CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The mysterious fate of Silicon Valley entrepreneur and visionary Steve Wurzel was widely known in San Francisco and probably across the nation. But I couldn’t blame Monk for not knowing about it, since it happened around the time of Trudy’s murder and his own complete mental breakdown.
So on our way back over the Golden Gate Bridge, I told Monk the story.
Wurzel set off early one foggy morning on his motorcycle to travel the winding coastal highway from his home in San Francisco to his weekend getaway in Mendocino, a picturesque village on the cliffs above the pounding waves of the Pacific.
He never arrived.
Much of the coastal route is a dangerous, twisting, two-lane highway running along the edge of jagged cliffs with nothing but a few planks of rotted wood between you and a spiraling plunge to the rocky surf below.
And where the road deviates away from the cliff’s edge, it snakes into dense forests and across bridges over deep gorges.
It’s an exhilarating and very scary drive, a road that offers spectacular views and the potential for spectacular deaths.
The Highway Patrol, the Mendocino County Sheriff, and the U.S. Coast Guard mounted a massive search along the coast, on land and at sea, but no sign of Wurzel or his motorcycle was found. After a few days, the official search was suspended.
Wurzel’s wife, Linda, and their Silicon Valley friends weren’t ready to give up. They mounted an ambitious, expensive, and exhaustive search effort of their own, but also failed to find him.
All of this happened only a few weeks before InTouchSpace received a massive infusion of venture capital funds and exploded on the Internet, becoming a global social phenomenon and making all of the early investors, including many who helped finance the search for Wurzel, unbelievably rich.
After Wurzel was declared dead, several women came forward claiming a share of his billion-dollar estate on the grounds that they were his lovers and that he’d fathered children with them. But without DNA to confirm paternity, the cases were thrown out.
What, if anything, any of that had to do with the murder of a senile old bartender was beyond my powers of reasoning and deduction. And, apparently, it was beyond Monk’s as well. Because after I was finished telling him the story, he didn’t make any teasing statements hinting that he’d solved the murder. Instead, he asked me to take him home so he could get back to work on the remaining cases that Slade had given him.
“What about the Peschel case?” I asked.
“We’ll have to wait and see what the captain has turned up,” Monk said. “Perhaps someone was released from prison who had a grudge. But I wouldn’t rule out Carol or her husband yet.”
“Don’t you wonder why Wurzel bought Peschel’s tavern?”
“I suppose Wurzel was betting on the neighborhood becoming more desirable in the future and the property increasing significantly in value.”
“It just seems odd,” I said.
“The only connection between the two of them is that Wurzel bought Peschel’s business and Peschel invested in InTouchSpace at about the same time. What is odd about that?”
It was as if we’d switched roles.
Usually, he was the one saying that something was odd and I was the one questioning it. The frustrating thing was that I couldn’t even say exactly what was odd about this, except that thinking about it gave me a tickle in my chest.
“They’re both dead,” I said. “Wurzel disappeared under mysterious circumstances and Peschel was murdered.”
“Ten years apart,” Monk said. “There’s nothing odd about that.”
“Both of their last names end with the letters ‘e-l,’” I said.
Monk gave me a look.
“Okay, that was stupid. But if there’s nothing odd, why did you cock your head when I told you at the bookstore that Wurzel died ten years ago?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You cocked your head, like a chicken,” I said, demonstrating by cocking my own. “You do that whenever you hear something that doesn’t fit or that makes something fit that didn’t fit before.”
“You mentioned death, and whenever I hear about a death in the context of a murder investigation, my interest is piqued.”
“There you go,” I said. “You admit it: You’re piqued.”
“The pique passed,” Monk said. “My head is swimming with murders and deaths over the last few days. I am having trouble keeping them all straight.”
“I’m telling you, Mr. Monk, there’s something ticklish about this.”
“Ticklish?”
“I feel a tickle, right in the middle of my chest.”
“Maybe you are having a heart attack,” Monk said.
“I am not having a heart attack.”
“Do you feel any shooting pains in your left arm?”
“No, but I’m beginning to feel one in my head,” I said.
“We should stop by a hospital.”
“I’m fine.”
“You have heart palpitations and a throbbing headache,” Monk said. “That’s not fine. It’s fatal.”
“Something’s bugging me, that’s all,” I said.
“Heart palpitations and a throbbing headache. It could be the onset of a massive stroke.”
“I think it’s my subconscious,” I said. Perhaps after all the years of working for Monk, and all the murders that he’d solved with me tagging along, I was finally developing some detective instincts of my own.
But what good would they do me if I had no idea what my instincts were trying to tell me?
“We should stop and see Dr. Bell,” Monk said. “He can help you with that. Maybe he can help me, too, as long as we’re there.”
“I have a better idea,” I said.
“What could be better than seeing Dr. Bell? It’s on the way. You’ll thank me later.”
I flipped open my cell phone and, breaking the law requiring motorists to use hands-free units while driving, I called Danielle. I asked her to give us a rundown on Dalberg Enterprises and to find out where we could bump into Linda Wurzel.
“Why would we want to meet her?” Monk asked after I finished the call.
“I don’t,” I said. “You do.”
While Lansdale and the forensics unit searched Captain Stottlemeyer’s apartment, Lieutenant Randy Disher sat at his desk, racked with guilt.
He knew he was doing what he had to do, but he couldn’t help feeling that he was betraying his commanding officer, his mentor, and his friend.
Disher tried to distract himself from his despicable behavior by going through the statements taken from the hotel guests who were on Braddock’s floor the night of the murder.
A detective from Wichita stayed in the room next to Braddock’s. He said that someone knocked on Braddock’s door around ten p.m. and, shortly thereafter, he heard a thump and the sound of a glass breaking, but nothing that alarmed him or made him think there was trouble.
The detective’s statement would go a long way towards convincing a jury that Braddock was killed in his seventh-floor hotel room between ten and ten thirty p.m., which, unfortunately, was the same time that Captain Stottlemeyer said that he was sitting by himself in a conference room on the second floor.
Supposedly.
Disher scolded himself for thinking that way, for yet another betrayal of his friend, in thought if not in deed.
But Disher had no choice. He had to follow the evidence where it led him. And as the captain said, this case could make or break his career. He couldn’t afford any mistakes.
Disher had called the deputy chief, half hoping that his boss would countermand his decision to search the captain’s apartment. But, to Disher’s dismay, the deputy chief agreed with Disher’s actions and congratulated him on not letting his loyalty cloud his judgment.