gleaming so bright that it was nearly pure light. He was in his fifties, with the kind of hard, chiseled features that only soldiers, comic-book characters, and statues usually possess.
“May I help you?” the captain asked.
“Actually, we’d like to help you,” Monk said. “I’m Adrian Monk and this is my assistant, Natalie Teeger.”
“I’m Captain Mantooth.” He offered his hand to Monk. “You’re the detective, right?”
Monk shook his hand, then held his open palm out to me for a disinfectant wipe. I gave him one. If Mantooth was offended, he didn’t show it.
“I’ve been hired to investigate Sparky’s murder,” Monk said as he wiped his hands.
“Are you working for Joe?” Mantooth asked.
“Who is Joe?” Monk replied, and handed the wipe back to me.
“Firefighter Joe,” I supplied, stuffing the wipe into a Baggie in my purse. By the end of a day my purse was usually overflowing with little Baggies of wipes. “He and Sparky were a team.”
“They were much more than that, Miss Teeger,” Mantooth said. “Joe Cochran rescued that dog from the pound ten years ago, and they have been inseparable ever since. Sparky wasn’t my dog, but I still feel like we lost one of our men last night. We all do.”
Monk picked up one of the folded towels from the cart and gestured to the fire truck. “May I?”
Mantooth shrugged. “Sure.”
Monk went over to the truck and buffed one of the sparkling chrome headlights. When he turned back to us he had a big, boyish grin on his face.
“Wow,” he said.
The captain and I watched Monk polish a valve. The other firemen on the truck watched him, too. I could see we might be there for a while, so I decided to press on.
“Can you tell us what happened last night?”
“We responded to a residential fire four blocks from here. Must have been around ten o’clock, but I can check the logs for the exact time. A woman fell asleep on her sofa while she was smoking a cigarette. It’s the most common cause of fire death worldwide and easily the most preventable,” Mantooth said. “We knocked the fire down and got back here about two A.M. We knew something was wrong the minute we pulled into the garage. Usually Sparky runs out to greet us, tail wagging. But he didn’t this time. . . .”
Monk approached us, but it wasn’t to ask a question or actually participate in some meaningful way in his own investigation. It was to drop his used towel into a basket and get a fresh one.
“This is so cool,” he said, then grinned giddily at us both and got to work scrubbing a spotless door handle. Mantooth couldn’t stop staring at him.
“Were there any signs of a break-in?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, tearing his gaze away from Monk and back to me. “The firehouse wasn’t locked.”
“Was it unusual to leave the firehouse open and the dog by himself?”
“Not at all,” Mantooth said. “That’s one of the reasons, historically, that we have dalmatians. They guard the firehouse. Joe is full of facts like that. He can tell you all about dalmatians.”
“Has anyone ever tried to steal anything from the firehouse before?”
“Not before and not last night,” Mantooth said. “As far as I can tell, nothing is missing. It’s a safe neighborhood, or at least it used to be.”
I didn’t know what to ask next, so I turned to Monk, who was, after all, the legendary detective around here.
“Mr. Monk?” I said.
He kept polishing.
Monk snapped his fingers. “Of course. Thank you for reminding me.”
He tossed the dirty towel in the basket and looked at the captain. “Do you have any of those honorary- fireman badges?”
“You mean the ones we give the kids?”
“No, the ones you give the honorary firemen,” Monk said.
“I think so,” Mantooth said. “Would you like one?” Monk nodded. Mantooth went back to the office. Monk looked at me.
“Wow.”
“Is that all you’re going to say?”
“Yippee.”
“Don’t you have any questions you’d like to ask about the murder? Like what happened here that night?”
“I already know.”
“You
“I’ve known since we walked in,” he said.
“How?”
He drew a triangle in the air with his hands. “Simple geometry.”
There’s nothing simple about geometry. I flunked it in high school, and I’m occasionally awakened by this nightmare that Mr. Ross, my tenth-grade math teacher, hunts me down and makes me take the final exam again.
“Is there a way we could keep geometry out of this?” I said.
“The dog was over there.” Monk pointed to the far right-hand side of the station house. “Point one of the triangle. That was his favorite spot to lie down when the trucks were away.”
“How do you know?”
“You can see where he’s scratched the wall with his paws,” Monk said.
I followed his gaze and squinted. Sure enough, there were some light scratches the dog must have made when he was stretching or rolling over or lying against the wall.
“When the fire trucks are gone, that spot gave Sparky a clear view of the garage doors,” Monk said. “When the fire trucks were here, they blocked the view from there, so he slept in his basket in the kitchen, where he could get table scraps and also enjoy more foot traffic.”
He tipped his head toward the kitchen, and I saw the edge of the dog’s basket inside the open doorway. I could see a rubber hot-dog chew toy in the basket.
I couldn’t figure out how, or when, Monk noticed the scratches and the dog bed. It seemed to me that from the moment we got there all his attention had been on the fire trucks. But I was wrong.
Monk cocked his head, looked around the station, then took a few steps forward, as if he were placing his feet in a set of footprints in the sand.
“The murderer crept in through the open garage and reached this point, the second point in our triangle, when the dog saw him and charged,” Monk said. “He looked around for something to defend himself with and spotted those.”
Monk whirled around to face the axes, shovels, and rakes neatly arranged along the wall to the left of us, every tool in its proper place. At least I knew why that had attracted Monk’s attention.
“He ran over there, the dog closing in on him. He grabbed the pickax off the wall and swung it at the dog at the last possible second.” Monk took a few steps forward and stopped near the open racks of coats, helmets, and boots. He tapped the floor with his foot. “Sparky died right here. The third point in our triangle.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Simple geometry,” Monk said again.
“He’s right, Miss Teeger,” the captain said, coming up behind me. “That’s exactly where we found the poor dog when we got back, right here in front of the turnouts.”
“The what?” I said.
“It’s what we call our firefighting gear,” he said. “All the stuff we wear into a fire.”
Monk looked past me. “Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh, what?” I asked.
He went over to the rack of heavy fire coats, which were all aligned front-to-back in a neat row. One of the coats was hanging from a hanger that was facing a different direction from the others.
