Mr. Monk Is Open for Business (4 page)

CHAPTER SIX

Mr. Monk and the Shooter

B
y the time we arrived on the scene, quite a lot had already happened.

A full block of Stockton Street had been cordoned off, with a SWAT team suited up and making its way into place. The center of action was a three-story warehouse, currently the focus of dozens of riflescopes and binoculars and, from a greater distance, cameras from the TV affiliates. Captain Stottlemeyer had taken up a position behind a barricade of black-and-whites, which was where we found him.

The building was the U.S. headquarters of East Decorative Imports, an importer of high-end statues and pottery and religious trappings from the Far East. If you’ve ever been to a Zen center or a trendy spa, then you know the kind of things they supply. The first two floors made up the company’s warehouse, while the third floor, the center of the SWAT team’s attention, housed the showroom and offices.

“Someone’s alive in there with a phone,” Stottlemeyer said as we settled in beside him, our heads popping over one of the hoods. “As far as she knows, it’s a single shooter. One of the employees. Wyatt Noone by name. We did a quick check and he fits the profile. Mid-thirties, Caucasian, a loner,
no local family. It seems that he came in this morning with a shotgun and started firing. We don’t yet know the cause.”

“How many are in the building?” I asked. Monk was paying attention even though he was busy wiping down the driver’s side door with a handful of antiseptic wipes.

“All the office staff,” said the captain. “Four plus the shooter. The warehouse doesn’t open until midafternoon. Maybe it’s got something to do with local time in Japan or wherever the company is based. The good news is the warehouse workers aren’t here. It could be a lot worse.”

“You say there’s someone still alive?” I asked.

“The office assistant, Sarabeth Willow. We think she’s hiding out in the second-floor warehouse space. Nine-one-one patched her through to me. I told her not to call, to find somewhere safe, then text us her location. That’ll make it safer for her when the SWAT team goes in.”

“Why am I here?” Monk asked. He had finished with the door and was reaching up to do the rearview mirror.

“Devlin is coordinating site access. Normally that’s a SWAT function. But she was here early and jumped right in, flashing her homicide badge and filling in where needed. I think she misses this kind of action.”

“Are you worried about her?” Monk asked, forgetting for a moment the smudged mirror. He raised his eyes over the hood and found Lieutenant Devlin, the only woman I know who looks even better in a Kevlar vest, not that there are many women wearing them. She was at the building’s main entrance, sharing a few words with a team member on the door. Then she made her way around to the alley to check another access point.

“Devlin’s a pro,” said Stottlemeyer. “But yeah. Anything off protocol is a worry. That’s why I need your eyes, Monk. She’s family.”

Lieutenant Amy Devlin is the captain’s number two, having replaced Randy Disher after he’d gone off to run the show in Summit. She is tall and muscularly thin, which I found a bit intimidating at first. Her hair is the kind of shiny, spiky mess that always looked different and probably took more time to arrange in the morning than my dirty-blond locks. Devlin had taken some getting used to, just the way Monk had taken some getting used to for her. But Captain Stottlemeyer was right. She was family.

The transceiver on the shoulder of Stottlemeyer’s tactical vest started to squawk. “Movement, movement,” came a male voice. “Second floor, northeast corner. Shooters, wait for confirmation.” It sounded like the SWAT team commander.

The captain lunged for his binoculars and trained them on the corner window. I could see it, too: a medium-sized figure with a bald or shaved head, apparently male, in a dark sweatshirt, flitting back and forth across the window. In his right hand, hanging by his side was what looked like a shotgun. In a second, Stottlemeyer was comparing him to an image on his smartphone. “Looks like our guy,” he said, pushing a button and leaning into his transceiver. He handed the binoculars off to Monk. “Here.”

“Thanks, Captain.”

Stottlemeyer heaved a sigh. “Don’t clean them. Use them.”

“Oh, okay.” Monk put away his wipes and gingerly lifted the lenses within an inch of his eyes. That’s as close as they would get.

“Take your shot,” crackled a voice.

We all waited, eyes focused on the window, ears tuned for the sound of gunfire. But the figure in the window stepped back into the shadows and within half a second the shot was lost. Curses sputtered over the transceiver from at least three sources.

Stottlemeyer’s phone pinged. “Sarabeth, good for you,” he muttered. But his face fell as he read the text message.
Shot bad hiding help.

The captain relayed the information and somewhere on the other end a decision was made. Four or five SWAT team members scrambled around the edges of the building. And out of the half dozen voices crackling over the transceiver, Devlin’s was the only female, as gruff and decisive as the others, guiding the officers to the entry points and barking out last-second information.

A lot of things were said and done over the next few minutes. Honestly, I have no idea how these people do it. I felt so helpless, hunched behind the police cruiser, staring at the captain’s transceiver. Helpless, but a little grateful that I didn’t have to be a part of it.

The first floor, consisting of the loading dock and lower warehouse, was soon cleared. One body, no shooter. The teams positioned themselves at the two opposite stairwells and started the second-floor assault at the same moment. Outside, officers were in place at every possible exit and sniper rifles had their scopes trained on the roof.

“We got her,” a voice shouted. “She’s alive.” All of us couldn’t help giving a little cheer. Even Monk clapped his hands and grunted in approval.

Someone shouted back. “Stay put until clear. He’s still in there.”

“Second floor clear,” came another voice. And then the teams repeated the process for the third-floor assault.

“Be careful,” I said into the transceiver. I felt instantly foolish but I really couldn’t help myself. Whatever danger remained had to be on the top floor. Not to mention the confusion and carnage.

We were in radio silence for what seemed like forever. Everyone was staring at the three-story building, listening for shots. The door to the roof opened and two SWAT members emerged, scanning for an escape route that hadn’t been used.

“Two more down,” came the next voice from inside. “Both dead.”

“What about the shooter?” Captain Stottlemeyer and the SWAT team commander said it almost in unison.

“No shooter. Send in the EMTs. Our survivor looks critical.”

“No,” the SWAT commander barked back. “Stay locked down. Do another sweep.”

“Did it twice. He’s not here.”

“How can he not be there?” Stottlemeyer shouted. “We saw him.”

“He must have gotten through.” A little angrier this time. “We know what we’re doing. He’s gone.”

“Keep locked down,” the commander ordered. “We’ll send in an evac team for the survivor.”

Stottlemeyer kept staring at the radio on his vest, then finally clicked it off. “This isn’t good.”

“Of course it’s not good,” I said. “How could he have escaped?”

“No, I mean, it’s really not good. Devlin was in charge of site access. She’s not SWAT trained.”

“Are you saying she let the shooter slip through?” I shook my head. “Amy wouldn’t make a mistake like that.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Monk. “When something like this happens, they always look at procedure. Anything out of place, that’s what gets the blame.” He was right. Sometimes I forget that he’d been a cop and knows how the system works. “Devlin will be getting the blame.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mr. Monk on the Rebound

L
ess than an hour later, the four of us were at work in the building.

At first glance, the lower two floors of East Decorative Imports were a funhouse of eerie delights. Or perhaps a nightmare. That was what it must have been for Sarabeth Willow, when the lights were off and the place was encased in shadows while a fellow employee, out of his mind with homicidal rage, stalked her through the warehouse.

Buddhas of all shapes and sizes congregated in groups, like gently smiling juries. Multi-limbed gods from India danced in place, entertaining the rows of fat, elephant-headed boys. Wooden crates, still unopened from their long voyages, stood guarding the corners. The more valuable items—at least I supposed they were—sat inside locked cages: jewel-encrusted daggers, golden masks, and more Buddhas. Hundreds of them. Everyone seems to love a good Buddha.

“It would be easy to miss something in this mess,” Monk observed. It was a little hard to understand him, possibly due to the gas mask he’d borrowed from the hazmat van the
SWAT team had brought along. To protect from dust, you know. Asian dust, which carried all sorts of exotic, incurable diseases, at least in his mind.

“We kept the place locked down,” said Lieutenant Devlin, “until the whole building was searched. Except for the survivor and the EMTs, of course.” She shook her head in disgust. “How’d I let myself get into this?”

Monk was tilting his head from side to side. The warehouse was giving him plenty to frame. Then slowly he followed some invisible trail, invisible to normal humans, and wound up in a cubbyhole made from two crates and a massive teak chandelier, set in a loose triangle. “This is where she hid from him,” he said. “Where they found her.” With the gas mask on, he sounded like an adenoidal Darth Vader.

“That’s right,” Devlin said in a surprisingly cooperative tone. Her usual reaction to my partner was to be caustic and impatient. She generally saw him as the captain’s human, dysfunctional cheat sheet, a way for him to close cases that she herself could solve, given some more time and manpower. But in this particular case, with her professional reputation on the line, she was playing nice. Monk didn’t seem to notice the difference.

He spent a minute framing Sarabeth’s hidey-hole—the blood, the moved crates, the angles of view—then walked straight to the stairwell on the other side. The captain, the lieutenant, and I followed. As soon as the door to the warehouse was closed, as soon as we were safely separated from the world of Asian dust, Monk removed his mask.

“You guys are going to need vaccinations, you know. Cholera, hepatitis A and B, Japanese encephalitis. The federal
government needs to do a better job of regulating the entry of foreign particles. They’re like microscopic terrorists.”

“And yet billions of Asians live with Asian dust every day,” I pointed out.

“But you’re not Asian, are you? So you really need those vaccinations. I’m saying this as a friend who will have to spend time around you and watch you die horrible deaths.”

“We’ll take our chances,” said the captain. He pointed. “What can you tell us about this?”

Just inside the door, on the landing leading down to the first floor, was a pile of men’s clothing: a dark blue sweatshirt and tan Dockers slacks, with a pair of brown loafers on top, as if to hold it all in place.

“Nothing’s been touched,” Stottlemeyer said. “And that goes for you, Monk. No straightening out the clothes.”

“What about the button?” Monk asked. I hadn’t seen it until he pointed it out, a broken black button on the edge of the first step going down.

“It’s been examined and photographed,” said Devlin. “It’s consistent with the buttons used on the EMT uniforms. That’s the department’s working theory. But that’s not how he got away, I swear.”

The department’s working theory—based on Wyatt Noone’s clothing in the stairwell, his vanishing act from a secure building, and the broken button—was that he had escaped in the flurry of EMTs leaving the site with the stabilized survivor. According to this theory, Noone had it all carefully planned—to injure his last victim instead of killing her. He knew her evacuation would be a top priority, even with the rest of the building shut down.

“Four EMTs entered the building and four left,” Devlin insisted. “I was there. No one on the medical team saw anyone extra. They would have been the first to notice.”

“Not if they were all focused on treating the victim,” said Stottlemeyer. “He could have slipped out right behind them.”

“But he didn’t,” said Devlin. “At least . . . At least I don’t think so. I couldn’t have made a mistake like that.”

Monk was reaching out for the shoes. But I have eyes in the back of my head, and I grabbed his arm. “I wasn’t going to touch,” he said, insulted at the thought. “I’m just wondering why they’re on top.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean you normally take off your shoes first, so they would be at the bottom of this unruly mess, not the top. And . . .” Monk cocked his head to the right. “And why would he change shoes in the first place? If this was his plan, then he’d already be wearing the right shoes, probably even the right pants. And the broken button? That’s too much of a coincidence. The button was planted for us to find.”

Stottlemeyer did an identical cock of the head. “You’re saying this is a setup, Monk? That Noone didn’t leave this way? He just wants us to think he did?”

“Why would he do that?” Devlin asked. She thought for a moment, then almost gasped. “You think he’s still in the building.”

“It’s worth checking out,” said Stottlemeyer, reaching for his transceiver. “The man used to work here. He could know of a place we haven’t checked, just waiting for our security to loosen up.”

“Then it’s not my fault,” said Devlin. “He didn’t get past
me. He couldn’t have.” And she allowed herself a half smile, her first in quite a while.

* * *

Devlin stayed behind at East Decorative Imports, heading up nearly a precinct of officers. If Noone was in the building, she was going to track him down. Another half dozen cops were assigned to the suspect’s friends and background, in case he had somehow made it out.

Meanwhile, Stottlemeyer, Monk, and I made our way to San Francisco General, where Sarabeth Willow had been stabilized and was strong enough to talk, at least for a few minutes at a time. She was in one of the few private rooms in the ICU, more for her security than the severity of her injuries. She’d been shot twice, a grazing wound to the left shoulder, and a more serious shot in the abdomen.

“Are they really dead?” Sarabeth asked. “All of them?”

“Everyone,” Monk answered. “Except you. You were lucky.”

Lucky seemed an inadequate word to describe her situation. Or maybe it was just the wrong word. The office assistant looked to be the kind who always wore a smile, remembered your anniversary, and brought in cupcakes with candles for your birthday. She would probably never be the same.

“Do you have any idea why Mr. Noone did this?” said the captain. “Was there trouble at work? Did he seem unstable?” He had turned on a digital recorder. I was taking notes. Monk, being Monk, didn’t need either.

Sarabeth was middle-aged, a little taller than average, one of the efficient, nurturing breed who used to be labeled secretaries but kept half the offices in America up and running. She was probably more attractive than I gave her credit for.
You can’t be looking your best when you’ve been through hell and just been pumped up with three pints of blood. I did notice she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

“Wyatt’s been our financial officer for about a year.” Her voice was raspy and swallowing seemed difficult. “Before that we did without one, until the bookkeeping got too much. He seemed good. Everyone liked him, although he kept to himself. Not much of a sharer, if you know . . .”

“What happened this morning?” Stottlemeyer asked.

She swallowed again. A second later, Monk was there, holding a cup of water to her lips, adjusting the bendy straw at a ninety-degree angle. I’ve rarely seen him do anything like this. He’s not what you would call a caregiver.

“Thanks,” she said, trying to smile. “This morning Wyatt was late. Maybe eleven? I was at my desk and the sun was coming through the front windows, so I could barely see.”

“He was backlit,” Monk suggested.

“That’s right. Not that I was paying close attention. I thought he was carrying an umbrella, which is silly. It’s been so dry.”

“He was carrying the shotgun,” Monk said.

“I know that now.” Sarabeth took another sip. “He went right in the back, to Mel’s office. Didn’t say a word. Next thing I know there was a gunshot. Very loud. I didn’t know what was going on.”

Sarabeth paused again and took her time. After the first shot, she said, Mel had come running out of his office, holding his bloody shoulder and screaming. If Mel had tried to escape through the front, things might have been different. Sarabeth might not have survived. But Mel ran toward the
back, perhaps thinking about the fire escape and the stairs. Two more shots followed, one right after the other.

Sarabeth and the other woman in the office both placed 911 calls from their cell phones. But Katrina’s call was cut short by a gunshot into her head, all of it recorded by the city’s emergency-response system.

When Caleb, the last victim, came running into the reception area, Sarabeth was under her desk. She peeked around the corner to see the young, heavyset man wasting precious seconds pushing the elevator button. Then he headed for the stairwell, just a few yards in front of Wyatt who was striding after him, pulling hot shells from the shotgun and reloading. Caleb’s body was later found on the first level, a gaping, bloody hole in his back, just yards from the loading dock exit.

All this time, Sarabeth’s phone was open to 911 and the dispatcher stayed with her as she took the rear stairs. The sound of rushing footsteps from below made her stop at the second-floor landing. But she wasn’t quite in time. The first shot hit her in the shoulder. The second shot caught her in the stomach. Her weight pushed open the iron door, and she collapsed into floor two, the upper level of the warehouse.

“I don’t know why he didn’t come in then,” Sarabeth said. Her energy was fading and we wouldn’t have much longer to question her, not this time.

“He was reloading,” said Captain Stottlemeyer. “We recovered shells on that landing.”

“Thank God,” said Sarabeth. “I bolted the door as best I could, then tried to find someplace safe.”

The place she found to collapse and wait for death was just feet from the door. The two angled crates and the teak
chandelier she pulled in behind her blended perfectly with her modest brown blouse and made her nearly invisible.

“He must have really wanted you dead,” said Monk as gently as you could possibly say those words.

“Me?” said Sarabeth. “What do you mean?”

“I mean Noone could have escaped. He knew the SWAT team was coming. Yet he took the time to shoot through the door and search the warehouse. We saw him through the windows, scouring the place. Why do you think he did that?”

“He was waiting to escape with the EMTs,” said Sarabeth. “That’s what they told me.” I wasn’t surprised she’d already heard this theory. People love to gossip, even doctors and nurses.

“That’s a faulty theory,” Monk said. “We had a top-notch officer on the door. That’s not how Noone escaped.” It was nice to hear him defending Devlin. “He probably did want you dead. Why did he want you dead?”

Sarabeth didn’t have an answer. “Why does a crazy person do anything? I was always nice to Wyatt. We never had an argument.”

Stottlemeyer frowned. “Are you saying Miss Willow was the main target?”

“No,” said Monk. “If she was the target, he wouldn’t have left her till last. But maybe he needed all four of them. He attacked when the warehouse workers were gone. Just the four office workers. Do you know anything that could help us?”

Sarabeth shivered. “If I did, I would tell you. Honest.”

Monk nodded and didn’t press his point. Instead, he turned to the rest of us. “Miss Willow needs some rest,” he said. “We should leave.”

“Call me Sarabeth.”

“Sarabeth. Can I come back?”

“Please,” she said, and reached out to squeeze his hand. “They were all my friends. Please catch him.”

“I will,” said Monk, and squeezed back. I reached in my bag for a wipe, but he didn’t seem to want it.

“What was that about?” I asked five minutes later. Captain Stottlemeyer had just said good-bye and left us standing on the third level of the hospital parking garage. “And don’t act all innocent. You know what I mean.”

Monk wanted to get in the car and end the discussion. But I wouldn’t beep him in. “Sarabeth’s been through a lot,” he said. “It’s called empathy.”

“I know what empathy is. I’m just surprised you do.”

“Do you think she likes me?”

“Likes you?” I was in shock. “Since when do you care if people like you? If you cared, my world would be so much easier.”

“I noticed she was trembling when I spoke to her. That means she likes me, right?”