you do that.”
“It’s a gift,” Monk said. “And a curse.”
“I’ll take my chances,” she said with a smile, flirting ever so slightly. It was cute and probably calculated to be. The flirtation was wasted on him but not the flattery.
He gave her the file and she added it to the stack in her arms. She took the files and went off to call Slade. Monk turned to me.
“I think we’re going to be very happy at Intertect,” he said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Julie nearly fainted when I showed up at home that night with the new Lexus. The first thing she wanted to do was drive it. I let her drive all over San Francisco with the windows rolled up, because we didn’t want to lose one precious whiff of that new-car smell.
She also insisted that we cruise up and down Twenty-fourth Street, the main drag of our Noe Valley neighborhood, for an hour on the off chance that one of her friends might see us.
It was the first car we’d ever had that she wasn’t ashamed to be seen in, so she wanted to be seen. I did, too. I was hoping word would get around that we had a Lexus and that it might delay any plans to drive us out of the neighborhood with torches.
“Please don’t ever lose this job,” Julie said as she steered us on our twelfth pass down the street.
“Now that we have two cars, you can have the Buick all to yourself.”
She looked at me in horror. “Why don’t you drive the Buick and let me drive this?”
“Because this is the company car,” I said. “Technically, you shouldn’t be driving it now, but I am in a charitable mood.”
“I would rather walk to school than arrive there in a Buick,” she said. “I might as well show up wearing Grandma’s housedress and clutching a colostomy bag.”
“Grandma doesn’t have a colostomy bag,” I said.
“You’re missing the point,” she said.
“I’m just teasing you,” I said. “I totally understand your embarrassment. I’m not thrilled about driving the Buick either. It’s not a car that makes men take a second look at you.”
“Unless you’re driving up to a retirement home,” she said.
“I’ll drop you off at school in the Lexus,” I said. “We can keep the Buick for emergencies.”
“Like what?”
I shrugged. “Grandma might want to borrow it to impress a man on a date.”
“She’s got a BMW,” Julie said.
“I’m thinking of a man her own age,” I said.
“You may be but she’s not.”
I was afraid to ask Julie exactly what she meant by that, or what she knew about Grandma’s love life, so I didn’t.
Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
The rolling cabinet was nearly empty of files and Monk’s dining room table was covered with photos when I walked in the next morning.
He was studying the photographs very carefully, moving methodically from one to another.
I glanced at the pictures. I saw a dead man sitting in a leather easy chair in his home study. There was a knife buried to the hilt in his chest. He looked to be in his forties and well-off, judging by his monogrammed shirt and the wood paneled study where he’d been killed.
“You’ve gone through just about all the cases that Danielle brought you,” I said.
“This is the last one,” he said.
“You must have gotten an early start this morning.”
“I didn’t stop,” Monk said, cocking his head from side to side as he examined the pictures.
“You stayed up all night?”
“I had a lot of work to do,” he said.
“But you didn’t have a deadline,” I said. “There was no reason you had to do an all-nighter.”
“I tried to go to bed,” Monk said. “But I could feel all those unsolved cases out there. I couldn’t leave them like that.”
“It was like leaving behind a mess without cleaning it up,” I said.
He nodded. I would have to talk to Danielle about giving Monk only a few cases at a time. At this rate, he’d exhaust himself within days.
I gestured to the pictures on the table. “These look like official crime scene photos.”
“They are,” Monk said.
“Then how did Slade get them?”
Monk shrugged. “I don’t know. He must be very well connected.”
“So what’s the case?”
“A home-invasion robbery and murder that happened six months ago in a mansion off Skyline Boulevard in Oakland. The killers got away with jewelry worth about two hundred thousand dollars. The culprits still haven’t been caught, though the police are pretty sure they know who is responsible. The victim, Lou Wickersham, was in considerable debt to a lot of very unfriendly people. The police believe those people lost patience and came to collect.”
There were close-up photos of Wickersham’s wound, the knife, a cut on his hand, a bloodstained handkerchief on the floor, a broken window, shards of glass on the rug, and his ransacked study. And there were some photos of the rest of the house, which had also been thoroughly ransacked.
“So why don’t they arrest the people that Wickersham owed money to?” I asked.
“There’s no evidence,” Monk said. “The knife was wiped clean of prints. The case has gone cold. So Wickersham’s widow, who was in Europe when the killing happened, hired Intertect to investigate.”
“What’s your theory?”
Before Monk could answer, there was a knock at the door. I went to answer it. Danielle was standing outside with another rolling file drawer.
“Good morning, Ms. Teeger,” she said, pushing the cart right past me.
“Danielle,” I said, closing the door and catching up to her. “You can’t keep wheeling files in here.”
“He asked me for more,” Danielle said.
“I’m all out,” Monk explained.
“But you haven’t slept,” I said to him. “You can’t keep working like this. You have to pace yourself or you’re going to get fried and make mistakes.”
Monk ignored my comment and turned to Danielle. “Did you get the information on the Judge Stanton case?”
“Of course, Mr. Monk.” She took a notebook out of the file drawer and referred to some pages.
“You’re not supposed to be meddling in that case,” I scolded him.
“Professional curiosity, that’s all,” Monk said.
I motioned to the new cart full of files. “Don’t you have enough to keep you busy already?”
“I just want to make sure the captain is on the right track.”
“You don’t work for him anymore,” I reminded him. “You are under exclusive contract to Intertect.”
Danielle spoke up. “The police believe that the killer is a woman, based on the type of bicycle she was riding and the impression left in the dirt by her running shoes. They’ve identified the shoes as a woman’s Nike model that’s sold by the thousands in stores all over the country, so that’s a dead end. But they have determined the assailant’s weight and height based on the measurements taken from the bike and the depth of the shoe prints in
