Monk said. “He ran Steve Wurzel off a cliff somewhere between here and Mendocino.”
“Do you think Peschel helped him?”
Monk shrugged. “Whether he did or not, they both got paid. Linda bought Peschel’s bar and gave them both InTouchSpace stock.”
“She got stinking rich, Peschel retired, and Slade got his detective agency,” I said. “Everybody was happy.”
“Until Peschel became senile and started calling his old cop buddies with ten-year-old tips,” Monk said. “Slade couldn’t take the chance that Stottlemeyer or Braddock would start thinking about what Peschel had told them and put it all together.”
“Slade had to clean up the mess and silence all three of them,” I said, knowing that Monk would appreciate the metaphor. “Taking care of Peschel was the easy part. But what about Stottlemeyer and Braddock? How was he going to do that?”
“That must have been worrying him until saw us at the conference,” Monk said. “Watching Braddock humiliate the captain in front of everybody was a godsend for him. So he stole the captain’s glass to use later.”
“Things got even better for Slade when Stottlemeyer fired you and then took a swing at Braddock at the wake,” I said. “He probably couldn’t believe how lucky he was.”
“Then he hired me,” Monk said.
“He purposely kept you so busy that you couldn’t think straight.”
“But you could,” Monk said. “You saw all the clues.”
“I felt them more than saw them,” I said, touching my chest.
“That’s even more important. It’s instinct and a natural sense of order,” Monk said. “That’s how you solved three murders.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “You did.”
“You did before I did,” Monk said.
“But I didn’t know I did it until you did it,” I said. “You had to do it before I knew I did it so I didn’t actually do it even though you let me do it just now.”
“You still did it,” he said. “And you did it first.”
“But I couldn’t do it,” I said. “So you solved it.”
Monk shook his head. “We solved it.”
I gave him a big kiss on the cheek and my eyes filled with tears.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. Tears scared him almost as much as germs. Maybe more. He knew how to deal with germs.
“Nothing,” I said, handing him a disinfectant wipe from my purse. “These are happy tears. I know exactly who I am.”
“You’re Natalie Teeger,” Monk said.
“Adrian Monk’s assistant,” I said, wiping his cheek where I’d kissed him.
“And this was a mystery to you before?”
“In a way it was,” I said. “But not anymore.”
“I’m glad we solved one mystery today,” he said.
“Are you forgetting about the one we were just talking about?” I put the used wipe in a tiny plastic bag and stuffed it in my purse. News choppers were flying overhead.
“I’m afraid that’s all it is, just talk,” Monk said. “We can’t prove any of it.”
He was right. The only ones who knew the truth were Linda Wurzel and Nick Slade and they certainly weren’t going to confess. Even worse, now they would know that we were onto them.
“Nick is going to know that we talked to Wurzel,” I said. “If she doesn’t call and tell him, he’ll figure it out himself from tracking our car.”
“We’re under surveillance?”
I told him about the tracking device on the Intertect cars, the keystroke monitoring of their computers, and my suspicion that even the phones at the company were bugged.
“Slade is obsessed with keeping track of his operatives,” I said.
“Especially us.” Monk glanced up at the news choppers. There were three of them hovering over Chinatown now. “I just hope the car isn’t bugged, too. You need to call Julie and ask her to meet us at my apartment right away.”
“Why?”
“We’re going to switch cars with her and let her drive this one all over the Bay Area,” Monk said.
“She’s going to love that,” I said. “That’s all she’s wanted since I got the car.”
“Call Danielle on her cell phone and tell her to meet us there, too, but in her own car.”
Monk obviously didn’t want Slade to be able to track our movements anymore.
“What do you have in mind?”
“Linda Wurzel will be tied up with the authorities and the media for at least another hour and then she’ll want to go home. That gives us barely enough time to get organized.”
“For what?”
“Around-the-clock surveillance,” Monk said. “We aren’t letting Linda Wurzel out of our sight.”
“For how long?”
“Until hell freezes over,” Monk said. “And we’ll know when that happens because she’ll be covered in ice.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It was getting dark when we swapped cars with Julie outside of Monk’s apartment. She couldn’t wait to pick up her friends and put some miles on the Lexus cruising around San Francisco, which was just fine with Monk and less fine with me.
I didn’t think she’d be in any danger from Nick Slade. I was more concerned about the trouble that she and her friends might get into on their own.
As soon as Julie left, Danielle pulled up behind us in her Mini Cooper convertible and we met on the sidewalk for a quick briefing.
I didn’t want to tell her the whole story yet, and Monk agreed with me, so we left out the part about Nick Slade being a triple murderer.
All she needed to know was that we were keeping an eye on Linda Wurzel.
Danielle probably suspected that there was more going on than we were letting on, but she didn’t press the point. She pulled out a map of Sea Cliff, an exclusive, very wealthy neighborhood that was tucked between the Presidio and Lincoln Park and boasted breathtaking views of the Pacific, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin headlands, and, on clear days, Mount Tamalpais.
Linda Wurzel lived on a curving street. If we parked a car at either end, we could keep her house in sight and follow her no matter which direction she took when she left.
By keeping in touch via cell phone, we could then tail her wherever she went, switching off who was behind her so she wouldn’t notice that she was being followed.
That was how the professionals did it and, for the first time, I actually felt like one.
“What are we following her for?” Danielle said.
“We’ll know when we see it,” Monk said.
He ran into his apartment to get Wheat Thins, water, and extra wipes and then we sped off to Wurzel’s estate.
Two stone pillars on the western and eastern corners of Twenty-fifth Avenue and El Camino Del Mar marked the entrance to Sea Cliff so that everyone knew that this was a neighborhood set apart from the rest of the city.
Nobody needed a couple of pillars to know that. The smell of money was enough.
