Mr. Monk Gets Even (17 page)

Julie hadn’t sustained any injuries beyond some minor cuts and bruises, but she couldn’t stop trembling, even after she’d eaten all the cookies and drank all the Gatorade that the paramedic gave her to deal with the shock.

Monk, meanwhile, gave a detailed report to the arson investigator about what he’d seen and smelled before the explosion. It was the most detailed witness report that the arson investigator had ever taken. By the time Monk was done, there wasn’t a whole lot left for the investigator to investigate. Monk finished up his story just as the team from the medical examiner’s office wheeled out Stella Chaze’s corpse in a body bag and a crime scene unit arrived to process the scene for evidence.

The four police officers who’d accompanied Stottlemeyer, Monk, and Julie to Chaze’s house, but who had remained outside during the interview, came through the blast with minor injuries. Only one of the officers was cut badly enough by flying glass to require some stitches.

Although the hair on the back of Stottlemeyer’s head had been singed, he hadn’t suffered any serious burns. But the paramedic wanted to take the captain in to the hospital right away to have his arm x-rayed, since it was likely that it was broken. The captain refused to go just yet, though, promising the paramedic that he’d see a doctor later that day, after he was certain that the crime scene was secure.

So the paramedic put the captain’s splinted arm in a sling, gave him an ice pack to put on it, and went back to his unit to wait for his partner.

Stottlemeyer joined Julie and sent the other paramedic away with a nod of his head. He leaned against the car beside her and winced. His arm really hurt, despite the ice.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

She looked at him. “I almost got killed.”

“I know,” he said.

“I can’t do this job anymore, Leland.”

“This doesn’t happen every day,” he said.

“Once is enough, and thankfully I survived. I only took this job because it was an easy way to make some money and pay my bills. It’s not something I care enough about to die for.”

“You’re scared and in shock,” Stottlemeyer said. “It will pass.”

She shook her head. “When I was flying through the air on a fireball, time slowed down for me. And do you know what I was thinking in that long split second? A crazy naked woman just tried to blow me up in her house. What the hell was I doing in there? I knew she was nuts, but I sat there anyway. What does that make me? Maybe as crazy as she was, only better dressed. I don’t want this insanity and risk in my life.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “So what are you going to do?”

“Get a job selling yogurt or something,” she said. “You don’t hear about many yogurt servers getting blown up by the naked girlfriends of imprisoned murderers.”

“I meant about Monk.”

“I’ll stick around for a little while,” she said, “but not for long.”

Stottlemeyer nodded and gestured to Monk, who was now heading their way. “When are you going to tell him?”

“Tonight, tomorrow, I don’t know yet.”

Monk joined them.

“I realized as I was giving my report to the arson investigator that Stella was burning that poop incense not just to unsettle me and hide the smell of gas but also to create additional ignition points,” Monk said. “She was insane, but deviously so.”

“Now you know what she had in common with Dale,” Stottlemeyer said.

“You saved our lives, Mr. Monk,” Julie said. “Thank you.”

Monk shook his head. “I don’t deserve any gratitude. I shouldn’t have let you go into that house in the first place. And I should have thrown you out the instant Stella started smoking her cancer sticks and disclosed that she was burning excrement. At that point, the lethal danger she posed was obvious. I was just too distracted to see it. You’re my assistant, but that’s secondary to the fact that you’re Natalie’s daughter. She entrusted me to look after you and I failed miserably.”

“I’m alive, Mr. Monk,” she said. “I’d say that you succeeded.”

“Accept the gratitude, Monk, and here’s some more,” Stottlemeyer said. “Thanks for putting out the fire on me. I’m sorry it cost you your coat.”

“No worries. I was planning on incinerating it anyway.”

“You were?” Stottlemeyer said.

“We’re in deep trouble now,” Monk said as he glanced back at the morgue wagon. “There’s no question Stella was Dale’s key accomplice, responsible for the accident and spiriting him out of the hospital, but now that she’s gone, we may have lost the one person we know who could lead us to him.”

“Which is exactly why she sacrificed herself,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Maybe she really did love him,” Julie said.

• • •

An officer drove Monk and Julie back to the station and another officer took Stottlemeyer to the hospital to get his arm treated.

Although she was still shaky, Julie felt well enough to drive Monk home and then head back to our house.

Once she was in the empty house, she immediately broke into tears, and after a good, long cry on the couch, she gave me a call and told me what happened, which scared me to death, even though she’d come through it all unharmed.

I won’t lie to you, I was relieved when she told me she intended to quit working for Monk. This is going to sound stupid, but it hadn’t occurred to me, despite my own years of personal experience, that working with him would put her life in danger. I’d simply forgotten how dangerous the job was because I’d become so used to it.

But after Julie told me about her near-death experience, I remembered something that had happened years earlier. I’d been in a life-threatening situation with Monk and a killer, and through an unusual turn of events my cell phone was on and the whole deadly encounter was recorded on my home answering machine. Julie listened to the message and heard it all. And when I came home, she’d confronted me about it. This is how our conversation went back then:

“What were you thinking, going into an abandoned warehouse in the middle of the night?”

“I was doing my job,”
I said.

“Going after murderers.”

“I think maybe it’s what I’m good at,”
I said.

“You are,”
Julie said.

“You think so?”

“This job makes you happy, happier than I have ever seen you doing anything else. But you have to promise me that you will be more careful.”

“Hey, I’m the one who is supposed to do the worrying in this relationship.”

“That changed when people started pointing guns at you.”

I loved the job, and the jolt I got from the potential danger that comes with dealing with killers was probably a part of that. I developed a genuine passion for the detective work (and, immodestly, some skill at it) and I didn’t mind the risks. It was how I’d ended up as a cop in Summit, New Jersey, and yet was also probably among the reasons I was so bored by what I was doing.

But my daughter didn’t love the job. She had no affinity for or interest in it. Working for Monk was just a way to earn money. And while I was willing to risk my life doing it, I was glad that she wouldn’t gamble with her own.

“Tell Monk tomorrow that it’s your last day,” I said without the slightest hesitation.

“I want to, but how can I leave him in the lurch with Dale on the loose and the possibility of Cleve Dobbs getting away with murder? He’ll fall apart.”

“I’ll be on the first flight back to San Francisco that I can get,” I said. “I was going to come back for the wedding this week anyway, so I’ll just move my flight up a couple of days. I’m sure Randy will understand. In the meantime, call Ellen Morse, let her know what you’re doing. She’ll keep him together and Leland will be there for him, too.”

“Thank you, Mom,” she said. “I wish you were here now.”

It was the first time in years that I’d heard Julie say something like that and it made my heart melt.

“Me, too,” I said.

Julie picked up Monk at eight the next morning to drive him down to the station. Monk hadn’t heard about any new developments in the search for Dale, nor did he have any new insights himself, but he didn’t have the patience to sit around his place waiting for news. He wanted to be at the station to help interpret any information that might come in. Monk knew that a fact that might seem insignificant to the police could end up being the key to solving the mystery of Dale’s whereabouts for him.

He didn’t have to tell Julie this, though. She knew it because she knew Monk.

And it was this unspoken interaction that made her delay telling Monk that she was quitting. She realized just how important she was to him, and how long it would take to not only find a replacement but for that new assistant to get in sync with his thinking and his moods.

She figured it would soften the blow if she waited until I was in town to tell Monk that she was leaving.

My daughter is a smart cookie.

They found Stottlemeyer and Devlin at a big dry-erase board that had been wheeled into the squad room. It was covered with a timeline of events, photographs, blueprints, and papers containing facts related to Dale’s arrival at the hospital, the crash in Union Square, and the explosion at Stella Chaze’s house.

Stottlemeyer’s right arm was in a dark blue cast and a matching sling and he looked like he hadn’t slept. Devlin didn’t look much better.

“Morning,” Stottlemeyer said to them without shifting his gaze from the board. He was hoping that if he stared at the damn thing long enough, the answer would emerge.

“How are you feeling?” Monk asked.

“Eternally grateful to whoever invented Vicodin,” Stottlemeyer said.

“You’re on drugs?” Monk asked.

“Hell yes,” Stottlemeyer said and tipped his head to Devlin. “You want to fill them in on what we don’t know?”

Devlin sighed, pointing first at an artist’s sketch taped to the board. “This is a rendering of how Dale might look now, derived from Dr. Auerbach’s description and some photographs we dug up of him in his teen years, when he was plump but not yet morbidly obese.”

Julie squinted at the picture. “It doesn’t look much like Dale. It looks like two entirely different people Photoshopped together.”

“You would, too, if you had a couple of hundred pounds of fat sucked out of you and the excess skin cut away,” Stottlemeyer said. “But I don’t think that sketch is of much use to us anyway. For all we know, Dale is undergoing additional plastic surgery as we speak, or he will once he’s recovered from the lipo and gastric bypass that he just had.”

Devlin tapped a photograph of a black Chrysler Town & Country hearse.

“This is the hearse stolen from the Buffman Brothers mortuary. It was found on the docks at Mission Bay,” she said, referring to the long-abandoned, decaying Bethlehem Steel warehouses, foundries, and machine shops on the piers. “We discovered tire tracks at the scene that match Chaze’s Lexus and dirt in her treads that match the docks.”

“That means that she drove Dale from the hospital to the pier, where her car was already parked. She left the hearse and drove back home in the car, where she cleaned herself up,” Stottlemeyer said. “We’ll never know what she planned to do after that because she ran into us first.”

“So Dale could be hiding out in one of those empty warehouses in a makeshift ICU,” Monk said.

“We’re searching every inch of those piers,” Stottlemeyer said.

“Or she could have delivered him to a waiting boat,” Monk said. “From there, he could have gone across the bay or out to sea.”

Devlin nodded. “We’ve alerted the Coast Guard, and they’re spot-checking sailboats, tankers, anything that floats, but they can’t possibly search every boat off the California coast.”

“Then again,” Monk said, “we don’t know that Dale’s nude girlfriend didn’t drive him somewhere in the city in her Lexus and drop him off before she got home.”

“That’s true,” Stottlemeyer said. “So he could be anywhere in the city or not in the city at all.”

“That narrows it down,” Julie said.

“We know he’s got to have another accomplice, someone who can take care of his medical needs,” Monk said. “What do we know about Dr. Auerbach? He was the last person to see Dale. He could have helped with the escape and bought the drugs and equipment necessary to care for Dale without raising suspicion.”

“He’s been Dr. Wiss’ partner for fifteen years,” Devlin said. “He’s a stable family man, married with kids, with no arrest record and no significant debts. We’ve also had him under surveillance since he left the hospital and he’s gone from there to their clinic and back to his house.”

“We checked his clinic,” Stottlemeyer said. “Dale isn’t there and we doubt he’s in Auerbach’s house, though we are keeping our eye on it.”

“And what about Dr. Wiss?” Monk asked.

“He’s still in Hawaii with his wife,” Devlin said. “The cops there have been keeping an eye on him for us, too.”

“You’re being very thorough,” Monk said.

“Thank you,” Devlin said.

“But we have nothing to go on,” Monk said.

“We were hoping that you’d spot something that we missed,” Stottlemeyer said.

Before Monk could answer, Deputy Chief Harlan Fellows marched in wearing a doubled-breasted suit and black shoes so shiny they put Dorothy’s ruby slippers to shame. Fellows was accompanied by two grim-faced uniformed police officers.

Monk couldn’t look at Fellows. It wasn’t the glare off those shoes or any personal animosity that made Monk turn away, but rather Fellows’ front teeth, which were crooked and overlapping. Monk found them repulsive.

“Captain, I need to talk with you,” Fellows said and gestured to Stottlemeyer’s office. “Now.”

“If it’s about the investigation into Dale Biederback’s escape, we can talk right here,” Stottlemeyer said. “You know Lieutenant Amy Devlin and Adrian Monk. I’m not sure if you’ve met his assistant, Julie Teeger.”

Fellows nodded and glanced at the two uniformed officers, who lingered behind him, before continuing. “The moment we heard that Biederback was going to be released from prison for this surgery, you rallied hard to be the one to handle security at the hospital. You assured us you had it covered and that building was locked down tighter than the secret formula for Coca-Cola.”