by Lee Goldberg
“What do you mean?” Monk asked.
“In the morning, I told Michelle how beautiful and special she was, and that if she’d let me, I’d treat her like a princess for the rest of her life, starting with a gourmet homemade breakfast. But you didn’t have anything edible in your house.”
“You didn’t mind my Cheetos.”
“She deserved better than that. So I told her to stay in bed while I went to the store. When I got back, I found her in the bathtub, murdered by John Smith. I was heartbroken, but I did the only thing I could do. I grabbed my money from under the bed and I ran.” He looked down at his feet, ashamed. “It’s my fault that she’s dead.”
“She wasn’t murdered,” Monk said. “She killed herself.”
“I don’t believe it. Why would she do that?” Irwin said. “She had everything to live for. She had me.”
“We know that Michelle was deeply depressed, that she hated her life,” I said. “We’ll never know exactly what was going through her mind that morning, but I think when she saw how sweet you were, and how wonderfully you were treating her, it made her feel terrible about herself. She couldn’t live with the person she had become, which was nothing at all like the idealized woman you saw. So while you were out, she killed herself.”
“I didn’t idealize anything,” Irwin said. “She was an angel.”
“Michelle was a con artist,” Monk said. “She picked up men for illicit sexual encounters, drugged their alcoholic beverages, and ran off with their money.”
“She didn’t drug me,” he said.
“Michelle had five thousand dollars of your stolen money in her purse,” I said. “So, at some point she was planning on robbing you, but something changed her mind.”
“Self-loathing,” Monk said.
“But I thought she was wonderful,” Irwin said. “I told her so.”
“I guess that wasn’t enough,” I said.
“So no one is after me?”
“Oh, they’re after you, all right,” I said. “The irony is that by killing herself, Michelle probably saved your life. It made you run before the bad guy was on your trail. But he definitely is now. Jeroen Berge walked in on him.”
“So she was an angel after all,” Irwin said.
“I suppose she was,” I said.
* * *
Monk believed that whoever stole the marked money was chasing the same trail that we were, only we lucked onto Irwin before the killer did.
I supposed the smart thing to do would have been to take Irwin straight to police headquarters, but we were still no closer to figuring out who the murderer was than we were before, though Monk had a theory behind the crime, which he explained as the three of us drove out to Tewksbury to find Yuki.
“Security going in and out of the Federal Building is tight, for employees and visitors,” Monk said. “Nobody could walk out of there with five hundred thousand dollars in cash, and taking it out bit by bit over time would have been too risky. So they mailed it out.”
“It’s brilliant and gets bonus points for being simple,” I said. “But that narrows down the suspects to any agent in the building with access to the evidence room.”
Monk turned around and looked at Irwin. “We’ve only recovered ten thousand dollars. What did you do with the rest of it?”
“I’ve got twenty thousand in my mailbag,” Irwin said. “The rest is in the safest place on earth.”
“Under a mattress?” I said.
“The United States Post Office,” he said. “I filed a vacation hold before I left and mailed the money to myself. It’s on a shelf where no one but me can get it without a search warrant.”
We probably should have made a U-turn right then, gone back to the police station, and told the captain what we knew. Or, better yet, we should have called the FBI and let them know that we’d recovered their money.
It would have cleared my name and Monk’s, but Irwin Deeb would likely face jail time and I wasn’t so sure that was fair. And, to be honest, from an egotistical viewpoint, it wasn’t enough for me that we recovered the money. I wanted to nail the bad guy, too.
So I kept driving to Tewksbury with no idea at all about what we were going to do with Irwin or how we’d flush out the killer.
But at least we’d be able to reunite Ambrose and Yuki and I took some satisfaction in that.
We didn’t know who the guys were who tried to grab Yuki, or what they wanted, but we knew she was hiding and we didn’t want to spook her. And, on the off chance that the grocery store was still being watched, we parked on the other side of the storage facility, which was on the next block, and then we walked to the front gate.
There was no resident manager. The gate opened and closed using a key-card system and the fence was topped with razor wire, which had somehow snagged a few scraps of plastic wrap.
The three of us stood staring at the key-card unit as if our gazes alone would be enough to make it open.
“How are we going to get inside?” Monk asked.
“I could climb the fence, but that razor wire is a problem,” I said.
“We could go to a hardware store, buy a tarp, and throw it over the wire to protect you from getting cut,” Monk said.
“But we’re out in the open here,” I said. “Someone could see us and call the police.”
“We are the police,” Monk said.
“I don’t think that’s going to give us a free pass on breaking and entering.”
“Technically, we aren’t breaking or entering.”
“Okay, criminal trespassing,” I said.
Suddenly the gate hummed and slid open. Monk and I turned to see Irwin leaning against the key-card reader and smiling with pride. While Monk and I were arguing, Irwin had somehow managed to finesse the reader.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“Same way I learned to pick locks,” he said. “Being a mailman is a great way to educate yourself on a broad range of topics.”
“Especially if you want to be a criminal,” I said as I walked past him into the storage lot.
“I’ve also learned to crochet,” Irwin said as he and Monk followed after me.
The three of us snaked our way around the boats, cars, horse trailers, Jet Skis, campers, and other large vehicles to Ambrose’s motor home. The shades were closed on all of the windows and a curtain was drawn in front of the windshield.
I went up to the door and knocked, careful not to raise my voice too loud. “Yuki, it’s Natalie Teeger and Adrian Monk. We’re here to help you.”
There was no sound from inside the trailer, no indication at all that it was occupied.
After a minute or two, Monk moved past me and knocked again.
“This is Adrian Monk, Ambrose Monk’s brother. I just want to state now, for the record, that I don’t approve of your relationship with him. But he asked us to find you and we have. We know your real name is Erika Ito and that you have been hiding in this motor home since you were assaulted in the parking lot across the street. However, if you don’t open this door promptly, we will call the police and report that my brother’s motor home has been burglarized. Since you are a convicted felon, this offense could send you straight back to the big house, where you undoubtedly belong.”
The door opened a crack. All I saw was darkness. I stepped up and pushed the door a bit more, sunshine spilling into the interior of the motor home to reveal Yuki in a shaft of light, crouched low by the driver’s seat and aiming a .357 Magnum at us.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Mr. Monk Goes Bananas
I’d seen the gun before. It had belonged to Dub Clemens, the journalist that Yuki was working for when we met her on the road. And Monk had actually fired the gun to save his brother’s life. But my familiarity with the weapon didn’t make it any less unsettling to have it pointed at me.
“You can put the gun down,” I said. “You’re among friends.”
She gestured with the gun to Irwin. “Who is he?”
>
“My mailman.”
“We prefer the term letter carrier,” Irwin said.
“Why did you bring him?” she asked.
“It’s complicated,” I replied. “The longer we stand here, the more likely we are to draw attention, and I think that’s the last thing you want.”
She stood up, but kept her gun trained on the open door. “Okay, you can come in, but do not open the door all the way, and lock it behind you once you are inside.”
We slipped in one by one and she kept the gun aimed at the door in case some unseen assailant used the opportunity to dash in and kill her. I closed the door and locked it.
“Don’t turn on the lights or open the blinds,” Yuki said, putting her gun down on the dining table and taking a seat. The only light in the RV seeped in from around the edges of the blinds and the drapes across the windshield. But even in the semidarkness, I could see that she was exhausted. “How did you find me?”
I explained it all, then tried to reassure her. “I don’t think you have to worry about anyone else finding you the same way we did. Nobody but Mr. Monk would ever notice the blinds.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said.
Irwin and I sat down across the table from Yuki, and Monk stood, his arms crossed, striking a very judgmental posture.
“Who were those men who attacked you and what do they want?” he asked.
“They want the money I took from them and then they want me dead.”
“Me, too! I’ve got exactly the same problem,” Irwin said. “We’ve just met and we already have so much in common. Do you like to crochet?”
Yuki looked at me. “Who is this guy?”
“Irwin Deeb,” I said, and then I told her my story of woe and stolen cash. When I was done, she just shook her head.
“Aren’t we a lovely bunch,” she said.
“But only one of us is a convicted felon,” Monk said.
“Not true,” I said.
“And a killer,” he said.
“Again, not true,” I said.
“You’re reformed,” Monk said.
“Maybe she is, too,” I said and turned to her. “All we know is that you embezzled a million dollars from Juanita Banana Company.”
“And killed someone,” Monk quickly added, just in case I’d forgotten.
I gave Monk a sharp look, which I am not sure he could see in the dim light, and then turned back to Yuki. “Could you fill in the blanks for us?”
Yuki sighed. “I was an idealistic computer hacker living in St. Louis. I thought I could change the world with a few keystrokes. Juanita Banana paid the Marxist death squads in Urabá, Colombia, over a million dollars in protection money. It didn’t matter to Juanita that the guerrillas were using that money to kill thousands of civilians, crush labor unions, and drive peasants off of their land. All that mattered to them was keeping their business running smoothly. So I hacked into Juanita’s payroll system and stole a million dollars, which I dispersed to dozens of human rights organizations to even the score.”
“So Juanita alerted law enforcement and you became a fugitive from justice,” Monk said.
Yuki laughed. “Juanita didn’t call the police or the FBI, because that would have generated unwanted publicity and scrutiny. They called their own death squad, Blackthorn Security, the same people the U.S. government hired to commit their ‘extraordinary renditions,’ which is a ridiculously docile term for outright illegal kidnappings committed on foreign soil. One of those lovable Blackthorn guys attacked me on the street as I was coming out of a coffeehouse. I fought back, he lost his footing on a piece of uneven sidewalk, and I pushed him in front of a bus.”
“This is why I keep saying that cracked sidewalks are a hazard,” Monk said.
“Really?” I said. “Because you might trip while attacking a woman and fall under a bus?”
“If that sidewalk had been properly maintained, that man wouldn’t be dead,” Monk said.
“But I would be,” Yuki said.
“You’re missing my point,” Monk said.
“You could learn a few things from Ambrose about empathy,” Yuki said.
“He could learn a few things from me about not fornicating with tattooed, killer biker chicks.”
Irwin looked at her. “Does this mean you’ve got a boyfriend?”
“Yes,” she said.
“But we’ve got this amazing connection,” he said.
“So what did you do after the guy was hit by the bus?” I asked her, eager to keep the conversation on track.
“I stuck around and waited for the police.”
“You did?” Monk said.
“Of course I did,” she said. “What kind of person do you think I am?”
“A tattooed, killer biker chick,” Monk said.
“I wasn’t any of those things at the time. I was an A student studying computer science at community college, I didn’t have a single tattoo, and I drove a Ford Escort. I was an upstanding citizen who’d fought off an attacker. Naturally, I stayed because if I’d bolted, that would have been irresponsible and made an act of self-defense into a crime.”
“It was,” Monk said.
“The hacking was, technically speaking, but what happened to that Blackthorn agent was an accident. He brought it on himself. I figured, wrongly as it turned out, that no jury would ever convict me for that,” she said. “Besides, I thought the police were the only ones who could protect me from Juanita Banana and Blackthorn.”
“This is such a cool story,” Irwin said. “It’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, except with bananas instead of Nazis.”
“Didn’t Juanita’s actions in Colombia come out in the trial?” I asked. “It might have justified your actions.”
She shook her head. “The judge ruled that bringing that issue into trial was prejudicial or irrelevant or some other crap and my public defender was too inexperienced to do anything about it. I was convicted of embezzlement and involuntary manslaughter and sent to prison. Juanita didn’t even get a slap on the wrist.”
“But they didn’t get their money back,” I said.
“That’s because I refused to tell them where I’d sent it and I’d wiped all of my electronic footprints,” she said. “But they were convinced I had it stashed somewhere. I knew they’d be waiting for me when I got out. So I looked at prison as another college and took unofficial courses in self-defense and falling off the grid.”
Yuki went on to say that she changed her name and her appearance when she got out of prison and went to ground, emerging only to take a job working as journalist Dub Clemens’ assistant. Clemens was dying of lung cancer and crisscrossing the country in an RV, chasing a story on an elusive serial killer.
The job offered her the perfect way to stay out of sight and off the grid, traveling the back roads of America completely unnoticed.
As far as Juanita Banana was concerned, she’d disappeared from the face of the earth.
“But then I met Ambrose, moved in with him as his assistant, and got sloppy. I forgot I was a hunted woman and how resourceful Blackthorn is,” she said. “The other day, they found me and attempted an ‘extraordinary rendition,’ but I guess they didn’t do enough research on me. They didn’t know that I got a prison black belt.”
She smiled with pride. Wiping the parking lot with the Blackthorn ops was apparently a pleasant memory.
“What are you still doing here?” Monk asked. “Why haven’t you run?”
“Because I love your brother, you idiot,” Yuki said.
“It’s probably a good idea to have someone on tap as a backup in case it doesn’t work out,” Irwin said. “Someone who really understands what you are going through right now.”
“And that would be you,” Yuki said.
“I know what you’re feeling,” Irwin said. “I share your isolation, your fear, your pain under the yoke of injustice. Great relationships have been built on far less.”
“The yoke of injustice?” I
said.
“You’d have to be in our shoes to understand,” Irwin said, reaching out to touch Yuki.
“If your hand touches me, I will break it,” she said.
He withdrew it. “You can see how emotionally scarred she is already.”
Monk groaned. “If you really cared about Ambrose, you’d go and take the danger that follows you as far away from him as you can get.”
“I would, but it’s not that simple,” she said. “I know that they are watching him and I’m afraid of what they might do to him if they get frustrated about not being able to find me. They might think that hurting him will bring me back.”
And they’d be right, because even the thought that they might harm him was keeping her close by. Maybe they knew that might happen, too. “How do you know they are watching him?”
“Twenty-twenty hindsight and a quick recon under cover of darkness,” she said. “A new family moved in across the street a week or so ago. And ever since, there have been a lot of cable, telephone, and electrical service trucks in the neighborhood. Obviously, it was Blackthorn setting up shop for round-the-clock surveillance.”
“Or you have a vivid imagination,” Monk said.
“I didn’t imagine getting grabbed at the grocery store,” Yuki said. “How do you think they knew I’d be there with enough notice to get there ahead of me?”
I’d had the same question when I watched the surveillance video. Now she’d answered it.
“So what’s the plan?” Irwin asked. “We all hide out here until my bad guys and her bad guys give up and go away?”
That was my initial plan, but it didn’t seem like a great long-term strategy.
“Because if it is,” Irwin continued, “I’m game. I can teach Yuki to crochet.”
“I would rather give myself up to Blackthorn and let them torture me to death,” Yuki said.
I thought about the similarities of their plight and then, out of nowhere, a plan came to me almost fully formed. It was risky, and there were a thousand ways it could go wrong, but there was one aspect to it that was too appealing to ignore, so I led with that.
“My plan is to kill two birds with one stone,” I said.
