Monk headed back towards my car. I hurried to catch up with him.
“Where are we going?”
“Home,” he said.
“Don’t tell me you’re giving up,” I said. “The captain just told you how much he needs you.”
“He certainly does,” Monk said. “He’s going in the wrong direction.”
“Then why are you going home?”
“I need to consult an expert,” Monk said.
26
Mr. Monk and the Expert
We sat down with Ambrose on the couch and watched the security camera footage of Kingston Mills getting killed. Watching it reminded me in an odd way of what was happening with Beyond Earth. The shooting of Kingston Mills was the shooting of Conrad Stipe, only reimagined and more authentic.
Like the previous video, the image was divided into four sections, each one giving us a different angle of the loading dock area of the convention center.
The limousine pulled up to the rear of the convention center. The back door of the car opened and Mills bounded out. Almost immediately, Mr. Snork emerged from behind the Dumpster, coughed, and shot him once in the shoulder.
Ambrose grimaced and made a notation on his yellow legal pad. I don’t think he really had anything to write. The images were just too hard to take.
I didn’t blame him for turning away. It’s not easy watching real violence, pain, and bloodshed. The look on Kingston Mills’ face when the bullet hit him in the shoulder was something I will never forget. It was raw, naked terror. Mills was a man who knew with absolute certainty that he was about to die a horrible death. And when you see something like that, you can’t help but imagine yourself in the same situation and imagine all too clearly what it would feel like.
It gave me a shiver.
Things played out on the screen exactly the way Monk had described them to us at the crime scene. Mills tried to run, but Mr. Snork marched after him, continuing to fire, the coughing ruining his aim.
The second bullet hit Mills in the leg, knocking him off his feet. He tried to crawl away, but Mr. Snork walked up and put him down with a bullet in the back.
It was an execution.
I had to force myself to keep watching. It was one thing to show up at the scene of a murder; it was another to watch a human being die.
Mr. Snork coughed again and ran back into the convention center. That was where the DVD footage ended.
Monk rolled his shoulders, cocked his head from side to side, and turned to us. I knew the look. He was going to tell us whodunit.
“What do you think?” Monk asked.
I thought he knew who did it. But before I could answer, Ambrose spoke up.
“It’s horrible,” Ambrose said. “At least it was over instantly for Conrad Stipe. This was like torture.”
“Maybe if he wasn’t coughing so much his aim would have been better,” I said.
“The number of times the victim was shot isn’t the only difference,” Monk said. “In the first shooting, Mr. Snork was perfectly centered in all four security camera views. But this time, there were instances where the shooter was partially or completely obscured by other objects.”
“It didn’t seem to me like he was avoiding the cameras, ” I said.
“He wasn’t,” Monk said, “but he wasn’t paying close attention to how he was being photographed by them. This shooting wasn’t tightly organized and choreographed. He also blinked.”
“Blinked?” I said.
“He was startled by the sound of the gunshots,” Monk said. “The other shooter wasn’t.”
“The other shooter?” Ambrose said. “This isn’t the same man?”
“I don’t think so,” Monk said.
This was the point when Monk would ordinarily reveal who the killer was, but instead he stayed silent.
Ambrose chewed on his lower lip. “Could I see it again?”
“Of course,” Monk said and replayed the DVD.
I wondered why Monk was being so reticent about announcing his conclusion. Did I misread his body language?
I watched the footage again. That time I noticed the blinking, too. But in every other way, this Mr. Snork looked just like the other Mr. Snork to me: the same basic build, the same color eyes, the same uniform, and, of course, the same elephantine trunk and pointed elfin ears.
“You’re right, Adrian,” Ambrose said. “It’s not the same man.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
It’s a question clever people like the Monks get asked a lot by considerably less clever people like me.
“It’s the same uniform that the first shooter wore, but he’s wearing season-one ears,” Ambrose said. “The nasal appendage is also the design from the pilot, not the more refined, less hairy one used in later episodes. This man is a Beyond Earth purist who is paying remarkable attention to detail. Notice how he’s holding his gun. He’s grasping it like a Confederation energy dissembler weapon instead of a conventional handgun.”
“So I guess it wasn’t his coughing that threw off his aim after all,” I said.
“He’s not coughing,” Ambrose said.
“Then what is he doing?” I asked.
“He’s speaking Dratch.”
Once Ambrose mentioned it, I realized that what I’d thought was coughing was in fact the guttural hacking of Snork-speak that we’d encountered when we tried to talk to the leader of the Galactic Uprising.
“Congratulations, Ambrose,” Monk said. “You’ve just solved the murder of Kingston Mills.”
“I have? Before you could?” Ambrose asked incredulously.
He had good reason to be incredulous.
“You’ve revealed that the killer is Ernest Pinchuk,” Monk said. “I never would have spotted that he was speaking Dratch without you.”
I might not have, but Monk surely would have. In fact, I’m positive that he knew “whodunit” from the first moment he watched the security tape.
So this performance could mean only one thing: Monk was giving his brother a gift.
I don’t know if he was doing it out of guilt for ignoring Ambrose’s efforts to help before, or as a way of acknowledging the importance of Beyond Earth in his brother’s life, but his reasons didn’t matter.
It was the most selfless thing, perhaps the only selfless thing, I’d ever seen Monk do.
Ambrose beamed with pride. “Would you like to know what he’s saying?”
“You can read lips?” I asked.
“Of course,” Ambrose said.
“In Dratch?”
“And seven other languages,” Ambrose said. “If you include pig Latin.”
“Incredible,” Monk said.
And useless.
How often did Ambrose get a chance to speak in pig Latin to anyone, much less have to read their lips?
Monk was overdoing it now, but Ambrose was too flattered to notice.
We watched the DVD again and stopped every few moments so Ambrose could jot down what Pinchuk was saying. When we reached the end of the video, Ambrose gave us the full translation.
“He’s saying, ‘Feel the hot kiss of my bullets of righteous justice, you miserable, greedy scumbag. You are guilty of unspeakably heinous crimes against humanity, the Confederation, the Beyond Earth-verse, and all of fandom. And for that unforgivable transgression you must die.’ ”
That was an awfully overwrought speech, even in Dratch.
Monk turned off the TV and smiled. “That sounds like a confession to me.”
Monk called Captain Stottlemeyer on Ambrose’s speakerphone and told him that the shooter was Ernest Pinchuk and that he’d identified him off the security video thanks to observations made by Ambrose.
What helped Stottlemeyer accept Monk’s conclusion was that Pinchuk had a strong motive for wanting Mills dead, he could be placed at the scene of the crime, and he’d already been identified as one of the people who’d purchased a first-season uniform recently.
That, and the fact that
Monk was, until that day, never wrong when it came to homicide.
But Stottlemeyer wasn’t ready to accept Monk’s conclusion that this was a copycat crime. He believed that Pinchuk was responsible for both killings.
“It’s the same motive for the same shooting at the same location,” Stottlemeyer said. “So the obvious conclusion is that it’s the same guy.”
“Except there are too many differences,” Monk said. “There’s the ears.”
“And the nose,” Ambrose said.
“And the way he was holding the gun,” I said, just to be supportive.
“Maybe Pinchuk did all that just to throw us off,” Stottlemeyer said, “to make it look like there are two different killers when there was actually only one.”
“But you wouldn’t have noticed and neither would I,” Monk said. “The differences are obscure details that would only be noticeable and significant to the most ardent Beyond Earth fans.”
“Which is why he did it that way,” Stottlemeyer said. “He knew the security video would end up on TV. Wearing a baseball cap or something for the second killing would have been a difference that was too obvious. It wouldn’t have fooled anyone.”
“I don’t think Pinchuk is that smart,” Monk said.
“Don’t underestimate the intelligence of Beyond Earth fans,” Ambrose said. “One of them is a Nobel Prize winner in physics.”
“It doesn’t matter right now whether Pinchuk killed one person or two,” Stottlemeyer said. “We can all agree that he killed Kingston Mills, and that’s all I need to arrest him.”
So Stottlemeyer hung up and sent Disher to arrest Pinchuk at the Airporter. But Pinchuk wasn’t there. His girlfriend told Disher that Pinchuk feared he’d come down with Rigilian Fever and so he went back home to Berkeley. Rigilian Fever, she explained, is the stomach flu for Snorks.
Since the East Bay town was outside of the captain’s jurisdiction, Stottlemeyer contacted the Berkeley police and arranged to meet them at Pinchuk’s house to make the arrest.
We headed out to join them.
On the way there, I couldn’t resist asking Monk about why he gave Ambrose the credit for cracking the Kingston Mills murder case.
“Because Ambrose solved the crime,” Monk said.
“After you did,” I said. “You just didn’t say anything. ”
“Do you think he noticed?” Monk asked.
“He hasn’t seen you solve enough crimes to recognize the visual tics,” I said. “But I have. So why did you do it?”
“I wanted him to feel good about himself for a change.”
“What makes you think he doesn’t?”
“Because he’s a Monk,” he said sadly.
I’m sure the double meaning of those words probably wasn’t intentional, but it wasn’t lost on me.
“But you’re a Monk and you feel good about yourself, ” I said.
“Rarely,” Monk said.
“So when do you feel good about yourself?”
“When I solve a case,” Monk said.
“That happens a lot,” I said.
“Not often enough to keep me from dwelling in misery most of my waking life,” Monk said. “It would take dozens of murders a week for me to feel really good about life.”
“You do see the contradiction in that, don’t you?”
“That hundreds of people would have to die for me to know true happiness and fulfillment?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Now you know why I’m miserable,” Monk said.
The front yard of Ernest Pinchuk’s dilapidated house was strewn with weeds and littered with trash. It might as well have been surrounded by a moat, too, as far as Monk was concerned. There was no way he was crossing the yard to the sagging front porch.
So we stayed on the curb as Captain Stottlemeyer and a thirtyish detective from the Berkeley PD walked up to Pinchuk’s door and Lieutenant Disher led a few local uniformed officers around the back.
The Berkeley cop knocked on the door while Captain Stottlemeyer stood off to one side, his gun in his hand.
“Ernest Pinchuk? This is Detective Hidalgo Rhinehart, Berkeley PD. We want to talk with you.”
Hidalgo Rhinehart? With a name like that, he must have dropped from a branch of a very interesting family tree.
There was no answer. Rhinehart knocked again.
“Open up,” he said.
I heard Disher yell “Halt!” from the backyard and then came loud shrieking, coughing, and gurgling.
Stottlemeyer stepped off the porch. “What the hell is that sound?”
“It’s Pinchuk,” I said. “He’s spitting out some Dratch.”
“He should have chewed it before trying to swallow it,” Stottlemeyer said, holstering his gun.
“It’s a language,” I said.
“A fictional one,” Monk added.
Disher led Pinchuk down the driveway to the street. Pinchuk was still in his Snork outfit and his hands were cuffed behind his back.
“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law,” Disher said. “Regardless of what language you speak it in, a real one or a TV one.”
Pinchuk angrily gurgled and wheezed and snorted at us some more as Disher finished reading him his rights and put him in the back of a police car.
“You get some weird cases in Frisco,” Hidalgo said.
“That’s why we have Monk,” Stottlemeyer said, offering his hand to Hidalgo. “Thanks for the cooperation today.”
“My pleasure,” Hidalgo said. “I’m always glad to kick one of our wackos across the bay. It’s one less for me to deal with.”
Disher joined us. “I got a look inside his house when he came out. You’ve got to see it.”
“Okay,” Stottlemeyer said and started ambling down the driveway. “But I’m telling you right now that I’m not going to take any decorating tips from a guy with an elephant trunk glued to his nose.”
We followed the captain. Monk looked at his feet as he walked to avoid stepping on the cracks in the driveway. The backyard was as weedy as the front, but there was a concrete path from the driveway to the door at the rear of the house. Monk stuck to the path, concentrating on his balance as if he were crossing a bridge over a deep gorge.
The door was ajar. Stottlemeyer pushed it open the rest of the way and we stepped into another world, a couple of centuries into the future.
The living room was an exact replica of the command center of the starship Discovery, right down to the captain’s control podium, the joysticks on the navigational console, and the panel of constantly blinking multicolored lights of the main computer, which always seemed to explode in a shower of sparks whenever the ship ran into a meteor storm or was attacked by aliens.
Mr. Monk in Outer Space Page 24
