“Because she would have been the most obvious suspect, ” Ludlow said. “It made far more sense to kill a complete stranger who couldn’t be connected to her, frame her husband for the crime and get him locked away forever.”
“Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense,” Sharona said, “if you’re insane.” She looked at Monk again for support, but he seemed distracted, lost in his own thoughts.
“Is that going to be your defense?” Ludlow said. “Temporary insanity?”
“She’s not going to need a defense, because you’ve got nothing on her,” Stottlemeyer said. “It’s all wild speculation. Where’s your proof?”
“All the evidence against Trevor, for one thing,” Ludlow said, turning to Sharona. “It points right back at you.”
“How do you figure that?” Stottlemeyer asked.
“The person in the best position to set up an eBay account in his name using his checking-account number and to plant the stolen goods in his truck was you,” Ludlow said. “You had unfettered access. And in your most brazen act, you told Lieutenant Dozier how you did it.”
“I told him how somebody could do it,” Sharona said.
“Perhaps the most revealing thing of all is that you never called your old employer, Adrian Monk, to help you,” Ludlow said. “He’s one of the best detectives on Earth, and yet you didn’t seek his help. Why? Because you knew he’d discover the truth, that you killed Ellen Cole.”
“I didn’t go to Adrian for help because I thought he hated me for leaving him and because I thought Trevor was guilty,” Sharona said. “I was wrong on both counts.”
“But in a cruel twist of fate, you encountered Monk and his new assistant, Natalie, anyway,” Ludlow said. “And your carefully plotted scheme began to unravel.”
I realized that Ludlow wasn’t so much speaking as he was writing aloud. Everything he was saying would be coming out of his hero Detective Marshak’s mouth by the time the book was written.
“There are a thousand ways a reasonable person could interpret everything you’ve told us,” Stottlemeyer said, “and reach an entirely different conclusion.”
“For instance,” I said, looking at Ludlow, “maybe you killed Ellen Cole.”
I turned to Monk, waiting for him to run with that, but he remained silent. I was shocked. Stottlemeyer was probably relieved. I was sure that the last thing the captain wanted to deal with were two absurd theories about the murder from two bullheaded egotists at once.
Even so, I wish Monk had stepped up. I wish he had done it for Sharona. But once again, he was letting her down when she needed him most. And I didn’t know why.
"C’mon, that’s just stupid,” Disher said to me. “We’re talking about Ian Ludlow here. He’s the man.”
“What about me, Randy?” Sharona said. “Do you really think that I’d kill a woman I don’t even know and frame my husband for it?”
“You’re more likely to do it than the greatest crime writer of our generation,” Disher said, then turned to Ludlow. “But I just don’t think you’re right about this. You don’t have any evidence to support your charges.”
“Three days ago I didn’t,” Ludlow said. “But then you called and asked me to come up here to figure out how someone was killed on a nude beach by an alligator.”
“How does Ronald Webster’s murder prove that Sharona killed Ellen Cole?” I asked.
Ludlow smiled at me. “Because you murdered him, Natalie.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Mr. Monk Loses an Assistant
Ludlow might as well have punched me in the stomach. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t find the air to speak. His accusation was so wrong, so unfair, so terrifying that it left me numb.
I didn’t know where to begin. How do you argue against something that goes against all logic and everything you know to be true?
It was surreal. At first, I thought he was just getting back at me for my crack about him being the killer. But I could tell by the way he was studying me for telltale signs of guilt that he meant it.
The best I could muster, once I found air in my lungs again, was to say with all the moral conviction, truthfulness and outrage that I could muster: “That’s not true!”
I don’t think it was very convincing, at least not to Ludlow, who had this smug, self-satisfied look on his face, not unlike the look Monk gets during his summations, only minus the smugness.
I turned to Monk, expecting him to leap to my defense, but he said nothing, which was the scariest thing of all to me. He hadn’t spoken since Ludlow started making his crazy accusations. It was like he was a member of the audiencewatching the show instead of a member of the cast of characters.
“Adrian, speak up,” Sharona said. “Are you just going to stand there and let this happen?”
Monk shrugged and looked away. He was abandoning me, too.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said to him, then turned to Stottlemeyer and Disher. “What about you two? The next thing Ludlow is going to do is accuse one of you of murder.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Stottlemeyer said, “considering the way things have been going.”
Ludlow faced Sharona and pointed to me. “Natalie knew how much you meant to Monk. She was terrified that Monk would fire her and rehire you. So you simply had to go, and the best way to accomplish that was to get Monk to prove that Trevor was innocent. If Trevor was freed, you’d go back to LA, and her job would be safe again.”
That much was true, but I didn’t want to acknowledge it because I was afraid it would add credibility to whatever idiotic thing he was going to say next.
But unfortunately, Stottlemeyer and Disher already knew that Ludlow was right about that. I had owned up to it, no matter how embarrassing it was.
“Being petty and selfish isn’t a crime, though it’s pretty humiliating,” I said. “But once I met Trevor, it stopped being about me or what I wanted. I knew he was innocent. I believed him.”
“Of course you did, because he was telling the truth,” Ludlow said. “But this created a huge problem for Sharona. Your meddling could send her to prison. She had to stop you. But how? This part is where I’ve had to do a little guesswork.”
“Just this part,” Stottlemeyer said, “because everything else you’ve said has been so firmly grounded in fact.”
Ludlow ignored the captain’s sarcasm and plowed ahead. “Somehow Sharona convinced you that even if Trevor was innocent, he was an abusive husband who would make her life, and her son’s, a living hell. She made you a deal: She agreed to disappear from Monk’s life forever if you helped her keep Trevor behind bars.”
“You’re guessing wrong,” Sharona said.
“That conversation never happened,” I said. “None of this did. It’s fiction, something you’re very good at.”
“You concocted a brilliant scheme,” Ludlow said to me. “You committed another murder in San Francisco, one so bizarre you knew Monk wouldn’t be able to resist it, one that even the police would agree ‘cried out for him.’ And while you did that, Sharona remained in LA to establish an alibi and erase whatever tracks she’d left behind when she killed Ellen Cole.”
His theory was so ridiculous, and his reasoning so flawed, that I actually felt relieved. Nobody would ever believe that he was right.
“You think that I murdered a complete stranger just so I could keep my job with Mr. Monk?” I said. “Do you have any idea what this job pays?”
“You didn’t do it for the money,” Ludlow said. “You did it because you’re in love with him.”
The surprises never stopped coming from Ludlow. Of all his accusations, that was by far the stupidest.
Disher gasped and looked at me. “You are?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I don’t love him.”
I regretted it the instant the words were out of my mouth.
I’d hurt Monk. I could see that. His whole body seemed to sag with the pain of it. I’d broken his heart, even though I k
new he didn’t love me either. Not like that. Not like he loved Trudy or I loved Mitch.
“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “You know that I want you in my life, Mr. Monk, and that I care deeply for you, but not the way Ludlow is making it seem.”
I felt terrible and hated Ludlow for having made me say something so cruel and hurtful to someone I was close to. It was a crime and I wished there was some way I could punish him for it.
But at the moment, it was all I could do to hold my own against the wave of accusations that were coming at me. And he wasn’t done yet.
“Your protestations would be a lot easier to believe if there wasn’t so much irrefutable evidence to the contrary,” Ludlow said. “I suppose I’m somewhat to blame for what happened. On Tuesday, you bought a signed copy of my novel Death Is the Last Word, which gave you the inspiration for your fiendish plot.”
“I didn’t read your book,” I said.
“Of course you did. I asked Lieutenant Dozier to do some checking for me,” Ludlow said. “He discovered that on Tuesday night, you visited a Web site called Cassidy’s Curios, where you used your credit card to buy a set of alligator’s jaws and have them sent overnight priority to your home in San Francisco.”
“That’s not true,” I said. I kept saying that and it sounded hollow, even to me. I needed to refute what he was saying with facts and reason, but I couldn’t. I didn’t have the facts and I was too overwhelmed to reason.
“We found the packaging in your trash can,” Ludlow said, motioning to Captain Toplyn, who I’d forgotten was even there.
Toplyn reached into a box at his feet and pulled out an evidence bag containing a torn-up FedEx carton and stuffing. The label on the carton said CASSIDY’S CURIOS.
“Anybody could have ordered that using my credit card, had it sent here and swiped it off my porch that morning,” I said. “I didn’t get back from LA until Wednesday.”
“Which is when you set fire to a car in Washington Park and stole the Jaws of Life from the firehouse where your lover works,” Ludlow said. “That’s how you knew where to find it. I bet you even had a key to the building.”
“I was home with my daughter that night,” I said.
“You crept out when she was asleep,” Ludlow said. “You probably made sure she’d be out cold by slipping her a sleeping pill with her painkillers.”
“I didn’t drug my daughter, I don’t have a key to the firehouse and Joe Cochran is not my boyfriend!”
I was yelling. I couldn’t help myself. My heart was pounding with terror, pumping adrenaline into my veins and making me shake.
“If he’s not, perhaps you can explain why you have Joe’s T-shirt,” Ludlow said, motioning to Captain Toplyn again, who held up an evidence bag containing Joe’s SFPD T-SHIRT, “and why he spent the morning here with you on Thursday. Don’t bother lying. We have statements from your neighbors who saw him here.”
Stottlemeyer and Disher were looking at me with doubt and disappointment. Even Monk was looking at me sadly. The only person looking at me with any sympathy was Sharona, but she was in the same fix that I was in.
“It was the first time I’d seen Joe in months,” I said. “He came over because he wanted Mr. Monk to recover their stolen rescue equipment.”
“And did you tell Monk about it?” Ludlow asked, pointing his finger accusingly at me. “No, you didn’t. Why? Because you knew Monk would be getting the Webster case soon. You didn’t want him to have the stolen Jaws of Life already on his mind. Because you knew that if he did, he’d quickly put the facts together and follow the trail of coincidences straight to you instead of spinning around in circles of futility for months.”
Circles of futility. I’d become a character in a badly written book and I wanted out.
“That’s not why I didn’t tell him,” I said, turning to the others, hoping one of them would say something or do something to end this ordeal.
Couldn’t they see how Ludlow was twisting things?
Why was Monk just standing there? Why wasn’t he cutting Ludlow down, deftly refuting each one of his unbelievable accusations?
Was it because Monk believed them?
I looked Monk in the eye, or at least I tried to. He wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“I didn’t want you to be distracted from the Ellen Cole investigation,” I said. “The sooner you found out who really killed her, the sooner Trevor would be freed from jail, and the sooner I’d have my life back the way it was.”
I needed him to believe me. If he didn’t, then I was lost. Julie was lost. Everything was lost.
“Please, Mr. Monk, say something,” I said.
But Monk didn’t.
“That’s what this has all been about,” Ludlow said, “keeping your life intact and sending Sharona away again. For that, a man had to die. For that, you turned the Jaws of Life into the Jaws of Death.”
“The Jaws of Death,” Disher repeated, almost reverently. “It’s going to make a great title for the book.”
“There isn’t going to be a book,” I said, “because none of this is true.”
“It was Joe’s fateful call to you last night that was your undoing, and ultimately Sharona’s as well,” Ludlow said. “When I overheard that you were talking to a firefighter, everything fell into place for me. In one exhilarating moment, I realized how the alligator attack was faked. Once I discovered that the Jaws of Life were stolen from your lover’s firehouse, I knew that you were the killer. After that, the rest was easy.”
“What rest?” I said. “There is no rest.”
“Ronald Webster worked in the same neighborhood where you live,” Ludlow said. “That’s how you picked him at random on Thursday night to be your victim.”
“Until I arrived at the Baker Beach crime scene, I’d never seen Ronald Webster before in my life,” I said.
“That’s a lie and I can prove it.” Ludlow glanced at Captain Toplyn, the man with all the damn evidence bags.
This time, Toplyn held up a bag containing a tiny slip of paper.
“What’s that?” Disher asked.
“The cash-register receipt that was taped to the pizza box in Webster’s kitchen,” Ludlow said. “He went to Sorrento’s for pizza on Thursday night and so did you, Natalie. That’s when you saw him there.”
“I didn’t see him,” I said.
“The time-stamped receipt shows he got a ten-percent discount on his pizza, because he was there the same time you and your daughter were,” Ludlow said. “We know that because he asked for and received the discount offered on Julie’s cast. That’s when you chose him as your random victim.”
“There were lots of people in the restaurant,” I said.
“But he was the one you hit on,” Ludlow said. “He was the one you went to visit at his home after your daughter was asleep. He was the one you murdered.”
“Just because I may have been in the same restaurant at the same time as Webster doesn’t make me a killer,” I said.
“No, it doesn’t,” Ludlow said. “But this does.”
Oh hell, I thought.
We all looked at Toplyn this time without waiting for Ludlow to gesture to him. He was holding an evidence vial containing some kind of green goop.
Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants Page 24