“You must have gotten an early start this morning.”
“I didn’t stop,” Monk said, cocking his head from side to side as he examined the pictures.
“You stayed up all night?”
“I had a lot of work to do,” he said.
“But you didn’t have a deadline,” I said. “There was no reason you had to do an all-nighter.”
“I tried to go to bed,” Monk said. “But I could feel all those unsolved cases out there. I couldn’t leave them like that.”
“It was like leaving behind a mess without cleaning it up,” I said.
He nodded. I would have to talk to Danielle about giving Monk only a few cases at a time. At this rate, he’d exhaust himself within days.
I gestured to the pictures on the table. “These look like official crime scene photos.”
“They are,” Monk said.
“Then how did Slade get them?”
Monk shrugged. “I don’t know. He must be very well connected.”
“So what’s the case?”
“A home-invasion robbery and murder that happened six months ago in a mansion off Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. The killers got away with jewelry worth about two hundred thousand dollars. The culprits still haven’t been caught, though the police are pretty sure they know who is responsible. The victim, Lou Wickersham, was in considerable debt to a lot of very unfriendly people. The police believe those people lost patience and came to collect.”
There were close-up photos of Wickersham’s wound, the knife, a cut on his hand, a bloodstained handkerchief on the floor, a broken window, shards of glass on the rug, and his ransacked study. And there were some photos of the rest of the house, which had also been thoroughly ransacked.
“So why don’t they arrest the people that Wickersham owed money to?” I asked.
“There’s no evidence,” Monk said. “The knife was wiped clean of prints. The case has gone cold. So Wickersham’s widow, who was in Europe when the killing happened, hired Intertect to investigate.”
“What’s your theory?”
Before Monk could answer, there was a knock at the door. I went to answer it. Danielle was standing outside with another rolling file drawer.
“Good morning, Ms. Teeger,” she said, pushing the cart right past me.
“Danielle,” I said, closing the door and catching up to her. “You can’t keep wheeling files in here.”
“He asked me for more,” Danielle said.
“I’m all out,” Monk explained.
“But you haven’t slept,” I said to him. “You can’t keep working like this. You have to pace yourself or you’re going to get fried and make mistakes.”
Monk ignored my comment and turned to Danielle. “Did you get the information on the Judge Stanton case?”
“Of course, Mr. Monk.” She took a notebook out of the file drawer and referred to some pages.
“You’re not supposed to be meddling in that case,” I scolded him.
“Professional curiosity, that’s all,” Monk said.
I motioned to the new cart full of files. “Don’t you have enough to keep you busy already?”
“I just want to make sure the captain is on the right track.”
“You don’t work for him anymore,” I reminded him. “You are under exclusive contract to Intertect.”
Danielle spoke up. “The police believe that the killer is a woman, based on the type of bicycle she was riding and the impression left in the dirt by her running shoes. They’ve identified the shoes as a woman’s Nike model that’s sold by the thousands in stores all over the country, so that’s a dead end. But they have determined the assailant’s weight and height based on the measurements taken from the bike and the depth of the shoe prints in the dirt.”
Monk nodded. He was impressed, though I wasn’t sure whether it was with the progress of the investigation or the confidential information that Danielle was able to dig up.
“Do they have any suspects?” Monk asked.
“They are concentrating on violent offenders that Judge Stanton sent to prison and who have recently been released,” she said. “And the possibility that mobster Salvatore Lucarelli had him killed to avoid trial.”
Monk frowned. “Why would any of them ask a woman to do their killing?”
“Women kill just as well as men do,” I said.
“It could be the mother, girlfriend, or daughter of someone that he sent to prison,” Danielle said.
“It’s possible,” he conceded with a nod.
And my theory wasn’t?
Monk had never conceded that one of my alternative theories might be possible. But I wasn’t a twentysomething hottie who told him he was amazing.
“Did you take care of that other thing?” Monk asked Danielle.
She flipped a page in her notebook. “Of all the Nobel categories, I think the Peace Prize is the one you want.”
“You think that you deserve a Nobel Prize?” I asked him.
“Not me,” Monk said. “John Hall.”
“Who is he?”
“The inventor of the Diaper Genie,” Monk said.
“You honestly believe that creating the Diaper Genie deserves the Nobel Peace Prize?”
“I do,” Monk said. “Don’t you?”
“Unfortunately, Mr. Monk, what you believe won’t be enough,” Danielle said. “The only people allowed to submit nominees are professors of social sciences, law, and philosophy; government leaders; directors of peace organizations; members of the Nobel committee; and past winners of the prize.”
“Who do we know who has won a Nobel Prize?” Monk asked us both.
“No one,” I said.
“How about professors?”
“There’s Professor Cowan,” I suggested flippantly.
“Good idea,” Monk said.
“You just proved him guilty of murder, Mr. Monk. I doubt that he’s in the mood to do you a favor.”
“But it’s for a good cause,” Monk said.
“Even if he agreed with you about that, I doubt that the Nobel Committee would accept a nomination from a murderer.”
“Then let’s create a peace organization,” Monk said. “How hard could that be?”
“I’ll look into it,” Danielle said, writing a note to herself. I bet it was something like, Monk is crazy.
“I believe in peace.” Monk made a peace sign with his fingers. “You can’t have peace without cleanliness. The Diaper Genie could unite the world.”
“Did you have any luck with the home-invasion murder case?” Danielle asked.
“It’s not a home invasion,” Monk said. “And it’s not a murder.”
She looked baffled. “Then what is it?”
“Suicide,” Monk said.
He motioned us over to the table and gestured to the photographs.
“Look at this. Lou Wickersham was stabbed in the heart while sitting in his easy chair. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“If he’d walked in on robbers and they attacked him, then his body would be on the floor, not in the chair. And if they came at him from the front, why doesn’t he have any defensive wounds?”
“There’s the cut on his hand,” I said.
“It’s on the back of his hand,” Monk said. “If he grabbed for the knife, the wound would most likely be across his palm. Besides, the cut is superficial.”
“You’re saying that Wickersham stabbed himself in the chest?” Danielle said.
“Yes,” Monk said. “He sat down in what is probably his favorite chair in his favorite room and plunged the knife into his heart.”
“Then why aren’t his fingerprints on the knife?” she asked.
“Because he held it with the handkerchief that’s on the floor,” Monk said. “The police assumed the killers used the handkerchief to grip the knife and that the spot of blood came from the chest wound. It didn’t. The blood came from the cut on his hand.”
“How did he get the cut?” I asked.
“When he broke the glass on the French doors to his study,” Monk said. “Here’s what happened. He ransacked the house to hide the fact that he’d sold his wife’s jewelry and everything else of value to pay off the loan sharks while she was away. But it wasn’t enough and he knew it. All he bought was some time. The best he could hope for was to secure his wife a comfortable life. So he staged a home invasion and made his suicide look like murder so that his wife would get his life insurance money.”