Mr. Monk Gets Even (3 page)

I approached the storage unit, looking like a weary, beaten-down single mother without much cash. It wasn’t a hard performance for me to pull off. I’d had plenty of experience in that role.

The storage unit was laid out like a mini-mart, with metal shelving along the walls and one freestanding set down the middle. A young Asian woman in a T-shirt and jeans sat on a folding chair behind a card table with a cash register on top. She was reading a tattered Michael Connelly paperback. I wondered whether the book was stolen, too. Behind her, listening to an iPod, stood a big Hispanic guy in a tight tank top that showed off all his muscles and tats. I guess he was there to prevent shoplifting from the shoplifters. I wondered whether he’d paid for the music on his iPod or if it was pirated.

The cashier glanced at me and said, by rote, “Everything is half off the ticketed price.”

“Thanks,” I said, and went inside.

I browsed the shelves. They sold soap and cleaning supplies, mostly, along with some basic foods such as flour, rice, and breakfast cereal. A refrigerator in the back was filled with jugs of milk. The thieves didn’t even bother hiding where their merchandise had come from or what it actually cost. Each item was still marked with the original price stickers from the stores they were stolen from. In fact, the information was a selling point to their cash-strapped clientele.

I knew it was a profitable enterprise. They paid an army of shoplifters twenty percent of the retail price of the items they stole, and then sold the items for half price. It doesn’t sound like much, but the profits could really add up. They made five dollars tax free on every fifty-ounce bottle of Tide that they sold.

Part of me felt guilty for what I was about to do. The only reason that this underground market existed and thrived was because so many people in the present economy simply couldn’t afford to pay full price for milk, soap, and other basic necessities.

I grabbed a bottle of Tide and took it to the front table. “Do you take credit cards?”

The woman looked up at me from her book and sneered. “Cash only.”

“Do you give a law enforcement discount?” I reached into my purse and pulled out my badge.

The woman, and the four other customers in the store, bolted. But the big Hispanic guy was resigned to his fate. He stayed where he was and raised his hands in surrender. He’d probably been in trouble with the law before and didn’t want to add resisting arrest to his offenses.

While I read him his rights and handcuffed him, the woman was nabbed by the two uniformed police officers who were waiting at the gate, the only way out of the property. I’d called them in for backup before I’d arrived.

By the time I got to the gate with my prisoner, the cashier was in the backseat of the patrol car and Chief Disher had pulled up in his police-issue SUV.

Disher was in his late forties, but he had a boyish quality that made him look easily half his age. And when he was dressed in uniform, as he was now, complete with his wide-brimmed ranger-style hat, he looked like a kid in a costume. The big goofy smile on his boyish face only underscored that impression.

“Great work, Natalie,” he said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if this arrest brings down the entire criminal enterprise.”

“Thanks, but it’s hardly the French Connection,” I said as I put my prisoner in the backseat of the patrol car. “They’re selling stolen laundry detergent and low-fat milk, not cocaine and heroin.”

“Yeah,” said the woman in the backseat. “You should be going after real criminals.”

“You are a real criminal, lady,” Disher said, then slammed the door and turned to me. “You’re not looking at the big picture.”

“There’s a big picture?”

He led me away from the car. “I’ll bet my badge that this isn’t the only underground store this ring is operating. We’ll cut a deal with the woman you just arrested and she’ll sing like Adele and bring down the whole operation to save herself. The Summit Chamber of Commerce and the New Jersey Grocers Association are going to be very grateful to you.”

“That’s my dream.” I gestured to the four frightened customers who were being interviewed by the uniformed officers. “What about them? They are probably working for minimum wage or less. Their only crime is just trying to get by.”

Disher glanced at them. “I understand how you feel and you don’t have to worry—we’re not going to arrest them. But these thefts cost legitimate businesses tens of thousands of dollars, and to make up those losses, they cut back on employees or close stores, putting more people in the same lousy financial situation as those folks are in who were shopping here today.”

He had a good point. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“Not only that, but petty thieves and drug addicts swarm to areas where they know they can make a quick buck selling shoplifted items, and that causes a domino effect in crime. We don’t want that element here.”

“You’ve given this a lot of thought,” I said.

“That’s why I wear the big hat,” he said. “This may not be the most exciting investigation you’ve ever been a part of, and laundry detergent may not be as sexy as recovering blood diamonds, rescuing a kidnapped child, or catching a serial killer, but this is what real, street-level law enforcement is all about. And most impressive of all, you did it on your own time. You should be proud of yourself.”

Maybe so, but I wasn’t feeling it.

I remembered the satisfaction, the pure adrenaline rush that I felt every single time I helped Monk solve a murder, particularly on those cases that seemed utterly unsolvable.

This felt nothing like it. Nor did any of the other arrests I’d made or crimes that I’d solved since I got to Summit.

I was beginning to wonder if I’d ever feel that way again, or if it was even possible without Monk.

CHAPTER TWO

Mr. Monk and His Assistant

W
hile I was in Summit, hot on the trail of laundry detergent thieves, life was going on as usual for Monk, Julie, and my friends in the San Francisco Police Department.

Which brings me to the story of a BMW 320i parked on a downtown street. The roof was flattened and the windows were shattered. That’s what happens when a two-hundred-pound weight is dropped on the ultimate driving machine from seventeen stories up.

But when that two-hundred-pound weight is a human body, it also creates a gory mess that draws a crowd of shocked onlookers and a swarm of crime scene investigators and homicide detectives.

And if it happens in San Francisco, it also draws Adrian Monk.

He was standing still beside the BMW, but his attention wasn’t on the corpse. He was staring at a gleaming silver 2004 Mercedes CLK Brabus parked across the street.

My daughter, Julie, was a couple yards away, checking her e-mail on her iPhone. She wasn’t uncomfortable around crime scenes, but she wasn’t eager to hang around dead bodies, either. Besides, she figured her job was getting Monk to the body, not examining it with him.

But she knew it was her responsibility to run interference for Monk, to make sure that he was free of distractions so he could concentrate on the task at hand, so when she glanced up and saw that he wasn’t walking around the body, looking for clues, she sighed, stuck her phone in her back pocket, and walked over to him.

“What’s the problem, Mr. Monk?”

“I’m revolted,” he said.

“You can’t see most of the body,” she said. “It’s under a tarp. Only his feet are sticking out. But his shoes are clean and his laces are tied.”

“I’m not talking about the body,” Monk said.

Julie followed his gaze to the Mercedes across the street.

If it were me, at that point I’d have tried to figure out what Monk found objectionable about the car, then attempted to make him see how petty and irrelevant the problem was compared to the dead body that was right in front of him.

It was an argument I would lose, which meant I’d have to find the owner of the car, then convince whoever it was to fix whatever was dirty, crooked, or imbalanced about the Mercedes, and then get Monk to calm down and focus on the investigation.

But my daughter took a different approach. She slipped her messenger bag off her shoulder, went over to the forensic unit van, foraged around inside it as if it were her own, and emerged with a folded blue tarp, which she carefully spread out evenly over the Mercedes so that it was completely covered.

Then she walked back over to Monk. “Is that better?”

“Thank you,” he said. “But you need to make a note to have a police officer deal with that before we go.”

“Will do,” she said.

“You don’t know what I am talking about, do you?”

She shrugged. “I’ll just have them tow the car. That should solve the problem.”

“But the back rests in the front seats will still be at different angles and the headrests at different heights.”

“Yes, but the car won’t be on the street anymore. Besides, having it towed will teach the owner an important lesson,” Julie said. “Now he’ll know not to leave his car without first making sure that all the seats and headrests are in the same position.”

Monk thought about it for a moment, then nodded with approval. “You’re right. Good thinking.”

She smiled. “Just doing my job.”

It was a job that was only supposed to last for a week or two, just until Monk found someone to replace me. But at the time the unemployment rate in California, a state teetering on bankruptcy, was at historic highs and she needed work, so she stuck with him.

It was a smooth transition for her. Julie didn’t have to apply for a job, try to impress anybody, or learn new skills. Monk was like family. So unlike me, when she started working for him, she was already familiar with every bizarre facet of his obsessive-compulsive disorder. She wasn’t startled by his behavior, confused by his arcane rules, or baffled by his phobias. It was life as usual for her.

And she certainly wasn’t uncomfortable around cops. Captain Stottlemeyer was like an uncle to her and she thought that his right-hand man, Lieutenant Amy Devlin, a former undercover detective with whom I had a rocky relationship, was probably the coolest woman she’d ever met.

It was a smooth transition for Monk, too. He’d known Julie since she was a little girl. And having her there almost made it feel like I hadn’t really left him. It kept a big part of me in his life, even if I was thousands of miles away. Besides, he didn’t like change. Sticking with her meant he didn’t have to make any effort to find someone else or let a stranger into his life.

But their working relationship was definitely different from the one that he and I had. For one thing, Julie wasn’t nearly as stressed out by him as I was. Nor was she as accommodating to his needs. Her attitude was that he was a grown man and that she was his assistant, not his babysitter. And this was her job, not her life.

Not only had she grown up around Monk, but more important, she’d grown up around me working for Monk, and she wasn’t going to make the same mistakes that I had.

While Monk walked slowly around the BMW, his hands out in front of him, framing the scene like a director picking his shots, Julie stayed on the sidewalk and texted Devlin, who was with Captain Stottlemeyer in the victim’s seventeenth-floor apartment, telling her what they were up to.

Devlin sent back a text telling her to come up to the apartment with Monk as soon as he was done surveying the scene.

Unlike my daughter, I wouldn’t have been standing around texting. I would have been right beside Monk, evidence baggies and wipes at the ready, trying to see for myself what the clues were. I involved myself in the cases.

Not Julie.

She was more interested in getting home and salvaging what was left of her Saturday night. The call from Captain Stottlemeyer had interrupted her date with Ricky Capshaw, an aspiring singer, who was still in our living room watching movies on Netflix.

Monk took tweezers from his pocket and used them to pick up a pair of glasses from the street. Both of the lenses were cracked and one of the arms was broken. He held the glasses up in front of his eyes and squinted at them, then waved his hand at Julie. She knew what that meant.

She took an evidence baggie from her messenger bag and held it open for Monk. He dropped the glasses inside. “What’s so special about the glasses?”

“Nothing,” Monk said. “They are common reading glasses.”

“So why are we bagging them?” She sealed the baggie and stowed it.

“He might have been wearing them when he fell.”

“Is that significant?”

Monk shrugged, then tipped his head toward the corpse’s feet, which were sticking out from under the tarp on top of the car. They reminded Julie of the Wicked Witch’s feet peeking out from under Dorothy’s house after it landed in Munchkinland. She half expected the feet to curl up and disappear underneath the tarp.

“He wears size eight shoes,” Monk said. “They’re New Balance 622s.”

“What about them?”

“They are very clean,” he said. “And a fine brand.”

“So?”

“It shows he was a decent man,” Monk said. “What else do we know about him?”

“All I was told was that his name was David Zuzelo and that he either fell, jumped, or was pushed from his apartment balcony,” Julie said.