What a shock.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Mr. Monk Takes a Walk in the Woods
It was dark when we got out of our car in the Franziskus-hohe parking lot. Monk turned on one of the two flashlights that we’d bought on our way back to Lohr and aimed it into the woods, letting the beam play on the trees.
“Ready to go?” he asked me.
“It’s dark,” I said.
“That’s why we’ve got flashlights,” he said. “But the moon is so bright we hardly need them.”
“Maybe we should do this in the morning,” I said.
“This is the perfect time to do it.”
“You’re not going to be able to see anything.”
“But this is probably what it was like when Dr. Rahner was out there, looking for a place to hide the body until morning. We’ll see things the way he did.”
“You’re on drugs,” I said.
“You’re scared,” Monk said, grinning.
“I am not,” I lied.
Monk shined the light under his chin, giving him a ghostly look. “You think the boogeyman is going to get you?”
“I’m being cautious. What if you trip over something?”
“Uh-huh.” Monk reached into his pocket and came out with his prescription bottle. “Maybe you’d like one of my pills.”
I didn’t like being the crazy person in our relationship. So what if I got mauled by a bear or fell off a cliff? I decided that would be better than him getting to be smug and superior.
“The trail is over here.” I turned on my flashlight and marched past him. “Follow me.”
It didn’t take us long to get to the spot beside the muddy pond where I’d found Leupolz’s body. Remembering the corpse while standing there in the dark made me very nervous.
Monk aimed his flashlight into the bushes, then out over the pond. Something in the trees at the far edge of the pond reflected the light.
I’d seen a dog’s eyes reflect light at night. What if Monk’s beam had just passed over a wolf?
“What’s that?” Monk asked.
“A beer can, maybe?” I said. “Or a pack of slavering wolves.”
“Slavering?” He swept the trees again with his light and caught another glimmer.
“Wolves slaver,” I said. “Especially when they are rabid and hungry.”
“Let’s go see,” he said and started walking, not waiting for my reply.
We followed the perimeter of the pond. I shifted my gaze and the beam of my light back and forth, between the woods and the brown water.
Was the pond full of leeches lusting for a taste of my blood? Which was a worse way to go? Feasted on by slavering wolves or bloodthirsty leeches?
Beyond the trees, a few yards from the pond, we found a weedy clearing where a rotting wooden shack stood. It blended so well with the trees that we hadn’t seen it yesterday. On one side of the shack there was a pile of firewood where seemingly a thousand spiders lived. They, too, probably hungered for my sweet flesh.
Monk aimed his flashlight at the shack, the beam slicing through the gaps between the boards to illuminate a pile of rusty paint cans inside, creating the reflection that had drawn him here like a fish to a lure.
And I knew what happened to fishes lured by lures. They ended up scaled, gutted, and grilled.
“This looks like a good place to hide a corpse to me,” Monk said, which is exactly what you don’t want someone to say in the middle of the woods at night, not when you’re already so scared that you find the thought of grilled fish frightening.
“Great,” I said. “We can come back in the morning and check it out.”
But Monk was already opening the door and going inside.
“I’ll wait here,” I said.
That was when I heard a twig snap in the woods behind me.
I whirled around, letting my beam play out over the trees and the murky water. I didn’t see anything.
It was a relief. It was also terrifying. I went inside the shack and slammed the door shut behind me, just as I thought I heard another twig snap.
Monk was crouched in the far corner, examining something.
“Look at this,” he said.
I walked up behind him. There were some white feathers on the ground at his feet.
“Pillow feathers,” he said. “Bruno Leupolz was here.”
“But we can’t prove that Dr. Rahner was,” I said.
“Those paint cans are rusted through and leaking,” Monk said, motioning to the cans behind me. “You’re standing in a puddle of dry paint on the ground. I bet we can find some of it on Dr. Rahner’s shoes, maybe even his socks or pant legs.”
“Don’t you think he would have washed them or thrown them out by now?”
“Oh,” Monk said. “I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe there’s something else in here that will be his undoing.”
“We’ll have better luck seeing it in daylight,” I said.
“But we’re here now,” he said. He sniffed. “Do you smell gasoline?”
I sniffed. “It could be the turpentine.”
“Is there turpentine?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But if there’s paint around, there’s probably some turpentine, too.”
“Maybe we can find that on his shoes,” Monk said, going over to examine a rotting bag on the ground, its contents of white granules spilled on the floor. “What’s this?”
“Looks like fertilizer to me,” I said. “Not that I am any kind of expert.”
“Maybe we can find some of these granules
