Mr. Monk and the Blue Flu Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 - Mr. Monk Takes a Walk in the Park

  Chapter 2 - Mr. Monk Goes Shopping

  Chapter 3 - Mr. Monk and the Straight Answer

  Chapter 4 - Mr. Monk Takes Command

  Chapter 5 - Mr. Monk and the Astrologer

  Chapter 6 - Mr. Monk and Madam Frost

  Chapter 7 - Mr. Monk and the Scum on the Street

  Chapter 8 - Mr. Monk Plays Make-believe

  Chapter 9 - Mr. Monk Improves His Stats

  Chapter 10 - Mr. Monk and the Secret Rendezvous

  Chapter 11 - Mr. Monk and the Masterpiece

  Chapter 12 - Mr. Monk Goes to Another Crime Scene

  Chapter 13 - Mr. Monk Goes to Headquarters

  Chapter 14 - Mr. Monk Leads the Charge

  Chapter 15 - Mr. Monk and the Press Conference

  Chapter 16 - Mr. Monk and the Conspiracy Theory

  Chapter 17 - Mr. Monk Cleans Up the Mess

  Chapter 18 - Mr. Monk and the Helpful Horoscope

  Chapter 19 - Mr. Monk Goes to Dinner

  Chapter 20 - Mr. Monk and the Dust Bunny

  Chapter 21 - Mr. Monk Drops the Other Shoe

  Chapter 22 - Mr. Monk Goes to Jail

  Chapter 23 - Mr. Monk Feels Queasy

  Chapter 24 - Mr. Monk Learns a Life Lesson

  Chapter 25 - Mr. Monk and the Status Quo

  Chapter 26 - Mr. Monk Goes to Traffic School

  Praise for the Monk Novels by Lee Goldberg

  Mr. Monk Goes to Hawaii

  “An entertaining and ruefully funny diversion that stars one of television’s best-loved characters, and because it’s a mystery novel, it will stick long after you’ve forgotten the plot of the latest Monk episode.”—Honolulu Star-Bulletin

  Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse

  “The first in a new series is always an occasion to celebrate, but Lee Goldberg’s TV adaptations double your pleasure. . . . Mr. Monk Goes to the Firehouse brings everyone’s favorite OCD detective to print. Hooray!”—Mystery Scene

  Acclaim for Lee Goldberg’s previous mysteries

  “Can books be better than television? You bet they can—when Lee Goldberg’s writing them.”

  —Lee Child

  “A nifty creative take on the tradition of great amateur sleuths with a cast of quirky characters.”

  —Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “A clever, high-octane whodunit that moves like a bullet train.”—Janet Evanovich

  “Well plotted and beautifully rendered.”

  —Margaret Maron, Edgar, Agatha, and Macavity

  Award-winning author of the Deborah Knott

  mysteries

  “Elegant writing, wry humor, a suspenseful premise, [and] a fast-paced plot.”

  —Aimee and David Thurlo, authors of the

  Ella Clah, Sister Agatha, and Lee Nez mystery series

  “A clever, twisting tale.”—Lisa Gardner

  “A riveting mystery . . . wonderful stuff!”

  —Paul Bishop, two-time LAPD Detective of the

  Year and head of the West Los Angeles Sex Crimes

  and Major Assault Crimes Units, and author of

  Twice Dead, Chalk, and Whispers

  “Sly humor, endearing characters, tricky plots.”

  —Jerrilyn Farmer

  “A swift saga with colorful homicides, glamorous locales, and clever puzzles.”

  —Walter Wager, author of Telefon,

  Twilight’s Last Gleaming, and 58 Minutes

  “Intricate plots and engaging characters . . . page-turning entertainment.”—Barbara Seranella

  “A devilish plot sense, sophisticated humor, and a smooth writing style . . . he’s as good as anyone writing in the genre today.”

  —Donald Bain, coauthor of the

  Murder, She Wrote series

  “Just what the doctor ordered, a sure cure after a rash of blah mysteries . . . more plot twists than a strand of DNA.”

  —Elaine Viets, author of Murder Unleashed

  “Fast-paced, tightly constructed mysteries. . . . You’ll read them in great big gulps!”—Gregg Hurwitz

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, January 2007

  Copyright © 2007 Universal Studios Licensing LLLP. Monk © USA Cable Entertainment LLC. All Rights Reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-01075-4

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  To Valerie and Madison,

  my Natalie and Sharona

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank Dr. D. P. Lyle, William Rabkin, T. J. MacGregor, Janet Markham, Pat Tierney, David Mack, Tony Fennelly, Sheila Lowe, Hal Glatzer, Karen Tannert, Michael Siverling, Eve Simson, Aubrey Nye Hamilton, Jim Doherty, Paul Bishop, Lee Lofland, and Barbara Fahringer for their invaluable technical assistance on astrology, medicine, geography, police procedure, and dental fillings, among other things. Any mistakes in the book are entirely my fault and shouldn’t be held against the fine people mentioned above.

  Special thanks, as always, to my friend Andy Breckman, creator of Monk, and his incredibly talented staff—Stefanie Preston, Tom Scharpling, David Breckman, Hy Conrad, Joe Toplyn, Dani
el Dratch, Jonathan Collier, and Blair Singer—for their inspiration, enthusiasm, and support. And to Gina Maccoby and Kerry Donovan, without whom there would be no Monk books for me to write and you to enjoy.

  I would love to hear from you. Please stop by www.leegoldberg.com and say hello. We validate parking.

  1

  Mr. Monk Takes a Walk in the Park

  The corpse might as well have been in a minefield, surrounded by razor wire, and guarded by trigger-happy snipers. There was no way Adrian Monk would go near it.

  Monk stood on the red gravel jogging path that ran around McKinley Park at Vermont and Twentieth on Potrero Hill. He wore one of his six identical wool coats, one of his twelve identical off-white shirts (tieless and buttoned up to the collar), one of his twelve identical pairs of pleated brown slacks (specially tailored for him with eight belt loops instead of the usual seven), and one of his twelve identical pairs of brown leather shoes (Hush Puppies buffed to a shine each night).

  He held a pair of binoculars up to his eyes. From where he stood he had a clear view west across the Mission District and Noe Valley to Sutro Tower, which rose out of the fog that always seemed to surround the Twin Peaks in the morning.

  But that wasn’t what he was looking at.

  His binoculars were trained on the dead young woman sprawled only ten yards below him. The weedy area around her body was cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape that was twined around several trees.

  The woman was twisted at an unnatural angle, her mouth open in a silent, frozen scream. Her shirt was hiked up, revealing the pale skin of her flat stomach and her tattooed lower back. The tattoo was a plus sign, with little matching plus signs in each of the four quadrants of the larger one. She was wearing Lycra shorts that showed off her long, muscled legs.

  She was a jogger. The two previous victims were also joggers. And like them, she’d been strangled.

  I’m not a cop or a medical examiner, but I’d picked up a little basic knowledge about homicide investigation over the years as Monk’s assistant. Even I could tell from the bruising around her neck that someone had throttled her.

  But my imagination wouldn’t leave it at that. I put myself in her shoes. Or shoe, I should say, since she was missing her left one, just like the other victims who had been killed over the last month.

  She had been jogging along the path in the early-morning stillness, enjoying the quiet and the view, her breathing steady and deep. And then he attacked her, knocking her off her feet. He wrapped his hands tightly around her throat. Her lungs ached for air. Her heart pumped madly. Her head and chest felt like they were going to burst.

  She had suffered horribly.

  I got scared just thinking about it, and I wasn’t even in any danger.

  It’s that kind of overactive imagination that would make me a lousy cop. Since I’m not one, and have no official status with the police, I tend to keep my mouth shut at crime scenes and be as unobtrusive as possible. I feel like I’m in the way and that if I speak up, it will only call attention to the fact that I’m someplace where I really shouldn’t be.

  Capt. Leland Stottlemeyer chewed on a toothpick and studied the body. Maybe he was imagining the same stuff I was. Maybe he was wondering what the victim had been like, whether she could carry a tune or how her face changed when she smiled. Maybe he was asking himself why his wife left him and if there was anything he could do to get her back. Or maybe he was just trying to decide where to eat lunch. Cops can be amazingly dispassionate about death.

  Lt. Randy Disher was standing beside him, busily scrawling something in his notebook. My guess was that he was doodling, because there wasn’t anything for him to take notes on. Not yet, anyway. And while he was good at running down facts, and eager to please his captain, deduction wasn’t his strength.

  The truth is, they were both waiting for Monk, the brilliant detective and my boss, to share his observations or, better yet, solve the murder right then and there. It wasn’t that crazy a thing for them to hope for. Monk had done it before. That’s why the SFPD paid him to consult on the trickiest homicide cases. He used to be a cop himself once until his obsessive-compulsive disorder made staying on the force impossible for him.

  I stood beside Monk. Behind us, several uniformed officers and crime scene techs were going over the playground and jogging path, searching for clues.

  Stottlemeyer looked up at us expectantly. “Are you going to be joining us?”

  “I don’t think so,” Monk said.

  “The body is down here, Monk.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  Monk grimaced with disgust, lowering his binoculars. But it wasn’t the body that made him uncomfortable; it was where it was located—right in the middle of a dog park. There were no dogs in the park now, but when we arrived some officers were still cleaning up the evidence that dogs had been there, if you catch my drift.

  “This is the crime scene.” Stottlemeyer pointed to the body.

  “So is this,” Monk said.

  “The crime scene is where the body is,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “I beg to differ,” Monk said.

  “You can’t investigate the murder from up there.”

  “I can’t investigate the murder if I’m dead.”

  “Standing here isn’t going to kill you,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “If I had to stand there,” Monk said, “I would kill myself.”

  “We’ve cleaned up all the dog poop,” Stottlemeyer said. “I guarantee you won’t step in anything.”

  “The ground is saturated with it,” Monk said. “This entire park should be dug up, put in a rocket, and sent into deep space.”

  Stottlemeyer sighed. There was no way he was going to win this one; he had to know that. “Okay, fine. What can you tell me?”

  “The killer was hiding in the playground equipment over in the sandbox.” Monk gestured behind himself to a fortlike structure that was part slide, part jungle gym. “When the victim ran past on the track, he tackled her, pinned her to the ground, and killed her. She was easy to overcome because she was already winded from running. He took her left shoe and then rolled her off the edge of the hill into the toxic-waste dump.”

  “Dog park,” Stottlemeyer said.

  “Same thing,” Monk said.

  “I’ve got the mayor, the chief, and the news media all over me on these killings, and we’ve got nothing. I don’t even know who this poor woman is. She’s not carrying any ID,” Stottlemeyer said. “I need you to tell me something I don’t already know. Have you got anything at all?”

  Monk sighed. “Not really.”

  Stottlemeyer sighed. “Damn.”

  “Except she’s from Russia, probably the Republic of Georgia, where she was active in the United National Movement, which favors closer ties with the European Union. So did she. She married a Jewish man from Eastern Europe.”

  Stottlemeyer and Disher shared a stunned look. I was pretty stunned, too.

  “Is that all?” Stottlemeyer asked dryly.

  “Her shoes are new,” Monk said.

  Disher glanced down at the body. “How do you know that?”

  “The soles aren’t worn down and the leather isn’t creased yet,” Monk said. “The only dirt on the laces is the red dust from the track.”

  “That’s very observant,” Stottlemeyer said, “but I think Randy meant how did you know the other stuff?”

  “One of her teeth is capped with steel, which you see a lot in Soviet dentistry.”

  “I don’t see much Soviet dentistry,” Stottlemeyer said. “I guess I need to get out more.”

  “The tattoo on her back is the five crosses, adopted as the symbol of resistance by the Georgian nationalist movement in 1991. It became part of the Georgian flag in 2004,” Monk said. “She’s wearing a gold wedding ring on her right hand, which is a common practice in Eastern European countries, particularly among the Jewish faith. You’ll notice the ring has a slight reddish tint because Russian go
ld has a higher copper content than Western gold.”

  “You saw all that from up there?” Stottlemeyer asked.

  “I had these.” Monk held up his binoculars.

  Stottlemeyer shook his head. “I’m standing right over the body and I couldn’t see half that stuff.”

  “It’s okay, sir,” Disher said. “I didn’t even see three-quarters of it.”

  Stottlemeyer gave him a look. “I feel so much better now.”

  Disher smiled. “I’m glad I could be there for you.”

  One of the things that amazed me about Monk was that he knew all about things like Soviet dental fillings or the copper content of gold from different regions, but if someone had a gun to his head he wouldn’t be able to name one of the judges on American Idol or tell you what a Big Mac was. I often wondered how he decided what obscure knowledge was worth knowing and what wasn’t. After all, which was he more likely to come across, a Big Mac carton or the Georgian flag?

  Monk rolled his shoulders and tilted his head like he was working a kink out in his neck. But I knew that wasn’t it. What was irritating him was a detail, some fact that didn’t fit where it was supposed to. Stottlemeyer noticed it, too.

  “What’s bugging you, Monk?”

  “She’s a brunette in her twenties,” Monk said. “And almost six feet tall.”

  “That’s obvious,” Stottlemeyer said. “Even to me.”

  “She’s buff,” Monk said.

  “She’s in good shape; that’s true.”

  “The first victim was a blonde in her early thirties and kind of flabby,” Monk said. “The second victim was a short Asian young woman in her late teens.”