Monk rolled his shoulders and tipped his head from side to side, as if I was revealing the answer to some great mystery, and that struck me as very odd.
Surely Monk knew what a souvenir was. After all, he’d brought an unused street sweeper’s broom back from Paris to remember his trip by (though he reverently kept it wrapped in plastic in his closet).
“You don’t just pick them up on trips,” I said. “You could say a wedding ring is a kind of souvenir. Or all of those newspapers you’ve saved for your dad since the day that he abandoned you.”
“They reminded me of him,” Ambrose said, almost apologetically. “They still do.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that, Ambrose. It just means that you have feelings.”
Ambrose shook his head. “It’s not just the newspapers. My whole house is a souvenir. And I live in it. What does that make me?”
“The same as me,” I said.
“I’m nothing like you, Natalie. You’re outgoing, youthful, adventurous, attractive. You’ve been married, you’ve had a child. You’ve traveled the world and had dozens of jobs,” Ambrose said. “I am none of those things. I have done none of those things. We are nothing alike.”
I slid onto the bench seat beside Ambrose and took his hand in mine.
“There’s no practical reason for me to keep my house. I live alone. Julie is gone. It’s too big for me, and the mortgage is more than I can afford. But I bought that house with Mitch. The last night we ever spent together was in that house. I raised our daughter under that roof. Besides Julie, it’s the only thing I have left that Mitch and I shared. I will
never
let go of that house. So my house is a souvenir that I live in, just like you do.”
Ambrose nodded. “At least you can walk out the door.”
I picked up the rock and put it in his hand. “So can you.”
“What is this rock for?”
“That is my souvenir of the day Ambrose Monk stepped outside for the first time in thirty years. But you can keep it for me.”
I gave him a kiss on the cheek. Ambrose blushed and picked up the casino chip.
“You know what this is?” he said. “My souvenir of this moment.”
I smiled and looked across the table at Monk, who’d remained uncharacteristically silent during the conversation, to see his reaction.
I recognized the expression on his face, but it made absolutely no sense in the context of where we were, what we’d said, and what we were doing.
“You’ve just solved a murder,” I said.
“No,” Monk said. “I’ve solved three.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Mr. Monk Goes to Yosemite
“B
ut you haven’t been investigating any murders,” I said as we drove out of Las Vegas a few minutes later, leaving the city and our deposit on the camping spot behind. “I made sure of that.”
“Apparently I was and I didn’t know it.”
I could keep Monk from the crime scenes, and from interviewing suspects and examining clues, but I couldn’t stop him from thinking.
“I don’t understand why we couldn’t spend the night in Las Vegas,” Ambrose said. “I wanted to see the dinosaurs fight and fall in the lava. I’ve never seen that before.”
“We can come back,” Monk said. “The dinosaurs aren’t going anywhere. The murderers are.”
“Ah,
murderers
, as in more than one,” I said. “And since you insisted we make a beeline for Yosemite, which is seven hours away, I’m guessing you’re talking about those three old ladies we met outside of Victorville.”
“I didn’t say that,” Monk said.
“You didn’t have to,” I said. “I’m not in your league as a detective, but that deduction was easy, even for me. I just find it hard to believe that they’re capable of killing anyone.”
“Who have they killed?” Ambrose asked.
“The woman on the beach in Santa Cruz, the student in the alley in San Luis Obispo, and the construction worker at the Grand Canyon,” Monk replied. “And probably more.”
“But the Zarkin sisters couldn’t have killed all three of those people. The timing is all wrong,” I said. “The women would have had to have been in two states at once, and that’s impossible. What evidence do you have that they’ve killed anyone?”
“None at all,” Monk said.
“So why are we leaving Las Vegas,” Ambrose said, “depriving me of seeing the city by night, and rushing to Yosemite?”
“To get the evidence that I don’t have and to stop the Weird Sisters before they kill anyone else.”
“Why don’t we just call the police and let them handle it?” Ambrose asked.
I had the answer to that question.
“Because the only cop who’d believe Mr. Monk, without any evidence or explanation, that three old ladies are traveling the country killing people is Captain Stottlemeyer, who doesn’t have jurisdiction in Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, the Grand Canyon, or Yosemite National Park.”
“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t call him,” Monk said.
“To what end?” I asked.
“So he can marshal the forces in preparation.”
“For what?” Ambrose asked.
“The arrest,” Monk said. “Those harridans are killers, and I’m going to take them down.”
I dutifully called Captain Stottlemeyer and put him on the speaker. He told Monk the same thing that I had, but that he would go ahead and make a fool out of himself anyway and alert the authorities in Santa Cruz, San Luis Obispo, and Arizona of Monk’s suspicions.
“It’s not a suspicion,” Monk said. “It’s a fact.”
“That you can’t prove,” Stottlemeyer said.
“Yet,” Monk said.
“That’s a big stumbling block when it comes to getting cops to arrest people, particularly three old ladies,” Stottlemeyer said, and then pointed out that there was no guarantee the women would actually be in Yosemite. They could have changed their plans.
So Monk gave Stottlemeyer the names of the Zarkin sisters and the license plate number of their RV so the captain could try and track their movements through credit card use, traffic citations, and any other applicable databases.
“You memorized their license plate number?” Stottlemeyer said. “Was this before or after you suspected them of being killers?”
“Before,” Monk said.
“Then why did you memorize it?” Stottlemeyer asked.
“Because I saw it,” Monk said.
“You don’t have to memorize every license plate that you see.”
“It’s instinctive and automatic,” Monk said. “You have no control over it.”
“Oh, really? I couldn’t tell you my license plate number,” Stottlemeyer said.
Monk recited it to him. “That’s for your police department sedan. Would you like to know the license plate number of your personal car?”
“No,” Stottlemeyer said.
Monk told him anyway, then informed him of which states the women had visited, a fact he’d gleaned from the diagram of the United States on the back of their motor home.
“I’m betting you’ll find unsolved murders in all of those states,” Monk said.
“Of course I will, Monk,” Stottlemeyer said. “Every state has unsolved murders. That’s a given. What’s not is that these old ladies are responsible for any of them.”
“They make marijuana brownies,” Monk said. “And they eat them while listening to funky music.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked.
“That’s how it starts,” Monk said. “One day you’re a drug fiend eating marijuana brownies and the next day you’re an ax murderer. It’s the logical conclusion.”
Stottlemeyer got off the phone to make his other calls and we continued with our journey.
We spent the next six hours plodding north on Highway 95 across the bleak and dry Pahute Mesa before hitting Highway 6 at Tonopah, a sun-bleached and eerily vacant old mining town, and heading west.
It was while I was filling the tank at a gas station in Lee Vining, the last town before the fifty-mile drive and ten-thousand-foot climb up Tioga Pass and into Yosemite, that Stottlemeyer called me back to notify us that the Zarkin sisters had arrived in the park that afternoon. Their license plate number was registered by the park rangers when they signed up for a camping space.
I got the name of the campgrounds and asked the captain whether he’d alerted the park police about the women.
“And what would I tell them, exactly?” he said. “I know Monk, they don’t. They have no reason to believe his story or keep an eye on three senior citizens in a motor home.”
“But you do,” I said.
“That’s why I’m calling you from my car. I’m on my way. But it’s at least a four-hour drive from San Francisco to Yosemite. Do you think you can keep Monk from charging anybody with murder before I get there?”
“Nope,” I said.
“I didn’t think so. You could puncture the tires of your RV and spend the night wherever you are.”
“I could, but if Mr. Monk is right, and they are murderers, what’s to stop them from killing another person tonight?”
He sighed. “Be careful.”
I promised him that I would be and I got us back on the road.
I’m sure Ambrose would have been astonished by Yosemite, with its incredible views of waterfalls spilling over massive granite cliffs into forests of giant sequoias and black oaks. But by the time we got there, it was too dark for us to see any of it. All we saw was the narrow, winding strip of asphalt in front of us, my headlights barely piercing the depths of the pitch-black night created by the dense forest. I felt like I was on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean driving through the Mariana Trench.
But I managed to find my way to the campground, nestled deep in the woods on a rise above a river. I registered us with the loopy park attendant who stood in the window of the small trailer that served as the front gate.
The attendant looked like Smokey the Bear, only with more hair, and had a drowsy grin on his face, as if he was amused but couldn’t muster the energy to laugh.
As we drove in, I spotted the Zarkins’ distinct motor home, with the map of the United States on the back, parked to my left, at one end of the camp and overlooking the river.
“Look who else is here,” Monk said, and gestured out the passenger window. On the opposite side of the park, also at the edge of the rise, was Dub Clemens’ motor home, which I recognized from the collage of faded and peeling bumper stickers from all the places he’d been.
“I take it that it’s not a coincidence that they’re both here,” Ambrose said.
“Nope,” Monk said.
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“I’m not,” Monk said. “And I’m sure that none of them are surprised to see us here, either.”
That’s when I remembered my encounter with Yuki, Dub’s assistant, on the beach. I told her that she didn’t know anything about us. Her reply, and her enigmatic smile, was unsettling then and even more so now:
I know everything.
I got us parked, facing the river, in a spot smack between the Zarkins and Dub.
There was no shore power or utilities for us to plug into. We would be self-sufficient, which wasn’t exactly a hardship. We had food, water, and everything else we needed except, perhaps, a way to contact the outside world. There was no cellular service in the park.
As soon as the motor home leveled itself, Monk got up and headed for the door. I blocked his path.
“Where are you going?”
“To expose the harridans, of course,” Monk said.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “You can’t just march over to their motor home, knock on the door, and accuse them of being serial killers.”
“Why not?”
“Because they might shoot you in the face.”
“I don’t think so,” Monk said. “They’d never make it out of the park.”
“They could kill you in some other, more insidious way,” Ambrose said.
“Better me than someone else,” Monk said. “That way I won’t feel the guilt.”
“You won’t feel anything,” I said.
“This is a very bad idea,” Ambrose said. “They could kill us all.”
“We’re talking about three old ladies,” Monk said.
“Who you say are serial killers,” Ambrose said.
“Their victims didn’t know those wicked old crones were killers until they killed them,” Monk said. “We do. We are prepared. If they make a move on us, we can take them.”
“I could live without getting into a brawl with three old ladies,” I said.
“Trust me, Natalie, it won’t come to that.” Monk moved past me and walked out the door. “Let’s go. Justice can’t be delayed.”
Which really meant, of course, that he couldn’t possibly wait another second to face the killers and dazzle them with his brilliance. But I couldn’t really blame him, even if it was a stupid thing for him to do.
That’s because Monk’s summation was the one moment in his life when the world was in perfect balance, everything fit, and he was in complete control. There was no way he could deny himself that balance, not when it was so close. Nor could I.
“Lock the door, Ambrose,” I said, and dutifully followed my boss.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Mr. Monk Finds His Balance
D
espite my many misgivings about what we were about to do, I had to admire the confidence and sense of purpose in the way Monk marched across the park to the Zarkins’ motor home. He was in utter command of himself and, it seemed, the world around him.
He reminded me of a scene in
Patton
where the general storms outside into the open during an air raid and doesn’t take cover, not even when machine gun bullets are raking the ground all around him. Patton just stands there, angry and defiant and immortal, shooting at the planes with his pistol.
What Patton did was insane, but there was something admirable and heroic about his lunacy. That night, I could say the same about Adrian Monk. And I was following him into the open field, without cover, just like the good soldier that I was.