without it she would have been shamed out of adolescent society. The raincoat cost $100 at Nordstrom, but I found one for less than half that much on eBay. It was probably stolen, or a knockoff, but it saved Julie from disgrace, and she wore it every day, whether there were clouds in the sky or not. And then something happened, some great cosmic shift in society and culture. Raincoats were out; getting drenched was in.
“Mom,” she whined. “Do I have to?”
“There’s a sixty percent chance of rain,” I said. “Just take it with you. It’s better to be prepared.”
“So I get wet,” she said. “Big deal.”
“Take it,” I said.
“It’s only water,” she said. “It’s not like it’s acid.”
I didn’t have the time or patience to argue. I unzipped her backpack, rolled her raincoat into a ball, and shoved the raincoat inside.
“You’ll thank me later,” I said.
“You sound like
I was about to scold her for her rudeness, but he didn’t notice her disrespectful behavior. He was sitting straight up in his chair, lost in thought, and shrugging his shoulders as if neither one fit in its socket quite right.
Julie marched off and slammed the door behind her, but by that point her drama was wasted on me. I was watching Monk. I knew what all that shifting around in the chair meant—the facts were falling into place.
He knew what Breen left behind.
And I couldn’t help noticing that his breakthrough didn’t happen in some blissfully sterile environment of solitude, cleanliness, and order. It happened in my messy kitchen in the midst of a typical breakfast-table squabble between a sane, reasonable, rational mother and her deranged, unreasonable, irrational daughter.
“Do you have a computer with an Internet connection?” Monk said.
“Sure,” I said. “It’s not like we live in a cave.”
I regretted the comment right away, because I knew he’d take it as a dig. I didn’t mean it to be one; I just forgot for a moment that Monk doesn’t have an Internet connection at his house. He’s afraid of catching a computer virus, which is also why he doesn’t have a computer.
I went back to my room, got my laptop, and brought it to the kitchen table. I have a technogeek neighbor who designs Web sites for a living out of his apartment. He took pity on us and let us piggyback on his wireless network to use his high-speed connection. I was up and running and surfing the Net in seconds.
“What do you need?” I asked Monk.
“Can you get me detailed information on what the weather in San Francisco was like on Friday night?”
That was too easy. I was hoping for something a little more challenging so I could show off my Web-surfing prowess.
I quickly Googled my way to a site that tracked weather patterns, zeroed in on Friday night in San Francisco, and showed Monk his options. He could check out the temperature, rainfall, humidity, dew point, wind speed, direction, and chill. He could peruse satellite photos, Doppler radar, and 3-D animated views of the fog patterns and the movement of the jet stream.
“Can you show me when it was raining, hour by hour?” Monk said.
It wasn’t as impressive as watching the fog roll in and out in 3-D, but sure, I said, I could show him the rainfall, which was tracked in a straightforward graph. Bor-ing. The least they could have done was jazz it up with a few animated rain-drops rolling down the screen.
“Look,” he said excitedly. “There was intermittent drizzle and rain until about nine thirty, then it let up until about two A.M.”
“I’ll show you,” Monk said. “Could you search the Web and bring up the photos of Lucas Breen taken at the ‘Save the Bay’ fund-raiser that Disher showed us?”
I did a quick Google search that gathered about a dozen photos from the “Save the Bay” home page, various newspaper Web sites, and a couple of snarky gossip blogs (one of which speculated that Mrs. Breen’s trip to Europe the morning after the party was for “another facial refreshening” at a plastic surgery resort in Switzerland).
The photos were the same ones we had seen before of Breen arriving at the Excelsior in the rain with his wife and then the two of them leaving at midnight with the governor.
Monk pointed to the screen. “When Breen arrived, it was raining. You can see that he’s huddled under his umbrella and wearing an overcoat.”
Then Monk pointed to the picture of the Breens leaving the party. “But here, his umbrella is closed under his arm and he’s not wearing his overcoat.”
“Because it’s not raining anymore.”
“So where’s his coat? Why isn’t he carrying it?”
Good question. In light of everything that happened, I could think only of one answer.
“He left it in Esther Stoval’s house,” I said.
“According to the weather report, we know it didn’t stop raining until nine thirty, so he must have been wearing his overcoat when he slipped out of the hotel to see Esther,” Monk said. “She probably asked him to take it off and hang it up when he came in. Then they talked for a minute or two.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because of where her body was found. She was sitting on the far corner of the coach, facing the chair where he sat,” Monk said. “She said or did something that provoked him. He flew out of the chair and smothered her with the pillow. After that, all that was on Breen’s mind was covering up the crime, staging the fire, and getting out of that house as fast as possible. It wasn’t raining when he left, so he probably didn’t realize he’d forgotten his overcoat until he was halfway back to the hotel.”
Which would have put him right smack in front of the empty fire station.
“Breen couldn’t risk the possibility that any part of his coat might survive the fire,” Monk said. “If it was like the rest of his wardrobe, it was handmade and had monogrammed buttons. It would point right back to him. He had to go back and get it.”
I bet it was while Breen was standing in front of the fire station, staring in panic at the empty garage, that he came up with the bright idea of how to save himself. When he ran in to get the gear, I’m sure the last thing he expected was that some barking, snarling dog would come charging at him. Wasn’t it enough that he left his coat behind? Did fate have to add a dog to his misery, too?
But Breen survived unscathed, and things went much smoother after that. He slipped into the burning house in his firefighting gear unnoticed by the other firemen, snatched his overcoat, and got out again. He returned the firefighting gear to the station without being seen and without having to fight off any more ferocious animals.
He must have thought the worst was over. And then he got mugged.
Unbelievable. His luck was so bad, I might have felt sorry for him if he hadn’t killed a woman and a dog and if he weren’t such a pompous jerk. Despite all his incredible misfortune, he made it back to the party without being missed. I’m sure he went straight to the bar and knocked back a few. I would have.
It was hardly the perfect murder, but I doubt anybody would ever have known what he did if it weren’t for a twelve-year-old kid hiring a detective to find out who killed a dog.
But I was getting ahead of myself. Breen wasn’t caught yet. We didn’t have enough evidence. We didn’t have the coat.
“So assuming he got his overcoat back,” I said, “what did he do with it?”
“We have to assume the overcoat was burned or damaged by the smoke and that he ditched it somewhere between Esther’s house and the hotel.”
“What about Lizzie Draper’s house?”
Monk shook his head. “Too risky. What if she stumbled on the overcoat before he had a chance to get rid of it? He wouldn’t want her, or anybody else, to be able to connect him to the fire. He ditched it somewhere else, somewhere between the fire station and the hotel.”
Then I knew where we should start looking.
