Monk closed his eyes and nodded to me. I drove up as close to the lobby doors as I could get. He took a deep breath, opened the door, and ran into the lobby.
I got out, met Grimsley at the door, and walked in. We took the stairs up to Grimsley’s office on the fifth floor. One entire wall of his office was a window that allowed him to look over the transfer station floor.
The warehouse was the size of several airplane hangars and was dominated by a mountain of trash that dwarfed the trucks emptying their loads and continuously adding to its bulk. Tractors loaded the trash into a complex maze of conveyor belts that sorted and fed the garbage out to larger, long-haul trucks that lined the far end of the facility.
“Twenty-one hundred tons of solid waste pass through this station every day,” Grimsley said. “It takes one hundred ten trips per day to move it all from here to the Altamont Landfill.”
“I see,” Monk said weakly, putting his hands against the window to steady himself. The sight of so much garbage was making him dizzy. “And where is zone nine?”
“Zone nine?”
“Where you keep the special trash.”
“Recyclables go to a separate facility; so does construction and demolition debris.”
“I’m talking about the zone for the really clean trash. Like mine,” Monk said. “I’d like to visit my trash.”
Grimsley motioned to the mountain of garbage. “That’s the only zone we’ve got. Be my guest.”
Monk blanched. He looked like a child who’d just found out there was no such thing as Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy all at once.
“You mix all the trash together?” Monk said in disbelief.
“As it comes in, we just dump the new on top of the old,” Grimsley said.
“My God,” Monk muttered.
“So where could we find the trash that was picked up from the Excelsior?” I asked.
“On the leading edge of the pile, right in front here,” he said. “It’s still early, so your overcoat may only be under twenty or thirty tons of solid waste at the moment.”
“Twenty or thirty tons?” Monk said.
“You’re very lucky,” Grimsley said.
I asked Grimsley if he could reroute the rest of the trash deliveries to another end of the facility and essentially lock off the twenty or thirty tons where the overcoat might be buried until they could be searched. He said he could.
We left Grimsley’s office and went downstairs in silence. Monk was in a daze, so much so that he didn’t ask for a single wipe after leaving the office. He didn’t say a word on the way to the police station, either. It was a nice break and gave me a chance to worry about Joe without any distractions.
I don’t know what unsettled Monk the most; the discovery that his trash was mixed with everybody else’s, or the realization that the key piece of evidence he needed was buried somewhere under tons of garbage.
I tried to reach the captain at the station, but was told that he and Disher were at the scene of a homicide on Mount Sutro. The officer manning the phones knew Monk and me, so he gave us an address on Lawton Street and that’s where we headed.
The rows of tightly packed apartments clung to the wooded slopes of Mount Sutro like mussels on a wharf piling, a tide of thick fog lapping up against them. As we wound up Lawton, the street curved and I glimpsed the massive base of Sutro Tower above the roofline in a shadowy blur that could just as easily have been a mirage.
The three-story apartment buildings climbed the mountain in steps, forming a stucco corridor through the trees, with the forest on one side and the cliff on the other. A dozen police vehicles were parked in front of one of the buildings, creating a bottleneck on the narrow street, not that it really mattered. We were the only traffic on the road, if you don’t count the squirrel that leisurely crossed in front of us.
I found a space two blocks up from the crush of police cars and we walked downhill to the apartment building where Stottlemeyer and Disher were working a murder investigation.
The building was a charmless, architecturally featureless block of human cubbyholes constructed in the seventies to provide basic shelter and a view of the asphalt flatlands of the Sunset District and, on the rare clear day, the Pacific Ocean beyond.
The activity was in a spartan, ground-floor apartment with a view of the building across the street. I couldn’t see the point of living way out here, away from everything, for the opportunity to look out the window at another generic apartment.
The interior was every bit as bland and unremarkable as the exterior. A subdivided, eight-hundred-square-foot box. Off-white walls. Off-white countertops in the kitchen. Off-white linoleum on the floors. Brown carpet. White popcorn ceilings.
The victim was a man in his forties, who was now lying faceup on the entry-hall floor with a neat little bullet hole through the Ralph Lauren logo on his blue dress shirt. He went into the afterlife in a state of astonishment at his demise, his dead eyes still wide-open in permanent surprise.
I’m not a detective by any stretch, but even I could tell by where the body had fallen that he was shot by whoever was behind the door when he answered it. There was a crocheted pillow discarded beside his body with a hole blasted through the center, the cotton stuffing frosting the dead man like snow.
Simply walking into the crime scene seemed to revive Monk, snapping him out of his garbage-induced stupor. Seeing the corpse had the opposite effect on me. I didn’t shut down, but I felt awkward and depressed. Awkward because I didn’t really belong there and I didn’t have anything to contribute and I was always in the way. Depressed because there was a dead body in front of me and, even though I didn’t know him, anytime I see a corpse I can’t help thinking that whoever he was and whatever he did, someone loved him. The dead always reminded me of Mitch and of the suffering I felt when I lost him.
But I felt something else this time, too. Fear. It was like a barely audible hum, but it was there. It was irrational, of course. The killer was long gone and I was surrounded by armed police officers. But the atmosphere in the room was still electrified by the recent violence.
Maybe my fear was a visceral, instinctive reaction to the smell of blood, to the scent of cordite. Murder was in the air, and every one of my receptors, physical and psychological, was picking up on it.
Between my awkwardness, my sadness, and my fear, I was feeling pretty uncomfortable. I wanted to run right back to the car, lock the doors, and turn up the radio until the music drowned out what I was feeling.
But I didn’t. I soldiered on. Brave and stalwart, that’s me.
The officer at the door told us that Stottlemeyer and Disher were in the bedroom. As we made our way through the apartment, Monk stopped to study the body, examine the matching living room and dining room sets, and squint at the framed prints on the wall. I felt like I was in a hotel room instead of someone’s apartment.
Stottlemeyer was standing in front of the open closet, where four perfectly pressed pairs of slacks and four matching Ralph Lauren shirts were hanging.
Disher was in the bathroom looking at the medicine cabinet, which was filled with wrapped bars of soap, shaving cream, cologne, and razors.
“Hey, Monk, what brings you down here?” Stottlemeyer said.
“I think we may have a breakthrough in the Breen case,” Monk said.
“That’s great; tell me about it later,” Stottlemeyer said. “I’m busy here.”