Mr. Monk on the Couch

by Lee Goldberg

  The furniture was simple, an eclectic mix of contemporary, vintage, and thrift shop finds. Apparently, Costa had blown his bank account on the house and didn’t have much left over for furnishings. The artwork on the walls consisted of framed prints and the kind of knickknacks you’d find at any weekend sidewalk arts-and-crafts show. This told me that Costa saw his home merely as a shelter, perhaps even temporary. He wasn’t someone who was ready to commit to one place or, perhaps, to any one person. I admit, though, that my last deduction may have been more than a little biased by what I’d already learned from Stottlemeyer about the guy.

  The bedroom had gleaming hardwood floors, white walls, and a big, four-poster bed, angled to face the window and the terrific view.

  Mark Costa was naked on the bed, a pillow over his face and a big kitchen knife deep in his chest. The white sheets were stained with blood, which had also dripped onto the floor and puddled there. It didn’t seem possible that so much blood could come from one person.

  “The ME puts the time of death around midnight,” Stottlemeyer said. “Neighbors didn’t hear a thing or notice any unusual activity.”

  Monk walked around the bed, his hands framing the scene in front of him in his usual fashion, tipping his head from side to side as he studied the gory tableau.

  I glanced around the room. The drawers of the dresser had been pulled out and all the clothes thrown out onto the floor. The closet had been emptied, too.

  “A jealous husband wouldn’t waste time ransacking the house,” I said. “Unless he wanted to make it look like a robbery.”

  “But there’s no sign of a break-in and nothing of value appears to have been stolen,” Stottlemeyer said. “There’s also about a thousand dollars in cash and a lot of expensive gadgets and computer equipment still in the house.”

  “You said the door was unlocked when Costa’s lover arrived,” I said. “So that means that the killer may have had a key or was someone that Costa knew. Maybe it was another lover, upset that he was cheating on her with other women.”

  “That’s a good theory,” Stottlemeyer said. “It would also explain the mess—it’s not a ransacking, it’s explosive rage.”

  “What’s upstairs?” I asked.

  “More of the same,” Stottlemeyer said. “Only without the bloodshed. I’ll show you.”

  He led us up to the fourth floor. It was bright and airy, the front window and the skylights in the pitched ceiling filling the small space with sunshine. The low walls were lined with bookshelves, which gave the office a cozy feel, at least for me. Costa’s desk and computer were facing the window, giving him the same great view from his desk that he had from his bed.

  The only other piece of furniture in the room, a boxy red couch, had been slashed and gutted, the stuffing and springs scattered all over the floor. The couch seemed to have been designed to be stylish more than comfortable. It had that hard, sculpted, contemporary feel to it that made my shoulders and lower back ache just looking at it.

  The couch must have been ripped up by one of Costa’s lovers, or an angry husband, or anyone who’d ever tried to read a book or take a nap on it.

  Monk cocked his head and headed back downstairs without a word to us. We followed him and were joined by Lieutenant Devlin, who’d just walked in the front door.

  “Rachael Nunn is a mess,” Devlin said.

  “Just like this kitchen,” Monk said. “And this entire house.”

  “She and Costa have been meeting once a week for a year, ever since he appraised her house,” Devlin said. “She likes to stop by for a morning pick-me-up on her way to work and claims her husband knows nothing about it. And she wants to keep it that way.”

  “Where was her husband last night?” Stottlemeyer asked.

  “Sleeping right beside her, or so she says. On the other hand, she has bad allergies and takes a couple of Benadryl tablets before she goes to bed at night. That would knock her out cold,” Devlin said. “He could have left the house, killed Costa, and slipped right back into bed afterward without her knowing a thing.”

  “See if that’s enough grounds for the DA to get us a search warrant,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “There goes her happy marriage,” Devlin said.

  “If it was so happy, she wouldn’t have been playing around,” Stottlemeyer said. “Does she know if Costa had other lovers?”

  “She says he had plenty,” Devlin replied. “He was a very popular appraiser.”

  Stottlemeyer turned back to Monk. “What’s your take on all of this?”

  “It’s going to be a major cleanup job,” he said.

  “I meant about the murder.”

  “The blood has seeped onto the floor and probably between the floorboards,” Monk said. “The whole floor might have to be pulled up and maybe the ceiling down here.”

  “You think there might be evidence under the floor?” Stottlemeyer asked.

  “I think there might be blood,” Monk replied.

  “The killer’s blood?”

  “No,” Monk said.

  “Then why would we want to pull up the floor?”

  “To clean it, of course,” he said.

  “I don’t care about the mess, Monk, I care about catching the killer. What can you tell me about that?”

  “You mean besides the fact that we’re dealing with a serial killer?” Monk said. “Not much.”

  He made the comment in such a matter-of-fact way that it made his statement far more powerful than it would have been if he’d made a big, dramatic announcement.

  “What makes you think that a serial killer did this?” Devlin asked.

  “Because whoever did it has killed more than one person.”

  “Yes, we all know what serial means,” Devlin said. “What we don’t know is who else you think he’s killed.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Monk said. “The manager of that godforsaken hellhole you call a thrift store.”

  “That was an entirely different situation,” she said.

  “On the contrary, all the elements are the same. The killer either entered through a door that was left unlocked or he picked the lock without leaving a trace. Same as the thrift store. He didn’t steal anything, at least not as far as we can tell, and didn’t bring his own weapon, opting instead to use a knife that he found at the scene. Again, same as the thrift store. And he searched the premises, though this time it feels improvised and fueled by anger, as the level of destruction increased as the killer moved through the house.”

  Now that he’d laid it all out, the similarities were obvious to me, too, and I felt like a moron for not seeing them before. I’m sure Stottlemeyer and Devlin felt the same way.

  At least Stottlemeyer was used to it and had developed protective scar tissue around his ego. But for Devlin, each time it happened was a fresh slap in the face.

  Her reaction was anger, probably directed more at herself than at Monk. I figured that after her many years working undercover, each mistake revealed to her a personal weakness that could get her killed.

  Stottlemeyer sighed. “So the big questions are is he picking his victims at random or is there a connection between them? And what the hell is he looking for?”

  “If it is a serial killer,” Devlin said, “perhaps what he is searching for is a particular kind of souvenir, something that has no apparent value to any of us but is enormously significant and symbolically meaningful for him.”

  “You missed the biggest question of all,” I said. “Both killings have been in the same general neighborhood—mine. What I want to know is if he’s going to strike again.”

  “He will,” Devlin said and gestured to the broken dishes, spilled food, and open drawers. “Looking at that, I’d say he’s unsatisfied. Whatever he wanted from this killing he didn’t get.”

  “The least he could have done was straighten up before he left,” Monk said.

  Devlin stared at him. “He smothered a man with a pillow and impaled him to a mattress with a butcher
knife. And you’re upset that he didn’t clean up after himself?”

  “Aren’t you?” Monk said, then turned to Stottlemeyer. “How soon can you wrap up here so we can start cleaning?”

  “We?” Stottlemeyer said.

  “I’ve been helping out the crime scene cleaners,” Monk said. “Just for fun.”

  “We don’t pay you to have fun, Monk. We pay you to solve murders. That should be your priority.”

  “It absolutely is,” he said. “So when do you think you’ll be releasing the scene?”

  “It’s a big mess in tight quarters and the forensic team just got started. They probably won’t be done until late this afternoon. That gives you most of the day to do some actual work, like, you know, helping us catch a serial killer.”

  The captain walked out and Devlin followed him. I turned to Monk.

  “Told you so,” I said.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Mr. Monk and the Missing Piece

  There wasn’t much for Monk to do. As I’ve said before, performing the backaching, shoe-leather-grinding, buttin-the-chair basics of investigative work wasn’t one of his skills, though it was clear to me that his brother excelled at it.

  I was still marveling at all the information Ambrose had managed to glean, and so quickly, from a single photograph of the nurse and the little girl. Genius was a quality that seemed to run in the Monk family, though it was offset by psychological problems of equal scale.

  I’d come to the conclusion that Monk’s detecting style, his nearly crippling obsessive-compulsive disorder aside, was based on observing people’s actions and the placement of things around him. He relied almost entirely on discrepancies in the environment and in an individual’s behavior as the basis for his deductions.

  That dry, analytical explanation might make what Monk does sound simple and even easy, but as you’ve probably gathered already, it’s not. It’s a gift and, as Monk was fond of saying, also a curse.

  But at that particular moment, stuck in police headquarters, we were both cursed.

  Ostensibly, Stottlemeyer wanted Monk there to assist in the investigation. But Monk had nothing to contribute at this early stage, and I had even less.

  So he began passing the time by sweeping floors, and I read old issues of American Police Beat while the detectives dug into the backgrounds of Casey Grover, the thrift store manager, and Mark Costa, the real estate appraiser, to see where their paths may have intersected with each other and with that of a serial killer.

  Meanwhile, Devlin went through the motions of checking Costa’s many lovers and their spouses and significant others to confirm their whereabouts during the killings, rule them out as suspects, and to see if they might have had a connection with Grover.

  Monk and I observed as some of those people were brought in and questioned, we read some of the forensics reports, and we were generally about as useful to the investigation as two potted plants.

  But after that brief flurry of detecting excitement, Monk busied himself dusting, emptying trash cans, and organizing the squad room while what he really wanted to do was get over to Costa’s house and help Jerry and his team clean up.

  I decided to take advantage of the situation. I sat myself at an empty desk in homicide and used the phone to call the hospitals on Yuki’s list.

  At each hospital, I asked for the personnel director and then asked that person if I could speak to any doctors, nurses, technicians, or custodial staff who’d been working at that facility since the late 1970s or early 1980s.

  I contacted those employees, then asked if I could show them the photo of the nurse, either in person or by e-mail, to see if anyone recognized her or the girl on the bike.

  Once I got their e-mail addresses, I told them I’d be in touch soon and gave them my cell phone number and the phone number of my temporary desk in police headquarters.

  I knew, of course, that by doing so, that I was implying that I was a police officer even though I was careful not to claim that I actually was one. I simply said that I was Natalie Teeger, that I was trying to identify a dead man, and that I was calling from the homicide department of the San Francisco Police Department, all of which was true.

  Was it also deceptive?

  Yeah, it probably was.

  But it was also something that Thomas Magnum or Jim Rockford would have done in my position, so that made it okay.

  My cleverness paid off almost immediately. Many of the personnel directors or employees that I contacted called me back within minutes through the SFPD switchboard on the pretense of confirming my e-mail address or some other insignificant detail, when, in fact, they were really just double-checking that I wasn’t some scammer.

  Which, of course, I was, but kudos to them for making the effort to unmask me.

  I was heading toward Stottlemeyer’s office, preparing to argue that keeping us there was a waste of our time, when he bolted out, nearly colliding with me.

  “There’s been another murder,” he said.

  “Is it connected?” I asked.

  Stottlemeyer glanced past me at Monk, who was making his way over to us. “He can tell me when we get there. All I know is that the victim is a young woman, she was killed in her home, and it’s near Twenty-third and Vicksburg.”

  That was only a few blocks away from the thrift shop, Costa’s place, and my house. So I didn’t really care whether or not it was the same killer. Three people had been murdered practically right outside my door, and that was too close for comfort. Until this killer was caught, I’d be sleeping with my doors locked and a baseball bat beside my bed.

  We weren’t usually at police headquarters when a homicide call came in. It was a bit like being at a fire station when the alarm goes off, only there were no poles to slide down and no uniforms to put on in a hurry.

  And although we were off to see a corpse rather than rescue anyone in immediate danger of becoming one, we still left the police station in a rush, sirens wailing, faces taunt with grim determination.

  Except for Monk, who seemed preternaturally relaxed, totally distanced from the urgency and seriousness of the situation.

  But show the man spilled milk, a crooked picture, or a shelf of unalphabetized books, and he’d jump on those situations as if he were preventing the imminent release of poison gas in a nursery school.

  The crime scene was a house on Twenty-third Street, a half block east of Vicksburg at Nellie Street, which was basically a long alley that somebody had actually bothered to name.

  When we got there, the paramedics were sitting in their unit out front, waiting to deliver their official report that the woman inside wasn’t merely dead, but really most sincerely dead.

  There were also two police officers at the scene. One of them stood at the front door while another unfurled crime scene tape around the house, which looked like someone had lopped off the top three floors of Costa’s place, dropped them on the corner, stripped off the fretwork, and painted everything powder blue.

  Stottlemeyer approached the officer at the door, a woman built like a wrestler. From her physique, I wondered for a moment if she might have once been a he, which wasn’t entirely outside the realm of possibility, especially in San Francisco.

  “Howdy, Claire,” Stottlemeyer said. “How are your feet?”

  “Sore as hell, Captain. Have been since the day I left the academy.”

  Devlin spoke up before Stottlemeyer could.

  “When they stop hurting, that’s when you know you’re sitting on your ass too much and it’s time to retire.” Stottlemeyer and Claire both looked at her. Devlin shrugged, almost sheepishly. “I trained under Captain Hudson at the academy, too, right before he traded in his gold shield for a fishing pole.”

  Claire didn’t appreciate the intrusion on her little ritual with the captain. She turned to him and asked him a question that made her feelings very clear.

  “Have you heard from Randy lately?”

  “You mean the chief,” Stottlemeyer
said. “That’s what he likes to be called now. We spoke a couple of days ago. He’s leading a crackdown on scofflaws who chain their bikes to trees on the mean streets of Summit.”

  “I’d trade those streets for this one any day,” she said, tipping her head toward the house. “This is some ugly stuff.”

  “Tell us about it,” Stottlemeyer said and we all gathered closer around the officer.

  “The victim is Cheryl Strauss. Twenty-nine years old, single, a sales associate at a clothing store. She lived at this address for only a few months,” Claire said. “The mailman was crouching down, trying to shove some big magazines through her mail slot, happened to catch a peek inside and saw it.”

  “It?” Devlin said.

  Claire took out her nightstick and used it to nudge open the front door of the apartment behind her.

  The door swung slowly into the living room, almost like a curtain opening on a stage.

  And there, draped on her back over the coffee table, her arms and legs bound to it with tie strips, was Cheryl Strauss, covered with cigarette burns and knife slashes, her mouth duct taped shut, a clear plastic bag over her head, her dead eyes staring past us into the abyss.

  I didn’t have to be a medical examiner to know that she’d been tortured and asphyxiated.

  It was a shocking sight that galvanized everyone except Monk, who stepped past all of us and went into the room. He walked right up to her, his head cocked at an angle, his hands out in front of him, framing the gruesome image along with the matched red chairs that were at either end of the table.

  And then he lowered his hands, turned around, and faced the three of us. He rolled his shoulders and tugged his sleeves.

  “This is a four-piece living room set,” Monk said.

  Devlin marched angrily into the room, careful not to step on the mail on the floor.

  “There’s a woman in front of you who suffered an agonizing, horrific death and all you can see is the living room set? What the hell is wrong with you, Monk?”