Mr. Monk and the New Lieutenant (8 page)

“My wife?”

“Your wife, Susan, has been missing for almost two days. One day and twenty hours to be precise. I know she told you about having a sick aunt in San Diego. That was a canard fabricated by Mrs. O'Brien and Natalie here.”

“Mr. Monk, I'm gay.”

“That's what Natalie tells me. Do you think your wife suspected?”

“Suspected?” O'Brien stared at Monk over the top of his
rimless half reading glasses. He pressed a button on his phone console. “Gayle, can you come in here?”

Her office must have been right next door, since it took Gayle Greenwald less than thirty seconds to arrive in his doorway. This was the first time I'd seen her close-up and in office lighting. She was older than I'd originally thought—almost Sue's age, attractive with highlighted brown hair. Not quite the husband bait I'd imagined.

“Gayle, this is the brilliant detective Adrian Monk. He wants to know where my wife is.”

“Your wife?” Gayle laughed. “You were never married, were you? I've known you since law school. I was there when you met your first boyfriend, Frank. Kind of a pretentious jerk, although I never said so.”

“Agreed. He preferred to be called Francis, which should have been a clue.”

O'Brien was nodding his head while I shook mine. “No, that can't be right. A woman came into my office. Susan Puskedra O'Brien. She told me her life story. She said she was your wife and that you were having an affair. The two of you.”

“You mean Timothy and me?” asked Gayle. She laughed. “Maybe we should have. It would have saved me from a bad marriage.”

“Yes,” Timothy agreed. “Then you would have had two bad marriages.” They were both treating this as a joke. Maybe it was.

Monk turned to me, scowling. “Did anyone meet this Sue, besides you?”

“I don't think so, but . . .”

“Did she show any ID? Do you have a photograph of her? An e-mail address? A business card?”

“Yes, a card,” I said, and began to rummage through my bag. “When we first met.” I pulled out the card triumphantly and handed it to O'Brien.

“Susan O'Brien,” he said. “With a phone number only.”

Monk leaned my way. “You didn't have her fill out a client form or sign a contract?”

“No. I didn't want you finding out.”

“Did she pay you, at least?”

“I was going to bill her at the end of the week.”

“Great, just great. Thank you, Natalie. You're my hero.”

It seemed that Monk was getting better at sarcasm every day.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mr. Monk and the Clean Sweep

P
uskedra. I should have known when she gave me that name.

“How could you not know?” Monk demanded.

“I don't know,” I moaned. “I take things at face value. A sympathetic woman walks through the door and talks about her cheating husband. Why would she invent a story like that?”

“She didn't walk through the door,” he corrected me. “She was on the street, casing the joint. You're the one who pulled her inside and got her talking about her quote, husband, unquote. You made it easy for her.”

On our drive back to the mini-mall, I told him everything, every detail I could remember about our nonexistent client. “Made what easy? What did she do?”

“There are three possibilities.” He released one hand from the strap of his seat belt and raised an index finger. “One, she needed your professional attention distracted while she did something nefarious. This doesn't make the most sense. If she needed to distract someone smart and important, it would have been me.”

“Distracting you can be done with a crooked sign in a window.”

“There's a crooked sign?”

“Proves my point. What's the second possibility?”

He raised a second finger. “She needed some information about Timothy O'Brien but needed to do it secretly. That recording you made between O'Brien and his coworker . . .”

“It seemed pretty innocent. You'll listen to it, of course. But anyone could have sat in the booth behind them and heard the same conversation.”

“Maybe.” Finger number three. “Or maybe she needed you out of the way for a few hours—while you were surveilling O'Brien's house.”

“But you were at the office during those hours. I assume you locked up tight and put on the alarm?”

“I did. There's also possibility three-A.” He raised his pinkie, then bent it at the joint. “She needed to be alone in our office, and she did it by using the excuse of listening to the tape privately. How long was she in there?”

I thought back to that afternoon when I'd left her and went off to buy some pricey teas, an expense that just added more insult to injury. “Half an hour,” I said. “She wanted to be alone, so I left her alone.”

“Well, that's it. Ms. Unknown Puskedra O'Brien did something in our office. I told you offices were bad. All the rest—her story, the case, your stalking of a homosexual lawyer—was just window dressing. Speaking of window dressing . . .”

“Our signs are straight, Adrian. Don't worry.”

As I pulled into my parking space, Monk had already taken a mini level out of his jacket. I don't know who else in
the world would need a level small enough to fit into a pocket, but apparently there's a market for this. Five minutes later, satisfied that all our signage was still perfect, he joined me inside.

“I think the whole mini-mall is off by an inch or so, but the signs are straight. There's only so much one man can do.”

Nine times out of ten, Monk's attention to detail drives me crazy. But this was time number ten. I swept my arm over the office. “Okay, Adrian. Focus. What did Ms. Unknown O'Brien do in here?”

My OCD-gifted partner began his routine, framing the scene, dropping his hands to open a drawer, then lifting them again, then closing the drawer. Three times he took tweezers from his pocket and stored things in baggies, also from his pocket. When he finished, we met in the center of the space, between the desks.

“I couldn't find any bugs or electronic devices,” he reported. “But I'd have someone sweep the place to make sure. I don't mean physically. I can sweep physically.”

“Julie and some college friend are coming over,” I said. “He's an electronics security expert.”

“Good. You should have him check your computer. Also mine in the closet. After she left, did your computer seem different? The height or direction of the chair? The angle of the screen? The position of the mouse?”

“I don't think so.”

“Good.” He held up a baggie. “I found a blond hair that's not yours. It's a little thicker, wavier, no split end. The color's a little brighter.”

“Yes, Adrian. That's from her.”

“We could do a DNA test, but since there's nothing to compare it to, it's pretty useless.” He held up the second baggie with something barely visible in it. “Also the cut end of a fingernail. Even though it has your shade of polish on it, I know it's not yours, since I strictly forbid anyone in this office from cutting fingernails except over a wastebasket on top of a double-ply tarp.”

“That's mine,” I said, and took the baggie.

“I know. I'm just making a point. Speaking of wastebaskets, I found this in yours.” In the third baggie was a slip of paper. “I'm no geologist, but from the layers of trash and the depth, I estimate it's from that same day, early afternoon. It doesn't match the notepad on your desk, so she brought it with her.”

I took the baggie and held it up to the light. There were eighteen rows of numbers or letters. The first row said “0-0,” the second row “1-2,” the third row “A-B,” the fourth “P-W,” the fifth “1-A,” the sixth “A-1.” I forget the others, but they all seemed like gibberish. All were written in pen and all were crossed out in the same kind of ink.

“I have no idea,” I said. “Is it some kind of code or secret writing?”

“I don't know,” Monk admitted. “But it can't be too important if she left it in your wastebasket.” Monk took back the baggie and slipped it into his jacket. “At least we have something.”

“And that's it?” I couldn't hide my disappointment. “You did your whole Monk thing and came up with one piece of paper?”

“Natalie, it's been days. If I'd been in the loop from the beginning, this woman wouldn't have done whatever she did. Probably. I'm not a magician. You can't hide things from me, then expect me to solve it all instantly.”

“You're right.” He was totally right. “I'm sorry, Adrian.”

He shrugged, accepting my apology. “There are times when you're right and I'm wrong. There are killers who would still be free if you weren't part of team Monk. But on the whole, I think we'd be better off if you just read the rule book and obeyed the rules.”

“What rule book?”

“The one I'm going to write this evening. We definitely need a rule book. And the first rule, no divorce cases.”

“Got it,” I said. “Do you need a ride home?”

“I'll walk. You need to stay for Julie and her friend. Besides, it's not raining for once and I need the exercise.”

“If it does rain, be sure to check your umbrella.”

“I always do,” he said, and was out the door.

Julie and Trevor arrived a short time later. I hadn't told them the whole embarrassing story, merely that our offices might be electronically compromised. Trevor—a tall boy, impossibly young and thin, with some remnants of acne on his chin—took some mysterious black boxes out of his backpack and began with my desktop computer. He didn't ask questions, but treated it as he would any school project. Julie, on the other hand . . . “How did your office get compromised?”

“
Might
be compromised. It's a long story,” I said, even though it wasn't.

“I'll bet if I was your intern, this wouldn't have happened.”

Julie has gotten it into her head that after she obtains her
degree from Berkeley this spring, she should throw it all away by becoming an unpaid intern at the flourishing firm of Monk and Teeger. This is instead of going to law school, which used to be my daughter's dream. So far, I've managed to say no and make it stick. “No,” I said again, for good measure.

“Does this have anything to do with the poison attack on the captain?” Julie and the captain were good friends, dating back to when they met. She'd been eleven and involved in her first murder case.

“No,” I repeated. “It's a different case.”

“Two cases? Mom, you need an intern—that's all I have to say.”

“I wish, but I'm sure you're going to say more.”

Trevor poked his head up over my monitor. “Your Wi-Fi is password protected. That's good. How about your computer?”

“Also password protected and I change it every week.”

“Hm, you should really change passwords every day.”

“That's not going to happen.”

He shrugged in the same way parents shrug at their clueless kids. “Any other devices in the office?”

“There's an identical computer in the closet, but I'm not sure it's ever been turned on.”

“Your phone?”

“I keep it with me.”

It didn't take Trevor long to sweep through my system, or whatever the process is called. Meanwhile, Julie and I unwrapped Monk's computer from the closet and set it up. “It's
never even been initiated,” announced Trevor after a few clicks. And we wrapped it back up.

Using another mysterious black box, Trevor toured the office slowly, listening on a headset for something. “All clear, Mrs. T.,” he finally reported. “You're good to go.”

I didn't know whether to be relieved or annoyed. “So you're saying there are no bugs, no cameras, nothing funny on our computers. Nothing missing or added to the office.”

“I don't know about the missing or added part,” he said.

“Mom, what's up?”

“Nothing, sweetie. Nothing Adrian and I can't handle.” I clasped my hands and put on a happy face. “Thank you so much, Trevor. I owe you and Julie a fancy dinner somewhere.”

“Sweet,” said Trevor.

“Mom,” said Julie in a tone that suggested having dinner with Trevor would not count as a reward.

A minute later, I watched from the doorway as the thin young man opened the car door for Julie. Then I waved them on their way, all smiles until they disappeared.

Who the hell was Sue Puskedra? I had to ask myself. If I knew who she was, I'd have a fighting chance of figuring out her game. If I knew her game, I'd have a chance of figuring out who she was. As it was, I knew nothing except that I had trusted her.

That was the most galling part, I guess. She had made me care. I had listened to her dilemma, felt a real connection, and sat in my Subaru for hours waiting for a man to walk up to a mansion in Pacific Heights and kiss another man. I'd
even fretted over how to break the news to her that her husband was gay.

I'd been had. And I did not like the feeling.