I thought about what Stottlemeyer had just told me. “Maybe you ought to take a time-out.”
“A time-out?”
“Step back from this for a day or two, relax a little, collect your thoughts. Afterwards you may see things differently.”
“My thoughts are already collected,” he said. “Indexed and color-coded.”
“Color-coded?”
“It’s an integral part of my thought filing system,” he said.
“You have a thought filing system?”
“You don’t?” Monk said.
I shook my head.
He nodded knowingly, as if some other great mystery had finally been solved.
“That explains so much,” Monk said. “I’ve had a real breakthrough today.”
“I think so, too,” I said. “You’re understanding people now in a way you never have before.”
“That’s so true,” Monk said. “I can’t imagine how anyone could go through life with their thoughts spread out all over their psyche. I see you in a whole new light, Natalie. Your mind is a mess. You can’t hold a thought if you can’t find it first.”
“I was talking about Ernest Pinchuk and how he’s really no different than you.”
“I’m glad you can see that although he’s crazy, his thoughts are organized. It’s the first step in your rehabilitation. If you can organize your thinking, you’ll be a lot more rational,” Monk said. “But we don’t have time to straighten out your life right now. We have to save the captain from making a mistake that could destroy his career.”
“But what if he’s right?” I said. “Then all you’ll be doing is antagonizing powerful people who could get him fired. And if he’s gone, you’ll lose the only champion you have in the San Francisco Police Department.”
“He’s not right,” Monk said. “And I can prove it.”
“With gum and candy wrappers?”
“With the hit man himself,” Monk said.
“You can do that?”
“I can,” Monk said.
Archie Applebaum saw us coming, so he got up from behind his security desk in the lobby of Burgerville headquarters and opened the after-hours employee door for us.
“You really ought to try the revolving door, Mr. Monk,” he said. “It’s fun.”
“That’s what people say about skydiving, too.”
“For some people it is,” Archie said as we followed him back to his donut-shaped desk.
Ernest Pinchuk would have been happy in Archie’s seat. It wasn’t Captain Stryker’s command podium, but the console looked a lot like the navigational station of the Discovery bridge. There were lots of buttons and several screens that showed alternating views from the cameras in various corridors and stairwells.
“Maybe there are people who enjoy setting themselves on fire, drinking rat poison, and stabbing themselves in the heart with a butcher knife, too.”
“That would be suicidal,” Archie said.
“So would jumping out of an airplane and going through a revolving door.”
“It’s a door,” Archie said. “Not a buzz saw.”
I knew that it was futile arguing with Monk about something like this, or just about anything else, but I couldn’t blame Archie for trying.
It’s human nature, I suppose.
“We’d like to see Andrew Cahill,” Monk said.
“Let me call up and see if he is available,” Archie said.
He picked up the phone, told the secretary that Monk was downstairs, and then he waited for her response. I judged by the way his expression hardened that the news wasn’t good.
Archie hung up and looked at Monk. “Mr. Cahill doesn’t want to see you. In fact, he asked me to escort you out of the building and never allow you in again.”
“I see,” Monk said. “Then would you mind passing along a message to him for me?”
“Sure,” Archie said, and took out a pen.
“You can give it to Mrs. Lorber, too,” Monk said. “The medical examiner has determined that Brandon Lorber wasn’t murdered. It was natural causes.”
Archie looked up from his notepad. “The guy was shot three times.”
“Yes,” Monk said.
“Twice in the chest and once in the head,” Archie said. “That’s not natural. Even if I wasn’t a cop before, I’d know those were fatal shots.”
“They would have been if he wasn’t already dead when he was shot,” Monk said. “He died of a heart attack before he was shot.”
“Why would anyone shoot a dead person?”
“I don’t know, but you can tell Mr. Cahill and Mrs. Lorber that it’s no longer a homicide investigation,” Monk said. “It’s a desecration case.”
“I’m sure that Mr. Cahill and Mrs. Lorber will be relieved to hear that,” Archie said, jotting down some notes. “So do the police even care about a corpse shooting?”
“The Special Desecration Unit is on it,” I said.
Archie raised an eyebrow. “There’s a unit for that?”
“There is,” I said.
“Wow,” he said.
We walked back to my car, Monk tapping each parking meter that we passed, keeping a silent count. I never understood why he did that. I mean, I got the counting part but not the touching. Didn’t he realize how many hundreds of people had touched those parking meters? How many birds must have crapped on them?
But I didn’t bring it up. I didn’t have enough patience, Advil, or Pepto-Bismol in reserve at that moment to deal with it.
“Where to now?” I asked.
“Nowhere,” he said.
I wasn’t sure what that meant. “So are we going back to your place to check on the carpets? They should be done by now. Or are we going back to Ambrose’s house?”
“We’re going back to the car and staying here until something happens.”
I glanced back at the Burgerville building. “We’re doing a stakeout?”
“Yes, we are.”
We got into my car, which was parked at the corner of a side street. It gave us a pretty good view of the lobby and the entrance to the underground parking garage.
“What are we waiting to see?” I asked.
“The hit man,” Monk said. “Whoever hired him is
