"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 set 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?"