Conviction

by Richard North Patterson

  Betty Sims sat on the couch now, shoulders slumped, knees pressed together beneath her half-open robe. Minnehan held the picture out to her; his other hand, Monk saw, held a wad of tinfoil plucked off the top of the bureau.

  Betty's gaze flickered from the photo to the wad of foil. "Who's the lucky girl with Demetrius?" Minnehan asked.

  Betty glanced back at the picture. "My cousin, Cordelia. Cordelia White."

  "What's her address?"

  Betty told him. "Know where we can find Demetrius?" Minnehan asked her politely.

  She shook her head. "Maybe Cordelia does."

  Without asking anything more, Minnehan took out his cell phone and directed someone at the station to visit Cordelia White. Then he opened up the tinfoil and showed Betty Sims two rocks of crack cocaine—maybe forty bucks' worth, Monk thought. Enough to get her tossed out in the street.

  "Who this belong to, Betty?"

  She looked away, silent. Minnehan appraised her swollen eye. In a gentle tone, he asked, "Eddie do that to you?"

  She hesitated, then shook her head, no longer looking at Minnehan. Still speaking quietly, Minnehan said, "If you can, Betty, stay away from him. Guys like Eddie don't get better."

  The words were followed by silence. In an affectless tone, she asked. "Am I going to be in trouble?"

  Minnehan studied her with a look akin to resignation. "The crack?" he answered. "No. That's Eddie's now."

  They left her sitting on the couch. Closing the door behind him, Minnehan murmured, "Demetrius and Cordelia. Almost sounds like Shakespeare."

  * * *

  Monk and Ainsworth put Eddie Fleet in the same room they had used to question Payton Price.

  He sat staring at the wall, eyes as blank as poker chips. The bulky gray sweatshirt he wore, far too thick for such a day, was meant, Monk supposed, to create the illusion of a body mass to go with the attitude.

  "Minnehan took your last two rocks," Ainsworth said. "I don't think he likes you beating up on Betty. I don't think he likes you, period."

  The tacit threat induced only silence. Monk placed the photo of Thuy Sen between them. "Ever seen this girl, Eddie?"

  Seconds passed before Fleet looked down. Then he gave an almost indiscernible shake of the head.

  "Was that a no?" Ainsworth asked skeptically.

  This time Fleet shrugged. "I never seen her."

  " 'Cause my friend Inspector Monk has. He saw her floating in the bay."

  Fleet neither moved nor spoke. "The thing about a body," Monk told him conversationally, "is it just lies there. Most uncooperative kind of person you'll ever know.

  "Now it's one thing, Eddie, to murder somebody in his house—you just leave him there. But killing someone at your own house is a whole different deal. As long as the body stays there, it's incriminating.

  "So you got to move it. That's how this poor child wound up in water way too cold to swim in."

  How long, Monk wondered, could Fleet go without seeming to breathe? "The whole problem," Monk continued, "comes down to transportation. How do you get little Thuy Sen where she won't take herself? You drive her." Monk softened his voice. "Unless you don't own a car.

  "Don't own a car, Eddie, then you've got to borrow one."

  With this, Monk fell silent. Moments passed before Fleet slowly raised his eyes. With a touch of melancholy, Monk said, "You got anything to tell me, son?"

  Fleet stared back at him. This time the frozen look of his eyes struck Monk as more than attitude.

  In the silence, Monk reached into his wallet and pulled out a card, laying it beneath Thuy Sen's picture. "Time may come you need to talk. If it does, I can do more for you than any lawyer can. But it's way better to seek me out before somebody else does."

  For another long moment, Fleet gazed down at the card. Then he reached out and slipped it into the front pocket of his sweatshirt, the reluctant, surreptitious movement of a man whose head doesn't know what his hand is doing.

  Abruptly, Monk informed him, "That's it, Eddie. Inspector Ainsworth will call a car to take you home."

  The last thing Fleet wanted, Monk knew, was to be dropped off in the Bayview by a squad car. But he seemed to have lost the gift of speech.

  Ainsworth left. Glancing at his watch, Monk gave himself five minutes with a man who would no longer look at him at all. Then he stood and said comfortably, "Let's see if your ride's here."

  Ainsworth was waiting outside. Together, they walked Fleet out the door and down the dim, tiled hallway to the elevator.

  As they approached, one of the elevator doors rumbled open. Breslin and Minnehan stepped out. Between them were the Price brothers.

  For an instant, Payton looked startled, then managed a subdued "Hey, man."

  Fleet nodded as they passed, his brief glance meeting Payton's. But when Payton looked away, Rennell still stared at Eddie Fleet, eyes wide with surprise in his sullen face.

  EIGHT

  "LIKE PULLING THE WINGS OFF FLIES," TERRI OBSERVED IN A clinical tone. But beneath this she felt a chill: at this point in Monk's narrative, Rennell Price's fate had already begun to feel inexorable. "You were pretty sure the brothers killed her, then."

  Though Monk eyed the Italian delicatessen across the street with seeming idleness, his voice turned cool. "You mean, did I commit myself to their being guilty, then look for the evidence to match?"

  "Something like that."

  " 'Fraid not. All I was convinced of then was that they were scared of Eddie Fleet."

  "Both of them?" Terri asked quietly. "Or just Rennell?"

  Monk pondered this. "I didn't see the difference," he answered with a shrug. "Turns out they both had reason."

  * * *

  Monk and Ainsworth put the brothers in separate rooms, then worked on each in turn.

  The questioning was taut now. Payton had nothing more to say; clearly fearful, Rennell kept repeating, "I didn't do that little girl." But each pause between denials seemed longer.

  None of this mattered. All that mattered at the moment was happening before the nearest convenient judge. So when Monk offered the brothers a ride home, it was with an incongruous amiability.

  * * *

  They sat in the backseat, silent. "By the way," Monk said over his shoulder, "we just got a warrant to search your grandma's house. Hope she doesn't mind—it's the best way of checking out your story."

  In the rearview mirror, he could see Rennell turn to glance at Payton, who kept staring at the back of Monk's head. As they stopped at a traffic light on Third Street in the borrowed squad car, some gangbangers on the corner gazed at Monk and the two brothers. By the time they reached Eula Price's house, the forensics team was already there—the neighborhood, Monk figured, would soon be humming with tension.

  "We'll be talking with your grandmother," he told the brothers. "We'll get some other folks to hang around with you."

  * * *

  Monk seated Eula Price on the porch between Ainsworth and himself.

  Worriedly, she turned her head from one cop to the other. She was a large woman with venous legs: though judging by her face she could not be much past sixty, her body seemed a burden on her heart. Her other burden in life, Monk perceived, was the brothers. She was clearly respectful of police, and he guessed that his visit tapped into some nameless but pervasive dread about what the boys would come to.

  The sight of Thuy Sen's picture seemed to convert the dread to fear. "Ever seen this girl?" Ainsworth asked.

  "Only on TV." She paused, then added softly, "That poor child."

  "But you never saw her here?"

  Eula Price's throat worked. "No."

  "Where do you sleep?" Monk inquired.

  Slowly, she turned to face him. "Upstairs."

  "And the boys?"

  "They sleep downstairs."

  "Do you eat together?"

  "We used to. Then they started keeping different hours." She hesitated, and Monk could hear the sadness in her voice. "I got the bedroom se
t up to cook my own meals."

  Monk recalled Flora Lewis's image of this woman gazing out her second-story window. "When did the boys come to live with you?" he asked.

  "When Payton was eleven," she answered quietly. "Rennell was only nine. But they both were trying so hard to be little men."

  To Monk, her last phrase bespoke a long-ago tragedy. "How was it that they came to live with you?"

  "Athalie, my daughter-in-law—she stabbed my son Vernon with a knife." She began gazing out at the street, at nothing. "They put her in an institution. Been there now for eleven years."

  Monk could think of no response. "When did you move upstairs?" he finally asked.

  Her eyes shut. "Four years back."

  "Why was that, ma'am?"

  "The boys got bigger."

  Monk waited for a moment. Almost gently, he asked, "Do you know how they earn a living?"

  She folded her hands in front of her. "Odd jobs, they tell me."

  "Not selling crack cocaine?"

  Eula Price was quiet and then turned to him, tears welling in her eyes. "My health just ran down," she said wearily. "Every day, I pray to the Lord to lead my boys down a righteous path. I tried so hard, and now I pray so hard . . ."

  Her voice trailed off. In the silence, Monk heard other voices—the crime lab team, going through the first floor of what once had been her home.

  * * *

  After Monk watched her retreat upstairs, each step slow and painful to watch, he sought out the head of the three-man crime lab team.

  "What you got?" he asked.

  The man, small and lean and precise, adjusted his glasses as he took his mental inventory. "Some stuff just for the finding," he answered. "The makings for crack cocaine, some remnants in the sink. Condoms—good for crack whores." The man handed Monk two magazines. "Plus pornography for inspiration."

  Monk riffled their pages. They were less than he had hoped for—long on sadism and aggression but devoid of photographs that might suggest a taste for children.

  "What else?"

  "Some clothes that more or less match your eyewitnesses' descriptions, though they're kind of generic. We think this room may be more interesting."

  Monk paused to look around the living room—the green walls were dingy, the carpet and couch were worn and stained, and the sooty fireplace, which did not look like anyone used it now, was filled with empty beer and soft drink cans. The sole, incongruous remnants of what Monk supposed was Eula Price's more gracious household were the painting of a beatific, pale Jesus and a lacquered coffee table, which retained a dull sheen beneath its mars and nicks.

  It also retained, Monk saw at once, fingerprints—on his hands and knees, a technician studied the dust he had scattered with a laser light. Nearby a plump female technician had put down her ultraviolet lamp and begun slicing out a rectangle of carpet.

  "She found what looks like fresh semen stains," the crime lab guy told Monk.

  * * *

  "Semen mixed with saliva," Terri amended now. "I read the crime lab report. But without DNA technology, the most it proved is that someone had oral sex with someone else. There was nothing to link the semen to Rennell, or to Thuy Sen's strangulation." But Terri was not as impervious as she tried to seem—once more, she imagined her own daughter, and then, too vividly, the painful image merged with what had happened to Thuy Sen. And she had read the whole damning report.

  Monk completed its narrative for her. "Black hairs consistent with Asian ethnicity. A green fiber which matched Thuy Sen's sweater. A partial of her fingerprint on one corner of the coffee table. All we had left to prove was that she'd died there."

  "So you went back to Eddie Fleet."

  Monk's laugh was short and unamused. "He angled his way back to us," he said with weary disdain. "Human nature."

  NINE

  MONK AND AINSWORTH SAT SIDE BY SIDE IN AN INTERROGATION room, a tape recorder between them and Eddie Fleet.

  "So why'd you call me?" Monk demanded curtly.

  Fleet mustered a smile which combined nervousness with bravado, displaying a row of gold teeth—a status symbol behind which, Monk supposed, the enamel was rotting away. The smile faded in the face of Monk's impassive stare. "Had somethin' to run by you," Fleet ventured at last. "Call it a hy-po-thetical."

  Monk was not certain whether the satiric twist given the last word was intended to obscure Fleet's difficulty in enunciation. But it did not conceal his fear, or the guile which had driven him here.

  "Spit it out."

  Fleet fidgeted, trying out the smile again. "Not that it happened this way, understand. I'm just wanting to hear what you might think."

  Monk said nothing. Silent, Fleet watched the tape keep spinning.

  "Can you turn that damned thing off?" he asked.

  Monk did. "So?"

  Fleet glanced at Ainsworth, then tried to look Monk in the eyes. "S'pose somebody asked to borrow my car the day that girl disappeared."

  "Somebody?"

  A trapped, furtive look crept into Fleet's eyes. "This can't get out, man. You can't tell no one."

  Still Monk stared at him. "I can't tell 'no one' about something that 'somebody' asked you that maybe never happened. You call so I can watch you tap-dance?"

  Fleet looked away. Finally, he said, "What if I said it maybe was Rennell."

  "Maybe? I'd say we need a warrant for your car. You just went and gave us probable cause."

  * * *

  Fleet's ancient blue Cadillac Eldorado smelled like sweat and cigarettes and pot. Payton's prints were on the passenger-side dashboard, Rennell's on the handle of the right rear door.

  The rough gray carpet in the trunk compartment was spiky and matted. Caught in its fibers was a strand of green wool; the portion cut out by the crime lab yielded a mixture of semen and saliva. There were also traces of urine—as Monk well knew, corpses often leak.

  * * *

  They picked up Fleet and the brothers again, separately, then stuck them in three rooms. Monk's message to each was simple: whoever talks first does best. But Payton was stone silent, and Rennell kept repeating in a monotone what Monk now thought of less as a mantra than as a life raft—"I didn't do that little girl."

  In the fourth hour of questioning, Monk came back to Eddie Fleet with the same relentless patience. "We know she was in your trunk, Eddie. We know that she was dead. Sooner or later someone's gonna tell me how she got that way. When he does, this thing is over."

  Fleet hunched in the chair with folded arms. "Was she dead when you first saw her," Monk inquired, "or were you part of how she died?"

  Fleet's lips parted, as if to speak. Then his jaw clamped tight again.

  "Don't know about my friend here," Rollie Ainsworth said in a tone of deep sincerity. "But in my heart and soul I don't believe you killed Thuy Sen. Maybe I'm wrong, but you don't seem like the type to me." His voice hardened. "The thing we know for sure is that you had a part in it."

  The room felt hot and close now: the first sheen of sweat began appearing on Fleet's forehead. Monk and Ainsworth contented themselves with watching.

  At length Monk asked, "You know about accessories?"

  Fleet did not answer. Only his body, tense with anticipation, betrayed him.

  "I'm not talking about do-rags, Eddie."

  Slowly Fleet looked up at him. "I'm talking about murder," Monk continued softly. "So let's see if you can follow what I'm telling you.

  "With murder there's only three types of accessories. First there's accessories before the fact. They're the worst ones—they know a murder's gonna happen, and don't do anything about it. Maybe they even help things along.

  "Then there's accessories during the fact. Want to guess who they are?"

  Fleet barely seemed to breathe. "I'll tell you then," Monk said in a conversational tone. "They're present when the murder happens, and still don't lift a finger to stop it. You with me so far?"

  Still Fleet was silent. "You're with me," Monk said. "You'
re a real smart young man, and I just know you're with me. So you know damned well if you're one of the first two kinds.

  "Course maybe that's why you're so quiet. If I were an accessory before or during, I'd have a whole lot to think about."

  A trickle of sweat made Fleet's left eyelid flutter. He was too proud or scared to wipe it. "Want to hear the rest?" Monk inquired.

  Almost imperceptibly, Fleet nodded. "Okay," Monk said. "Last one's an accessory after the fact. That's where the victim's already dead, and you help cover up. Maybe like getting rid of the body.

  "That's the least culpable kind of accessory." Sitting back, Monk gave him a slow, appraising stare. "Don't know where you fit in, Eddie. But all three of us know there's a slot for you. Sooner or later we're going to decide which one you are."

  In the silence, Fleet's light brown face glistened beneath the fluorescent lights.

  "Thirsty?" Ainsworth asked.

  After a moment, Fleet nodded again. Companionably, Ainsworth said, "I'll get us all a Coke." He left Monk staring at Fleet.

  With mild interest, Monk wondered if Fleet would meet his eyes. For a moment Fleet seemed ready to try, then looked down again.

  Ainsworth came through the door, which was still ajar, clutching three cans of Coke.

  Monk accepted one, then placed the second can in front of Eddie Fleet. Ainsworth took a swallow of his and leaned against the wall. Still quiet, Fleet studied the cool red cylinder, beading with its own sweat as he watched.

  "Maybe," Ainsworth suggested, "we should leave you with your thoughts. Maybe you'll figure things out before Rennell or Payton does."

  Monk stood abruptly. Before Fleet could form an answer, they closed the door behind them.

  * * *

  In another interrogation room, feet propped on the table, Monk and Ainsworth drank their Cokes while they observed Eddie Fleet on a video monitor.

  Fleet was slumped forward, face in his hands. The inspectors kept watching with the casual interest of anthropologists studying an all-too-familiar species. "Sort of sluggish," Ainsworth remarked. "Quiet, too. Not like Ralphie Menendez."

  Monk emitted a laugh. Left alone after absorbing Monk's dissertation on the degrees of murder, Menendez had muttered on videotape, "Goddam, fifteen fucking years"—repeating the minimum sentence for murder in the second degree.