Mr. Monk and the Two Assistants by Goldberg, Lee (ready player one ebook .TXT) 📗

in front of him, palms up, as if warming himself by a fire, and did a little pirouette, coming to a stop facing the closet.

He went over to the closet and opened the double doors.

The clothes that were hanging on the wooden bar had been pushed aside. Behind the clothes, there were several file boxes stacked against the back wall. On the floor, there were shoes, which had been cleared away to make room for one of the boxes.

Monk shook his head and groaned.

“What’s wrong, Adrian?” Sharona asked.

"Everything,” Monk said sadly. “Trevor didn’t kill Ellen Cole.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mr. Monk Takes the Case

I was glad that I was right about Trevor and relieved that my job might no longer be in jeopardy. But at the same time I felt terrible for Sharona, who sat down on the edge of Ellen’s bed and hugged herself.

“Oh my God,” she said softly, “what have I done?”

Dozier scrambled to his feet. “He’s wrong.”

Sharona shook her head. “He’s never wrong about murder. Never.”

“There’s no Styrofoam in this case,” Dozier said. “Trevor killed her. All the evidence points right to him.”

“Only if you don’t see all the evidence that points somewhere else,” Monk said.

“Like what?” Dozier said.

“Your theory is that Ellen came home early and caught Trevor in the act of stealing her things. So he hit her with the lamp and fled.”

“That’s how it went down,” Dozier said.

“Why didn’t Trevor run out into the backyard when he heard her coming in?”

“Maybe he didn’t hear her,” Dozier said. “Or he didn’t think he could escape from the backyard without her seeing him. So he hid in the closet.”

“That’s impossible,” Monk said.

“Why?” Dozier said. “The closet was right behind him.”

“Why didn’t he just wait in there until she left again?” I asked.

“Maybe he panicked. Or maybe she opened the closet and caught him,” Dozier said. “She ran to the phone to call the police, so he grabbed the lamp and hit her.”

“All you have are ‘maybes,’ ” I said.

“That’s because Trevor won’t talk,” Dozier said. “But the evidence clearly shows what happened.”

“Yes, it does,” Monk said. “Have you thought about getting your eyes checked?”

“Someone was obviously hiding in the closet,” Dozier said.

“Yes, that’s true,” Monk said. “But look at how the boxes are arranged. Someone moved the clothes aside and put a box down on the floor to give him something to sit on. That means the killer was taking his time. He was waiting for her to show up long before she got here and he wanted to be comfortable.”

“Or the boxes were already like that,” Dozier said. “And Trevor moved the clothes to make space for himself when he hid.”

“But she was hit on the back of the head and fell forward. If he’d jumped out of the closet and then grabbed the lamp off the nightstand by the bed, she would have had time to turn around and face him. That means she should have been hit on the side of her head, not the back,” Monk said. “If he hit her as she was running out of the room, her body would have been in the doorway or the hall, not in front of the dresser. The fact that she was hit from behind proves that whoever killed her already had the lamp in his hands when he went into the closet. We aren’t talking about a man doing a desperate act. This is what we in the detective trade call ‘premeditated murder.’ ”

I had to smile at that last, patronizing comment. Monk had obviously been paying a lot more attention than I thought to what Dozier had been saying before.

“I’m the most horrible wife in wife history,” Sharona said. “I wouldn’t blame Trevor if he never wanted me back.”

I sat down next to her and took her hand. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Sharona. Trevor is partly to blame for the way you reacted. If he hadn’t misled you so many times before, you wouldn’t have had any reason not to believe him this time.”

“Instead I believed the worst about him, the absolute worst,” Sharona said. “It’s as if I wanted him to be guilty.”

“He is guilty,” Dozier said.

“I know how you feel,” Monk said to Dozier. “I wish he was, too.”

“That’s an awful thing to say,” I said. “Why would you wish that?”

“He’s a bad influence,” Monk said.

“What terrible thing has he ever made me do?” Sharona said.

“He made you marry him again and move back to New Jersey,” Monk said.

“You are the most selfish man I have ever met,” Sharona said. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Adrian.”

“Not only that—he’s wrong,” Dozier said. “We found Ellen Cole’s jewelry in Trevor’s truck. He was stealing jewelry from his landscaping clients and auctioning it off on eBay. The payments for those sales went directly into his personal checking account. If he’s innocent, how do you explain that?”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t a thief,” Monk said. “But he didn’t kill Ellen Cole.”

“He didn’t steal those things, either,” Sharona said. “This whole thing is a setup.”

“Who would want to set up your husband?” Dozier said. “He’s a nobody.”

“I don’t know who, but it wouldn’t have been too hard to pull off,” Sharona said. “Anybody could have created an e-mail account for him on Yahoo!, got his checking account number somehow and used it to open an account in his name on eBay. Give me your name and one of your checks and I could do it in ten minutes.”

“Was it the eBay auction of stolen goods that led you to Trevor?” I asked Dozier.

“We found out about the auction after we got the lead on Trevor,” Dozier said. “It was Ian Ludlow who put the clues together.