by Gene Riehl
“She’s a pro,” Monk told Lyman Davidson, as they sat together in the front room of Davidson’s spacious home in Kalorama Heights. “You never had a chance.” Monk smiled. “Not with the weapon she was using.”
Davidson shook his head. “I’m still embarrassed.” He reached to his knee to adjust the crease in his white linen slacks. “This kind of thing happens to other people, Agent Monk. The people who installed my security system warned me about the system’s biggest weakness. Be careful about who you let in the house, they told me. We can’t protect you once they’re inside.” He paused. “I just didn’t see it coming … didn’t see someone like her coming, that’s for sure.”
“I’ve seen what the computer came up with from the description we got from you and the people at the art gallery.” Again Monk smiled. “Like I said, you never had a chance.”
“It’s good of you to say so, but you didn’t come over just to tell me that.”
“I want to try something with you.”
“Will it help find my painting?”
Monk looked at him. “We will find your painting, Mr. Davidson. We’ll get the Madonna back, but we want the woman at the same time.”
Davidson sat forward in his chair. “Anything I can do, you’ve got it … but why today? What can you do now that you and your people didn’t try the other night?”
“I couldn’t do this the night it happened, not while you were still recovering from the drug she injected.” Monk paused. “We’ll need to go upstairs. Back into your vault.”
Davidson rose. Monk followed him out of the room, then up the staircase to the second floor. Davidson pushed the buttons on the Ademco panel, then opened the door and stepped through to push the second set of buttons to deactivate the alarm. Monk waited until it was safe, then joined Davidson inside the vault.
As he had the night of the robbery, Monk took a moment to appreciate what he was seeing. The paintings were magnificent, the lighting dramatic, the entire room like something out of a movie.
“Okay,” Davidson said. “What’s next?”
“Humor me for a few minutes. This might seem strange, but it works.”
Davidson’s eyebrows lifted, but he had no objection.
“I need you to close your eyes,” Monk said. Davidson did so. “I want you to go back to that night. Don’t just think about it … I want you to actually see it.”
Davidson smiled. “It wasn’t one of my best nights, Mr. Monk.”
“No talking. All you do is listen.”
Davidson nodded.
“You poured her a drink downstairs. Courvoisier in a snifter. I want you to see the snifter, see the brandy in the glass, smell the brandy. Smell the scent of the woman sitting across from you. Smell your own scent as you react to the sight of her legs, as you grow warmer from the brandy and the proximity of a woman you’re beginning to feel might like to see more than just your paintings.”
Davidson was smiling now, his eyes shut, but still able to see.
“Now see the two of you moving upstairs,” Monk said. “Closer to your bedroom. A few minutes with the paintings, you’re thinking, then another drink up here, before … you’re not sure of the rest, but you’re starting to feel the excitement of possibilities.
“As you unlock the door to get in here, she stands so close you feel her breasts pushing against your back. Now her smell is much headier than the brandy, the scent of her perfume, her shampoo.
“She examines the Madonna, blown away by a painting she’d never expected to see. She’s looking at you differently, as well. Now it’s clear that you’re going to see the rest of that long lean body, and soon. All that’s left is the charade of looking at the rest of your collection up here.”
Now Davidson was nodding, as Monk continued.
“You suggest that the collection can wait, that a drink in the bedroom would make it all the better, but she disagrees. I’ll look at them now, she tells you, then we don’t have to worry about coming back. Suddenly you’re aware of your own breathing, as you turn to lead her deeper into the vault. But before you get there, you feel a sudden pain in the back of your neck. A sharp pain, like a bee sting. You try to turn toward her, but before you can react you feel yourself falling toward the floor. But you’re not unconscious, are you? Not totally, anyway. On the floor you’re somehow aware of what she’s doing. You’re like a camera now. You see, but you don’t react, you can’t react. You record, but you have no ability to identify what it is you’re recording.”
Davidson was stone-faced, but Monk could see his eyelids flickering, as his eyeballs shifted to the left, back toward the past. Looking now at what had happened then. Seeing what had happened then.
“But now you can,” Monk told him. “Now you can see what she’s doing. Exactly what she’s doing. Now you can tell me exactly what she’s doing.”
Monk paused.
“Tell me, Lyman. Tell me what she’s doing.”
“She’s pulling at my back,” Davidson said, his eyes still closed but his voice entirely normal. “Then she’s on the floor, on her hands and knees … like she’s looking for something she dropped. The needle, probably, the needle she stuck me with. Twice, from the marks the paramedics found in my neck.”
“Then what.”
“Then she goes to the Madonna. She takes it back to the doorway … then she turns around and sees me … she sees me looking at her … she comes back to me … reaches down and …” Davidson shook his head. “She …” He stopped. Seconds passed. “I don’t see her anymore … I don’t see anything anymore.”
Monk reached out and touched his arm. “Good. Good work. That’s a lot more than I was hoping for.”
Davidson shook his head. “My God, Agent Monk, I did see her. I don’t mean the rest of it, the drinks and my … my expectations … but the last part. She was on the floor, searching for something. I can’t imagine why I didn’t remember that the other night.”
“Where was she searching? Can you point me in the right direction.”
Davidson looked around. “The Madonna was right here.” He pointed toward the rear wall. “I was heading back there. She was behind me. I felt the pain in my neck just before I fell to the floor.” He took a couple steps to his right. “I think I was lying about here. So she would have been between me and the wall.”
“And before you fell, you seemed to black out.”
“Like I told you the other night, it was more like what I imagine a stroke would be like, or a seizure of some kind. Sort of a buzzing sensation in the back of my head, before I fell.”
Monk settled to his knees on the black carpet, then looked up at Davidson. “Do the lights go higher? Can you make it brighter in here?”
Davidson stepped back to the door and used a sliding switch set into the wall. The lights blazed. So quickly Monk almost closed his eyes. He lowered his head to the carpet, his eyes searching along the floor. He saw nothing. He crept toward the wall, his face inches from the carpet. Still he saw nothing. At the wall, he pulled at the carpeting where it disappeared under the baseboard. He used both hands to press the carpet back toward him, and that’s when he saw the three tiny white disks.
Monk rose to his knees and pulled his money clip from his pocket, peeled a twenty off the top, and put the rest back before bending over again. He plucked the three disks from the carpet and placed them in the twenty-dollar bill, then folded the bill carefully and put it in his pocket.
“Monk?” Wayne Nelson said, when Monk walked into the tech room at WFO. “Is that really you?”
Sitting on a stool behind the chest-high workbench he favored over a conventional desk, WFO’s senior and most heavily bearded technical specialist peered at Monk over the top of his half-glasses. “I thought you finally got fired.” He shook his head. “I haven’t seen you down here for … what’s it been? … gotta be months.”
“Yeah, Wayne,” Monk said. “A couple of weeks short of two years, but thanks for caring.” He reached for the twen
ty in his pocket. “Got a second to look at something?”
Nelson scowled, then glanced at the mess on his workbench, a spread-out assortment of what looked like bits and pieces of a desktop computer, although they might have been the parts to a time-machine for all Monk knew.
“Damn it,” Nelson said, “I don’t have time for you. I’ve got to get this thing fixed by five o’clock.” But he extended his hand anyway. “Whattya got?”
Monk stepped closer, then unfolded the bill and shook out the three white disks onto Wayne’s workbench. Nelson frowned at the disks for a moment before reaching for a flexible-neck magnifying-lamp clamped to the edge of the workbench. He pulled it into position. The business end of the lamp consisted of a circular fluorescent tube surrounding a powerful magnifying glass. Nelson peered through the glass at the disks, then poked with his forefinger to position one of them under the strongest point of light. He lowered the lamp to just above the disk, taking his time now, as he continued to examine it.
Waiting, Monk looked beyond Nelson to the rest of the tech room Wayne was in charge of. Because the SOG had its own electronics inventory, Monk hadn’t needed to come downtown to this one in a long time, and now he could see how much it had grown in his absence. Even more of the metal shelving these days, even more gear filling the shelves to overflowing. A whole section of video cameras and recorders now—much more compact units even than a couple of years ago—along with TV sets, FM walkie-talkies, cellular telephones, computer terminals, and flat-panel monitors, all of them smaller than ever before.
You’d think the room itself would get smaller, Monk thought, but there was no way the bureau was going to let that happen. The machines might vanish away to nothing, but the bureaucracy would only get bigger. No FBI director was going to go before Congress and ask for less money.
“Where’d you get these, Monk?” Nelson asked. “We had some training with them at Quantico last month, but these are the first I’ve seen in the field.”
“I’m happy to hear that … I was pretty sure they were what I thought they were.” Monk told him about the Davidson robbery. “It’s part of a series I’m working. Art. Paintings mostly, all over the country.” The rest of it—the Sung Kim part—he kept to himself. “I found these in the victim’s house.”
“Did you copy the serial numbers yet?”
“I thought I might as well let you do that, if you don’t mind.”
Nelson bent to examine the disk again. “You ready to copy?”
Monk grabbed a notepad from the workbench, and a government-issue ballpoint pen. “Go,” he said.
“A–T–6–3–8–2–9,” Nelson read. He straightened up. “I suppose you want me to look it up on the computer, too.”
Monk grinned. “I was kinda hoping.”
“As long as you don’t tell anyone I did it.” The famously grouchy tech specialist shook his head. “First thing you know, every son of a bitch agent out there’ll want the same thing.”
FORTY-ONE
It was nine o’clock the next morning when Monk walked into the office of Samuel Haggard, the general manager of Security Services, Inc., the company Wayne Nelson had identified as the seller of the Air Taser from which had come the disks Monk found in Davidson’s house. The AFIDs. The Anti-Felon Identification Disks that were designed to identify a specific air-Taser gun whenever it was used.
The heavyset man wearing thick glasses stared at the disks Monk dumped out on his desk, then used a square magnifying glass to examine them more closely. He reached for a pad of paper, scribbled on the pad, then set aside the magnifying glass to pull his computer keyboard toward him. Haggard typed quickly. After a moment, he looked up.
“No problem,” he said. “We sold the weapon you’re looking for. It was part of a shipment of eighty-seven Tasers to Evans Medical two years ago. They run a chain of hospitals here in Washington. The tasers were shipped to George Mann, their director of security.”
“Got an address?”
Haggard wrote on his pad again, ripped off the page, and handed it to Monk.
“Christ,” George Mann said. “I wish I’d never heard of those goddamned stun guns.”
The gaunt, hollow-eyed director of security for Evans Medical scowled.
“We own hospitals, Agent Monk. We have to be ready for anything. People go nuts around hospitals … you wouldn’t believe it.” He paused. “The tasers seemed like a perfect solution … a weapon to stop crazy people without killing them.”
Monk nodded. “I would think so, too.”
“What I didn’t figure on was the people who were going to use them. Most security guards are good, but there are some real losers … mouth breathers about one notch smarter than a juniper bush. Give ’em non-lethal weapons they go ape shit. Spit out your chewing gum on the floor, some dipstick fills you with electricity.” He shook his head. “It was a nightmare. Twenty lawsuits in the first three months. We got rid of them pronto.”
“You don’t have them anymore?”
“Couldn’t even sell them. Corporate legal wouldn’t let us. Liability, they said. Throw the damned things away, they said. Make sure they never hurt anybody again.”
“But how? You can’t just put something like that in a garbage can.”
“Tell me about it. They laid around here for a couple of weeks before we took them to the Metropolitan P.D. I don’t know what they did with them.” He looked at Monk before shaking his head again. “I hate to tell you this, but some of them got stolen before we got them downtown to the cops.”
“Any idea who took them?”
“Like I said, some of the guards are about half a step from doing time themselves. We try not to hire the bad ones, but it’s a tough market. The pay … the hours …” He shrugged. “I wish I could help you, but what’re you gonna do.”
On his way to the woman whose singular skills he now needed, Monk called Dr. Gordon, but the doctor was out of the office until tomorrow. Was there anyone on call? Monk asked his receptionist. Anyone who could tell him about his PET scan? She would check, the woman promised, and get back to him. Monk shook his head as he hung up. Keep busy, he told himself. You’ll know soon enough. He punched 4-1-1 this time, got the number he needed and dialed. Eleanor DeWitt was home, and she would love to see him again.
Monk tossed the phone aside, then realized he had to eat, that he was starving, and that he wanted nothing to do with Lisa’s idea of healthy food. Eleanor DeWitt lived near Washington Circle, not far from George Washington University, and there had to be a Burger King along the way. He could swing past the drive-through and choke down a quick pair of cheeseburgers, maybe just the smallest order of their grease-soaked fries.
“You do know about me, Puller,” Eleanor DeWitt said, after she’d let Monk into her apartment. “You do know the bureau considers me persona non grata.”
Monk smiled. “Why do you think I’m here?”
“Well, you better come in and sit down then.”
Eleanor toggled the joystick on the arm of her wheelchair, turned herself around, and glided back toward the brown tweed upholstered couch and contrasting armchairs that dominated her small living room. Monk followed. She motioned toward the couch. He walked past her and sat down. Eleanor zipped over until she was sitting in front of him. She reached up to smooth her gray bangs, then rearranged the burnt-orange and yellow afghan in her lap.
“Can I bring you some coffee,” she asked. “Or a drink, maybe?”
Monk shook his head. “It’s good to see you again, Eleanor, but I’m afraid I don’t have much time to visit.” He frowned as he realized how abrupt that sounded. “How are you?” he asked. “I mean how have you been?”
“Incredible,” she said. “I liked it at the bureau … I loved my job there, but this is so much better.”
Eleanor gestured toward a room beyond the living room, partly visible through an arched doorway. From where he was sitting, Monk could see a couple of computer monitors along one wall of the room.
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“I’m doing the same thing here in the apartment,” she continued. “The same sort of computer stuff I used to do for you downtown, but now I freelance.” She smiled. “And I make a lot more money.”
He thought about the day she’d quit, the eyewitness accounts he’d heard of the way she’d stormed out of the office after a donnybrook shouting match with an idiot supervisor who hadn’t realized what a treasure of a computer analyst she’d been.
“So it worked out okay then,” he said. “In the end, I mean.”
“Doesn’t everything?”
Monk couldn’t stop his glance at her withered legs, and she caught him at it.
“It’s a philosophy, Puller,” she said. “I don’t believe it half the time, either, but I don’t let a day go by without saying it.”
Monk looked at her, at her long thin face, at the wire-rimmed glasses that dramatized her intelligent brown eyes. He tried to imagine what it would be like to live in a wheelchair, but couldn’t begin to. The silence grew uncomfortable until she finally grinned and broke it.
“Okay, Monk, you’re off the hook. No more visiting.” She pushed her joystick and closed the gap between them by another six inches. “So tell me, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I need to find some connections. Something to connect Thomas Franklin, or Franklin’s Global Panoptic Corporation, with stolen art. Worldwide.” Monk reached into his pocket for the list he’d prepared back at the SOG. He handed the list of stolen paintings to Eleanor. “Specifically with the stuff on this list.”
She studied the list, then looked at him.
“The da Vinci is the latest? The one from Georgetown just the other night?”
Monk smiled. “I knew I’d come to the right place.”
“You said connections … plural. Something else to do with Franklin?”
“There’s a rumor that he’s involved with a younger woman, a much younger woman. Cost him his marriage, I’ve heard.”
Eleanor nodded as Monk continued.
“He’s a big socialite. Lots of parties, lots of press coverage. TV cameras, that sort of thing.” He paused. “Can you do anything with that?”