Mr. Monk in Outer Space Goldberg, Lee (top 5 books to read .TXT) 📖

restaurants of a Burgerville regional franchisee for far more than the market value. It turned out the franchisee was his brother-in-law.

She also told us that Burgerville overcharged franchisees for supplies and misappropriated the money that the restaurants contributed to a marketing and promotion fund.

The list of financial irregularities seemed to go on and on, and the shredded document on Lorber’s desk was the Rosetta stone to discovering it all.

Now that Lorber was dead, attention would focus on Andrew Cahill, the company’s longtime chief financial officer, who had been named acting CEO after Lorber died.

It was clear that Brandon Lorber had been on the verge of being outed as a greedy, dishonest scumbag who’d ruthlessly plundered the futures of his employees for his own personal gain. He was facing public humiliation, criminal prosecution, and the fury of thousands of employees.

It was no wonder, then, that he’d had a heart attack or that someone wanted to kill him.

The desecration made sense to me, too. I could see why someone who’d lost everything would fire a few bullets into the body of the guy who was responsible. He did it from fury and frustration at the cruelty and unfairness of being cheated yet again—this time cheated out of the opportunity for justice or revenge.

I didn’t see how Burgerville’s financial problems and Lorber’s death—and subsequent desecration—fit in with Conrad Stipe and the cabbie, but we now had thousands of possible suspects in the shootings.

I just wasn’t sure whether that made the case easier to solve or a whole lot harder.

We went back upstairs to share what we had learned with Stottlemeyer and Disher.

The contrast between the Homicide Department and the Forensic Accounting Unit was startling. The squad room was bathed in the off-white glow of fluorescent bulbs and the diffused sunlight streaming through the dirty windows and crooked blinds.

The light made the stained white walls look yellow and somehow made the gray metal desks seem even more dented, scratched, and old than they were. The big, cumbersome computer monitors on all the paper-cluttered desks appeared bloated, beat-up, and fifty years old.

Yes, I know desktop computers haven’t been around that long, but somehow when electronic equipment becomes dated, it seems far older than it actually is. Of course, most electronic equipment becomes dated two months after it comes out, but you get my point.

Even the people in Homicide seemed older, fatter, wearier, and less organized than the black-clad ninja accountants in the basement.

Monk looked depressed. “This is a cesspool.”

“You never minded it here before,” I said.

“That was before I glimpsed heaven,” he said. “Now there’s no going back.”

I’m sure most of the cops in the Homicide Department would feel the same way. Maybe the real reason that the accountants carried weapons was to protect themselves from the fury of their jealous coworkers.

Disher was sitting at his desk. He’d replaced the placard with his name on it with one that read SPECIAL DESECRATION UNIT.

“Where have you been?” he asked.

“Talking with Lieutenant Chase,” I said. “Have you ever been down to her office?”

Disher lowered his voice. “They’re not real cops, if you catch my drift. They are stuck in some windowless pit in the basement. I had her come up here and visit the big boys so she’d realize just how important this assignment was.”

“I’m sure it was very exciting for her,” I said.

“She got the message,” Disher said. “That’s what counts.”

“When did you start playing office politics?”

Disher tapped his new nameplate. “It comes with the job, baby.”

I didn’t see the point of reminding him that his unit had been effectively disbanded the moment Monk deduced that the desecration was part of a homicide case. Disher deserved to enjoy his new position for as long as it lasted. I even let him get away with calling me “baby”—that’s how sensitive I was being.

“It’s a good thing you’re here,” Disher said, rising from his seat. “The captain and I have lots of news for you.”

“We have some for you, too,” I said and we followed him into Stottlemeyer’s office.

“You were right, Monk,” the captain said from behind his desk. “Stipe was in that cab.”

“You got the DNA back on the gum already?” Monk asked.

“We took the low-tech approach,” Stottlemeyer said. “We went through Stipe’s personal effects again.”

“We found a taxi receipt in his wallet for the ride from the airport to the Belmont Hotel,” Disher said. “It was from Phil Bisson, the cabbie who was shot.”

“You were also right about the candy wrapper,” Stottlemeyer said. “Lorber’s shooter was in that cab, too.”

“You confirmed the lot number and twist of the wrapper?”

“I checked with the dispatcher and got all of Bisson’s fares for the last week,” Disher said. “The cabbie picked someone up two blocks from the Burgerville headquarters the night of the shooting and took him to the airport, where the cabbie picked up Stipe and took him to the Belmont.”

“And you were onto something with those Beyond Earth uniforms,” Stottlemeyer said.

“I was?” Monk said.

“Ambrose was,” I said.

“The seamstress remembers selling uniforms during the convention to Morris Hibler, the convention organizer, and Ernest Pinchuk, the leader of the Galactic Uprising,” Disher said. “She sold a dozen to other people she didn’t know, so we’ve got her looking at photos of convention attendees and we’re going to sit her down with a sketch artist.”

Monk rolled his neck and shoulders and smiled. I knew that smile. We all did.

It got us smiling, too.

“You’ve got it all figured out,” Stottlemeyer said. “Don’t you?”

“Yes,” Monk said. “I do.”

20

Mr. Monk and the Deadly Triangle

This was the part that I liked best, when everything about the case seemed so clear and I felt stupid for not seeing how everything fit together. But Monk was taking his sweet