“So while you were walking the beat as a uniformed cop, you were studying the gum on the sidewalks?” Disher asked.
“Long before that, my friend. I’ve been watching for gum on the sidewalks since birth. It’s a blight on society, ” Monk said. “If you run a DNA test on the gum under the seat of this cab you’ll see that I’m right that Stipe is the culprit. We should be scraping gum off all the sidewalks in San Francisco and having it tested, too.”
“Why would you want to do that?” I asked.
“To prosecute the offenders,” Monk said.
“People who spit out their gum on the streets?”
“It’s about time justice was served on those despicable monsters,” Monk said. “Finally we have the technology to do it.”
“Just because Stipe rode in that cab while he was in town doesn’t mean the same shooter killed him, killed the cabbie, and desecrated Brandon Lorber,” Stottlemeyer said.
“The candy wrapper does,” Monk said.
He took a pair of tweezers from his pocket, leaned inside the cab, and came out holding a tiny gold foil wrapper.
“I found this on the floor of that filthy cab. It’s from the coffee candy in the bowl on Lorber’s desk,” he said. “The shooter must have helped himself to a piece the same way you and Lieutenant Disher did.”
Monk motioned to me for a Baggie.
“That brand of coffee candy is sold all over the country, ” Disher said. “Tens of thousands of people buy it. How do you know that wrapper came from a piece of candy in Lorber’s bowl?”
I took a Baggie out of my purse and held it open so Monk could drop the wrapper inside. He paused before he dropped it in so he could squint at the writing on the wrapper.
“The lot number is the same,” Monk said. “So is the twisting flaw.”
Stottlemeyer sighed. “What flaw?”
“Ordinarily, the candies are individually wrapped with the foil machine-twisted in the same direction on both ends,” Monk said. “But the ends were folded in opposite directions on these candies, causing a tiny tear at the seam. You can also see it in the wrinkle pattern at the ends of the open wrapper.”
“You may see it,” Stottlemeyer said, “but no other human being can.”
“Even if the same man shot the cabbie and Brandon Lorber’s corpse,” Disher said, “you still haven’t connected it to Conrad Stipe.”
“Lorber’s shooter was in the cab,” Monk said. “Conrad Stipe was in the cab. Now Lorber, Stipe, and the cabbie have all been shot. That’s too big of a coincidence to be a coincidence.”
There was a long silence, which Stottlemeyer finally broke with a sigh of resignation.
“You’re right,” Stottlemeyer said. “So what’s the connection between Lorber, Stipe, and the cabbie?”
“Only one thing so far,” Monk said and pointed to the taxicab. “That rolling garbage can.”
The taxicab was towed back to the forensics lab so it could be taken apart for clues and, if Monk had his way, thoroughly cleaned and disinfected. We went back to the station with Stottlemeyer and Disher.
Monk had the evidence and the crime scene photos from Lorber’s office brought to one of the interrogation rooms. While he sorted through it, Disher made some calls to find out more about the cabbie and his activities over the last few days.
There wasn’t much evidence to look at, just the papersthat were on Lorber’s desk when he died and the bullets that were removed from his body. There was also the bloody chair that Lorber had been sitting in, but thankfully Monk hadn’t asked for that to be brought in.
Monk examined the items without removing them from their evidence Baggies.
I browsed through the crime scene photos and passed them along to Monk, who compared them to what was in the evidence bags. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be looking for, but I didn’t see any Beyond Earth books or toys on the shelves.
And that was when I remembered something.
“Mr. Monk, do you remember the lady with the Beyond Earth cereal?”
“She will haunt me forever,” he said.
“I don’t know if this means anything, but she was selling some Beyond Earth toys that Burgerville gave away in their kid’s meals thirty years ago. That’s a connection, I suppose.”
“It is,” Monk said. “But I don’t know if it means anything.”
“Have you found anything?”
“A paper clip irregularity,” Monk said.
“Is that serious?”
He laid out the Baggies on the table. “All the papers on Lorber’s desk were attached with color-coded paper clips. He had some kind of paper clip system for organizing his work. But the financial documents he was reading when he died were held together with a regular paper clip.”
“Maybe that was part of his system,” I said.
“There were no other documents on his desk bound with a colorless paper clip,” Monk said. “And if you look closely at the paper, you’ll see that it’s badly streaked. There are lines going across the page every eighth of an inch or so.”
“Maybe it’s a bad photocopy,” I said.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Monk said. “It’s a bad photocopy of a document that was shredded and then reconstructed from the strips. The streaks aren’t from the photocopying process. They are from the blades.”
“I wonder what was so important about this document that Lorber had it reconstructed from shreds,” I said. “Maybe what we’re looking at is evidence of industrial espionage. Maybe this was something he had stolen from a rival’s trash.”
At the mere mention of the word “trash,” Monk instinctively recoiled.
“The forensic accountant should be able to tell us what the numbers mean,” Monk said. “But whatever it is, I don’t think Lorber was reading it when he died.”
“Then what was it doing on his desk?”
“Someone wanted us to believe that Lorber was reading
