Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu (7 page)

A bespectacled man stood beside her, completely absorbed in whatever he was rapidly text-messaging into his PDA. He looked like he’d fallen out of bed onto the pile of clothes he wore yesterday and decided, what the hell, he’d wear them another day. He wore an untucked, unbuttoned, wrinkled blue oxford over a wrinkled red T-shirt and wrinkled cargo pants. There was something undeniably academic about him. I don’t know whether it was the glasses, the rumpled clothes, or just a general sense of studiousness.

“Who are you?” she asked Monk, her voice barely above a whisper.

Monk cocked his head and studied her with scientific curiosity.

“I’m Adrian Monk,” he said.

“Prove it,” she said.

Monk pulled out his badge and proudly showed it to me, to her, and to the man at her side.

“A badge like that can be bought in Union Square for spit,” she said. “If you really are who you say you are, then you won’t object to giving me a swab of your DNA to confirm it.”

She reached into the inside pocket of her leather jacket and pulled out a long Q-tip in a sterile package. This action inspired a flurry of excited thumb-typing by the guy beside her.

“You must be Detective Cindy Chow,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes at me. “Who do you work for?”

I tipped my head to Monk. “Him. Your boss. The captain of homicide.”

“She’s my assistant, Natalie Teeger,” Monk said.

“Who do you
really
work for?” Chow asked me.

“Nice hat,” I said.

“It’s crude but it effectively blocks the signal.” She smiled. “And that just frustrates the hell out of you and your puppet masters, doesn’t it?”

Monk looked incredulously in my general direction, but not exactly at me. He still hadn’t forgotten I had breasts. “She’s a detective?”

“You’re the one who didn’t want to read the files,” I said.

“What files?” Chow said.

The guy standing next to her couldn’t input this stuff into his PDA fast enough.

“Who is your buddy?” I asked.

The man paused in his typing. “Oh, I’m sorry. I should have said something, but I was trying not to influence the natural course of the interaction. I’m Jasper Perry, Cindy’s psychiatric nurse.”

“You can drop the charade,” Chow said. “I know you both work for them.”

“Them?” Monk said.

“The extraterrestrials occupying the shadow government,” she said, getting a blank look from him. “The ones who designed the CIA’s Operation Artichoke program to control the masses with fast food laced with mind-control drugs, subliminal messages in television shows, and transmissions from orbiting satellites to microchips implanted in our brains.”

“Oh,” Monk said. “Them.”

“They wouldn’t let me back on the force unless I agreed to let their spy here dope me up and keep me under constant surveillance.”

“I’m curious about something,” Monk said. “When you got your badge back, did it also come with a gun?”

“Of course,” she replied. “Didn’t yours?”

“No,” Monk said.

“I’m not surprised,” Chow said. “Word is that you’re nuts.”

I turned to Jasper, who was giving his thumbs a workout on his PDA keyboard. “Who are you e-mailing?”

“I’m sending notes to myself.”

“About what?”

“Me,” Chow said. “Letting his handlers know about everything I think, say, and do.”

“Actually, I’m doing my doctoral thesis on the commonality of certain facets of complex, recurring conspiratorial delusions, which form an almost Jungian shared unconscious among paranoid schizophrenics, regardless of language, race, sex, or ethnicity, but that and this is the really surprising thing—incorporates mythological iconography from—”

“Where’s the body?” Monk interrupted.

“Inside,” Chow said.

Monk went into the house, and we all followed, though Jasper looked a little hurt that we’d so quickly lost interest in the topic of his doctoral thesis, whatever the hell it was.

The front room of Doucet’s house was devoted to her business, but there was nothing about the sleek, contemporary decor that was related to astrology. No crystal balls or tarot cards. No beaded curtains or incense. This could easily have been the office of a shrink, a lawyer, or an accountant. There were two leather chairs facing a white wooden desk with a keyboard and a flat-screen monitor on top. The computer screen displayed a circle filled with multicolored numbers, crisscrossing lines, and strange symbols.

Doucet was facedown on the floor, her long black hair fanned out around her head and stuck in the brownish pool of dried blood.

When Officer Curtis said that the homicide victim was an astrologer, I immediately imagined a clichéd old crone with warts, cataracts, and a toothless grin.

But Doucet could have been a fashion model. She had smooth, darkly tanned skin, a slim figure, and was impeccably dressed in a Prada suit with the skirt cut just a bit too short to be professional.

Monk walked around her desk, tilting his head this way and that, holding his hands in front of him as if framing a shot for a movie. His footsteps echoed on the hardwood floor.

Jasper watched Monk in fascination. “What is he doing?”

“His thing,” I said.

My gaze was on the Louis Vuitton handbag on a side table. The bag was worth more than my car. Doucet must have been very good at her job. I wondered if the money came from her clients or from using her soothsaying powers to successfully wager on stocks, horses, and the lottery.

“The ME says she was killed sometime last night, stabbed multiple times in the chest and stomach with an ice pick or letter opener,” Chow said, standing behind the computer monitor. “One of her clients came by this morning, peeked in the window, and saw her body.”

Monk looked at the image on the computer screen. “What is this?”

Chow took out a mirror from her pocket. She reached over the monitor and angled the mirror so she could see the reflection of what was on the screen.

“Why don’t you just look at the screen?” I asked her.

“Because I don’t want it looking back at me.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. Jasper seemed to sense my confusion.

“Her fear is that computers allow the government to spy on us,” Jasper whispered to me. “That they log our keystrokes and watch us from cameras hidden in the screens.”

“It’s a computer-generated, personal astrological star chart based on how the planets and stars were aligned at the precise time and location of a person’s birth,” Chow explained to Monk. “The symbols represent zodiac signs, planets, and elements like fire, earth, air, and water. The circle is broken into sections called houses, representing different aspects of your physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional life. She could look at this, figure in the current alignment of the planets, and advance the chart mathematically to predict whether this is a good week to ask your boss for a raise.”

“You’re very knowledgeable about horoscopes,” Monk said. “Do you believe in astrology?”

“Hell, no,” she said. “But they do.”

“They?” Monk asked.

“Them,”
she said.

“Oh,” Monk said.

“There are probably hundreds of charts just like this one on her hard drive,” Chow said. “Every client will have one.”

“I’d like to know who those clients are. Maybe one of them had a motive,” Monk said. “Do you think you could find out?”

Monk was a deductive genius and had an incredible eye for detail, but I’d never seen him do any digging for facts. He gladly left that grunt work to others.

“I can tell you who they are, who they’re sleeping with, how they voted in the last election, and if they pick their noses while they drive their cars.”

“People clean their noses while operating heavy machinery?” Monk said incredulously. “Yeah, right.”

Monk shot me a look and rolled his eyes. As far as he was concerned, that was the craziest thing Chow had said yet. It was so crazy to him that he forgot he was afraid to look at me.

“I think her murder could be part of something much, much bigger,” she said.

“Here it comes,” Jasper said.

“Her scrutiny of the alignment of stars and planets on someone’s chart led her to accidentally discover the date, time, and location of an alien landing,” Chow said. “So they immediately dispatched a local agent to kill her.”

“They?” I asked.

“Them,”
she replied.

But Monk wasn’t listening anymore. Something had distracted him. He walked into the center of the room, head at an angle, his hands held up in front of him.

“Do you hear that?” he asked.

“What?” I said.

“A low whine,” Monk said. “No, a whistle. A whistling whine.”

“I don’t hear anything,” Chow said.

“Maybe you could if you turned down your radio,” Jasper said.

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Chow said accusingly. “You can’t wait to get inside my head again.”

“Ssshhh,” Monk said.

We were all silent. I heard the hum of the computer, the voices from Chow’s radio, and a sound that I recognized immediately.

“It’s a toilet running,” I said.

Monk glared at me. To him, saying the word “toilet” was the same as uttering a particularly ugly profanity.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I meant to say it sounds like a bathroom appliance isn’t operating properly.”

Monk headed down the hall, following the sound. The rest of us dutifully followed.

The bathroom was in the back corner of the first floor, just past the stairs, in what had probably been a closet when the home was originally built. It was narrow and cramped and would have been claustrophobic if not for the small window, which was open, the towel rack below it broken off the wall and lying on the floor in front of the toilet.

There was only room for one person in the bathroom, so Monk went in while we stood in the hall, peering through the doorway.

Monk examined the holes in the wall where the towel rack had once been affixed with screws. “Someone stepped on this and broke it off the wall.”

“Looks like you’ve found how the killer came in,” Chow said. “And made his escape after taking a whiz.”

Monk grimaced and stepped away from the toilet as if it might spontaneously combust.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Monk said.

“When you have to go, you have to go,” Chow said.

“Perhaps the anxiety, violence, and bloodshed of the killing made him sick and he had to vomit,” Jasper said. “It’s a common reaction to stress.”

“I’ll check the toilet for DNA,” Chow said, taking out one of her Q-tips. Monk stepped in front of her, blocking her access to the bathroom.

“Are you insane?” Monk said, practically shrieking. “If you open that lid, you could expose us all.”

“To what?” she asked.

“God only knows,” Monk said. “We’ll wait until the house has been evacuated and let the professionals deal with it.”

“You want to evacuate the house before lifting the toilet seat lid?” Chow said.

“This is no time for heroics,” Monk said.

Jasper’s thumbs flew over his PDA keypad. He’d found a new nut to write about.

Monk turned his attention back to the window and the broken towel bar.

“If he broke this on the way in, she would have heard it.”

“Maybe he broke it on his way out,” Chow said. “She was dead. He could make all the noise he wanted.”

“So why was he in such a hurry if the deed was done?” Monk said. “Wouldn’t it have made more sense to use the front door, the back door, or one of the larger bedroom windows? This window must have been a tight squeeze.”

“He could have been very small,” Chow said. “They often are.”

“They?” Monk asked.

“Them,”
Chow replied.

“Something isn’t right,” Monk said as the two of us left Doucet’s house.

“Gee, you think?” I said. “What was your first clue? The aluminum foil or the radio taped to her head?”

“I’m talking about the murder. Why weren’t there any signs of forced entry?”

“Isn’t the window in the bathroom a sign of forced entry?”

“I don’t know what it is yet. The only thing I’m certain of is that Allegra Doucet knew her killer.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She was standing and facing her killer when he stabbed her,” Monk said. “There are no signs of a struggle and no defensive wounds on her body. She didn’t know her life was in danger until she’d already lost it.”

“I guess this means you haven’t solved the case yet,” I said.

“I’m having an off day,” Monk said.

“I was joking.”

“I wasn’t,” Monk said, his attention shifting to a home across the street. “Maybe she can give us some insight.”

I followed his gaze and saw a shabby, faded-purple Victorian house, the dark curtains drawn behind a neon sign that read MADAM FROST—FORTUNE TELLER AND PSYCHIC. TAROT CARDS, PALM READING, ASTROLOGY. The curtains were decorated with half-moons and stars and a couple of yin-and-yang symbols thrown in for good measure.

“Are you going to ask her to look into her crystal ball for you?” I asked.

“Madam Frost might know something about her neighbor and fellow charlatan.”

We were heading for her front door when Madam Frost came hobbling around from the back of her house. I knew who she was because, unlike the late Allegra Doucet, Madam Frost looked every bit the part she was playing. She was in her sixties, or perhaps older, draped in a shawl that looked as if it were woven out of spiderwebs, and leaning on a knobby cane seemingly carved from an ancient tree limb. There were rings on every finger of her gnarled hands, and her teeth were as yellowed as the pages of a vintage paperback. Picture Yoda in drag and you’ve got her.