Mr. Monk in Outer Space (25 page)
Read Mr. Monk in Outer Space Online
Authors: Lee Goldberg
The temperature down there, emotionally and physically, was very chilly, but I could tell that Monk liked it. There was no cleaner space in the entire police department.
All three of the accountants were young, attractive, and dressed in stylish, perfectly fitted black clothes that made them almost entirely disappear into the shadows around them. They were like ninjas but with personal stylists and health club memberships.
The woman rose from behind her two flat-screen monitors and glided towards us. She was probably around my age and had short blond hair and very pale skin. I guess she didn’t see much sunlight. But what struck me most about her was the big gun in the holster on her belt.
It was comforting to know that she was armed in case a spreadsheet resisted arrest. She probably carried around those razor-sharp silver ninja stars in a pouch somewhere in case things really got tough.
She introduced herself to us as Lieutenant Sylvia Chase, the commander of the Forensic Accounting Unit. I guess she already knew Monk by reputation within the department, because she didn’t bother offering him her hand. Or maybe she was just as cold as the room.
“Welcome to the cutting edge of law enforcement,” she said with a nod.
“I had no idea this department even existed,” Monk said, glancing appreciatively around the room.
“We solve financial crimes the same way they are committed,” she said. “Quietly and in the shadows.”
I think the ninja accountant was taking that last part too literally. If her skin hadn’t been so pale, I wouldn’t have been able to see her at all.
“I like your office,” Monk said. “It’s very clean and inviting.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I believe in an orderly environment. ”
“Me too,” Monk said. “Can I work here?”
“I’m aware of your skills as a homicide investigator, ” she said, “but do you have any advanced accounting experience?”
“No,” Monk said. “But I like even numbers and I am very clean.”
“I’m afraid that’s not good enough,” she said.
I couldn’t see Monk’s face too clearly, but I was pretty sure he looked like he was about to cry.
“What makes this unit ‘the cutting edge’?” I asked.
“Murder is a Stone Age crime, Ms. Teeger. It hasn’t really changed over the centuries,” Chase said. “But finance is the future of crime. You can steal millions of dollars and destroy the lives of tens of thousands of people with just a few keystrokes on a computer in the privacy of your own home. You can topple a corporation, perhaps even a government, with your PDA.”
“Could I just hang out here?” Monk said. “My apartment is being recarpeted.”
“There was a coffee stain,” I said.
Monk nudged me hard. Apparently I’d revealed too much.
“Don’t worry, Lieutenant Chase. I wouldn’t bring coffee in here,” Monk said. “I’m not drinking it ever again. I’m not even thinking of coffee. Coffee is banned from my existence.”
“I appreciate that,” she said. “But I’m afraid this is a restricted area. You probably shouldn’t even be here now.”
“My wristwatch has more RAM than the computers that the detectives are using upstairs,” I said. “How come you get all the cool stuff down here?”
“Combating financial crime takes a different breed of cop, entirely new methods of investigation, and the latest technology,” she said. “The resources we receive are in direct proportion to the amount of revenue we’ve brought in.”
“I thought you were supposed to enforce the law,” I said. “I didn’t realize you were supposed to turn a profit, too.”
“Last year we recovered nearly twenty-two million dollars in cash, stocks, and other assets earned by various criminal enterprises,” Chase said. “After the cases we investigate are adjudicated and any victims are reimbursed for their losses, a significant percentage of what remains of those ill-gotten gains is apportioned to the police department to fund our continuing law enforcement efforts.”
“Why can’t some of that money make its way upstairs to Homicide?” Monk said. “Particularly for the housekeeping budget.”
“I’m sure some of it does,” she said. “But we need these tools to do our job effectively and keep up with the technological strides made by the criminals we pursue,” she said. “That costs a lot of money.”
“It takes money to make money,” I said.
“Or to follow money,” Chase added.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” Monk said. “Everybody in the building should be able to enjoy this blissful environment. Especially me.”
“I’m assuming you two didn’t come down here to debate how the police department allocates its resources, ” Chase said.
“We’d like to know what you’ve learned from the document that was found on Brandon Lorber’s desk,” Monk said. “It’s just numbers to us.”
Chase smiled at Monk. “It is far more than mere numerals on a page. Numbers are a lot like people. They each have a story. They interact with one another. They entertain. They inform. They deceive. They can create happiness or inflict enormous pain. You have to know how to get them to talk.”
I could have cheered. She was helping me reinforce the argument I tried to make to Monk at Ambrose’s house and in the interrogation room. Maybe hearing it from her, someone he obviously admired, would have some impact on him. But I wanted to make sure he didn’t miss the point.
“In other words, Mr. Monk,” I said, “she’s saying that what’s insignificant or meaningless to you can have great importance to someone else. Numbers are her second-season ears.”
Chase and Monk both looked at me quizzically. Or gave me withering stares. I don’t know for sure. It was hard to tell in that light, but even in the nearly pitch-dark room it was obvious to me that neither one of them saw my point with the same startling clarity as I did.
“Never mind,” I said. “Lieutenant Chase, what did those numbers have to say to you once you got them into the interrogation room and beat them with a phone book?”
Chase shook her head and turned to Monk.
“Ears and a phone book?” she said. “What do they have to do with anything?”
Monk shrugged. “She’s been babbling nonsense like that all day. Please go on, Lieutenant Chase.”
“To put it simply, that document is a secret internal financial report that reveals that years of financial irregularities,mismanagement, and impropriety are about to catch up to Burgerville. The company is on the verge of total collapse.”
“But it’s one of the biggest fast-food chains in the country, ” I said. “They’ve got restaurants everywhere.”
“That aggressive expansion has cost a lot of money in the midst of a downturn in popularity of their product. The company has been trumpeting its success but the truth is that average store sales have been plummeting for years. They fell twenty-one percent in the last fiscal quarter alone. The company is generating a pitiful cash flow and will take a net loss of more than a hundred million dollars this year.”
“They hid all of that from the public?” Monk asked.
“And from their investors and the government,” Chase said. “But the real crime is what will happen to the employee pension plan, which was sponsored by Burgerville and was made up almost entirely of company stock.”
“When word gets out about their financial problems, the value of the stock will nose-dive,” I said. “Thousands of lives will be ruined.”
“It’s Enron all over again, only on a smaller scale,” Chase said.
“It won’t seem small to the people who’ve lost their life savings,” I said. “It’s catastrophic. How could this happen without anyone noticing?”
“What’s going on is no secret from the Justice Department. They’ve been quietly building a case against Burgerville for months,” Chase said. “But it was a secret from the employees.”
“Maybe not to all of them,” Monk said. “There was at least one person who knew.”
“A person with a gun and a message for Lorber,” I said.
Monk nodded. “Only he got there a little too late to deliver it.”
Lieutenant Chase went on to tell us more about Lorber’s financial misdeeds. He convinced the company to buy out the seven restaurants of a Burgerville regional franchisee for far more than the market value. It turned out the franchisee was his brother-in-law.
She also told us that Burgerville overcharged franchisees for supplies and misappropriated the money that the restaurants contributed to a marketing and promotion fund.
The list of financial irregularities seemed to go on and on, and the shredded document on Lorber’s desk was the Rosetta stone to discovering it all.
Now that Lorber was dead, attention would focus on Andrew Cahill, the company’s longtime chief financial officer, who had been named acting CEO after Lorber died.
It was clear that Brandon Lorber had been on the verge of being outed as a greedy, dishonest scumbag who’d ruthlessly plundered the futures of his employees for his own personal gain. He was facing public humiliation, criminal prosecution, and the fury of thousands of employees.
It was no wonder, then, that he’d had a heart attack or that someone wanted to kill him.
The desecration made sense to me, too. I could see why someone who’d lost everything would fire a few bullets into the body of the guy who was responsible. He did it from fury and frustration at the cruelty and unfairness of being cheated yet again—this time cheated out of the opportunity for justice or revenge.
I didn’t see how Burgerville’s financial problems and Lorber’s death—and subsequent desecration—fit in with Conrad Stipe and the cabbie, but we now had thousands of possible suspects in the shootings.
I just wasn’t sure whether that made the case easier to solve or a whole lot harder.
We went back upstairs to share what we had learned with Stottlemeyer and Disher.
The contrast between the Homicide Department and the Forensic Accounting Unit was startling. The squad room was bathed in the off-white glow of fluorescent bulbs and the diffused sunlight streaming through the dirty windows and crooked blinds.
The light made the stained white walls look yellow and somehow made the gray metal desks seem even more dented, scratched, and old than they were. The big, cumbersome computer monitors on all the paper-cluttered desks appeared bloated, beat-up, and fifty years old.
Yes, I know desktop computers haven’t been around that long, but somehow when electronic equipment becomes dated, it seems far older than it actually is. Of course, most electronic equipment becomes dated two months after it comes out, but you get my point.
Even the people in Homicide seemed older, fatter, wearier, and less organized than the black-clad ninja accountants in the basement.
Monk looked depressed. “This is a cesspool.”
“You never minded it here before,” I said.
“That was before I glimpsed heaven,” he said. “Now there’s no going back.”
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