Mr. Monk on the Road (13 page)

“You stay there, Mr. Monk.” Brozinsky motioned me over to one side, out of Monk’s earshot, and spoke to me in a low voice. “You seem like a rational person, at least compared to those two.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“So tell me straight,” Brozinsky said. “Is he crazy?”

“Mr. Monk really is a police consultant and a brilliant detective. You can call Captain Leland Stottlemeyer at the SFPD and he’ll vouch for him.”

“That doesn’t explain his rant about the Mystery Spot or why he drugged and abducted his agoraphobic brother.”

“Mr. Monk can’t resist solving a mystery, and this one was too in-his-face to ignore,” I said. “As for his brother, Ambrose has led a very sheltered life, and all Mr. Monk wants to do is show him the outside world.”

“It sounds like a kidnapping to me,” he said.

“It’s a private, domestic dispute,” I said. “It’s not a crime like, say, abducting nubile women and sacrificing them to Satan would be.”

“Who said anything about Satan or sacrifices?”

“Nobody,” I said. “I was just using that as an example. I guess that’s not something you see a lot around here.”

“Sorting this mess out is beyond my pay grade.” He turned back to Santos and raised his voice again. “Watch this bunch for me while I make a call.”

Brozinsky went back to the patrol car and got on his radio. Santos hiked up his belt.

“You’re in big trouble now, Adrian,” Ambrose said through the window. “If you apologize, I won’t press charges.”

“How kind of you. But I’m not the one who is going to be arrested.
They
are.” Monk pointed to the Mystery Spot ticket booth. “From now on, this will be known as the Solved Spot.”

“I don’t think it will be as popular,” Santos said, fiddling with his belt some more.

“You ought to tighten that belt up a notch,” I said.

“I ran out of notches,” Santos said.

“Add another one.”

“We aren’t allowed to modify our equipment. I’ll just have to eat a lot of donuts and hope that I fill out some.”

“Sounds like hell,” I said. “Speaking of which, have you noticed any goats disappearing in the area?”

Before Santos could answer, Brozinsky got out of the squad car. “Captain Simcoe wants to see you, so you’re going to have to follow us.”

This couldn’t be good, but I was in no position to argue.

“What about the Mystery Spot?” Monk said. “It’s a crime scene. It should be secured.”

“It’s been here for seventy years,” Brozinsky said. “I’m pretty sure it will be here when we get back.”

“But the felons might flee,” Monk said.

“We’re prepared to take that risk,” Brozinsky said.

We got into the motor home. Monk glared at Ambrose, who glared right back. I wasn’t worried about the Monk brothers being angry at each other. I had concerns of my own.

“Buckle up, everyone,” I said as I got into the driver’s seat. “If I see any goats where we’re going, we’re making a run for it.”

 

We followed the patrol car to a beach in a rocky cove. A jetty of boulders reached out into the bay to protect the little strip of sand from eroding away.

The parking lot was filled with official police vehicles, one of which was a morgue wagon. It was a familiar sight for me, and I didn’t like the implications for our vacation. But at least we weren’t headed for a sacrificial altar.

I parked horizontally, so I wouldn’t have to back up, but it meant that our windows looked right out at the ocean, which ordinarily would have been perfect. Unfortunately, it gave Ambrose an unobstructed view of the young woman’s corpse on the sand. It wasn’t one of the splendors of the outside world that we’d hoped to show him, especially not on his first day on the road.

“Is she dead?” Ambrose asked.

“They don’t call the morgue otherwise,” Monk said, peering out the window. There was a lone beach chair, towel, and paperback book on the sand, and the forensic techs were taking pictures of them.

“That’s a cold thing to say, Adrian.”

“I’m just stating a fact.”

“From here,” Ambrose said, “she looks like she’s sleeping.”

“I wish she was,” I said.

Brozinsky knocked on the door. I opened it.

“Come with me, please,” Brozinsky said, and we stepped out, closing the door behind us.

“What about me?” Ambrose asked from the window.

“Stay there,” Brozinsky said.

“No problem,” Ambrose replied.

Brozinsky led us down to the beach, where forensic technicians wearing white jumpsuits and plastic booties over their shoes were erecting a tent over the woman’s body to preserve the scene and the evidence it contained from the elements.

The woman was attractive, with red hair, and was dressed in sandals, short shorts, and a sleeveless T-shirt. Her freckled skin was chalk white and bloated from being in the water. She looked to me to be in her mid-twenties.

Monk cocked his head, looking at her for a moment before we were greeted by a potbellied detective wearing dark sunglasses and a toupee that looked like a carpet sample. The sleeves of his blue shirt were rolled up, and his red tie was loose at the collar. His badge hung from a chain around his neck in case somebody couldn’t tell that he was a cop from the handcuffs and holstered gun clipped to his belt.

“Thank you for coming down, Mr. Monk,” he said, offering him his hand. “I’m Captain Russell Simcoe. I saw you speak a few years back at a police conference in San Francisco.”

Monk shook his hand, then motioned to me for a disinfectant wipe, which I already had ready for him. “So you know me to be a man of sterling character and you realize that my brother’s charges against me are preposterous.”

“Of course,” he said, watching Monk clean his hands and drop the wipe in the Ziploc baggie that I held open for him. “I know how complex family relationships can be. Don’t worry about any of that.”

“Thank you, Captain, we both appreciate it,” I said. “I’m Natalie Teeger, by the way, Mr. Monk’s assistant.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, too,” Simcoe said.

“What are you going to do about the Mystery Spot?” Monk asked.

“I’m assigning a special task force to look into it immediately.”

Simcoe was being facetious, but Monk’s eye for detail didn’t extend to the subtleties of human interaction, especially when it came to the nuances of speech. But I got it, and Simcoe knew that I did.

“That’s good news,” Monk said. “So why are we here?”

“Please forgive me, but once I heard you were in town, I couldn’t resist seeing you in action,” Simcoe said, gesturing to the body. “A swimmer found her floating in the water and brought her ashore. The ME figures she’s been in the water since early this morning. She doesn’t have any ID, a phone, nothing. She’s the second woman to get swept off the rocks by waves this month. I thought you might be able to tell me whether it was an accident or suicide.”

Before I could say that we couldn’t help him, that we were on vacation and would have to go, Monk spoke up.

“It’s neither,” he said. “It was murder.”

Simcoe couldn’t have been more stunned if Monk had slapped him across the face.

And I felt like slapping Monk. He’d spoken without thinking of the consequences of what he was about to say and what they would mean to Ambrose and me.

“How can you say that?” Simcoe said. “You’ve been here two minutes and you haven’t even examined the body yet.”

“It’s obvious,” Monk said.

“Not to me,” Simcoe said.

“No wonder the Mystery Spot was able to thrive here for seventy years,” Monk said. “She’s wearing sandals with half-inch heels. She couldn’t have walked on the rocks with those. Her heels would have gotten stuck and she would have fallen.”

“That’s probably exactly what happened. She’s got a wound where her head hit the rocks,” Simcoe said, crouching down and turning the victim’s head so we could see the contusion on the left side of her skull. “The ME says it definitely would have knocked her out.”

“I’m sure it did,” Monk said. “But she didn’t get it losing her footing on the rocks. She’s too familiar with the water to make a mistake like going out there with those sandals on.”

“You don’t know that,” Simcoe said. “You don’t even know who she is.”

“I know that she’s in her mid-twenties and has been rowing boats and swimming for most of her life.”

“How do you know that?”

Monk crouched beside him and pointed to her arms. “She’s got an inch-long, hairline scar behind the elbow on the inside of both of her arms.”

I crouched down so I could see the scars, too, getting sucked into the situation despite myself. It was amazing to me that Monk had spotted those scars in a single glance. Then again, he had an uncanny knack for picking up things that were out of the ordinary.

“What’s that have to do with rowing?” Simcoe asked.

“The scar is from a medial epicondylectomy and ulnar nerve decompression. It’s done to relieve a condition that’s commonly known as ‘tennis elbow’ because so many players in the sport are afflicted with it, typically between the ages of thirty and fifty. The condition is characterized by elbow pain and numbness in their forearms, pinkies, and ring fingers caused by damaged tendons and pinched ulnar nerves, the result of hitting hundreds of thousands of tennis balls, year after year. One of the few sports that would inflict that kind of repetitive stress injury on
both
elbows is rowing or swimming.”

“Couldn’t it be weight lifting?”

“Perhaps,” Monk said. “But she doesn’t have the upper-body muscle definition that would come from that kind of bodybuilding.”

Simcoe nodded and looked at me. “Damn, he’s good.”

“There’s more,” Monk said.

“There is?” Simcoe said.

“There always is,” I said wearily. I could see what this was going to lead to.

“She’s fair skinned and burns easily. She wouldn’t go in the sun without strong sunscreen. But there isn’t a bottle of sunscreen on her towel.”

“Maybe that’s why she was here so early,” Simcoe said, “to enjoy the beach before the sun got too intense.”

“That could be, but the novel on her chair belies that theory.”

“It does?” Simcoe looked over at the chair. “What’s so special about the book?”

“It’s
Moby Dick
,” Monk said.

“You can see that from here?”

“I saw it when we walked over. She’d never read that book. She’s a whale lover.”

“Is there a scar on her body that tells you that?”

“No, there’s a bumper sticker on her car,” Monk said.

“How do you know which car is hers?”

Monk pointed to the parking lot. “There’s only one car in the lot with a roof rack for a kayak, and it has a Greenpeace sticker on the rear bumper.”

I’d noticed the car. It was an old Volvo sedan. Based on the car, I could make a few stereotypical deductions about her myself.

“Why did you even notice the sticker?” Simcoe said.

“I couldn’t help it,” Monk said. “It’s off center.”

“My God,” Simcoe said. “You’re saying this was all staged by her killer. She was clobbered and thrown in the water.”

Monk nodded. “Do you have any suspects?”

“How could I? Until now, I didn’t even know she’d been murdered.”

“So where should we start?” Monk asked.

“By leaving here as fast as we can,” I said, taking Monk by the arm and leading him back toward the RV. “We’re on vacation.”

“But we don’t know who killed her.”

“Captain Simcoe can send us a postcard with the solution,” I said.

“I can’t walk away from a murder investigation.”

“Our trip began today, but if you get involved in this investigation, it ends right now because I will leave you here alone.”

“You wouldn’t do that.”

“Try me,” I said, staring him right in the eye. I meant it and I wanted him to know it. “I remember what happened to our vacations in Hawaii, Germany, and France. If you’re serious about the gift you want to give Ambrose, then you will get in that motor home with me right now, continue on with our road trip, and let the police handle this case on their own.”

“I don’t think I can do that,” Monk said. “I’ve never left a case unsolved.”

“How can you expect Ambrose to find the courage to leave his house, to overcome his greatest fear, when you can’t even summon the will to walk away from an investigation?”

I turned my back on him and walked across the beach toward the parking lot, leaving him standing indecisively on the sand, halfway between the crime scene and the motor home.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I
picked up a couple of sand dollars off the beach to keep as souvenirs and got into the motor home.

Ambrose sat at the dinette, sipping a bottle of Fiji water and watching his brother, who was standing still, looking back and forth between the corpse and the RV.

I slid into the booth beside Ambrose and showed him the sand dollars, setting them down in front of him. This was probably the first time in at least thirty years, if not his whole life, that he’d been this close to a seashell.

“These are for you,” I said. “Your first souvenirs of the trip.”

“What are they?”

“Seashells. These particular ones are called sand dollars because of their shape, but they are actually a type of sea urchin.”

Ambrose nodded and leaned back. “In other words, you’ve just dropped the skeletons of two dead sea creatures on the table where we eat.”

“I thought you might like them, especially with that leaf-like pattern in the center. I used to spend hours collecting them when I was a kid. You can keep them like this, or we can paint them, or we can coat them with shellac, which will make them smooth and shiny.”

“What a good idea. Why don’t you go out, pick up the woman’s decomposing corpse, and drop her on the kitchen table while you’re at it. Maybe we can preserve her in shellac, too.”