* * *
'Did you begin to wonder,' Terri asked sardonically, 'if Rennell wasn't maybe a little slow?'
Over the rim of his second cup of espresso, Monk gave her a look of sour amusement. 'How slow do you mean, counselor? So slow he couldn't remember what he'd done?' He put down the cup. 'For sure Payton was what passed for the family brains. This boy wasn't swift, though mostly he was as scared as he had every right to be. But he knew what he'd done, and he sure as hell knew that 'doing that little girl' was a bad thing to admit to. Don't have to be Einstein to do murder.'
* * *
'Let's pretend we're the defense,' Lou Mauriani told Monk and Ainsworth. 'Lay out what you've got.'
It was their good fortune, Monk thought, that Mauriani was the Assistant D.A. tracking the case—gray-haired, round-faced, and congenitally affable, Mauriani had keen blue eyes and an equally keen sense of the absurd, coupled with lightning swiftness of thought and a deep seriousness about doing his work well. In twenty-seven murder prosecutions, Mauriani had never lost.
Monk set down his coffee mug on a corner of Mauriani's cluttered desk. 'First, we've got Rennell pulling a girl dressed like Thuy Sen into the house, with Payton closing the door behind them—'
'By virtue,' Mauriani interposed dryly, 'of a cross-racial ID, from all the way across the street, by a scared old lady who hates them both. If I'm the defense, I'm thinking this pillar of Bayview's vibrant white community saw exactly what she wanted to.'
'We went back to her,' Monk responded without rancor. 'She's as solid as anyone like that can be. The forensics bear her out.'
'The fibers, hair, and fingerprints,' Mauriani amended, 'put Thuy Sen in the house. But only Flora Lewis makes her playmates Payton and Rennell.'
Ainsworth nodded. 'True. But we also found clothes which more or less match what she says they were wearing—'
'Uh-huh. Them, and every third guy in the neighborhood. So what happened inside the house between her and whichever two guys these were?'
'That's where they forced her to have oral sex,' Monk answered. 'We found semen and saliva.'
'Whose semen? Whose saliva? Suppose Payton or Rennell says they've lost track of all the age-appropriate young women who've blown them in the living room. Saves on condoms, after all.'
'Semen,' Monk countered, 'is what choked this girl to death. We've got Liz Shelton for that. And we know Thuy Sen was dead when she left the house.'
Mauriani gave them a beatific smile. 'Ah, yes, on the word of the honorable Edward Fleet. I can't thank you guys enough for the chance to share him with twelve of our fellow citizens. Let's see—crack selling, gun peddling, and a social life spent slapping women silly. No wonder he couldn't wait to help us out.'
Ainsworth flashed a grin. 'You've put on worse, Lou. We've brought you most of them ourselves.'
'And proud of it.' Mauriani's smile faded. 'You know the problem, Rollie. Fleet's a dirtball, and he admits to helping them dump the body. The only reason he's talking is so we can help him save his ass. If I'm the defense, I go after his credibility like hell won't have it—maybe imply he's the one who did her, and we're kicking him loose. There's no forensics that tells us whose 'weapon' killed her for sure.'
'We know that,' Monk said patiently. 'But we've taken Eddie through this, over and over. From beginning to end, his story makes sense. They needed a car; Fleet had one. We found semen and saliva on the carpet; Fleet saw drool coming from her mouth. He says Payton forced him to help dump the body; forensics puts her in Fleet's trunk. Fleet says Rennell dumped her by the tallow plant; the body washed up where the Coast Guard says it should have. Logic and the evidence corroborate his story.'
'What about its internal credibility. Any cracks?'
'Nope. Fleet doesn't try to say too much, or to be too helpful—like telling us who asphyxiated Thuy Sen. He didn't see it, he says, and no one told him.'
'That's also the missing piece. No confession, or no witness to her death.'
Monk fought back his annoyance. 'You need us to go back at the brothers again?'
'No. We've got more than enough to take them to the Grand Jury.' Amusement surfaced in Mauriani's clear blue eyes. 'After that, they'll have two defense lawyers—one dedicated to Payton's interests, the other to Rennell's. We'll let them sort out this last piece by themselves. Maybe they'll even play Cain and Abel.'
* * *
'So Mauriani indicted him,' Terri said. 'Then the media got hold of death by oral asphyxiation, and made sure everybody in the jury pool knew everything about it.'
'No help for that, counselor.'
'No help to Rennell, for sure. Both brothers became these scary black predators, kidnapping the daughter of Cambodian refugees and using her for sex.' Terri leaned back in her chair, studying Monk's expression. 'I was in law school, and it felt like I saw Thuy Sen's face every day for weeks. And theirs, staring out from the mug shots with no expression in their eyes. I was planning to be a defense lawyer, and I hated them anyway.'
And that was before, she did not add, what happened to Elena.
'Yeah,' Monk retorted with an edge in his voice. 'Pretty rough on those boys, people learning what they'd done. Kind of like it was for Thuy Sen's parents.'
This silenced Terri. For a while, they both sat there without speaking, Terri fighting back the images of what had seared Elena's soul.
'Early on,' Monk ventured at last, 'you wanted to do defense work. When I was young, I thought about that, too.'
