Mr. Monk Goes to Germany (18 page)

I turned and saw Monk squinting at me.

“What?” I said, daring him to criticize my actions.

“Is that a leech on your neck?” Monk asked.

I grabbed at my neck, but there was nothing there.

“Gotcha.” Monk laughed, turned away from me, and headed jauntily towards the trail with a skip in his step.

I thought that was cruel and unfair. I never made fun of his plethora of phobias, not that what I was experiencing was anything less than sensible, rational, and totally reasonable.

I vowed to myself that I would make him pay for this. Dearly.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Mr. Monk Has a Brand-new Bag

Mildred, the woman who had taken the picture of Dr. Kroger and Dr. Rahner, was setting up her collage of conference photographs on an easel in the center of the lobby as we came in dripping sludge.

She let out a shocked little squeak when she saw us. I don’t know whether she reacted that way because we looked and smelled like two corpses who’d risen from a bog to eat human flesh or because she was afraid I’d come back to beat up on a few more shrinks. Either way, I didn’t hold her reaction against her.

Stoffmacher and Geshir stood at the front desk, talking to the lady behind the counter. She sucked in her cheeks in disapproval and glowered at us.

“They can’t go any farther than the lobby,” she said to the detectives loudly so that we’d be sure to hear it. “I don’t want them tracking mud and spreading that stench all over the hotel.”

“That’s fine,” Stoffmacher said. “Could you call Dr. Rahner’s room and ask him to join us, please?”

“Could you ask Dr. Kroger to come down, too?” Monk set the garbage bag down on the coffee table and browsed the bowl of apples that was beside it.

“Whom do you think he killed?” Geshir replied.

“He’s Mr. Monk’s shrink,” I said.

“Then he should definitely be here,” Stoffmacher said, and nodded his approval to the counter clerk. “Please call him as well.”

Monk took an apple in his dirty hand and went over to look at the photographs in the collage. Mildred held on to the poster board protectively, as if it was some fragile artifact that Monk might break. I joined him and nodded towards the apple.

“You’re not going to eat that, are you?”

Monk bit into it with a loud crunch.

“Does that answer your question?” he said with his mouth full.

“Do you realize that apple hasn’t been washed and you’re eating it with dirty hands?”

He took another bite just to be contrary and nodded at me.

I glanced at the collage. Dr. Rahner was in nearly every picture. He was very photogenic. There were a couple of shots of me, too, and in all of them I was being forcibly restrained.

“Those are nice pictures of you,” Monk said to me, his mouth still full. “You should ask her for copies as souvenirs.”

His suggestion gave me a wonderful idea. I smiled at Mildred.

“You take marvelous pictures,” I said to her.

“Thank you,” she replied cautiously. “It’s my passion and my art.”

“It shows,” I said. “Do you happen to have your camera with you now?”

“I don’t go anywhere without it,” she said.

“Would you mind taking a picture of me and Mr. Monk? This is an unforgettable moment and I want to be able to share it with all of our family and friends.”

“It is?” she said incredulously. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” I said. In fact, I couldn’t wait. “Will you pose with me, Mr. Monk?”

“Of course,” he said and put his arm around me.

Mildred took out her camera and, once she did, she seemed to get into it. I think she realized that now she’d be able to show all of her friends the crazy swamp monsters she met in Lohr.

“Let’s have some big smiles,” she said, demonstrating with a smile of her own.

We smiled. Monk gave my shoulder a squeeze.

She took two pictures and, standing a safe distance away, showed one of them to me on the tiny screen of her digital camera.

Mildred got us in all our filthy glory. She even got the half-eaten apple in Monk’s other hand.

“It’s perfect,” I said and gave her my e-mail address and cell phone number so she could send the digital photo to me. “I will cherish this and so will Mr. Monk.”

“I’ll send them to you tonight,” she said. And, I figured, to everyone in her address book.

“Make sure I get one,” Monk said.

“Oh, I will,” I told him.

Dr. Kroger was the first to show up in the lobby. He let out a gasp when he saw Monk.

“Hello, Doc.” Monk held out his arms. “Give me a hug.”

“I think I’ll pass,” Dr. Kroger said.

“Come on, you know you want to,” Monk said, gesturing him forward.

Dr. Kroger held his ground and looked past Monk to me. “He’s on Dioxynl.”

“Gee,” I said. “How could you tell?”

Stoffmacher approached Dr. Kroger. “I am Hauptkriminalkommissar Stoffmacher and this is Kommissar Geshir. You are the doctor who prescribed this drug to Mr. Monk?”

Dr. Kroger nodded. “It relieves his anxieties and phobias and alters his personality to some degree.”

“Some?” I said as Monk dropped the apple core into an ashtray and wiped his hands on his wet, mud-caked pants.

“But neither his judgment nor his competence is the least bit impaired by the medication, if that’s what you are wondering, ” Dr. Kroger said. “He can be held responsible for his actions, though he’s not a danger to himself or to others.”

“How can you look at us and say that?” I said. “We were nearly killed tonight.”

“That’s not my fault,” Monk said. “It’s his.”

He gestured to the stairwell, where Dr. Rahner was emerging. His hair was wet and his clothes were crisp and clean.

“Sorry you had to wait,” Dr. Rahner said. “I was taking a shower.”

God, how I envied him. I was cold, my hair was matted, and my entire body itched from the drying mud.

“Trying to wash off the odor of gasoline?” Monk asked him.

“My sweat,” Dr. Rahner said. “I just got back from my nightly jog.”

“And an attempted murder,” Monk proclaimed.

Dr. Rahner glanced angrily at Stoffmacher and said something unfriendly to him in German.

“We’re here because Mr. Monk believes you killed two people,” Stoffmacher replied in English.

“Maybe three,” Geshir added.

“I’m aware of that,” Dr. Rahner said. “What surprises me is that you’re taking him seriously. I thought we discussed this.”

“We did, and I’ve brokered a solution to the problem. I’ve offered him this opportunity to present his case in exchange for his promise not to harass you any further after tonight. He has agreed. Now it is up to you.”

Dr. Rahner turned to Dr. Kroger. “He’s your patient, Charles. What do you think is best?”

I spoke up. “I think it’s a mistake. Mr. Monk is not himself. We should put this off until tomorrow when his medication has worn off.”

“Adrian is the same man,” Dr. Kroger said. “Only freed of his most obsessive-compulsive tendencies.”

“And his detective skills,” I said. “He might fumble something tonight that he wouldn’t if he was at the top of his game.”

“It doesn’t take any skill to solve these murders,” Monk said. “They are already solved. All the evidence is right here. I’m just presenting the obvious.”

It was true that we already knew how and why Dr. Rahner committed the murders; all that was missing was the evidence. If Monk was right, and the evidence was in the room, there wasn’t anything he had to deduce.

But that was a big, risky “if,” and Monk would have to live with the consequences.

“I’d let Adrian proceed,” Dr. Kroger said to Dr. Rahner. “He’ll never let go if you don’t.”

“Very well.” Dr. Rahner sighed and sat down on the arm of a chair. “This should be fascinating.”

“First, a little recap in case you missed our last episode,” Monk said. “Bruno Leupolz was a reporter who found out that you fudged your academic credentials and that you were swindling investors in your real estate venture—”

“Do you have any proof to substantiate that?” Dr. Rahner interrupted.

“None whatsoever,” Monk said. “You saw to that when you burned Leupolz’s notes and stole the hard drive from his laptop.”

“So this is merely libelous speculation on your part,” Dr. Rahner said.

Monk shrugged. “Well, Leupolz found the evidence, so I suppose that now that we know what to look for, we can find it, too.”

“In other words, this is all fiction,” Dr. Rahner said. “Please, go on. I love a good story.”

“Three nights ago, under the guise of taking your evening jog, you went to Leupolz’s duplex to find out what he knew, destroy the evidence, and scare him off the story. You used one of his pillows as a silencer and fired a gun into the wall to make your point. The pillow muffled the sound, but blew feathers all over you and the apartment. Even so, the gunshot scared Leupolz to death—literally—and killed the man in the next apartment.”

Monk went on to explain how Dr. Rahner staged things to make Vigg’s death look like a suicide, then returned to Leupolz’s apartment to erase any signs of foul play. He also recounted how Dr. Rahner hid the body in the shack and ditched the feathers, pillowcase, and laptop in the pond.

“And here they are,” Monk said, motioning to the bag like Bob Barker revealing a
Price Is Right
showcase. “Everything we need to convict you, tied up in a neat bow. The irony is, we might never have found it if you hadn’t tried to kill us tonight.”

“I’m curious,” Dr. Rahner said. “Do you have any evidence to support your claim that I attempted to kill you?”

“You’ve showered and undoubtedly put your clothes in the wash,” Monk said. “So, no, I don’t have any evidence of that. But I don’t need it.”

“You don’t?” Stoffmacher said.

“I have this trash bag,” Monk said and turned to Mildred. “Would you mind photographing the bag and its contents for the record?”

Mildred glanced at Stoffmacher, who nodded his consent. She took a few pictures of the trash bag.

“You’ll notice the drawstrings are tied in a Norwegian Reef Knot,” Monk said, making sure that Mildred got some pictures of it. “Just like the shoes that Dr. Rahner is wearing now.”

Mildred took a picture of the shoes, too, eliciting a scowl from Dr. Rahner.

“I’m sure there are millions of people who tie shoes the same way I do,” Dr. Rahner said.

“Maybe, maybe not.” Monk giggled. “Knot, not—get it?”

Nobody saw the joke. Even on drugs, Monk had a lousy sense of humor. He swallowed his giggles and cleared his throat.

“Okay, moving on.” Monk glanced at Stoffmacher. “Could I have a pair of rubber gloves, please?”

Stoffmacher reached into his coat pocket and gave Monk a pair.

Monk put on the gloves, untied the drawstring, and carefully opened the bag.

“Dr. Rahner didn’t expect anyone to dredge the pond looking for this stuff and he figured that if it was found later, nobody would connect it to Leupolz or understand the significance of what was inside, assuming it hadn’t rotted away.”

Monk reached into the bag and pulled out a laptop, which was covered in feathers and had an empty slot where the hard drive should be.

“How do you know Leupolz didn’t throw his own stuff in the pond?” Geshir asked.

“If Leupolz ditched his own laptop,” Monk said, “why did he take the hard drive out first?”

“To save sensitive information,” Geshir said. “Like passwords, financial information.”

“Then why throw out his laptop at all?” I countered. “It seems kind of pointless if you are keeping the component that actually has all the content on it.”

Stoffmacher and Geshir obviously didn’t have an answer for that.

Next Monk pulled out the remains of the pillowcase and then the vacuum cleaner bag, everything covered with feathers and down.

“I’m sure your forensics experts will find gunshot residue all over this pillowcase. Assuming I am right, and you still don’t believe me, I have a couple of questions for you,” Monk said. “Why would Leupolz shoot his pillow and then try to hide the fact that he did it? Is shooting a pillow a crime in Lohr?”

Stoffmacher stroked his mustache. Geshir doodled in his notebook. But they couldn’t hide that they didn’t have an answer for those questions either.

“All of that might be suspicious, Adrian, and it might even indicate the poor man was murdered,” Dr. Kroger said, “but it doesn’t prove that Dr. Rahner was the killer.”

“Exactly what I was thinking, Charles,” Dr. Rahner said.

“His extra finger does,” Monk said.

“There you go again,” Dr. Rahner exclaimed, then rose from his seat and pointed accusingly at Monk. “Now we’re getting to what this is really all about. This entire delusional episode arises from his irrational fear of people with physical anomalies. He pegged me as a killer from the moment he saw me in the town square!”

“That’s true,” Monk said. “And I was right.”

“You haven’t proven it yet,” Stoffmacher said.

“I’m not done. One of the problems with having eleven fingers is that you can’t find a decent pair of gloves.” Monk reached into the trash bag, pulled out a pair of used rubber gloves, and held one of them up for everyone to see.

There was a hole cut in it, right where Dr. Rahner’s extra finger would go.

Monk dangled the glove in front of Dr. Rahner’s face. “So you poked a hole in the glove for your extra finger, but you couldn’t leave it uncovered, could you?”

He dropped the glove on a table, reached into the bag again, and brought out a severed finger portion from a rubber glove.

“So you cut off a finger from another glove to cover it with,” Monk said.

Everyone turned to look at Dr. Rahner, whose face was reddening with anger.

“A hole in a glove and a piece of rubber don’t prove anything, ” Dr. Rahner said. “You still can’t put me in Leupolz’s duplex the night when you claim the murder occurred.”

“I don’t have to,” Monk said. “She did that for me.”

He pointed to Mildred.

“I did?” she said, looking very confused.

“With your beautiful collage.” Monk pointed to the picture she took of Dr. Kroger and Dr. Rahner together. “I was so freaked out by your fingers, and the sight of you with Dr. Kroger, that I didn’t even notice the pillow feathers stuck to your clothes. But thanks to the wonders of modern pharmaceuticals, I did today.”

Everyone but Dr. Rahner stepped up to examine the picture. Sure enough, there were some down feathers clinging to his sweats.

We all turned back to look at Dr. Rahner, who just sat there, shaking his head in sad disbelief.

“Shoelaces and feathers,” Dr. Rahner said. “That’s all it takes to destroy a man.”

Dr. Kroger looked at Dr. Rahner. “How could you murder two people?”