Mr. Monk Helps Himself (2 page)

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CHAPTER ONE

Mr. Monk Takes the Temperature

M
y boss has gotten easier to handle since I realized he’s a magpie.

I don’t mean that literally. Literally, he’s a consulting detective for the San Francisco PD, a man who has solved hundreds of impossible cases, usually with me at his side keeping him calm and handing him antiseptic wipes.

I mean that he’s distracted by shiny objects—only in his case the objects are odd numbers and germs and dirt and a hundred major phobias. Exactly one hundred. There’s a list in a binder, centered on the coffee table. Whenever a new phobia pops up, he has to either eliminate one of the old ones or, more often, combine a couple.

By the way, in case you’re thinking that’s not bad, he keeps an addendum in the back listing over three hundred secondary phobias that didn’t make the cut.

Just last week, he was watching Animal Planet and discovered his horrific fear of aardvarks. I don’t know why this didn’t come up years ago, especially since it’s probably the first fear in the alphabet. But, in order to accommodate aardvarks, he had to lump together spiders and insects, even though spiders are not technically insects. He now labels it his creepy-crawly phobia and it’s number seven.

As you probably already know, my boss is Adrian Monk—a man who has put away so many bad guys the state of California was thinking of naming a cell block after him.

My name is Natalie Teeger, unlegendary, underpaid and overworked. I’m not saying overworked like a coal miner or a medieval peasant. But overworked like the assistant to a brilliant and very stubborn six-year-old.

For years I’d been Monk’s sidekick, dealing with his quirks and phobias, but also helping him more and more on his cases. Then, through a long series of events—I won’t go into them here, but they included a fire bombing and a very weird murder—I was hired as a police officer across the country in the beautifully upscale town of Summit, New Jersey.

I know that sounds odd. Who in her right mind would move away from her friends and family and start over as a rookie cop? Natalie Teeger, I guess. I just felt it was important, for my self-esteem, to prove that I could be a cop on my own.

Well, I did it. I proved it. And now I’m back in San Francisco with Monk. With one big change. He won’t be my boss. We’ll be partners—once I pass the California Private Investigator Exam.

Monk himself isn’t a licensed PI. For one thing, he’s horrible at tests. Not because of the questions, but because he has to sharpen and resharpen the pencil and then fill in every circle so that it’s completely black and within the borders. So it’s up to me to get the license and incorporate and make our business legit. Monk and Teeger, Consulting Detectives.

Back to the shiny object.

When I rolled out of bed that Friday morning, I knew I had to come up with a distraction, something that would keep Monk from figuring out the real reason I needed this upcoming weekend off.

I’d been planning this getaway for a long time. I needed it. And I’d paid for it, nonrefundable. The last thing I wanted was Monk coming up with some excuse why I couldn’t go. Or, worse, coming with me. That would transform the weekend from “all about me” to “all about him,” and I would need another weekend, right away, just to get over it.

Lucky for me the phone rang during my first cup of Peet’s French Roast, and half an hour later, Monk was busy focusing on two home invasions, two assaults and a murder. Very shiny.

I know how callous that sounds, but the murder would have happened anyway. And the most distracting object you can put in front of Adrian Monk is a good old-fashioned crime scene.

The first home invasion was on Vernon Street in Ingleside Heights. When Monk and I ducked under the crime scene tape, we found ourselves inside a lovingly restored Craftsman bungalow. Captain Leland Stottlemeyer was there to greet us and hand us disposable gloves and those blue booties to fit over our shoes. “Morning,” he said, with a bit of a growl. “Body in the kitchen.”

Captain Stottlemeyer and Monk go way back. He had been watch commander when Monk joined the force. He’d also been the best man at Monk’s wedding and the first person to try to console him when his wife, Trudy, was killed by a car bomb. He was the man who had had to fire Monk when his fear of life became too disabling, and the man who had hired him four years later as a consultant on the city’s most puzzling cases.

The body, in this case, belonged to Barry Ebersol, midforties, a little soft through the middle, an account manager at an advertising agency. Now he was just a pudgy corpse with stab wounds in the back and hands and a meat thermometer sticking out of his chest.

He was lying on the beige granite tiles, a few feet from black marble countertops and a gorgeous fireclay farmhouse sink. It always makes me sad when people die right after remodeling. Seems such a waste. But I guess murder is always a waste.

“Is that a meat thermometer?” Monk asked, and followed up with a little shiver. “That’s so wrong.”

“Any murder weapon is wrong,” the captain suggested.

“But that belongs in a rib roast, at worst a pork loin, not in a person. It’s sick.”

Stottlemeyer shrugged. “A carving knife belongs in a rib roast, too. And you’ve seen dozens of those used for murder. What’s the difference?”

“I don’t care what you say. It’s wrong and sick.” That was Adrian Monk for you. Anything out of his normal realm of experience made him uncomfortable, even if he couldn’t explain why.

The CSIs had retreated into the dining room. The two of them stood in the doorway, gloved and bootied and with the smallest of smirks crinkling their mouths. “At least we know his body temperature,” the taller one said, pointing to the thermometer.

Stottlemeyer brushed his bushy mustache, but I could tell he was smiling. “It was a break-in,” he informed us, and pointed to a broken glass panel in the kitchen door, right above the lock.

“In broad daylight?” I asked, practicing for the day when I actually got my license. “That’s risky.”

“Ebersol’s car is in the shop. The intruder must have seen the empty driveway and assumed he’d left for the day.”

“So . . . ,” I went on. “Ebersol catches the guy in his house. One of them grabs a meat thermometer from”—I looked around until I saw it—“from the pot of utensils by the window. They fight. And Ebersol gets stabbed.”

“He put up quite a fight,” Stottlemeyer agreed, glancing once more around the kitchen.

It was a mess all right. I had to keep my eye on Monk’s hands. On more than one occasion, when his OCD was particularly bad, the captain and I had to forcibly keep him from straightening up. There had been one case where he came back after the CSIs left and scrubbed an entire crime scene apartment. The killer actually got her cleaning deposit back.

This time his hands didn’t even twitch. “A home invasion gone bad,” Monk said with a dismissive shrug. “Why call us in?”

“Because there’s a nearly identical one five blocks away.”

•   •   •

Soon we were standing in the kitchen of another bungalow. This one hadn’t been renovated. In fact, the whole house could have used some work. On the plus side, the victim was alive.

Stottlemeyer had stayed behind at the first house. At this scene, our tour guide was Lieutenant Devlin. She’s been Stottlemeyer’s number two for a few years now, ever since Lieutenant Randy Disher decided to leave and become police chief in the aforementioned town of Summit. I’ll bet you could live your whole life in Summit and never once see a meat thermometer used improperly.

It had taken me a while to get used to Amy Devlin. Before coming here, she’d been an undercover officer, a breed that seems to live on macho bravado. It couldn’t have been easy for her to hold her own in that boys’ club. When she came here, Devlin brought a lot of that swagger with her. But we don’t swagger much in Captain Stottlemeyer’s world. We’re more like a family—a dysfunctional family that probably spends too much time together.

“This was the second attack,” Devlin said, gnawing on a toothpick in the side of her mouth. She was slightly taller than me, with an incredible body and short black hair that looked like it had been coiffed by Edward Scissorhands.

Monk wasn’t listening. He was staring down at an evidence bag in his hands. Inside was another bloody meat thermometer. “This is wronger than wrong. His voice was trembling. “Wronger than wronger than wrong.”

“Maybe it’s a coincidence.” I’m glad Devlin said that, not me. But I was thinking it.

“Coincidence?” Monk shot back. “Over two decades in police work and I’ve never seen a meat thermometer used to kill. Now we have two in one day? Less than a day. How far apart were these attacks?”

Devlin checked her notes. “Twenty minutes. A neighbor heard the altercation at Ebersol’s house around eight a.m. It was an elderly woman and she called it in without coming over to check. At around eight twenty, Ms. Phister called nine one one and reported the second attack.”

The victim this time was Angela Phister, a twentysomething bartender with a closetful of T-shirts and a Harley parked on the front weed patch. She had been luckier or stronger or just angrier than Barry Ebersol. When the paramedics arrived, she was lying in a pool of blood, left for dead, clutching a deep hole in her side.

“She was being evacuated when I arrived,” Devlin said. “I’m going over to San Fran General after this to see if she’s strong enough to talk. All the evidence points to this being the same perp.”

I know I’ve previously stated that Monk doesn’t use sarcasm. I stand corrected. The look he threw her was pure sarcasm. “Really? You think? Don’t jump to any conclusions.”

He shook his head and put on a new pair of gloves. A second later and he was opening and closing drawers. He finally found what he was looking for. It was a bottom drawer filled with a few dozen cooking utensils. “This makes even less sense,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Devlin asked.

Here’s where I jumped in. I was almost a full partner, and I wanted to show that Monk and I were on the same page. “He means the first attack is reasonable.”

“Barely reasonable,” Monk interjected. “Reasonable anarchy.”

I jumped in again. “Ebersol kept his meat thermometer in a pot on the counter. So it’s reasonable that someone might have grabbed it to use as a weapon.”

“Barely reasonable.”

“But the second victim, Angela Phister, kept her utensils in a bottom drawer.”

“No one grabbed a knife, even though they were right here.” Monk pointed to the magnetic strip by the stove, covered with a row of cheap kitchen knives. “No, they opened a drawer—a bottom drawer—and rooted around and found the most disgusting, improbable weapon imaginable. Why?”

Devlin gave the room a few seconds of thoughtful silence. “Maybe it’s not her thermometer. Maybe the attacker brought his own.”

“Brought his own?” Monk gasped and blinked. “You mean instead of a gun or a knife? He started a crime spree with a handful of meat thermometers?”

“Maybe they mean something to him.”

“Meat thermometers? Do you think our killer is a deranged chef who wants to make sure his victims are well done?”

“I don’t know!” Devlin shouted. “Give me a theory, Mr. Genius. Any theory. Why do we have two such attacks five blocks apart within twenty minutes?”

“Well, it’s not a coincidence,” he shot back. “And it’s not a new rage in weapons.”

“Then what is it?”

I certainly didn’t have an answer. But Monk did. I could see the light dawn in his eyes.

“There weren’t two attacks. There was one.”

“What do you mean?” At least she’d stopped shouting.

“Angela Phister is our bad guy,” Monk said, thinking as he talked. “She and Ebersol fought in his kitchen. Don’t ask me why. One of them grabs the meat thermometer. And both of them get stabbed, which serves them right for picking such a stupid weapon.”

Devlin scrunched up her nose, like she was fighting off a nasty sneeze. “Then why would she go home and call the police?”

“She needed medical attention. And how else could she explain her wound? Any hospital would report a serious wound like that, and you guys would be on it in a minute.”

“I suppose we would,” Devlin said grudgingly.

“Of course,” I added. “You’re too smart to let that slip.”

Devlin nodded and took the scenario from here. “So, she goes home, grabs the thermometer from her own kitchen, and makes up the story about being attacked by the same perp.” Her mouth scrunched again. “But why kill Ebersol in the first place?”

“I told you not to ask me that.”

“You asked for a theory,” I reminded the lieutenant. “We gave you a theory. As far as I know, it’s the only one that makes sense.”

“That’s fair,” she had to admit. “All we have to do is comb through the evidence and see if it fits. Damn. Why do murders always come right before the weekend?”

“Oh, speaking of weekends . . .” This was my opportunity and I took it. “Mr. Monk, I won’t be around this weekend. I’m spending some time with my girlfriends.”

“What girlfriends?”

Devlin laughed. “C’mon, Monk. Every girl has girlfriends.”