Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu (16 page)

I was confused. I went over to the coffeemaker, where Jasper, Sparrow, and Arnie had congregated. I guess that made that corner of the room the assistants’ lounge.

I met Jasper’s gaze and gestured to the detectives. “How did they ever manage to pitch in and do all of this?”

“They didn’t,” Jasper said. “Sparrow and I did it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s obvious that Monk suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

“You mean he’s a freak,” Sparrow said.

“He’s already under an unusual amount of stress,” Jasper continued, ignoring Sparrow’s remark. “A disorderly environment would be crippling for him. The more comfortable he is in his surroundings, the more likely it is that he’ll perform at the peak of his abilities.”

All true. But that begged a cynical question.

“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” I said. “But what difference does it make to you if Mr. Monk succeeds or not?”

“I care about people. Otherwise I wouldn’t be in the mental health field. But I suppose you could also say it’s selfish interest in my patient,” Jasper said. “I’ve never seen Cindy so happy or her paranoia so subdued.”

“That’s subdued?” I said, glancing at her.

Chow was heading toward a file cabinet, dodging and weaving and using a circuitous route so she wouldn’t be seen by the computer monitors that she passed along the way.

“She left the house without a radio taped to her head,” Jasper said. “That’s a big step.”

“Most people have got those cellular phone thingies stuck to their ears,” Sparrow said. “I don’t see a big difference between them and her.”

Jasper smiled appreciatively. “That’s true, Sparrow. I wish more people had your enlightened, relative view toward mental health.”

I looked at Sparrow. “I’m surprised you helped Jasper with his little scheme.”

“Jasper’s got a nice butt,” she said matter-of-factly. Jasper blushed. “I’ll do a lot for someone with a nice butt. Besides, Grandpa really needed this. It reminds him who he is again so I don’t have to all the time. It may be his last chance to be himself, and know it, before he goes completely mad-cow.”

“Monk is the only thing holding this group together,” Jasper said. “None of them will say it, but they’re pinning their hopes for redemption on him.”

“Son of a bitch!” Wyatt yelled to no one in particular. “Who glued my pencil cup to my desk?”

Jasper shrank back behind me and Sparrow. There’s bravery for you: hide behind the girls.

Wyatt leaned back in his chair, brought up his boot, and kicked the plastic pencil cup until he shattered it, leaving only the base stuck to the desktop. Satisfied, he returned to his work.

“That’s progress,” Arnie said to us. “The old Mad Jack would have shot it.”

“Is there anything that man won’t shoot?” I asked.

“His mother,” Arnie said. “Well, not lately, anyway.”

Monk returned to the squad room. He seemed relaxed for the first time since he got his badge back. He went up to Porter’s desk. “Where are we with the questioning of fly-by-night dealers of discontinued and overstock running shoes?”

Porter glanced at his notes. “I’ve got reports back from seventeen interviews conducted by officers in the field. No merchants have recognized any of the women in the photos yet, but I’ve logged the names, addresses, and other vital stats of each person the officers talked to in case we have to go back to them later.”

Monk nodded. “Keep up the good work.”

“I’m not leaving my desk until we crack this case wide-open,” Porter declared.

“He’s not kidding,” Sparrow said to me. “I hope you’ve got showers in this building.”

Monk moved down to Cindy Chow’s desk. “Any luck finding Diane Truby’s stalker?”

“He’s in the wind, but he’s got relatives in Sacramento, so I’ve alerted the cops up there and the Chippies along the way to be on the lookout.”

“Chippies?”

“The CHP,” Chow said. “The California Highway Patrol. Where have you been?”

“Away,” Monk said.

“State or private institution?”

“My apartment,” Monk said. “It’s reasonably private.”

“Uh-huh,” Chow said, nodding as if there were some double meaning to what Monk was saying and she understood it. But there wasn’t any other meaning. At least, I
think
there wasn’t.

“I’ve made some important discoveries about Allegra Doucet,” Chow said, pausing for a moment to add significance to what she was about to say. “Shortly before she moved from LA to San Francisco, she spent a few months with ‘friends’ in Albuquerque.”

Monk shrugged. “Does that mean something?”

Chow looked flabbergasted. “It’s
huge
. The headquarters of the Omega Agency, the secret order of humans and extraterrestrials who pull the strings of every world government, is located underneath Kirtland Air Force base in Albuquerque. That’s where the ETs, mostly grays and greens, live and conduct their mind-control experiments, including Project Subzero, which is basically an illegal, unauthorized offshoot of Operation Grillflame.”

“That last part is real,” Jasper whispered to me while Chow kept rambling on.

“The gray and green space aliens?” I replied.

“Operation Grillflame,” Jasper said. “The CIA spent twenty million on a secret program to use psychics to read the minds of enemy agents, change the orbit of spy satellites, and detect plutonium in North Korea. It was an outgrowth of MK-Ultra, the CIA’s mind-control division, that was funded in 1953 with six percent of the agency’s operating budget until it was finally shut down in 1972.”

I stared at him.

“Honest,” he said. “They’re the ones who put LSD on the streets and accidentally created the 1960s.”

I stared at him.

“It’s true,” he said. “You can check it out yourself.”

Jasper scared me. He was a mental health professional. If some of Chow’s paranoia could rub off on him, what did that say about what was going to happen to me after hanging around with Monk? How long would it be before I was measuring the ice cubes in my freezer to make sure they were perfectly square?

Talking to Jasper, and getting lost for a minute in my private little nightmare, I missed a lot of what Chow had to say, but I can probably summarize the gist of it simply enough: Extraterrestrials are scrambling our brains, probing our bodily orifices, and controlling the world with the help of nefarious government agencies.

“What about Max Collins?” Monk asked. “Do you know anything about him?”

“That’s where it gets really interesting,” Chow said. “He made his fortune developing advanced software for radar systems,” she said. “One of his biggest customers is the United States government. Connect the dots.”

“What dots?” Monk said.

“Albuquerque. Radar software. Kirtland Air Force base. Astrology. Extraterrestrials. Project Subzero. Roswell. Murder. Do I need to draw you a picture?”

“Would you, please? I think that would be very helpful.” Monk moved on down to Wyatt’s desk and froze when he saw the missing pencil cup. “Your pencil holder is missing.”

“I busted three chop shops, but there’s no signs of Yamada’s wife’s car,” Wyatt said. “It’s probably been stripped into parts by now that are already on their way to Mexico, China, and South America. This time next week, her front seats will be in a taxi in Manila.”

“All the other desks have pencil holders,” Monk said. “Yours doesn’t.”

“I’ve got the tech geeks in the lab trying to match the tread marks from the intersection with marks on the floor of her garage,” Wyatt said. “I’m also checking her whereabouts at the time of the murder. She says she was at her boyfriend’s place, and he backs her up on it, but I’m sure he’d lie for a percentage of Yamada’s life insurance money. I’ll break him, if I have to do it with my bare hands.”

“We need to get you something for your pencils.” Monk turned to Officer Curtis, who was standing off to one side, awaiting orders. “It’s imperative you get him a pencil holder, one that matches the others.”

She nodded and made a note of it on her pad. “Pencil cup. Imperative. Got it.”

“Excuse me,” someone said.

We all turned to see a gangly man in his thirties standing in the doorway, after being escorted in by a police officer. The stranger was thin, with a long neck, long arms, and a narrow face. He jittered like he had a live current running through his bony body, and pulled nervously on a tuft of hair on his chin.

“Who’s in charge around here?”

Monk stepped forward. “I think that’s me.”

“Get ready to cut me a very big check,” the man said. “I can give you the Golden Gate Strangler.”

Monk hustled the man into an interrogation room. I went with them, even though I wasn’t a cop and hadn’t been invited. I’m pretty sure that Dr. Watson would have gone with Holmes in the same situation.

“I’m Captain Adrian Monk. Who are you?”

“Bertrum Gruber.”

“You can start by unbuttoning your shirt, Mr. Gruber,” Monk said.

“I didn’t come here for a physical.”

“You skipped a buttonhole,” Monk said. “Your entire shirt is misaligned.”

“So what?”

“You’re in a police station. It’s our job to enforce law and order,” Monk said. “You, sir, are out of order.”

“Mr. Monk,” I said, “this man says he has information that could lead to the arrest of the Golden Gate Strangler.”

“That’s what I’ve got,” Gruber said.

“I’m supposed to trust a man who is drunk and disorderly?” Monk said.

“I’m not drunk,” Gruber said.

“Then why are you so disorderly?”

Gruber grudgingly unbuttoned his shirt. Monk turned his back to the man and motioned to me do the same.

“I’m not bashful,” Gruber said.

“You should be,” Monk said.

“What do you know about the Strangler?” I said with my back to Gruber.

“There’s this community garden next to McKinley Park. I went out there early Saturday morning to water my strawberries. I was crouching down, you know, to water them, when I saw this guy come out of the dog park, but he didn’t have no dog. He didn’t see me. The weird thing is, he was clutching this running shoe to his chest like it was made of gold or something.”

A shoe
.

My heart skipped a beat. If Monk knew my heart did that, he would have demanded that it beat one more time to make up for it.

Monk turned around and so did I.

“Your shirt is still misbuttoned,” Monk said.

Gruber looked down at himself. “No, it’s not.”

It was. Monk glanced imploringly at me.

“You don’t seriously want me to button his shirt for him,” I said.

“Show some compassion for your fellow man,” Monk said.

“Yeah,” Gruber said. “Show me.”

I knew Monk wasn’t going to be able to concentrate with the misbuttoned shirt. I had to take one for the team. I sighed and unbuttoned Gruber’s shirt, exposing his scrawny, sunken chest. He grinned at me.

“Nice, huh?” Gruber said. “I work out.”

“I’d better get a big raise,” I said to Monk, but his back was already turned.

“Tell us more about this man you saw,” Monk said.

“He was a fat white guy in his mid-thirties or early forties. He was medium height with greasy brown hair and big, round cheeks, like he had a couple of tennis balls in his mouth.”

I buttoned the shirt up as fast as I could. “I’m done.”

“If you find yourself dreaming about this moment, give me a call,” Gruber said. “We can go sailing on my yacht.”

“You’ve got a yacht?” I asked.

“I will soon.” He winked. “It’s on the top of my list of things to buy with my two hundred and fifty Gs.”

“You haven’t given us anything we can use,” Monk said.

“I’m not done yet,” Gruber said. “The guy wipes his shoe against the edge of the curb to get some dog crap off of it, then gets into his car, an oxidized blue 1999 Ford Taurus with a broken left rear taillight and a dent on the bumper. You want the plates?”

“You remember his license plate number?” Monk said incredulously.

“Just the last letter and the numbers ’cause they match my mom’s birthday,” Gruber said. “M-five-six-seven. Like May fifth, 1967.”

“Stay here,” Monk said to him. “The room has a nice mirror. You might want to practice buttoning your shirt while we’re gone.”

As soon as we were out of the room, Monk went straight to Officer Curtis, who, like everyone else, was waiting in the squad room to hear whatever news he had.

“I need you to run a plate right away,” Monk said. “The last part is M-five-six-seven.”

“With just a partial plate,” she said, “you’re going to get hundreds of hits.”

“I only want those that are registered to a Ford Taurus,” Monk said.

Officer Curtis sat down at a computer and typed in the information.

“What do you think of his story?” I said.

“He knew about the left shoe. That information wasn’t released to the public. He also said the man was coming out of the dog park. The specific location where the body was found wasn’t released, either.”

“So this is a good lead.”

“I don’t trust him,” Monk said.

“You’re just saying that because his shirt was misbuttoned.”

“You won’t find a better indicator of a man’s character,” Monk said. “So I wasn’t surprised when he lied.”

“What did he lie about?”

“What he was doing in the park that morning,” Monk said.

“How do you know?” There I was, asking that question again. I should print the question on a T-shirt, along with a few others I frequently repeated, and wear it at work every day like a uniform.

“He said he was checking on his strawberries.”

“There’s an open garden there,” I said. “People can grow whatever they want.”