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

called Ian last night. I thought maybe he could offer us some insight into the criminal mind.”

“Oh, please,” Monk said.

“I drove up from LA first thing this morning,” Ludlow said. “I feel it’s my civic duty as a crime novelist and as a concerned citizen to help in any way I can.”

“And you just happen to have a new book out and any publicity you can get will only help your sales,” Monk said. “The press is going to be all over this. You want to be sure that everyone draws the same connection between your book and this case that Lieutenant Disher did.”

“I resent that, Mr. Monk. I’ve assisted the LAPD on many investigations,” Ludlow said. “And my integrity has never been called into question.”

“And it’s not now. We’re grateful that you’re here,” Stottlemeyer said. “You should be, too, Monk.”

“Why?” Monk said.

“Because you’re not exactly blazing a trail of discovery on your own,” Stottlemeyer said, then turned back to Ludlow. “If you wanted to fake an alligator attack, where would you get the jaws?”

“Alligator heads are very easy to find,” Ludlow said. “You can buy one on the Internet for as little as five dollars. That’s not the hard part. It’s creating the bite.”

“Couldn’t you just knock the guy out, hold him under water and then clamp the jaws on him?” I asked.

“An alligator champs down on his prey and then rolls, using his full weight to drag the victim under,” Disher said authoritatively. “If you don’t see signs of that on the body, it’s a dead giveaway.”

We all looked at Dr. Hetzer, who nodded.

“The wounds are consistent with the victim being pulled and rolled,” Dr. Hetzer said. “It was the first thing I looked for.”

Disher beamed. “I learned that reading Ian’s book.”

“Maybe the killer did, too,” Stottlemeyer said, “and then faked the bite.”

“That would be very difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish, ” Ludlow said. “A ten-foot alligator exerts nearly two thousand pounds of force per square inch with his bite. That’s more than a ton of force. You can’t fake that with your bare hands.”

“Or with a bear trap,” Disher said.

“A bear trap?” Stottlemeyer asked.

“That’s what the character used in my book,” Ludlow said. “She attached an alligator’s jaws with epoxy to a bear trap and then clamped the contraption on her victim. She got everything right but the proper force per square inch.”

Stottlemeyer glanced at Dr. Hetzer.

“The force exerted in this bite was easily two thousand pounds per square inch,” Dr. Hetzer said. “Probably a lot more. The alligator mimics the feeding biomechanics of dinosaurs and bites harder than any animal on earth. The only creature that may have had a stronger bite is the Tyrannosaurus rex at three thousand pounds per square inch.”

"Nearly as much force as the weight of my S-class Mercedes, ” Ludlow said.

“Braggart,” Monk muttered.

“So we’re looking for someone with a ten-foot-long alligator, ” Stottlemeyer said.

“Or a baby T. rex,” Disher said.

“How hard could that be to find?” Stottlemeyer said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Mr. Monk and the Man Who Wasn’t Himself

Everyone except Dr. Hetzer regrouped in the morgue’s windowless employee lounge to discuss the case over some cups of bad coffee instead of an eviscerated corpse. The five of us sat almost shoulder to shoulder at a tiny table, talking above the hum of vending machines and under the headache-inducing strobe of the fluorescent lights.

I preferred the ambience of the autopsy room.

“What do we know about Ronald Webster?” Ludlow asked.

“We?” Monk said. “You’re just a visitor in this morgue, pal. I’m certified by the State of California in Blood and Bodily Fluid Disposal, Disinfection, Deodorization and Sterilization under the Federal Medical Waste Management Act and the Federal Health and Safety Codes.”

“You are?” I asked.

“Want to see my card?” Monk said.

“You have a card?” I said.

“It’s laminated,” he said, opening his wallet and proudly displaying a certification card with the state seal on it.

“Of course it is,” Stottlemeyer said. “He’d laminate himself if he could.”

“I ran Webster’s prints and came up with nothing,” Disher said. “So I did some digging. Turns out he shares the same social security number as another Ronald Webster in Butte, Montana.”

“Our dead man was living under a false identity that he stole from somebody else,” Ludlow said. “He was hiding from something or someone.”

“Another brilliant deduction,” Monk said. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m impressed.”

Ian Ludlow hadn’t done anything to deserve Monk’s nasty attitude. I admired Monk, but he could be unbelievably petty and childish when he felt threatened. When he behaved that way, I wanted to send him to his room for quiet time.

The only person who looked bad in these situations was Monk himself, but he was too busy being churlish to recognize it. Then again, he never noticed or cared how he looked to others.

Stottlemeyer glared at him. “Do you have anything helpful to share?”

Monk frowned and crossed his arms in front of his chest. “No.”

“What about everything we’ve learned today?” I said.

“It’s not relevant,” Monk said, sulking.

“Of course it is,” I said.

So I told the others about our talk with Father Bowen at Mission Dolores, where Ronald Webster, or whoever he really was, attended mass every day to ease his guilt over running down Paula Dalmas and fleeing the scene. I told them that Webster had confessed his crime to Father Bowen and had been anonymously sending cash to Dalmas for years.

“I couldn’t make this stuff up,” Ludlow said, shaking his head with amazement.

“I wonder if Father Bowen knows more than he told,” Disher said.

“We’ll ask him, officially this time,” Stottlemeyer said, then nodded to me. “Go on, Natalie.”

I told them about Dr. Dalmas’ claim that she didn’t know the identity