said. “My first loyalty now is to you both. Nick made that very clear and that’s fine with me. I consider it an honor to be working with you. I am a big admirer of your accomplishments.”
“You mean Mr. Monk’s,” I said, handing her the sheaf of completed forms.
“Mr. Monk couldn’t have done it without you,” she said. “Don’t sell yourself short.”
Just what I needed: advice on self-esteem from a twentysomething with a college degree and a body that could melt the statue of David. What did she know about insecurity?
Danielle went on to tell me that she was at our beck and call any hour of the day or night, seven days a week, for anything we might need.
In other words, I was getting my own Natalie.
I didn’t want her to run away screaming on day one, so I decided to give her a quick briefing on Monk’s phobias and his obsessive-compulsive disorder.
It turned out that she’d already studied up on his “special needs” and was not the least bit put off by them. She said that one of the reasons that Slade handpicked her to work with us was because of her psychological background.
Danielle went out to her desk, dropped my completed forms in her out-box, and wheeled in what looked like a rolling file drawer.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Open cases for Mr. Monk to review,” she said. “Any insights he can give the detectives working on them would be welcomed. Or, if he likes, he can take over any of the cases himself.”
It looked like a huge amount of work, but considering what they were paying him, I couldn’t blame them for burying him in cases his first week.
Danielle wheeled the cart to the elevator and down to my car in the parking garage for me. Actually, she took it to a brand-new Lexus SUV parked next to my car.
The wheels of the cart collapsed like an ambulance gurney and it slid right into the back of the Lexus. She dangled a set of keys in front of me.
“This is your company car,” she said, dropping the keys into my hand. Then she offered me a credit card. “You can use this card for gasoline and any other expenses.”
“What about my car?” I asked, tipping my head towards my Buick Lucerne, a sheet-metal catfish that you have to be a card-carrying member of the AARP to drive. It was gift to me from my clueless father, who also threw in a Ferrante and Teicher CD so I could, and I quote, “crank up the hi-fi and give the stereophonics a real workout.”
“You can drive your car back and I can follow in the Lexus,” she said, “Or vice versa. Whatever you like.”
“I think we are going to be very happy at Intertect,” I said, and handed her the keys to my Buick.
I hoped she enjoyed listening to Ferrante and Teicher’s rockin’ piano version of the theme from You Light Up My Life while she drove
Monk got right to work that afternoon and so did Danielle, who stuck around after she delivered the car. They sat on opposite ends of his dining room table. While he went through the files, she read his indexed lists of personal phobias and made copious notes. I read the Lexus owner’s manual and
“The case of the missing diamonds was an inside job,” Monk said, closing a file and sliding it down the table to Danielle, who looked up, stunned.
“Was it the cleaning lady, the pool man, their son with the online gambling problem, her sneaky ex-husband, his bitter ex-wife, or the contractor who was building their home theater?”
“It was none of them,” Monk said.
I didn’t know any of the facts of the case but I didn’t need to. I was more interested in Danielle’s reaction to her first experience with Monk’s process, which has less to do with deduction and more to do with noticing the mess.
“Who else is left?” she asked.
“The dog trainer.”
“But the trainer worked with the dog in the backyard,” Danielle said. “He didn’t have any access to the house.”
“The dog did,” Monk said. “The trainer taught the dog to steal the diamonds and bury them in the backyard.”
“The dog?” she said incredulously.
“That explains why there was dirt in the house,” he said. “The dirt really bothered me.”
“That’s a surprise,” I said.
“I don’t remember seeing any dirt,” Danielle said.
“There were some grains,” he said.
“Grains?” she said.
“Mr. Monk can detect dirt that isn’t visible to the naked eye,” I said. “Or even the most powerful electron microscopes.”
“The trainer plans to retrieve the diamonds the next time he works with the dog,” Monk said, and checked his watch. “Which is in two hours.”
“Incredible,” she said, reaching for her phone. “I need to call Nick so we can catch the trainer in the act.”
“While you’re at it, you should tell Mr. Slade that the insurance company is right: The tennis pro is faking his arm injury,” Monk said, sliding her another file. “His sling is on his right arm.”
“That’s because that’s the arm he injured when he tripped over the crack in the country club’s parking lot,” she said. “He can’t bend or extend it. His doctors say his arm is locked at a ninety-degree angle.”
“And yet in the surveillance photos, you can clearly see his keys are in his right pocket,” Monk said. “How does he get them out if he can’t straighten his arm?”
She opened the file and squinted at the picture. We both did. If I had a bionic eye, I might have seen the keys, too.
“How could we have missed that?” she asked.
“You’ll find yourself asking that question a lot around Mr. Monk,” I said. “But there’s another question you’ll be asking even more often…”
Monk picked up another file. “And you can tell Mr. Slade that the spy at Joha Helicopters who is selling trade secrets to the competition is Ulrich Sommerlik, the disabled engineer.”
“How do you know?” she asked.
“That’s the one,” I said to her. “I’m thinking of putting the question on a little sign that we can just hold up.”
Monk opened the file and held up a photograph of a slender man in a cardigan sweater sitting in a manual wheelchair.
“He claims that he’s been in a wheelchair since a cop ter accident four years ago. But in this picture taken for his photo ID when he was hired six months ago, he has blisters on his hands. If he’d been pushing himself in his wheelchair all that time, he’d have calluses by now.”
We both squinted at that photo, too. I couldn’t see the blisters, but I knew that when it comes to open sores, Monk has an eagle eye.
“My guess is that he’s using secret compartments in the wheelchair to smuggle out drawings, disks, and anything else he can get his blistered hands on,” Monk said, putting the photo back into the file.
“I’ll call the security chief at Joha Helicopters and have Sommerlik detained and his wheelchair seized,” she said. “We’ll take it apart.”
“Notify them that the entire facility needs to be evacuated and decontaminated,” Monk said.
“Why?”
“Because Sommerlik’s hands are blistered,” Monk said. “God knows what else he’s touched. The whole place is probably dripping with his bodily fluids.”
Danielle stared at him, not quite sure what to say. I couldn’t blame her. I probably looked the same way the first few days I’d worked with Monk.
“You are amazing, Mr. Monk,” she said. “You catch details that nobody else sees. You’ll have to teach me how
