to protect his secret could kill again,” Monk said. “You could be next.”

Lizzie grabbed the pole and began to slide up and down it lasciviously, her back to Monk. The crowd cheered and whistled with glee. Even the women seemed to be into it.

“You’re supposed to put money under my skirt,” she said.

Monk reached into his pocket, pulled out a Wet One packet, and, with his eyes squinted nearly shut, tried to put it in the waistband of her skirt. But she kept moving, wiggling her butt to tease the audience and make his task more difficult.

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

“To do the right thing and help bring a murderer to justice. Wear a wire,” Monk said, finally slipping the Wet One packet into her skirt and backing away. “Get him to incriminate himself.”

“Never,” she said. “I don’t wear wires.”

“You don’t wear much of anything,” Monk said.

She turned now and danced in front of Monk. The other bartender came up behind him, and the two women squeezed in close, sandwiching him between them as they danced.

“If I were sleeping with a man like Lucas Breen, I wouldn’t betray him,” she said. “I’d die to protect him.”

“Then your wish might come true,” Monk squeaked, doing some gyrating himself, but only to scrupulously avoid any physical contact with the women on either side of him.

“You’ll never beat Lucas Breen,” Lizzie said. “You’re no match for him, button man. You’re out of your league.”

“What about you?” Monk said. “You think you’re in his league? You’re dancing on a bar. How long do you think it will be until he discards you like one of his monogrammed shirts?”

She and her partner each did a split, spun around, and slipped off the bar on the other side, leaving Monk dancing there alone.

The show was over.

The women went back to filling drinks and dancing behind the bar. Lizzie made a conscious effort to pretend Monk wasn’t there, which wasn’t easy. It’s hard to ignore a man standing on the bar.

Monk looked for a way to climb down without touching the countertop, but it wasn’t possible.

I elbowed the guy beside me. He yelped. “What was that for?”

“You know what it was for,” I said. “Move back, perv. He needs room to jump off.”

The guy and his tequila-soaked buddy moved aside. Monk jumped off the bar and landed soundly on his feet.

“I think I found my groove thing,” he said.

“I’m glad to know the night wasn’t a complete waste,” I said as we left.

17

Mr. Monk and the Mountain

The next morning Monk sat at the kitchen table and ate his bowl of Chex as if it were his last meal before his execution. And that was exactly what I said to him.

“At least an execution is quick,” Monk said. “I feel like a man condemned to a life sentence of hard labor in raw sewage.”

“This isn’t going to take the rest of your life.”

“It’s just going to feel like it.”

“I’m glad you’re going into this with a positive attitude,” I said. “What advice did Dr. Kroger give you?”

“He admires my dedication and sense of purpose. He said if I concentrate on the goal I hope to achieve, I won’t notice my surroundings.”

“That’s good advice. What did you say?”

“What if the goal I want to achieve is to get the hell out of my surroundings?”

Before we went to the dump, Monk made me stop at a medical supply store on O’Farrell that carried the kind of outfits those NIH doctors wear when they’re dropped into an African village to stop something like an Ebola outbreak or the Andromeda strain.

They outfitted Monk in a hard helmet with a large, clear face mask, and a bright orange jump-suit with matching heavy-duty gloves and boots. The outbreak suit, as they called it, also came with a self-contained breathing apparatus like firefighters and haz-mat people wear. By the time he was all suited up, Monk looked like the brightly colored offspring of an astronaut and a scuba diver.

I declined Monk’s offer to buy me the same getup. I figured whatever Grimsley had for me would be enough. Monk nagged me some more, but I told him if he wanted to give me something, he could give me the money he was going to spend on another silly suit. That shut him up.

When we got to the transfer station, Grimsley was waiting with jumpsuits, gloves, boots, hard hats, goggles, and air-filter masks for us to wear. His mouth dropped open when he saw Monk step out of the car in that outbreak suit.

“All of that really isn’t necessary, Mr. Monk.”

“Have you seen that mountain of garbage?” Monk said, his voice coming out of a speaker on his helmet.

“What I have here is really all the protection you’ll need,” Grimsley said. “We have an elaborate air-purification system, and we control airborne particulate matter by regularly wetting down the waste.”

“So we’re going to be soaked in garbage,” Monk said. “This nightmare gets worse every second.”

Grimsley handed me my stuff, and while I put it on over my tank top and sweats, he gathered together some paperwork he wanted us to sign. They were release forms absolving the sanitation company from liability for any injuries we might sustain, or illnesses we might suffer, from going through all that rotting waste.

Monk signed the papers and looked at me. “I bet you wish you were in one of these now.”

The truth was that I did, but I certainly wasn’t going to admit it to him. Once the papers were signed, Grimsley pointed to some shovels, picks, and rakes in the back of his cart.

“Feel free to use whatever tools you need,” Grimsley said. “Good hunting, Ms. Teeger.”

He actually tipped his hard hat. I was half tempted to curtsey.

“Thank you, Mr. Grimsley.” I plucked a rake out of his cart, handed it to Monk, then took one for myself.

I watched as Monk hesitantly lumbered toward the garbage. He stepped on a dirty diaper and screamed.

One small step for man, one major step for mankind.

I covered my nose and mouth with the mask, adjusted my goggles, and plunged into the garbage.

The first hour or two went slowly. I tried not to think too much about what I was doing or listen to Monk’s sobs. Things went a lot smoother for me once I decided to approach my work as a sociological exercise—to make something of a game out of it.

Instead of focusing on all the mundane, gross, and dangerous things I encountered (dead rats and other animals, junk mail, broken glass, decaying food, America Online CDs, soiled sheets, used razor blades, snot-covered Kleenex, curdled milk, etc.), I amused myself with all the interesting stuff people threw out: broken toys, porno tapes, vinyl records, love letters, magazines, scrap paper doodles, utility bills, canceled checks, well-read paperback books, yellowed family photos, business cards, empty prescription drug bottles, magazines, broken pottery, baby clothes, cracked snow globes, birthday cards, office files, shower curtains, those kinds of things.

If I found an unusual pair of shoes or a loud Hawaiian shirt, I tried to imagine the person who owned them. I read some of the discarded letters, skimmed some family photos, and examined a few credit card bills to see what other people were buying.

Every now and then I’d check on Monk, who’d be raking trash and whimpering, sounding like a depressed Darth Vader. One of those times, I looked up and saw Monk reaching for a big blue trash bag in the pile above him. He tugged at it, trying to pull it free. I saw right away what would happen if he succeeded.

I yelled to him to stop, but he couldn’t hear me through that damned helmet of his. I started toward him, but I was too late. He pulled the bag, fell on his butt, and an avalanche of garbage spilled on top of him, burying him in an instant.

I hurried over to him and clawed away the trash as fast as I could. I wasn’t worried about him smothering. I knew he had his own air supply. I was worried about him losing his mind.

I was frantically digging when I was joined by a half-dozen firemen in full fire gear, who started dragging away as much trash as they could. I glanced at the firefighter closest to me and saw the smiling face of Joe Cochran, a bandage on his forehead underneath his helmet.

“What are you doing here?” I said. I was never more relieved to see anyone.

“Making sure whoever killed Sparky doesn’t get away with it,” Joe said. “The rest of these guys are off-duty firemen who volunteered to help. We came in just as Mr. Monk pulled the trash down on himself.”

“You’re supposed to be recuperating,” I said.

“This is how I recuperate,” he said.

“Suiting up and slogging through garbage?”

“Hey, it was either do this or rescue cats from trees, chase purse snatchers, and make the world safe for democracy.”

“You’re wonderful,” I said. I could have kissed him right there, if my mouth weren’t covered with a mask and my hands weren’t full of rotten Chinese food.

“You’ve got that backward,” Joe said. “You’re the one standing hip-deep in gunk to get justice for a dog you never met. You’re the one who is wonderful.”

“Help! Help!” Monk’s muffled voice came from beneath the trash just a few feet away. The firefighters and I converged on the spot, and within a few moments we exposed Monk, who was clutching the blue trash bag like a life preserver.

Joe and another firefighter pulled Monk out, but he refused to let go of the blue bag.

“Are you okay?” I asked, wiping away eggs and chow mein and barbecue sauce from his helmet so I could see his face.

“I haven’t been okay since we got here,” Monk said.

“Is the overcoat in there?” Joe asked, motioning to the bag.

“No,” Monk said.

“Then what’s so important about that bag?”

“It’s my trash,” Monk said.

Joe looked at me. I shook my head and silently mouthed, Don’t ask.

He didn’t, and we got back to work.

Monk put his blue bag in the back of the electric cart, took a few minutes to recover, and then, much to my surprise, joined us again in the trash.

Over the next few hours Joe and his men recovered a couple more of Monk’s blue bags and thoughtfully placed them in the cart with the other one.

I stopped only for bathroom breaks. I’d lost my appetite for lunch. Monk felt the same way.

But the firemen must have been accustomed to ugly tasks like this, because they had no problem taking a break to eat. They enjoyed their fast-food meals, undeterred by the stench of garbage all around them, and plunged right back into the city’s rotting waste afterward without any trouble digesting.

Joe worked the hardest of all. He was doing it for me, and for Monk, but mostly for Sparky.

I was glad he was there. But as happy as I was to have Joe’s company, his presence brought back that twinge of anxiety in my chest. I tried to dismiss it as simply the fear of beginning a relationship, but I knew it was more than that. I tried to ignore the feeling the same way I was ignoring the uglier aspects of our search.

It wasn’t working. I wondered if that was how Monk felt when he tried to ignore all the things in a case, or in life, that didn’t fit.

It was late afternoon when Monk called out, “Over here! Over here!”

We scrambled over to see what he’d found.

He lifted up an Excelsior napkin, pinched between two fingers and held at arm’s length from his body.

It meant we’d finally reached the trash from the bins outside the hotel. We all began digging with renewed energy and hope.

We dug up a lot more items that clearly came from the hotel—billing statements, broken dishes, banquet menus, pounds of table scraps, damaged linens, tons of those tiny little liquor bottles, even some clothes, but by five o’clock we still hadn’t found an overcoat.

Monk decided to call it quits for the day, and I was thankful. I was tired and I wanted to clean up before my date with Joe. And, let’s face it, our morale was pretty low.

We thanked the firefighters again for their help. I told Joe that I’d meet him at my house in a couple of hours.

As Monk and I were on our way out, Chad Grimsley came down to the floor from his office and asked if he could have a word with the two of us.

We got into his cart, the one with Monk’s trash bags in the back, and Grimsley drove us to the other end of the transfer station. He stopped at a roped-off corner of the facility with a sign mounted above it that read, ZONE NINE. RESERVED FOR THE CLEANEST TRASH ONLY.

Grimsley turned to Monk. “I believe your trash belongs here, sir.”

Monk stared at the roped-off area for a long moment and then did something incredible. He took off his gloves and offered his hand to Grimsley.

“Thank you,” Monk said.

“You can come and check on it anytime you like.” Grimsley shook his hand.

Monk put his gloves back on and, with a happy smile on his face, began unloading his bags and placing them behind the ropes.

“That was a really nice thing to do,” I said to Grimsley.

He shook his head. “Mr. Monk is a very special man. I have an inkling of the kind of demons he had to overcome to spend the day in tons of garbage. That’s worth something, Ms. Teeger, and it demands acknowledgment and respect.”

Grimsley motioned to the blue bags in the center of the newly christened zone nine. “That’s the least I can do.”

When Monk climbed back into the car, I could see contentment on his face. We hadn’t found the piece of evidence we needed to convict Lucas Breen, but at least some small measure of order had been restored.

18

Mr. Monk Stays Home

Monk let me shower first, because he anticipated being in the bathroom for hours. In fact, he suggested that Julie might want to make arrangements with Mrs. Throphamner to use her facilities if the need arose.

When Monk went in to shower, I sat Julie down in the living room and gave her detailed instructions for the night. I wanted her to keep a close watch on Monk to make sure he didn’t remodel our house while I was gone and to call me if things got out of control.

“So you want me to babysit him,” she said.

“I wouldn’t put it like that,” I said. “I’m asking you to guard our house, our belongings, and our privacy.”

“In other words, you want me to perform babysitting and security services.”

“What are you getting at?”

“I have better things to do than watch Mr. Monk all night while you hang out with Firefighter Joe,” Julie said. “If I’m going to babysit, I expect to be paid. Six dollars an hour, plus expenses.”

“What expenses?”

“Things could come up,” she said.

“If you’re doing your job, nothing is supposed to come up.”

“Okay, six dollars an hour plus you kick in for a chicken delivery from the take-out place,” she said. “Unless you’d rather have Mr. Monk cook a meal in our kitchen without you here to supervise. Who knows what he might discover, rearrange, or throw out?”

She had a good point. When did Julie become so observant? I wondered. And when did she learn how to negotiate like that? She was growing up way too fast.

“You’ve got a deal,” I said.

We shook on it, and then I pulled her into a hug. When I let her go, she looked at me with a furrowed brow.

“What was that for?” she asked.

“Growing up,” I said. “Being adorable. Surprising me. Being you. Do I need to go on?”

“No, you’re making me nauseous as it is.” There was a knock at the door. Julie leaped off the couch and opened it. Joe Cochran stood there with another bouquet of flowers.

“You didn’t have to bring me more flowers,” I said.

“I didn’t bring them for you. They’re mostly for me in case I didn’t do a good enough job showering after our day in the dump,” he said with a grin. “They’re very fragrant. Mind if I carry them the rest of the evening?”

“I’ll take my chances.”

I took the flowers from him and put them in the vase. I told Julie not to wait up, gave her a kiss, and we left.

Joe took me to dinner at Audiffred, a French bistro that was, appropriately enough, located on the street level of the historic Audiffred Building at One Market Street down at the waterfront. It was constructed in the late 1800s by a homesick Frenchman, so the building had such typical Parisian architectural motifs as a mansard roof, decorative brick battlements, and tall, round-topped windows.

Audiffred was a fancier place than I’d dressed for, but the San Francisco dining scene had adopted the L.A. philosophy that you can go anywhere in jeans and running shoes as long as you have the attitude to pull it off.

Well, if there’s one thing I’ve got plenty of, it’s attitude. It’s a shame that won’t pay the mortgage.

Joe ordered a steak, well-done, with fingerling potatoes and sautéed spinach. The menu noted that the cow who sacrificed himself for Joe’s meal was a vegan and never consumed hormones. I’d never seen a cow’s diet mentioned on a menu before.

I ordered rack of lamb, but when I asked the superficially perky waitress whether my sheep was a vegan or not, she just gave me a blank look. She didn’t even crack a smile when I asked what the fish liked to eat before they ended up on the plate. Joe was amused, though, and that’s what counted.

“They take themselves way too seriously here,” he said. “And the food isn’t good enough for them to be so snooty.”

“Then why do you come here?”

“The food is fair, the decor is nice, and the place has been a friend to the fire department for over one hundred years.”

“You mean they donate money?”

“Better than that,” Joe said. “They donate booze.”

He explained that the Audiffred Building was one of very few in the city that survived the devastating 1906 earthquake and the fires in the aftermath.

“The owner of the saloon that was here offered the firefighters a barrel of whiskey each if they saved the building from the flames,” Joe said. “They did, and to this day firefighters drink here for free.”

“Maybe the waiters are just snooty to you because they know you’re not paying for the drinks,” I said. “I’m not a nurse or anything, but should you be having alcohol after what happened to you the other night?”

Joe touched the bandage. “This? Ah, it’s nothing. I’ve been hurt worse.”

“You have?”

“I’ve got a nasty burn on my back from a fire a couple of years ago,” he said. “It’s not a pretty sight, which is why I wore a shirt to dinner.”

“I wondered why you did that,” I said.

He went on to tell me the story of how he got burned. To be honest, I don’t remember a lot of the details, except that it involved a blazing tenement, a staircase that gave way, and a narrow escape. As he told the story, his whole face lit up, and he got more and more animated, the words spilling out in an excited rush. It was a memory he didn’t mind reliving and a story he liked to tell, even though it was an experience that left him physically scarred for life.

I know that’s part of what you do on your first couple of dates: You tell stories about yourself that show you in a really great light, or that illustrate aspects of your life and your character that are important to you. But sometimes you reveal things about yourself that you didn’t intend.

The story certainly proved Joe was caring, brave, and heroic, but that’s not the message I took from it. What I got was that he liked fighting fires. No, he loved fighting fires. The risks meant nothing to him. The accident that happened years ago and the one that happened the other night were near-misses he was bound to experience again.

Just another day at the office.

He loved battling fires the way Mitch loved flying fighter jets. The reasons why I was attracted to Joe weren’t a surprise to me. He was great-looking, with a body I wanted to devour, and had a personality that reminded me of Mitch’s.

But the more he talked, and the more attracted I became to him, the more my anxiety intensified.

Was it fear of a new relationship? Or was it something else?

Our dinner was served, and Joe asked me about how I balanced single motherhood and working for Monk. I think he asked me because he wanted to eat his steak before it got cold, and he couldn’t do that and tell another rousing firefighting anecdote.

So now it was my turn to tell a story about myself that would show what a clever, funny, caring, strong, terrific person I was. My vague anxiety turned into a very clear and definable panic. What story could I possibly tell that would accomplish all that? I didn’t think I had one.

“I don’t think of it as balancing single motherhood with anything else. Julie comes first, before me, before anything. I just try to make it through each day without screwing up too badly.”

“How did you end up working for Monk?”

Okay, that was a good story. But unlike Joe’s stories of his harrowing brushes with death, it wasn’t one I enjoyed telling. I was much better at telling funny anecdotes about Mr Monk’s bizarre, obsessive-compulsive behavior, though I always felt guilty afterward, as if I were breaching a trust.

“Someone broke into my house late one night. I walked in on him and he tried to kill me. I killed him instead. The police couldn’t figure out why the intruder was in my house, so they called in Mr. Monk to help them investigate.”

Joe set down his fork. “You killed a man?”

I nodded. “I didn’t mean to; I was defending myself. I still can’t believe I did it. When you’re in a situation like that, I suppose instinct takes over. I did what I had to do to survive. I was lucky; there happened to be a pair of scissors within reach. If there hadn’t been, I’d be dead.”

I never thought of myself as capable of violence, certainly not of killing someone. It was a memory I tried to avoid. It scared me. It wasn’t so much the attacker himself, the fight, or the fact that I almost died that terrified me. The nightmare was imagining what would have happened to Julie if I were killed.

What would he have done to her? And if she escaped, what would her life have been like after losing both of her parents to violent deaths?

Maybe it was that fear that gave me the ability to fight back so hard, to kill rather than be killed. It gave me an edge I wouldn’t have had otherwise.

After that experience, I immediately enrolled Julie in tae kwon do class, despite her protests. I wanted to be sure that if she were ever attacked, her instincts would take over, and that her instincts would kick ass.

I could see that Joe wanted more details about the killing, but he was kind and perceptive enough not to ask. So he moved past that.

“Why was the intruder in your house?”

“Mr. Monk figured out he was after a rock in my daughter’s goldfish aquarium,” I said. “A rock from the moon.”

“From the moon moon?” Joe pointed up.

“Yeah, that moon,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

“You’re full of long stories.” He reached across the table for my hand. “I’d like to hear them all.”

His hand was big and warm and strong, and I couldn’t help imagining what it would feel like against my cheek, my back, my legs.

I became achingly aware of just how many long months it had been since I’d spent time with a man, if you catch my drift. And yet, the anxiety I felt was even stronger than my desire.

I’m a normal woman, healthy and still relatively young, and I’m not ashamed of or embarrassed about my needs, so that wasn’t what it was. Nor was it the prospect of bringing another man into my life. There had been other men since Mitch, and I hadn’t felt this same kind of apprehension then. And it wasn’t because of any reservations about the kind of man Joe was or how Julie would feel about him.

But the apprehension was there, and it wasn’t going away.

I was spared having to tell Joe another story by the trill of my cell phone. I reluctantly, and self-consciously, took my hand from his to answer the call.

I was certain the caller was Julie and that Monk had done something terrible, like reorganizing the drawers in my bedroom. I shuddered to think what he—and Julie too, for that matter—might have stumbled upon.

But it wasn’t Julie, and my bedroom secrets were safe. It was Captain Stottlemeyer calling.

“Are you with Monk?” he asked.

“Not at the moment,” I said. “Why?”

“I’ve got a murder, and I’d like Monk’s perspective on it. Can you get him down here?”

It wasn’t unusual for Stottlemeyer to ask for Monk’s help on a particularly puzzling homicide. Monk regularly consulted with the SFPD on a per-case basis, though nobody told me how much he got paid.

Stottlemeyer gave me directions to the crime scene. It wasn’t far from the restaurant, but I had to go back home and pick up Monk first.

“We’ll be there in an hour,” I said, and flipped the phone shut. “I’m sorry, Joe, but we have to go. There’s been a homicide, and the police want Mr. Monk’s help.”

“It can’t wait until dessert?”

“Think of that call as my fire alarm,” I said.

“Gotcha.” He waved to the waitress for the check.

One the way home, I explained my working relationship with Monk to Joe, who didn’t understand exactly what I did for a living. I told him my job was mostly helping Monk manage the everyday demands of life and smoothing his interactions with other people so he could concentrate on solving murders. And that I also handed out a lot of wipes and kept him hydrated with Sierra Springs, the only water he’ll drink.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Joe said as he walked me to my door.

“Most days, I don’t know either.”

He kissed me. A real, deep, passionate, toe-curling kiss. And I gave it right back to him. The kiss lasted only a minute or so, but when we un-clinched my heart was racing as if I’d just run a mile. It was a kiss that promised so much more, born of the urgency of our forced parting. For me, there was also a hint of melancholy. For some reason it felt to me like a kiss good-bye, even though we’d be seeing each other at the dump the next morning.

But I didn’t have the time to sort out my feelings; I was in too big a hurry. I banged on the bathroom door to get Monk out of the shower. I told him Stottlemeyer needed him pronto at a crime scene. Then I called Mrs. Throphamner, who agreed to come over and watch Julie.

“I still expect to be paid for the hours I worked,” Julie said.

“But Mr. Monk never even left the shower,” I said. “You didn’t have to do anything.”

“Not my problem,” she said with a shrug.

I dug into my wallet and gave her a twenty because I didn’t have any tens or singles, just what the ATM spit out on my last visit. “Here. Credit my account with the balance for next time.”

Monk emerged from the bathroom perfectly coiffed and in a fresh set of clothes, as if he were starting a new day. Behind him the bathroom looked as if it had never been used. He shifted uncomfortably in his clothes.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I still feel dirty,” he said.

“I’m sure that will pass.”

“So am I,” Monk said. “In a few years.”

“Years?”

“No more than twenty,” he said. “Or thirty. But I’m being conservative.”

I figured that worked out to roughly one year for each ton of garbage we had to sort through.

Monk spotted the flowers in the vase. “Who brought those?”

“Joe. Actually, he brought them for himself. He was afraid he might still smell from the dump,” I said. “Maybe you’d like them.”

Monk leaned down and sniffed the flowers, then stood up straight and started working that kink out of his neck, the one caused by a fact that doesn’t fit.

I was about to ask him what it was about the flowers that set him off when Mrs. Throphamner arrived and hurried to the TV.

“Forgive me, Murder, She Wrote is starting on channel forty-four,” she said. “I don’t want to miss the murder.”

“It’s okay,” Monk said, heading for the door. “We’re a little late for a murder ourselves.”

19

Mr. Monk and the Wet Ones

Captain Stottlemeyer was waiting for us on Harrison Street, where the 80 Freeway emptied into the city center in a tangle of off-ramps and overpasses. The wail of the cold wind and the roar of traffic overhead created a loud, bone-rattling shriek. It sounded as if the earth itself were screaming in pain.

The freeway passed over a weed-covered lot that was ringed by a corroded cyclone fence that had been peeled back in places. Stottlemeyer stood in front of one of the openings, with his hands deep in the pockets of his coat and his collar turned up against the biting wind. Behind him, forensic techs in blue windbreakers moved slowly through the lot, looking for clues.

The lot was strewn with discarded couches, soiled mattresses, and crude structures of scrap plywood, corrugated metal sheets, and cardboard boxes erected atop wooden shipping pallets. Shopping carts overflowing with bulging trash bags were parked in front of some of the makeshift shelters like cars in driveways.

“Sorry to drag you down here, Monk,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Where are all the people?” Monk asked.

“What people?” Stottlemeyer asked.

“The ones who live here.” He motioned to the neighborhood of cardboard tract homes.

“They scurried away like frightened rats after somebody discovered the corpse,” Stottlemeyer said. “A couple officers in a patrol car happened to be driving by when the mass exodus occurred. It piqued their curiosity, so they investigated. It’s a good thing the officers were around or it could’ve been weeks before we found the body, if ever.”

“Why’s that?”

“We don’t get in here much,” Stottlemeyer said. “And even if we did, the body is kind of out of the way.”

The captain beckoned us through the hole in the fence while he held open the flap. Monk hesitated a moment, then turned to me.

“I’m going to need the suit,” Monk said.

“What suit?” I said.

“The one I wore today,” Monk said. “I need it.”

“We returned the outbreak suit on the way home,” I said. “You insisted that it had to be incinerated.”

“I know,” Monk said. “I need another.”

“They’re closed,” I said.

“It’s okay,” Monk said. “We can wait.”

“They’re closed permanently, at least to you,” I said. “The owner was quite clear about that.”

“I’ll stay in the car while you go in.”

Stottlemeyer groaned. “Monk, it’s late. I’ve been working a sixteen-hour day. This is my third murder. I’m hungry, I’m cold, and I just want to go home.”

“Fine,” Monk said. “We’ll meet back here in the morning.”

He started to go, but Stottlemeyer grabbed his arm. “What I’m saying is that you can step through the fence on your own or I can throw you. It’s your choice.”

“I’d prefer a third option.”

“There is no third option.”

“How about a fourth? Because three isn’t really a very good number anyway.”

“How about I throw you in there now?”

“That’s a third option, and before you said there were only two,” Monk said. “How can we have a reasonable conversation if you’re incoherent?”

Stottlemeyer took a menacing step toward Monk.

“Okay, okay,” Monk said, waving Stottlemeyer away. “Give me a minute.”

Monk looked at the hole, looked at the lot, then looked at me. Then he looked at everything again.

“You have five seconds,” Stottlemeyer said in a tone full of violent intent.

Monk held out his hand to me and snapped his fingers. “Wipes.”

I gave him four. He used two to wipe down the pieces of the cyclone fence he intended to touch while stepping through. He used the others to protect his fingers as he touched the bits of the fence he’d just cleaned.

Monk took a deep breath and stepped through, then immediately jumped away from something on the ground with a yelp.

“What?” I asked.

“Bottle cap.”

He said it breathlessly, as if he’d narrowly avoided stepping on a land mine.

I climbed through the opening and Stottlemeyer followed, glaring at Monk.

“This way,” the captain said, and proceeded to lead us across the lot toward the freeway.

Monk yelped again. I looked at him.

“Candy wrapper,” he said.

“You spent the day in thirty tons of trash and you’re freaking out about a candy wrapper?”

“I’m unprotected,” Monk said. “And that’s a big, big candy wrapper.”

I turned my back on him and marched on through the weeds.

Monk stepped gingerly through the lot as if he were playing hopscotch on hot coals.

I don’t know what he was avoiding, and I didn’t really care. It could have been dog droppings or dandelions; to him they are both equally repulsive.

If I sounded irritable, it’s because I was. It was bad enough that I’d been yanked off a perfectly good date to go strolling through a urine-stenched homeless encampment to see some hideous corpse. Having to deal with Monk’s irrational anxieties on top of all that was asking way too much of me.

But if I’d been really honest with myself on that cold, windy night, I’d have known it wasn’t the lot, the murder, or Monk that was eating at me; it was the feeling I’d had when I kissed Joe and what it meant.

Stottlemeyer took us up the embankment on a well-worn path beneath the freeway to a cardboard lean-to wedged against the ground and the base of the overpass. There were two feet, clad in topsiders held together with duct tape, sticking out of the entrance of the lean-to. It reminded me of the Wicked Witch after Dorothy dropped the house on her in Oz.

“The victim is in there,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Yes, I see,” Monk said.

“Aren’t you going to go inside?”

“Not until my suit gets here.”

“Why don’t you just wear the damn suit all the time?” Stottlemeyer said. “Then you’ll never have to worry about breathing or touching anything ever again.”

“It would be awkward,” Monk said. “Socially.”

“Socially,” I said.

“I don’t like to draw attention to myself,” Monk said. “One of my great advantages as a detective is my natural ability to slip smoothly and unnoticed into almost any social situation.”

“But just think of all the money you’d save on wipes,” Stottlemeyer said.

Monk took out his key chain and aimed his pen-light into the shelter. The tiny beam revealed a man lying inside on his back. He was wearing at least a half dozen shirts and had a scraggly beard. Beyond that he was unrecognizable. His head was bashed in with a brick, presumably the bloody one left beside the body.

I turned away.

Before I met Monk I had managed to go through my life without ever seeing a dead body, without seeing people who’d been shot, stabbed, strangled, beaten, poisoned, dismembered, run over, or clobbered with a brick. Now I was seeing as many as two or three murder victims a week. I wondered when, or if, I’d finally get used to it, and whether I would be a better person if I never did.

“Is he a friend of yours?” Stottlemeyer asked Monk.

“Does he look like a friend of mine? Weren’t you here for the outbreak-suit discussion?”

“I won’t ever forget it,” Stottlemeyer said. “Still, I thought you might know him. That’s why I called you down here.”

“I’ve bathed more today than he has in the past ten years,” Monk said. “What made you think that we could possibly know each other?”

Stottlemeyer motioned to the edge of the embankment. Monk peered over the side and saw a few dozen sealed Wet One packets scattered among the weeds.

“You’re the only person I know who carries around that many Wet Ones.”

Monk looked at me and we came to the same realization at the same instant. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the cold wind.

“You do know him,” Stottlemeyer said, reading our faces.

“We saw him panhandling on the street near the Excelsior,” I said. “He wanted money; Mr. Monk gave him wipes.”

“Figures,” Stottlemeyer said.

“It’s not easy to recognize him,” I said. “He doesn’t look the same now with the blood all over his face, and . . .”

I couldn’t go on. Stottlemeyer nodded. “I understand. It’s okay.”

“That’s not the only reason we didn’t recognize him,” Monk said.

He turned back to the shelter and crouched at the entrance, letting his flashlight beam sweep over the body and the interior of the lean-to. He sneezed.

Monk sat up, rolled his shoulders, and when he looked at us again, there was a glint of excitement in his watery eyes.

“I know who killed him,” he said, and sneezed.

“You do?” Stottlemeyer was astonished. “Who?”

“Lucas Breen.”

“Breen?” Stottlemeyer sighed wearily. “C’mon, Monk, are you sure about this? You’ve got him killing old ladies, dogs, and bums. What is he, some kind of a serial killer?”

Monk shook his head and sniffled. “He’s just a man who wants to get away with murder. The sad thing is, he has to keep killing to do it.”

“Why do you think Breen did this?” Stottlemeyer said.

“Look at you, Captain. You’ve got your jacket buttoned up to your nose.” Monk turned and shined his flashlight on the dead man. “But he’s not wearing one.”

“Maybe he doesn’t have one,” Stottlemeyer said.

“He had one when we saw him before,” Monk said. “A big, dirty, tattered overcoat.”

Only it wasn’t dirty and tattered. It was charred and burned. And we missed it. If we’d only known then what we were looking for, and what we were looking at, we could have solved the case right there and probably saved this man’s life.

I wondered if Monk felt as guilty and stupid as I did at that moment.

“Lucas Breen killed him for his coat and threw out the wipes that were in the pockets.” Monk sneezed again. “Which just goes to show Breen’s utter disregard for human life.”

I wasn’t sure what Monk meant. Was it murdering a man for his coat or throwing away disinfectant wipes that revealed the depth of Breen’s inhumanity? I didn’t dare ask.

Stottlemeyer pointed to the corpse. “You’re telling me this guy was wearing Lucas Breen’s overcoat?”

Monk nodded and blew his nose. “He must have rooted around in the Dumpster the night of the murder. He was a man with a death wish, and it came true.”

“It wasn’t going Dumpster diving that killed him,” Stottlemeyer said.

Monk took a Ziploc bag from his pocket and stuffed the Kleenex into it. “If the coat hadn’t been the agent of his demise, it would have been a hideous flesh-eating Dumpster disease and a horrible, drooling death.”

“Agent of his demise?” Stottlemeyer said.

“Horrible, drooling death?” I said.

“Thank the Lord for Wet Ones,” Monk said.

“How the hell did Breen know this guy had his coat?” Stottlemeyer asked.

I knew the answer to that one, and it didn’t make me feel clever. Quite the opposite.

“When we were talking to Breen in the lobby of his building, the guy passed by with his shopping cart. Breen saw him.”

“Breen must have crapped himself,” Stottlemeyer said. “He’s sitting there with a homicide detective and the two of you accusing him of murder, and a guy walks by wearing the one piece of evidence that could send him to death row. Breen has probably been searching like a maniac for this guy ever since.”

“Yeah,” I said. “And we spent the day wading through all the trash in San Francisco for nothing.”

Stottlemeyer glanced up at the night sky. “Somebody up there is having a nice laugh on all of us.”

“Has the medical examiner been here?” Monk asked.

“She left just before you got here.”

“Did she say how long this man has been dead?”

The captain nodded. “About two hours.”

“Maybe there’s still time,” Monk said.

“To do what?” I asked.

“To stop Breen from getting away with three murders,” Monk said.

20

Mr. Monk Plays Cat and Mouse

The Bay Bridge, which connects Oakland to San Francisco, is really two bridges—one that goes to Yerba Buena Island and one that leaves it, depending on which side of the bay you’re coming from. The two bridges are connected by a tunnel that cuts through the middle of the island.

Adjacent to Yerba Buena Island is Treasure Island, a flat, man-made patch of land that was created to host the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition and that the United States government seized during World War II for a naval base.

Treasure Island got its name from flecks of gold found in the Sacramento River Delta soil that was dumped into the bay to make the isle. But if you ask me, the real Treasure Island is across the bay, north of San Francisco in Marin County.

Belvedere Island is a one-mile-long, half-mile-wide enclave of the superwealthy, who gaze upon San Francisco, the Bay, and the Golden Gate Bridge from the windows and decks of their multimillion-dollar, bayfront homes. There may not be flecks of gold in the soil, but a handful of dirt on Belvedere is worth more than an acre of land just about anywhere else in California.

So if it were up to me, and for the sake of accuracy in island naming, they’d strip the title “Treasure Island” from that pile of Sacramento dirt dumped in the middle of the bay and slap it on Belvedere instead.

Of course, Belvedere Island is where Lucas Breen lived, because anywhere else just wouldn’t have the same cachet. He and his wife inhabited a lavish and ostentatious Tuscan mansion with its own deepwater dock for their sailboat. (Not that I have anything against being rich; I come from a wealthy family, even though I don’t have much money of my own. It’s the attitude of entitlement and superiority among the rich that I can’t stand.)

To get to Breen’s house, we had to take the Golden Gate Bridge out of the city, drive across Sausalito, then go over a causeway to the island and wind our way up a thickly wooded hillside. Even with a siren and flashing lights, it took us a good forty minutes to get there. Stottlemeyer did turn off everything as we were crossing the causeway, though. He didn’t want to panic the residents.

The gate to Breen’s property was wide-open. It was almost as if he expected us, and that couldn’t be good.

Breen’s mansion was at the end of a circular driveway built on a hillside that gave him sweeping views of Angel Island, the Tiburon Peninsula, the San Francisco skyline, and the Golden Gate Bridge—when the sky wasn’t pitch-black and all fogged in as it was when we arrived.

We pulled up behind Breen’s silver Bentley Continental sports car and got out. Stottlemeyer stopped and put his hand on the Bentley’s sleek hood.

“It’s still warm,” he said, and caressed the car as if it were a woman’s thigh. “How do you think I’d look in one of these, Monk?”

“Like someone sitting in a car.”

“This isn’t just a car, Monk. It’s a Bentley.”

“It looks like a car to me,” Monk said. “What else does it do?”

Monk was dead serious.

“Never mind,” Stottlemeyer said, and marched up to the front door. He leaned on the doorbell and held his badge up to the tiny security camera mounted over the door, though Breen probably knew we were there from the moment we drove through the gate.

After a minute or two Lucas Breen opened the door. His eyes were red, his nose was runny, and he was wearing a bathrobe over a warm-up suit. He looked miserable. Good, I thought, the more miserable the better.

“What the hell are you doing here? I was just getting ready for bed,” Breen said. “Haven’t you heard of a telephone?”

“I’m not in the habit of calling murderers for an appointment,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Captain, I’ve got a terrible cold, my wife is away, and all I want to do is go to sleep,” Breen said. “We’ll do this another time.”

Breen began to close the door, but Stottlemeyer shoved it open and pushed his way inside. “We’ll do it now.”

“You’re going to regret this,” Breen said, his stuffy nose and watery eyes making him look—and sound—like a petulant child.

“Fine with me,” Stottlemeyer said. “Without regrets I wouldn’t have anything to think about and no excuse to drink.”

We followed the captain past Breen and into the two-story rotunda, which was topped with a stained-glass dome. Monk covered his nose and gave Breen a wide berth, even though Monk was sniffling, too.

The rotunda overlooked a living room dominated by a set of French doors and large windows that framed a spectacular view of the San Francisco skyline, the city lights twinkling in the fog. To our left, just next to a grand staircase, was a book-lined study, where a fire roared in a massive stone hearth.

“I believe you were told to stop harassing me,” Breen said, wiping his nose with a handkerchief.

“I go where the evidence takes me,” Stottlemeyer said.

“You’ll be going on job interviews pretty soon,” Breen said. “What’s so important that it’s worth throwing away your badge?”

“A homeless man was murdered tonight,” Stottlemeyer said.

“That’s a shame. What do you expect me to do about it?”

“Confess,” Monk said.

“Tell me, Mr. Monk, are you going to accuse me of every murder that occurs in San Francisco?”

“He was wearing your overcoat.” Monk sneezed and held his hand out to me for a tissue. I gave him several.

“I told you before, my wife donates my old clothes to Goodwill.” Breen strolled into the study and sat down in a leather armchair facing the fire. There was a brandy snifter on the coffee table. It didn’t take much detecting skill to figure out that he must have been sitting there when we showed up at his door.

“Gee, it seems like everybody we meet is buying your clothes at Goodwill these days,” Stottlemeyer said.

“A fortunate few,” he said.

“That homeless guy didn’t look very fortunate to me,” I said. “Someone caved his face in with a brick.”

“The overcoat we’re talking about wasn’t a Goodwill donation.” Monk blew his nose and then tossed the tissue into the fire. “This was the custom-tailored overcoat you wore to the ‘Save the Bay’ fund-raiser but weren’t wearing when you left.”

Monk crouched in front of the fire and watched his tissue burn.

“It’s also the one you wore when you went to smother Esther Stoval and set fire to her house,” Stottlemeyer said. “The one you left behind. The one you had to disguise yourself as a fireman to get back. The one you later ditched in a Dumpster outside of the Excelsior hotel, which is where the man you killed found it.”

“You’re delusional,” Breen said to Stottlemeyer, and motioned to Monk, who was still staring into the flames. “You’re even crazier than he is.”

“You burned it,” Monk said.

“Burned what?” Breen said.

“The overcoat.” Monk gestured into the fireplace. “I can see one of the buttons.”

Stottlemeyer and I crouched beside him and looked into the fire. Sure enough, there was a brass button with Breen’s initials on it glowing in the embers.

The captain stood up and looked down at Breen. “Do you often use your clothes for kindling?”

“Of course not.” Breen took a sip of his brandy and then held the glass up to the fire, examining the amber liquid in the light. “The button must have come off the sleeve of my jacket when I put the wood in the fireplace.”

“I’d like to see that jacket,” Stottlemeyer said.

“I’d like to see your search warrant,” Breen said.

Stottlemeyer stood there, glowering. He’d been trumped and he knew it. We all knew it. Breen smiled smugly. I imagined he even flossed his teeth smugly.

“It’s a shame we don’t always get what we want; though, to be honest, I usually do.” Breen tipped his snifter toward Stottlemeyer. “You, on the other hand, strike me as a man who rarely does. I can’t imagine what that must be like.”

“I can’t imagine what it must be like on death row,” Stottlemeyer said. “Pretty soon you’ll be able to tell me.”

Monk sneezed again. I handed him another tissue.

“And how would you presume to put me there, Captain?” Breen said. “Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I’m guilty of everything you’ve accused me of. If that’s true, then the one piece of evidence you needed has just been incinerated, along with any hope of ever prosecuting me.”

Breen took another sip of his brandy and sniffled, which you’d think would have undercut his menace and smug superiority, but it didn’t. That’s how secure he was in the knowledge that he’d beaten us.

Stottlemeyer and I both looked at Monk. This was his cue to reveal the brilliant deduction that would destroy the bastard and prove him guilty of murder.

Monk frowned, narrowed his eyes, and sneezed.

Stottlemeyer drove us back to my car. Nobody said a word. Monk didn’t even sniffle. There wasn’t really anything left to say. Lucas Breen was right. He’d won. He was going to get away with three murders.

Obviously that was bothering us all, but I think what really troubled Stottlemeyer and Monk went beyond the injustice of a guilty man walking free. It was something deeper and more personal than that.

For years their relationship had been predicated on a simple truth: Monk was a brilliant detective, and Stottlemeyer was a good one. That’s not a slight against Stottlemeyer. He became a captain because of his hard work, dedication, and skill at his job. He solved most of the homicides he investigated and had a conviction rate that any cop in any other city would be proud of.

But he wasn’t any cop in any other city. He was in San Francisco, home of Adrian Monk. Any detective would have a hard time matching Monk’s genius at crime solving. It was worse for Stottlemeyer. He was also Monk’s former partner. His career was inextricably linked to Monk. It didn’t matter that Monk’s obsessive-compulsive disorder had cost him his badge. The captain and Monk would always be partners in their own eyes and the eyes of the SFPD.

As much as Stottlemeyer may have resented Monk’s astonishing observational and deductive abilities, he’d nonetheless come to depend on them, unfairly, if you ask me. So had the department as a whole. It was the reason they tolerated all of Monk’s considerable eccentricities. I think Monk, on some level, knew this.

Whenever a homicide was too tough to crack, they could always call in Monk. With the exception of one case, the murder of his own wife, he always got his man.

Until now.

What had to make losing to Breen even worse for Monk was that this wasn’t even a case where Stottlemeyer had asked for his help. This was a case that he’d dragged Stottlemeyer into. And now Stottlemeyer’s badge was on the line because of it.

But more than that, Monk’s future as a police consultant was also on the line. If Monk could no longer be counted on to solve every crime, what reason did the police, or Stottlemeyer, have to call on him anymore? What motivation would they have to tolerate his irritating quirks?

It was wrong for Stottlemeyer to expect Monk never to fail, to always make some miraculous deduction at the right moment. But because Monk had done it so many times before, what would have been an unrealistic expectation of anyone else had become the basis of their professional relationship.

That night, Stottlemeyer had gambled on it and lost. And if Stottlemeyer was demoted or booted because of Monk’s failure, Monk’s career as a consultant to the SFPD was effectively over as well.

And, perhaps, so was their friendship. Because if they didn’t have mysteries to solve, what did they have to draw them together? What would they share in common?

Maybe I was overanalyzing it, but as we drove through the darkness and the fog, that’s what I heard in the awkward, heavy silence, and that’s what I saw in their long faces.

When Monk and I got back to my house, we found Mrs. Throphamner asleep on the couch, snoring loudly, her dentures in a glass of water on the coffee table. Hawaii Five-O was on the TV, Jack Lord in his crisp, blue suit staring down Ross Martin, who looked ridiculous in face paint playing a native Hawaiian crime lord.

Monk squatted beside the glass of water and stared at Mrs. Throphamner’s dentures as if they were a specimen in formaldehyde.

I turned off the TV, and Mrs. Throphamner woke up with a snort, startling Monk, who lost his balance and fell into a sitting position on the floor.

Mrs. Throphamner, flustered and disoriented, immediately reached for her dentures and knocked over the glass, spilling everything right in Monk’s lap.

Monk squealed and scampered backward, the dentures resting on his soaked crotch.

Mrs. Throphamner reached down for her dentures and inadvertently toppled onto Monk, who squirmed and called for help underneath her, unwilling to touch her himself.

Julie charged, sleepy-eyed, out of her room in her pajamas. “What’s going on?”

“Mrs. Throphamner spilled her teeth in Mr. Monk’s lap,” I said. “Give me a hand.”

Julie and I lifted Mrs. Throphamner up. She angrily snatched her teeth from Monk’s lap, plopped them into her mouth, and marched out of the house in a huff without so much as a “good night.” I didn’t even get a chance to pay her.

Monk remained on his back on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. He didn’t move. He didn’t blink. I was afraid he was catatonic. I leaned down beside him.

“Mr. Monk? Are you okay?”

He didn’t say anything. I looked over my shoulder at Julie.

“Get me a bottle of Sierra Springs from the fridge.”

She nodded and ran off to get it.

“Please, Mr. Monk. Answer me.”

He blinked and whispered hoarsely, “This day has been a nightmare.”

“Yes, it has.”

“No, I mean really,” Monk said. “The city dump. The homeless encampment. The dentures in my lap. All of that didn’t really happen, did it?”

Julie returned with the bottle. I opened it and offered it to Monk.

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Monk.”

He sat up, took the bottle from me, and guzzled it as if it were whiskey.

Monk tossed the empty bottle over his shoulder. “Keep ’em coming.” He looked at Julie. “You’d better go to bed, honey. This is going to get ugly.”

21

Mr. Monk and Marmaduke

Monk drank two more bottles of Sierra Springs and carried another four off with him to bed, slamming the door behind him.

In the morning I found him sleeping facedown and fully dressed on top of his bed, the floor littered with empty water bottles. I quietly gathered up the plastic empties and left the room without waking him.

It was my morning to carpool Julie and her friends to school, and I have to admit, I was worried about leaving Monk alone. I wasn’t concerned that he was suicidal or anything dire like that—however I was afraid of what he might do in my house if left unsupervised. Would I return to find my closets reorganized? My clothes rearranged by size, shape, and color?

I toyed with waking him up and dragging him along on the carpool, but the thought of him stuck in an SUV filled with rowdy adolescent girls made me reconsider. Yesterday was nightmarish enough for him and, frankly, for me, too.

I decided to take my chances and left him alone. I rushed Julie through breakfast, wrote a note to Monk telling him where I was, and hurried off to pick up the other kids and ferry them to school.

Monk was still asleep when I got back forty-five minutes later. I was relieved and worried at the same time. It wasn’t like him to sleep in, at least not during the time he’d been staying with us. I was debating whether to call Dr. Kroger when Monk finally got up around nine, looking as if he’d spent the night barhopping. His clothes were wrinkled, his hair was askew, and his face was unshaven.

I’d never seen him looking so rumpled, so human. It was kind of endearing.

“Good morning, Mr. Monk,” I said as cheerfully as I could.

Monk acknowledged my greeting with a nod and trudged barefoot into the bathroom. He didn’t emerge from his room again until noon, dressed in fresh clothes and looking his tidy best. But instead of coming to the kitchen for breakfast, he simply returned to his room and closed the door to suffer his purified-water hangover in peace.

I wasn’t sure what to do, so I busied myself with household chores like paying bills and taking care of the laundry. While I worked, I tried not to think about Lucas Breen and the murders he committed. I also tried not to think about Firefighter Joe and my lingering anxieties about our nascent relationship. So, of course, Lucas Breen and Firefighter Joe were all I could think about.

I couldn’t prove that Breen was guilty of murder, but I figured out what was bothering me about Joe. Yeah, I know, it’s obvious what it was, and I can see it clearly now, but I couldn’t then. That’s how it is when you’re in the middle of a relationship, even if it’s only been two dates. You’re too wrapped up in your own insecurities, desires, and expectations to see what’s right in front of you.

Maybe it’s the same way when you’re a detective in the middle of an investigation. You’re under so much pressure to solve the case, and you’re bombarded with so many facts, that it’s almost impossible to see everything clearly. You see static instead of a picture.

I imagine that it was often like that for Stottlemeyer or Disher. I saw how much they invested themselves in their investigations, how hard they had to work at it.

For Monk, it’s all inside out. The investigation looks easy and everything else is hard.

We’re so distracted by how difficult it is for him to accomplish even the simplest things in life that we don’t notice the effort that he puts into solving crimes and how much of himself he puts on the line.

Figuring out the solutions to puzzling mysteries seems to come so fast and so naturally for him, we just shake our heads in wonder and chalk it up as miraculous. We don’t stop to consider the mental and emotional resources he has to marshal to pull that “miracle” off.

After all, we’re talking about a man who finds it virtually impossible to choose a seat in a movie theater and yet somehow manages to sort through thousands of possible clues in a case to arrive at a solution. That can’t be as easy as it looks. There’s got to be some heavy lifting involved. And I’m sure even he has times when he can’t see what’s obvious to everybody else or, in his case, what would ordinarily be obvious to him.

Who can he possibly turn to who can understand his anguish at times like that? Nobody. Because there’s no one else like Adrian Monk, at least not that I know of.

Even so, I resolved to give it my best shot. I went to his room and knocked on the door.

“Come in,” he said.

I opened the door and found him sitting on the edge of his bed, a book open on his lap. He grinned and tapped a finger on the page.

“This is priceless,” he said.

I sat down beside him and looked at what he was reading. It was a collection of single-panel comic strips about Marmaduke, a Great Dane the size of a horse.

In the comic Monk was looking at, Marmaduke was returning to his doghouse with a car tire in his mouth. The caption read: Marmaduke loves chasing cars.

“That Marmaduke,” Monk said. “He’s so big.”

“It’s a joke that never gets tired,” I said.

It was a lie, of course. I couldn’t imagine what Monk, or anybody else, found amusing about that comic strip. But at least now I knew the secret to recovering from a night spent binge-drinking purified water.

“He is so mischievous.” Monk turned the page and pointed to a comic where Marmaduke takes his owner for a brisk walk, lifting the poor man right off his feet. The caption read: There’s always a windchill factor when I walk Marmaduke!

“How are you feeling?”

“Dandy,” Monk said without conviction. He turned another page.

“You’ll get Lucas Breen, Mr. Monk. I know you will.”

“What if I don’t?” Monk said. “Captain Stottlemeyer could be demoted and Julie’s heart will be broken.”

“They’ll survive,” I said.

“I won’t,” Monk said, and turned another page in the book. Marmaduke jumps into a swimming pool, creating a splash that empties out all the water. Who invited Marmaduke to our pool party?

Monk shook his head and smiled. “He’s enormous.”

“You can’t solve every case, Mr. Monk. You’re asking too much of yourself.”

“If I can find the person who killed my wife, I won’t need to solve another murder ever again,” Monk said. “So until that day comes, I have to solve them all.”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s an order to everything, Natalie. If I can’t get justice for Esther Stoval, Sparky the fire dog, and that homeless man, how can I ever hope to get it for Trudy?”

That didn’t make a damn bit of sense to me. It was also one of the saddest things I’d ever heard.

“How can you put that burden on yourself, Mr. Monk? Those killings have nothing to do with what happened to Trudy.”

“Everything in life is linked. That’s how you can spot the things that don’t fit.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t believe that. You really think that if you solve some magic number of cases, you will have done your penance and God will tell you who killed your wife?”

Monk shook his head. “There’s nothing magic or spiritual about it. I’m not skilled enough yet to figure out who murdered my wife. If I solve enough cases, maybe someday I will be.”

“Mr. Monk,” I said softly, “you’re the best detective there is.”

“That’s not good enough,” Monk said. “Because whoever killed Trudy is still free, and so is Lucas Breen.”

Monk turned another page in the book.

“You can’t do this to yourself, Mr. Monk. You’re holding yourself to a standard of perfection no person could ever meet.”

“That wacky dog gets into one mishap after another.” Monk smiled and pointed at the page.

Marmaduke chases a cat up a tree and manages to uproot the tall pine, much to the dismay of several children who are lugging planks of wood, hammers, and nails. I guess we won’t be building our treehouse today.

“He sure does.” I patted Monk on the back and left the room.

Adrian Monk was, without a doubt, the most complex man I’d ever met, and perhaps the most tragic. I wished he could let go of some of that guilt he carried around.

Of course, I was a fine one to talk. How many nights did I stare at the ceiling and wonder if Mitch died because of me? If I had loved him more, he wouldn’t have been able to leave us. He wouldn’t have been half a world away. He wouldn’t have been shot out of the sky. If I loved him more, Mitch wouldn’t have needed to fly; he wouldn’t have needed anything but me. But I obviously didn’t love him enough, because he had to go. And now he was dead.

I knew it was foolish and irrational to blame myself for his death, but even so, I can’t deny that the guilt was there and still is.

Were Monk and I really so different?

But he was luckier than I. He knew what he had to do to set his world right again. I didn’t have a clue. What penance could I pay to restore order in my world?

I went into the kitchen, looked out the window, and saw Mrs. Throphamner in her backyard, tending her roses, the strong scent of those flowers filling my house. I hoped what happened last night wouldn’t scare her away from watching Julie for me. I’d come to depend on Mrs. Throphamner. The first step toward keeping her happy was probably paying her what I owed her.

I was heading back into the living room in search of my purse, and the cash to pay Mrs. Throphamner, when Monk came charging out of his room, holding open his book, a big smile on his face.

“He’s done it,” Monk said jubilantly.

“Who’s done what?”

“Marmaduke,” Monk said, tapping the open page and the strip about the uprooted tree. “He’s figured out how to get Lucas Breen!”

Stottlemeyer was in his office looking glum. Monk’s Marmaduke book was open on the desk in front of him. Disher stood behind the captain and looked over his shoulder.

“This is the solution to the case,” Monk said.

We sat in chairs facing Stottlemeyer’s desk and waited for his reaction. Stottlemeyer glanced at the comic, then back at Monk.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Stottlemeyer said.

That probably wasn’t the reaction Monk was expecting. But he shouldn’t have been surprised. It was the same reaction I had.

“I agree with the captain on this. I don’t think a dog could really uproot a tree like that,” Disher said. “Even one Marmaduke’s size.”

“Sure he could,” Monk said.

“That’s not my problem with it,” Stottlemeyer said.

“But trees that size have very deep roots,” Disher said. “A car could crash into a tree like that one and it wouldn’t move.”

“Marmaduke is full of rambunctious energy,” Monk said. “Cars aren’t.”

“Would you both stop it?” Stottlemeyer snapped. “I’m not sure you grasp the gravity of this situation, Monk. This morning I was officially reprimanded by the chief over what happened last night. I have to go in front of an administrative review board next week and explain my actions. They could demote me.”

“They won’t once you arrest Lucas Breen,” Monk said.

“You mean after I confront him with this Marmaduke comic and he confesses?”

“Basically, yes,” Monk said, tapping the book. “This ties Breen irrefutably to all three murders.”

“Frankly, Monk, I don’t see how,” Stottlemeyer said.

So Monk explained it, sharing with us the realization he had had while reading the comic and his simple plan for acting on it. I could only smile to myself and marvel, once again, at the mysterious way Monk’s mind worked. But I knew he was right. It was our only hope of bringing down Lucas Breen.

Stottlemeyer was quiet for a moment, mulling over what Monk had told him.

“If I go up against Breen again and I lose, they will take my badge,” Stottlemeyer said. “I need to know you’re right about this.”

“I am,” Monk said.

Stottlemeyer pursed his lips and nodded. “Okay, then, let’s do it.”

He rose from his seat and put on his coat.

“What about me?” Disher asked. “What would you like me to do?”

“Stay right here, Randy, and see that those tests that Monk suggested are run on the homeless man and his possessions,” Stottlemeyer said.

“I could do that with a phone call,” Disher said. “I want to back you up on this, Captain.”

“I know you do,” Stottlemeyer said. “But if this goes wrong and my career blows up, I don’t want you to get hit with the shrapnel. I’m only willing to gamble one badge on Monk and Marmaduke, and it’s mine.”

Disher nodded. Stottlemeyer squeezed his shoulder and we walked out.

“Marmaduke,” Stottlemeyer muttered. “He’s one big dog.”

“The biggest,” Monk said.

22

Mr. Monk and the Clam Chowder

The ride in the elevator up to Lucas Breen’s thirtieth-floor office went a lot faster without Monk. Stottlemeyer had his arms folded across his chest and tapped his foot nervously. I carried Lucas Breen’s surprise in my half-open bag and listened to a horrendous instrumental version of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” which, of course, lived up to its name. The bad elevator music was still stuck in my head when we stepped out into the waiting area.

The beautiful Asian receptionist greeted us with her best approximation of a smile. She wore a thin headset that connected her to the phone system. Several flat-screen monitors built into the desk showed security-camera views of the lobby, the garage, and other areas of the building. On one of the screens I spotted Monk sitting at a table outside of the Boudin Bakery in the lobby. He’d covered the seat bottom with napkins before sitting down.

“As our guard informed you downstairs,” she said to Stottlemeyer, “Mr. Breen is very busy and would prefer that you return at another time.”

She opened her calendar and ran a sharp, red-polished fingernail down the page. “I believe he can accommodate you in March of next year, assuming you’re still engaged in your present position on the police force.”

Stottlemeyer forced an insincere smile of his own. “Tell Mr. Breen that I appreciate how busy he is and that I need only a moment of his time to apologize.”

“You’re here to apologize?” she said, arching a perfectly tweezed eyebrow.

“I’m here to prostrate myself at his feet,” he said.

“Me, too,” I said.

“He likes that,” the receptionist said. This time her smile was real and vaguely sadistic.

“I’m sure he does,” Stottlemeyer said.

She called Breen and told him why we were there. I don’t know what he said, but after a moment she nodded at us.

“You may enter.” She tipped her head toward Breen’s office. I wondered if she was real or a vaguely lifelike robot, and if when she hummed, it sounded like the music we heard in the elevator.

The doors to Breen’s office slid open as we approached. Breen stood in the center of the room, looking nothing like the man we saw the previous night. He was completely recovered from his cold and dressed in one of his custom-made suits.

“You’re looking better this morning,” Stottlemeyer said.

“You have sixty seconds,” Breen said, checking his watch. I could see the monogram on his cuffs.

“That’s all I’ll need,” Stottlemeyer said. “I just wanted to apologize for all the trouble I’ve caused you over the last few days. You told us from day one that you’d never set foot in Esther Stoval’s house.”

“I never met the woman,” Breen said. “But you wouldn’t listen. Instead you accused me of committing every murder in this city.”

Stottlemeyer held up his hands in a show of surrender. “You’re right; I was wrong. I listened to Monk when I should have listened to you. I don’t blame you for being pissed off.”

Breen sneezed and wiped his nose with a handkerchief. “Indeed. Speaking of Monk, where is he?”

“He’s got a problem with elevators,” I said. “So he stayed down in the lobby. But I can call him on my cell phone. I know he’d like to say a few words to you.”

I took out my phone, hit speed dial, put it on the speaker setting, and held it out so we could all hear what Monk had to say.

“This is Adrian Monk,” he said over the speaker. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Testing, one, two, three,” Monk said.

Stottlemeyer took the phone from me and yelled into it, “We can hear you, Monk. Get on with it. Mr. Breen doesn’t have all day. We’ve wasted enough of this man’s time.”

Breen nodded appreciatively at Stottlemeyer, sniffled, and dabbed his nose with his handkerchief. His eyes were beginning to get teary.

“I want to say how sorry I am for intruding on you last night,” Monk said. “I hope you will accept this gift as a small token of remorse for the discomfort you’ve been through.”

I reached into my bag and pulled out a big, white, fluffy cat, a Turkish Van with tan markings on her head and tail, and held it out to Breen.

He immediately started sneezing and backed away. “I appreciate the gesture, but I’m allergic to cats.”

“So you wouldn’t have one in your house,” Monk said.

“Of course not.” Breen glared at the phone as if it were Monk standing there, then shifted his look to me. “Would you mind getting that cat away from me, please?”

I stowed the cat in my open bag.

“You didn’t have a cold last night; you had an allergy,” Monk said. “Your overcoat was covered in cat dander from Esther Stoval’s house. You trailed dander all over your den when you brought your coat in to burn. That’s why I was sneezing, too. I’m also allergic to cats, which is how I know you murdered Esther Stoval, Sparky the firehouse dog, and the homeless man.”

It was the cat in the Marmaduke comic that sparked Monk’s realization. He remembered sneezing when he first met the homeless man on the street days ago and again at the man’s lean-to under the freeway last night. He’d assumed the man slept with cats, but there were no cats anywhere near the man’s shelter.

Breen’s face reddened with fury. He turned his watery glare at Stottlemeyer. “I thought you came here to apologize.”

“I lied. I came to arrest you for murder. Since we’re on the subject, you have the right to remain silent—”

Breen cut him off. “I’m allergic to pollen, mildew, and one of my wife’s perfumes. A runny nose doesn’t prove a damn thing.”

“The cat hair does,” Monk said. “Esther got that Turkish Van only a few days before her murder. It’s a rare breed. I’ll bet we’re going to find dander from that cat, and others that she owns, in your house and in your car.”

“We’re searching your house now,” Stottlemeyer said. “We’ll do a DNA analysis and compare the dander we find to what we’ve recovered from the homeless man’s body and Esther’s other cats. It’s going to match.”

“Yet you said you don’t own a cat and that you’ve never set foot in Esther Stoval’s house,” Monk said. “That leaves only one explanation. You’re a murderer.”

It was a strange experience. Monk was summarizing his case and nailing a killer without even being in the same room. It couldn’t be half as satisfying for Monk as being able to look his adversary in the eye. It certainly wasn’t for me. But it was enough. Breen wasn’t going to get away with murder. He was going to prison.

Breen sneered, which was a lovely sight to see. It was a weak, halfhearted sneer. It lacked the sleazy power and smug self-confidence of all the other sneers he’d blessed us with over the past few days.

“You planted the evidence to frame me as part of some twisted, personal vendetta.”

“Save it for your trial,” Stottlemeyer said. “You’re coming with us.”

Breen ignored Stottlemeyer and marched out to the reception desk. “Tessa, get my lawyer on the phone immediately.”

We followed him out and, just as we reached him, he whirled around, grabbed the cat out of my bag, and flung the screeching animal at Stottlemeyer’s face. He staggered back, struggling with the furious, clawing cat.

Breen bolted for his office, aiming his remote at the doors as he passed. Stottlemeyer pulled the cat off of his face, dropped it on the receptionist’s lap, and chased after Breen, but the doors slid shut with a solid clank in his face just as he reached them.

“Damn,” Stottlemeyer yelled.

“What’s going on?” Monk demanded over the phone.

“Breen is getting away,” I told him; then I turned and confronted the receptionist, who was casually petting the cat. “Open the doors.”

“I can’t,” she said.

I wanted to strangle her.

“Okay.” Stottlemeyer took out his gun and, for a moment, I was afraid he was going to shoot her. “I’ll do it.”

He aimed at the doors.

“They’re bulletproof,” she said.

Stottlemeyer swore and holstered his weapon. “Does he have a private elevator in there?”

She didn’t answer.

The captain spun her chair so she faced him, leaned down, and got nose-to-nose with her.

Tiny rivulets of blood streamed down his face from the cat’s scratches. I don’t know how she felt about his scary visage, but the cat was terrified. The cat leaped out of her lap and scrambled up my leg and into my bag.

“I asked you a question,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Save your questions for Mr. Breen’s lawyer,” she said, her voice cracking just a bit.

“How would you like to be charged as an accessory to murder?”

“You can’t do that,” she said. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

“You helped a triple murderer escape. I’m sure the jury will be very sympathetic to you.”

“Oh, yeah,” Monk said from my cell phone. “They’ll see right away what a warm, honest person you are.”

She blinked once. “Yes, he has a private elevator.”

“Where does it go?” Stottlemeyer said.

“To the parking garage,” she said.

Stottlemeyer pointed to the security monitors. “Let me see it.”

She hit a button, and a view of Breen’s Bentley gleaming in its parking space in the underground garage showed up on one of the screens. On another monitor we could see Monk pacing in the lobby, holding the cell phone to his ear.

Stottlemeyer yelled into my cell phone.

“Monk, Breen is making a run for it. He’s going to the parking garage. I can’t get down there in time. You’ve got to stop him.”

“How am I supposed to do that?” Monk said.

“I don’t know,” Stottlemeyer said, “but you’d better think of something fast.”

Monk rushed out of frame on the monitor. Stottlemeyer handed me back my cell phone, took out his own, and called the police station for backup.

I turned to the receptionist and pointed to the screen that showed the lobby view. I wanted to see what Monk was doing.

“Can you move this camera?” I asked.

“It’s fixed in place,” she said.

Of course it was. The entire security system had been specifically programmed not to do anything Stottlemeyer or I wanted it to do.

“Can you show me the garage exit and the street outside of it?”

She hit a button and two images appeared on either side of a split-screen display. One camera looked down into the garage from the street. The other camera was outside, showing the exit and the sidewalk in front of the garage.

I glanced at the other screen, the one that showed the Bentley in its parking space. Breen ran out of the elevator and got into his car.

I looked back at the split screen. Where was Monk? What was he doing?

There was an easy way to find out. I put the cell phone to my ear, but all I got was a dial tone. Monk had hung up.

Stottlemeyer flipped his phone shut and joined me. “Where’s Monk?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

We watched the garage monitor as Breen backed up and sped out of his parking space, burning rubber.

“I’ve called for backup and put out an APB on Breen’s car,” Stottlemeyer said. “A Bentley shouldn’t be too hard to spot on the streets or on one of the bridges.”

“If he doesn’t ditch it as soon as he’s out of here,” I said.

“We’ll alert the airports, train stations, and the borders.”

That didn’t give me much reassurance. Fugitives with fewer resources than Breen succeeded in eluding the authorities for years. Breen probably had an emergency stash of money hidden somewhere. I knew with horrifying certainty that if Breen got out of the building he’d simply evaporate.

He’d never be found.

We watched what unfolded next on the security camera feeds at the receptionist’s desk. We saw the Bentley speeding up the ramps toward the exit. And then we saw Monk.

He stood on the sidewalk directly in front of the garage exit, a round loaf of sourdough bread in each hand.

Stottlemeyer squinted at the screen. “Is that bread that he’s holding?”

“Looks like it to me,” I said, shifting my gaze between the monitors. One screen showed Monk blocking the exit and another showed Breen’s Bentley racing toward him.

“What the hell is Monk doing?” Stottlemeyer said.

“Getting himself killed,” I said. “Breen is going to plow right over him.”

Breen was rocketing toward the exit, making no effort at all to slow down as he closed in on Monk. If anything, he was speeding up.

But Monk didn’t move. He stood there like Clint Eastwood, stoically facing the car down, holding the loaves of bread. Even Clint would have looked ridiculous and insane.

At the last possible second, Monk threw his loaves at Breen’s windshield and dove out of the way. The loaves burst on impact, splattering chunks of bread and thick clam chowder all over the glass, completely obscuring Breen’s view.

The Bentley flew out of the exit into the street. Steering blind, Breen fishtailed into a turn and slammed into a row of parked cars. The Bentley crumpled like a crushed soda can, setting off a shrill wail of car alarms up and down the street.

Stottlemeyer looked at me in stunned disbelief. “Did I just see Monk stop a speeding car by throwing two bowls of clam chowder at it?”

“Sourdough bowls,” I said, pretty shocked myself.

“That’s what I thought,” he said, and ran to the elevators. “I can’t wait to write that in my report.”

I glanced at the monitor and saw Monk stagger to his feet. He took out his phone and dialed. My cell rang just as Stottlemeyer stepped into the elevator.

“You’d better call a paramedic,” Monk said.

“Is Breen hurt?” I asked.

“I am,” Monk said. “I scraped my palm.”

“I think you’ll live,” I said.

“Do you have any idea how many people walk on that sidewalk each day? Who knows what they have under their shoes. A deadly infection could be raging through my veins as we speak.”

While Monk talked, I saw something on the monitor that scared me a lot more than the germs on the sidewalk. Lucas Breen was emerging from his mangled car. He was disheveled, bloody, and covered in broken glass.

And he was holding a gun.

“Mr. Monk, Breen has a gun!” I said. “Run!”

Monk turned around to see Breen staggering toward him, aiming his gun with a shaking hand. People on the street screamed in panic and took cover. Even the receptionist gasped at the sight, and she was thirty floors above the street, safe behind her desk, watching it all on the screen.

But I knew how she felt. It was like watching a horror movie, only these weren’t actors.

The only people left standing on the street were Monk and Breen, his face twisted with rage.

“You don’t want to do this,” Monk said, still holding the phone to his ear.

“I’ve never wanted anything more in my life,” Breen said. “I hate you with every molecule of my being.”

I could hear him clearly over the phone, and I could see the whole, terrifying scene playing out from various angles on the security-camera monitors.

“Stall him,” I said. “Stottlemeyer is on his way down.”

“It would be a big mistake,” Monk said.

“Oh, really? Give me one reason I shouldn’t blow your head off,” Breen said.

“It would be bad for tourism.”

Breen grinned, several of his teeth missing. “See you in hell, Monk.”

There was a gunshot, only it was Breen who spun around, the gun flying out of his hand.

Monk turned and saw Lieutenant Disher rising from his cover behind a car, his gun pointed at Breen, who was clutching his injured hand.

“Police,” Disher said. “Raise your hands and lie facedown on the ground. Now.”

The developer sank to his knees, then lay forward, his arms outstretched in front of him.

Disher ran up to Breen, pulled his arms behind his back, and handcuffed him.

“Good shot,” Monk said.

“Lucky shot,” Disher said. “I was aiming for his chest.”

“It doesn’t matter what he was aiming for,” I said into the phone. “Thank him, Mr. Monk.”

“You saved my life,” Monk said. “Thank you.”

“Just doing my job,” Disher said, but he was obviously quite proud of himself. I was proud of him, too.

That’s when Stottlemeyer rushed out of the building and over to the men. “Randy, what are you doing here?”

“I figured you might need backup,” Disher said. “So I followed you and parked outside.”

Stottlemeyer did a quick appraisal of the situation, took a rubber glove out of his pocket, and used it like a rag to pick up Breen’s gun.

“In other words,” he said, “you violated a direct order.”

“I don’t recall you phrasing it as an order, sir,” Disher said.

“Good,” Stottlemeyer said. “Then neither do I.”

“Somebody should really call an ambulance,” Monk said.

Stottlemeyer looked down at Breen, who was moaning and squirming on the ground. “Yeah, he’s in a world of hurt.”

“I was thinking about me,” Monk said, and held up his hand. I couldn’t see his palm on the monitor, but I could see the expression on Stottlemeyer’s face.

“That’s a scratch, Monk.”

“People spit on sidewalks,” Monk said. “Dogs urinate on them. This scratch could be fatal.”

“You’re right,” Stottlemeyer said. “Randy, get the paramedics here pronto.”

Disher nodded, took out his phone, and made the call.

Stottlemeyer put his arm around Monk. “You did good, Monk. Real good. The clam chowder was an inspiration.”

“Not really,” Monk said, and showed Stottlemeyer a speck on his jacket. “My jacket is a total loss.”

23

Mr. Monk and the Perfect Room

While we were at the police station giving our statements, Monk and Stottlemeyer learned that they were right. Crime-scene investigators found cat dander in Breen’s house and in the wreckage of his car that, at least in their preliminary examination, matched the hairs recovered from the homeless man’s body and Esther’s cats. They sent the samples out for DNA testing, but there was little doubt how it would turn out. Meanwhile, the forensics unit was still processing the prints and fibers they’d recovered from the firefighting equipment.

That was all nice to know, but what really mattered most was that Lucas Breen was being held without bail behind bars in the prison ward of the hospital.

As far as Monk, Stottlemeyer, and I were concerned, the murders of Esther Stoval, Sparky the fire dog, and the homeless man were solved.

We sat in Stottlemeyer’s office for our usual post-arrest wrap-up. It was a chance for Monk, Stottlemeyer, and Disher to congratulate one another on a job well-done, since nobody else was going to do it.

“After what happened today,” Stottlemeyer said, “we may make sourdough bowls of clam chowder standard equipment in every patrol car. Not only will it cut down on high-speed pursuits, but they’re tasty, too.”

Monk didn’t appreciate the joke, mainly because he wasn’t paying any attention. He was too busy trying to rub out the speck of chowder from his jacket with a Wet One, which wasn’t easy. Not only was the stain staying put, but Monk had a hard time holding the wipe with his heavily bandaged hand. He had more bandages on his hand for a scratch than Lucas Breen had for his gunshot wound.

“What about your administrative review hearing?” I asked Stottlemeyer.

“Canceled,” Stottlemeyer said. “The deputy chief is talking about a commendation ceremony instead.”

“For you?” I said.

Stottlemeyer shook his head and glanced at Disher, who was watching Monk wrestle with his stain. “For you.”

Disher looked up and his cheeks immediately flushed. “Me? Really?”

“You not only saved Monk’s life, but you defused a potentially deadly situation with an armed assailant without anybody getting killed or seriously injured, including the perp.”

I liked the fact that Breen was now a mere perp. Oh, how the mighty had fallen.

“What about you, sir?” Disher said. “You deserve some recognition for refusing to back down despite the political pressure from a corrupt police commissioner.”

“I’m getting to keep my job, which is enough for me,” Stottlemeyer said. “Defying authority and bullheaded stubbornness aren’t qualities the department likes to encourage.”

“And what does Mr. Monk get?” I asked.

“The department’s gratitude and respect,” Stottlemeyer said.

“I’d settle for a strong stain remover,” Monk said.

All in all it was a good day, a vast improvement over where we were the day before—up to our waists in stinking garbage.

“Is it okay if we let the firefighters know that Sparky’s killer has been caught?” I asked.

Stottlemeyer nodded. “Sure, as long as they don’t announce it to the media. The chief hates it when somebody beats him to the TV cameras.”

So we said our good-byes, and on the way back home Monk and I stopped by the firehouse to announce Breen’s arrest.

When we got there, the firefighters were once again cleaning and shining the fire trucks under Captain Mantooth’s direction and eagle eye. Monk went straight to the stack of neatly folded towels and picked one up.

“May I?” Monk asked.

“We would be honored, Mr. Monk,” Captain Mantooth said.

Monk smiled gleefully and got to work polishing the already gleaming chrome grille.

Joe climbed down off the truck and joined us. He wore an SFFD T-shirt that was one size too small and showed off his tight chest and strong arms. My breath caught in my throat. He was so good-looking.

“Did you solve the murder you ran off to last night?” Joe asked.

I nodded. “I didn’t; Mr. Monk did. He also caught Sparky’s killer. It was Lucas Breen.”

“The developer?” Captain Mantooth said in amazement.

“Yes, that’s the guy,” I said.

Hearing this, the rest of the firefighters began to abandon their duties and wander over.

“Why would a rich, powerful man like that want to kill a firehouse dog?” Joe asked.

That was a good question, and all the firefighters gathered around me to hear my long, detailed answer, leaving Monk blissfully alone to shine the fire truck to his heart’s content.

When I was finished with my story, there was a lot of head shaking and astonished looks. I tugged Joe’s sleeve and led him away while his fellow firefighters were occupied discussing what they’d learned.

“This is fantastic news. Let’s go out this weekend and celebrate what you’ve done for Sparky,” Joe said. “And for me.”

“That’s a really sweet suggestion, but—”

He interrupted me. “Let’s bring Julie, too. I want to thank her again for bringing Mr. Monk into this. We can make a day out of it. Besides, I’d like to get to know her.”

I put my hand on his cheek to stop him. “No, Joe, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want Julie to start caring for you as much as I have,” I said. “It’s why we can’t see each other anymore.”

I took my hand away. He looked as if I’d slapped him with it.

“I don’t understand,” Joe said. “I thought things were going so well.”

“They were,” I said. “You’re wonderful, and I really enjoy being with you. I can see us becoming very close.”

He shook his head as if to clear it. “Then what’s the problem?”

“That is the problem. Who you are. And all of this.” I waved my hand to encompass the firehouse around us. “You’re a firefighter.”

“So?”

“You risk your life for a living, and that’s noble, and great, and heroic,” I said. “But it’s wrong for me, wrong for Julie. We both lost a man we loved who did the noble, great, heroic thing. You’re so much like him. We’d both fall in love with you, and I can’t go through it again.”

He forced a smile. “What if I promise I won’t get hurt?”

“You can’t make that promise.”

“Nobody can,” Joe said. “You could get run over tomorrow by a truck while crossing the street.”

“I know, but I don’t make a living of leaping in front of speeding trucks every day,” I said. “I can’t get involved ever again with anyone who has a dangerous job. I can’t take the worry and the risk, and I can’t do it to my daughter. She needs—we both need—a man in our lives who has the safest job on earth.”

“I’m not that guy,” Joe said.

“I wish you were.”

“I wish I were, too.” He took me in his arms and gave me a soft, sweet, sad kiss. “If you ever change your mind, you know where to find me.”

He smiled, turned his back on me, and walked outside. I watched him go, trying hard not to cry, then saw Captain Mantooth and Monk watching, too. Monk tossed his towel into the basket and came over to me.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

“Eventually,” I said.

He saw the tears in my eyes and my trembling lip.

“Would you like to borrow my Marmaduke book?”

I smiled and nodded, a tear rolling down my cheek. “That would be great.”

When we told Julie that Sparky’s killer had been caught, she threw her arms around Monk and startled him with a big hug.

“Thank you, Mr. Monk.”

“It’s nice to have a satisfied client,” Monk said.

“I did something for you,” she said. “Can I show you?”

“Sure,” Monk said.

Julie motioned for us to follow her, and she hurried ahead of us down the hall to her room. As soon as her back was turned, Monk motioned to me for a wipe. I gave him one.

“Children are so special,” he said, wiping his hands thoroughly, “but they’re walking cesspools of disease.”

I gave him a look. “Did you just call my daughter a walking cesspool?”

“She’s also bright and adorable and lovable,” Monk said. “From a safe distance.”

She stood in front of the door to her room, her hand on the doorknob.

“Okay, prepare yourselves,” she said.

Monk glanced at me. “Am I going to need shots for this?”

Before I could reply, she opened her door and waved us inside with a big, proud smile on her face. I peeked in first.

She’d cleaned her room. But saying that doesn’t do it justice. It was immaculate, with everything organized.

“You should see this, Mr. Monk,” I said.

He hesitantly stuck his head in and then looked at Julie. “What have you done?”

“I’ve Monked it.”

“Monked it?” he said.

“My books are arranged by author, genre, and copyright date, and my CDs are organized in even-numbered stacks by artist.” She strolled into her room and opened her closet. Her clothes were arranged by color and type. So were her shoes. “I organized my closet and all of my drawers.”

Monk went over and looked at her shelf of stuffed animals with obvious admiration. “You’ve arranged your animals by species.”

“And size,” she said. “And whether they are amphibians, reptiles, birds, or mammals.”

“That must have been fun,” he said, and he meant it. In fact, from the expression on his face, I think he envied her the experience.

“Oh, yes,” Julie said. “I had a great time.”

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This was a major change for a kid whose idea of making her bed was picking her pillow up off the floor.

“It must have taken you hours to do this,” I said.

“Actually, it’s taken me a few days, but I wanted to show Mr. Monk . . .” Julie stopped and shrugged, at a loss for words to explain herself. “I don’t know. I just wanted to say thank-you.”

I gave her a kiss. “I love you.”

“I didn’t do this for you, Mom.”

“Can’t I be proud of you anyway?” I said.

Julie turned to Monk. “What do you think?”

I was curious to know that myself. Monk touched a whisker on one of her stuffed lions and smiled.

“I think I’m sorry that I have to go home tomorrow,” he said.

24

Mr. Monk and the Wrong Teeth

I woke up in the morning to find Monk all packed, dressed, and ready to go. He insisted on making breakfast for Julie and me. I figured it would be bowls of Chex all around, but he surprised me by saying he’d be making eggs.

“I’d like mine scrambled, please,” Julie said.

“Perhaps you’d like some LSD and some weed with that too.” Monk gave her a chastising look, then glanced at me as if to say I’d failed as a parent in some fundamental way.

Julie’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “What’s LSD? And why would I want to eat weeds?”

“Never mind,” I said, giving Monk a chastising look of my own. “So how are you preparing them?”

“There’s only one way,” Monk said.

He expertly cracked the eggs on the rim of the pan and the yolks spilled out, the egg whites forming perfect circles. I’m not exaggerating—perfect circles.

“How did you learn to do that?”

“Lots of practice,” Monk said. “It’s all in the wrist.”

“Could you teach me?” Julie asked.

“I don’t think we have enough eggs,” Monk said.

“How many does it take?”

“One thousand,” Monk said.

Julie and I both looked at him.

“You know the exact number?” I said.

“It was actually nine hundred and ninety-three,” Monk said. “But I broke seven more to make it even.”

“Of course,” I said. “Makes perfect sense.”

“Can you buy some more eggs today?” Julie asked me.

“I’m not buying a thousand eggs,” I said. “You’ll just have to learn two eggs at a time over breakfast each morning.”

“That could take years,” she whined.

“Now you have a goal in life,” I said.

Monk toasted some sourdough bread, which he cut into even halves and served to us on separate plates, along with oranges that were completely peeled and sliced in perfect wedges.

The breakfast was so perfect, in fact, it looked synthetic and strangely unappetizing, as if it were all made of plastic.

Julie had no such reservations. She devoured her breakfast, finishing up just as her ride to school arrived. She gave me a kiss on the cheek and ran out.

Monk cleared the table and I washed the dishes. After that, we were all alone with nothing to do. No murders to solve. No crimes to investigate.

“So what’s on the agenda for today?” I asked.

“Moving back into my house and cleaning,” Monk said. “Lots of cleaning.”

“You haven’t been there in days,” I said. “What is there to clean?”

“Every inch,” Monk said. “The entire building has been tented and pumped full of poison. It’s a death trap. We’re going to be on our hands and knees scrubbing for days.”

“You will; I won’t,” I said. “I signed on to be your assistant, not your maid. I’ll supervise.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ll be sitting on the couch reading a magazine and watching you work,” I said. “If you miss a spot, I’ll let you know.”

I picked up my purse and my car keys. He grabbed his luggage and we went out to the car. Mrs. Throphamner was in her garden, already tending to her roses. I remembered I still owed her money.

“Good morning, Mrs. Throphamner,” I said. “Your flowers are looking lovely today.”

“So are you, dear,” she said.

At least she didn’t have any hard feelings.

“Oh,” Monk said. “I almost forgot.”

“Me, too,” I said, reaching into my purse. But before I could pay her, Stottlemeyer drove up and got out of his car.

Monk set down his suitcases and we walked over to greet him.

“Monk, Natalie,” Stottlemeyer said. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Sure is.” It amazed me that he could still appreciate it, considering a typical day meant he had plenty of ugliness and death in store. “Do you need Mr. Monk’s help on a case already?”

“Nope,” Stottlemeyer said. “I was on my way into the office and thought I’d stop by with the good news. We’ve got Breen.”

“We had Breen yesterday,” Monk said.

“We had cat hair yesterday,” Stottlemeyer said. “Today we’ve got a fingerprint. The crime lab found his prints inside a firefighter’s glove. He might have been able to explain away the cat hair, but he can’t talk himself out of that. You came through for me again, Monk, like you always do.”

“You too, Captain,” Monk said. “In fact, there’s something you can do for me right now.”

“Retie my shoes? Adjust my belt to a different loop? Change the license plate on my car so all the numbers are even?”

“Yes, that would be great,” Monk said. “And when you get a moment, could you also arrest Mrs. Throphamner?”

I glanced back at Mrs. Throphamner, who was coming out of her backyard with the hose.

“Don’t you think you’re going a bit overboard, Mr. Monk?” I said. “She fell in your lap by accident.”

Stottlemeyer looked past me. “That’s Mrs. Throphamner?”

“Yes,” Monk said.

“And she was in your lap?”

“Yes,” Monk said.

“Maybe it’s you I should arrest,” Stottlemeyer said.

Monk scowled at Stottlemeyer and went over to Mrs. Throphamer, who was rolling up the hose.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Throphamner?” Monk said. She turned around. “You’re under arrest for murder.”

“Murder?” I said. Actually, Mrs. Throphamner, Stottlemeyer, and I all said the same thing in unison. We sounded like a chorus.

“Her husband isn’t in a fishing cabin near Sacramento,” Monk said. “He’s buried in her backyard. That’s why she planted the most fragrant roses she could find and kept changing them—to hide the smell of his decomposing corpse.”

I knew that he was always right about murder, but this time he just had to be wrong. Mrs. Throphamner, a murderer? It was ridiculous.

Mrs. Throphamner sagged and let out a weary sigh. “How did you know?”

“It’s true?” I said, utterly shocked.

Mrs. Throphamner nodded. “I’m glad you found out. I’m so tired of tending the garden, and the guilt was driving me mad. I loved him so much.”

“I know you did,” Monk said. “That’s why you couldn’t entirely let go. That’s why you kept his teeth.”

“His teeth?” Stottlemeyer said.

“His dentures,” Monk said. “She’s got them in her mouth right now.”

“She does?” He narrowed his eyes and stared at her mouth, but she closed her lips and turned her head away. “How could you possibly know that, Monk?”

“When she babysits, Mrs. Throphamner likes to set her dentures on the table beside her while she watches TV,” Monk said. “I had the chance to examine them. They’re obviously male dentures. The maxillary lateral incisors are prominent and large, while a woman’s are narrower. Also, a male’s alveolar bone has a heavier arch, and the internal portion of the dentures—”

“Okay, okay,” Stottlemeyer interrupted, still watching Mrs. Throphamner’s face, waiting for a glimpse of her husband’s teeth. “I believe you. What tipped you off?”

“The flowers that Firefighter Joe brought on his date with Natalie,” Monk said. “He said they were to cover any lingering smell on him from the dump. That got me thinking about Mrs. Throphamner, and it all fell together after that.”

It took me a second, but then it all fell together for me, too. That was two days ago. I felt my whole body tighten with anger. My fists clenched. I think my toes did, too.