Mr. Monk on Patrol (30 page)

“He didn’t want you to be able to locate him using his phone,” Monk said.

“You think he’s on the run?” Disher asked.

“No,” Monk said. “I think he’s murdering his secretary.”

Disher posted Evie at Goldman’s house to secure the scene until the window could be boarded up, and we went back to the chief’s office to wait to hear from the NYPD regarding Trina’s whereabouts.

We figured that Goldman must have been using a throwaway cell phone for his non-business-related calls to Trina so that his wife wouldn’t find out about the affair or her own impending demise.

It made sense that Goldman would use the same phone to contact Trina now. He wouldn’t want anything leading back to him from her on the day she disappeared.

But without any information from the NYPD, there wasn’t really anything more we could do except scream profanities, kick desks, and, in Monk’s case, pace sullenly back and forth.

We were well into our second round of the morning doing exactly that when Disher’s phone rang.

It was the NYPD. The news wasn’t good. Trina Fishbeck wasn’t at home and she wasn’t at Goldman’s office, either.

So Disher used DMV records to find out that Trina drove a blue 2006 Honda Accord and put out an APB for it. But I had a few ideas of my own to track her down.

“Let’s ask Lisa McCracken to see if Trina’s Honda passed through any tollbooths on the highways out of Manhattan in the last couple of hours. Maybe McCracken can also see if Trina made any calls on her cell phone during that time and pinpoint the nearest cellular tower the signal bounced off of to give us a clue where she’s headed.”

Disher gave me a look. “Someone has been watching a lot of
Law & Order.
”

“The real challenge is turning on your TV in the afternoon and finding a program that’s not
Law & Order
.”

Disher made the call and pleaded with McCracken to do two more little favors for him. When he was done, he hung up the phone, sat back in his chair, and sighed.

“I owe that woman so much now that I might as well just quit my job and become her indentured servant for life.”

“Look at the bright side, Chief,” I said. “What resources could the Summit police force possibly have to offer that Homeland Security would want?”

“She might demand that I pay off my debt to her with my body.”

“You think you’re that hot?”

“I know I’m that hot,” Disher said.

“Speaking of which,” Monk said, “if Joel Goldman lured Trina out to meet him, it was surely on the pretext of a romantic rendezvous.”

“So they’re meeting at a hotel somewhere,” I said.

Monk shook his head. “He won’t take her to a hotel. There’s too high a risk that they will be seen together.
He’ll take her somewhere remote, but not so much so that she finds it suspicious.”

“It could be anywhere,” Disher said.

The phone rang. It was McCracken.

I turned to Monk. “She’s almost as fast at detective work as you.”

“Her detecting is primarily done by computers.”

“Do I sense a little defensiveness?”

“She’s an efficient keyboard-and-mouse detective,” Monk said. “You, of all people, should know the difference between what she does and what we do.”

“We?” I said.

“We,” he said.

Disher quickly scrawled some notes on his blotter.

“Thank you so much, Agent McCracken. I owe you big-time,” he said, and hung up. “Trina Fishbeck left Manhattan for New Jersey over an hour ago along Interstate Eighty.”

“How did McCracken get that information so fast?” I asked.

“We made it easy for her by being timely and precise. We were asking her surveillance matrix to scan activity regarding a specific person over the last few hours along key geographical checkpoints. It would have been a different story if we were talking about days.” Disher got up and went to the map on the wall. “Trina made and received calls that puts her in the general area of Denville.”

He tapped an area about twenty-five miles northwest of Summit. Monk and I stepped up on either side of Disher and looked at the map.

“What’s out there?” Monk asked.

“A good chunk of the state of New Jersey,” Disher said. “Forests, rock quarries, gravel pits, and other good places for disposing of bodies.”

But I saw something else, too. Lots of little patches of blue dotting the area.

“And there are a lot of lakes,” I said.

“How does that help us?” Disher asked.

“When we first met Goldman, on the night of the murder, he mentioned that he’d built a cabin at Spirit Lake,” I said. “Where’s that in relation to Denville?”

“How do I know? I’m new here,” Disher said. “I have no idea.”

“You knew about the rock quarries and gravel pits out there,” I said.

“Only because I watched
The Sopranos
,” he said.

Monk looked at the key on the side of the map, found Spirit Lake on it, and then found the grid where the lake was located.

“The lake is only a few miles north of Denville,” Monk said.

“You two start heading out there,” Disher said. “I’ll find out where Goldman’s cabin is and be right behind you.”

The lake was thirty minutes away from Summit if you obeyed the speed limit, which I assumed Joel Goldman had done. The last thing you want to happen on your way to a murder is to get stopped for a speeding ticket.

But we could go as fast as we wanted without any worries, though judging by the look of terror Monk had on his face as I drove pedal-to-the-floor, I don’t know if he would agree with me about that.

Even though Goldman had a big head start on us, I was determined to make up the difference by hitting the siren and driving like Michael Schumacher up the 287 to I-80.

By the time we reached the turnoff on I-80 that led to Spirit Lake, Disher was right behind us. He’d alerted
the local police that we were coming and requested backup, but they were busy dealing with a report of a kid with a gun in their local high school, which was on lockdown until they found him.

So we were on our own.

We turned off our sirens as we left the major streets and transitioned to the narrow, unpaved roads that wound through the thick woods to the mobile homes and hunting and fishing cabins that dotted the area around tiny, undeveloped lakes.

I finally came across a rusted mailbox pocked with pellet holes that had the address Disher had given us over the radio.

I slowed way down as we bumped and bounced along the rutted road until we reached a small clearing surrounded by towering pines. In the center was a wood-planked cabin, an outhouse, and a storage shed.

A blue Honda Accord was parked out front, right beside a rust-eaten, salt-corroded brown van.

We were definitely in the right spot. But were we too late to save Trina Fishbeck?

We parked our patrol cars side by side and took out our guns as we emerged from our vehicles. Monk didn’t look very comfortable holding his weapon. He probably would have preferred to be wielding a can of Lysol instead.

Disher made some very military-looking, rapid hand signals that I interpreted to mean: be quiet, I see you, you see me, there’s something in your hair, you two go here, I’ll go there, circle here, circle there, and your zipper is open. Or he could have been saying something entirely different. I had no idea what he was trying to say.

So he went to the front door, Monk went around back, and I headed toward the outhouse and shed.

I kicked open the door of the outhouse and was hit by a smell so awful I almost gagged. I quickly moved to the shed, nudged open the door with the toe of my shoe, and saw that it was filled with rusted tools and cobwebs.

That’s when I heard the digging.

I looked over my shoulder to signal Monk and Disher to follow me, but I didn’t see them. They were probably in the house.

I took a deep breath and moved slowly through the trees in the direction of the sound. A bead of sweat rolled between my shoulder blades, tickling my skin as I crept along cautiously, trying not to crunch too many twigs and leaves under my feet so I wouldn’t announce my presence.

The trees were thick and it was hard to see very far ahead. But the sound was getting louder, though less frequent. Whoever was digging was either nearly finished or getting tired.

I came through some trees and caught a glimpse of a mud-caked and sweaty Trina Fishbeck standing in a shallow grave, shoveling out dirt as Joel stood over her. His back was to me and he was aiming a shotgun at Trina. Her shoulders were heaving, as much from her sobs as the strain of digging.

“That’s deep enough,” Joel said.

I took a quick, desperate glance over my shoulder. If Disher and Monk were back there somewhere, I couldn’t see them. I was alone.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me,” she said, her voice cracking as she struggled to speak through her sobs. “I loved you.”

“So did Pamela,” Joel said. “But you can blame Adrian Monk for this. Somehow he figured it all out. If that hadn’t happened, we’d be in bed right now.”

“We still could be,” she said.

“You’d sleep with me even after I made you dig your own grave?”

“I’m a very forgiving person,” she said.

“I’ll remember that about you,” he said and raised the shotgun.

I planted my feet firmly on the ground and took aim. “Don’t move, Goldman.”

“Who do we have here?” he said, without lowering his weapon.

“Summit Police. Drop the weapon and put your hands on your head.”

“Oh, it’s you, the make-believe cop.”

I felt a pang of anxiety in the pit of my stomach because he’d said pretty much what I was feeling at that exact moment.

“My badge is real and so is the gun I’ve got aimed at you.”

I wasn’t sure who I was trying harder to convince, him or myself.

“Yes, but I don’t think you’ve got the balls to fire it. So here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to shoot you and then I’m going to shoot her and then I’ll bury you both.”

“I’m not alone, Goldman.”

“I’m even less afraid of Monk than I am of you,” he said and whirled around toward me.

I heard the gunshot and saw him tumble backward into the grave, the shotgun flying out of his hands, before I even realized that I’d fired my weapon.

Perhaps that’s because Trina’s scream was even louder than the gunshot.

She scrambled out of the grave and ran into the trees, nearly colliding with Disher and Monk as they came out.

I marched up to the narrow grave and peered down into it. Joel Goldman was wedged faceup in the middle of it, his body bent at the waist so that his legs were sticking up over the edge. He was conscious and moaning in pain, pressing his hand against a big, bloody wound in his right shoulder.

I was so relieved that Goldman was alive that I almost cried. But instead I kept my gun leveled on him and forced myself to look him right in the eye when I spoke.

“Are you afraid of me now?”

He nodded, gritting his teeth against the tremendous pain. I nodded, too.

“Then I guess we’ve both learned something today,” I said. “You’re under arrest.”

Monk stepped up beside me. “Are you okay?”

I thought about it for a moment so that I was sure of the answer myself.

“Yes,” I said, “I am.”

Our next two weeks, compared to our first few days, were relatively uneventful.

I didn’t have any regrets or go into much soul-searching about my actions at Spirit Lake and didn’t suffer any stress over it, either. I really was okay with shooting Joel Goldman. I don’t know how I would have felt, though, if I’d killed him.

Monk and I continued patrolling Summit, New Jersey, on the day shift, dealing mostly with traffic violations, a few drunk-and-disorderly calls, and we arrested a serial shoplifter. No major crimes or murders were committed, much to my relief.

When we weren’t working, I honed my shooting skills at the firing range with Evie, who I gradually grew to like quite a bit, much to my astonishment and probably to hers as well.

But that wasn’t nearly the most surprising relationship that developed in Summit over those weeks. That honor would have to go to Adrian Monk and Ellen Morse.