Richard Patterson - Conviction

Ainsworth took a sip of coffee. "So?"

"So I'm pretty damned sure she's sure of everything she thinks she saw. I'm also pretty sure Thuy Sen died inside that house."

"Me, too. Why not get a warrant?"

Monk shook his head. "Let's poke around a little—whatever we'd find at Grandma's house is likely to still be there in a day or two. I keep wondering about how Thuy Sen got from the house to the bay. Sure as hell didn't walk there, and the brothers don't own a car."

Ainsworth propped his chin on folded hands. "Wouldn't be smart to swipe a car for that, would it."

* * *

"A tall guy in a light blue Cadillac," Larry Minnehan repeated. "That would be my man Eddie Fleet."

He turned to the bulletin board and pointed out a mug shot, glancing at the notation beside it. "You're in luck, guys—no overnight change in status. Eddie's still not dead."

Monk studied the photograph—close-cropped hair, flat features, full mouth with one corner twisted in disdain. Even from a head shot Monk could guess that Fleet was tall and rangy. "Tell me about this guy."

"A real waste of talent—before crack got to him he was a playground hoops legend. But you know the story—all innates, no character." Squinting, Minnehan called upon his memory. "I'm remembering girlfriend violence, a concealed weapons charge, a couple of assaults, a dopedealing rap that got kicked for illegal search and seizure. Typical lowlife résumé."

"What's he got to do with the Prices?"

"He's Payton's jack-of-all-trades, majordomo, and chauffeur. God help us if the State of California took away this asshole's car, 'cause then he couldn't drive Payton where he needed to go. Then where would the Bayview be." Minnehan cocked his head. "You thinking Eddie might fit in this somewhere?"

"He'd give us someone else to play with." Monk thought for a moment, then asked Minnehan, "Rennell have any girlfriends you know of?"

* * *

On the way back to the Hall of Justice, Ainsworth pondered this. "You think Payton's covering for his pedophile brother?"

"Too fancy a concept for him to get his mind around," Monk answered. "But it's funny Minnehan never saw Rennell with any women. I'd have given odds he'd be a daddy by now." He turned their car down Bryant Street. "It would make more sense if Rennell wound up alone with her. That's how these creeps like it."

"What's in it for Payton?"

"He's no respecter of women, either. Maybe Rennell wants what he wants, and Payton just wants his muscle happy. What's Thuy Sen to either one of them?"

* * *

The toxicology report was waiting on Monk's desk. He passed the report to Ainsworth. Thuy Sen had died clean—no crack cocaine in her system. Though this was only what Monk expected, he had learned that you could never be too jaded. In the Bayview, girls scarcely older than Thuy Sen traded oral sex for crack.

Putting down the report, Ainsworth asked, "What goes next—warrant, or Fleet?"

"I keep thinking about that Cadillac," Monk answered.

"Eddie Fleet," Terri said now. "Anyone's dream witness. No wonder you went looking for him."

Monk regarded her impassively. "That's what we get in our business—scumbags who know about other scumbags. You were expecting Kofi Annan?"

SEVEN

LARRY MINNEHAN AND HIS PARTNER, JACK BRESLIN, DROVE MONK and Ainsworth out to look for Eddie Fleet.

Their unmarked car entered Double Rock, a public housing project so lawless that cops who went there feared being shot. "Came out here last week," Minnehan said, "to pick up a guy for a probation violation. Walked into his kitchen and the fucker jumps out from behind the refrigerator and tries to shoot me in the face."

"What happened?" Ainsworth asked.

Behind the wheel, Minnehan kept tautly watching the street as he drove. "Pretty much blew his kneecap away. He's off the street for a while."

Not that it much mattered, Monk thought. The dingy stucco buildings spewed an endless supply of young men warped by Double Rock into dead-enders before they could make the choices they never believed they had. The place they lived in looked like a training ground for prison: even the graffiti-scarred buildings, some with windows boarded up, had addresses—like F-7: 1840–1860—which reminded Monk of a prisoner's ID number. As they passed one parking lot, a gangly teenage boy, urinating on someone else's car, called out to Minnehan, "Don't give me a ticket for pissing, man."

Minnehan, laughing, gave him a jocular version of a papal blessing. "That's Lance," Minnehan explained. "He's a Crip, and stupid as a rock. Whoever owns that car will probably do him for us." Breslin kept his eyes on the street.

A block later the car slowed to a stop beside a gray-bearded man in a Yankees cap cooking burgers on a grill. Breslin rolled down the window. "Hey, Globetrotter."

The man glanced warily at the two strangers in the back of the car. "Hey, man. What's happening?"

"Nothin' much. Just looking for Eddie Fleet."

"Eddie? Haven't seen that boy for a while. Heard he took a job being President of Microsoft."

A corner of Breslin's mouth turned up, though his eyes didn't change. "If he gets sick of it, Trotter, and comes back here, you might mention dropping by our office. We've got an opportunity for him."

The man nodded. It would not take long, Monk knew, for word on the street to spread.

"Fucking waste," Breslin said as the car pulled away. "Man used to play for the Globetrotters before the white powder got him. Now all he can afford is crack." They kept on driving, eyes combing the sidewalk idlers for the guy who looked back at them a little too long, or avoided looking at all, or maybe just started walking faster—the small signs of psychic disruption at the otherwise routine appearance of an unmarked car.

Two blocks later it happened. From the backseat, between the broad shoulders of the two cops, Monk saw a tall man slide from inside an old blue Cadillac and swiftly head for the door of an apartment in a one-story complex. "Step on it," Breslin said.

Minnehan did, snapping Monk and Ainsworth against their seat. Tires squealing, they pulled up in front of the complex; Breslin leapt out of the car before it stopped and covered the twenty feet to the door before the man could get inside. By the time the three others came up behind him, Breslin had his quarry by the scruff of his sweatshirt and was pressing his face against the door. "Give me trouble, Eddie, and I'm gonna be truly pissed."

Fleet said nothing. Jerking him three steps to the sidewalk, Breslin held Fleet upright while Minnehan searched him. In the bright afternoon sunlight, three women and a small boy walked by with their eyes straight ahead, their silence the only sign they had even noticed a black man being frisked by two white cops.

This gave Monk time to look Fleet over. He was perhaps six foot five, with close-cropped hair, cleft chin, and a broad face whose most remarkable features were a nose which appeared to have been flattened—perhaps by a flying elbow in a Darwinian game of playground hoops—and large brown eyes, which just before they assumed an unusually persuasive look of otherworldly detachment had raked Monk's face with a swift, keen glance. Monk had never seen Eddie Fleet before, but he understood at that moment that Fleet knew who he was—Monk's reputation on the street, held with a mixture of awe, fear, and respect, was that of a man who could be trusted but never crossed. By the time this piece of street theater was over, word would begin spreading in the Bayview that he had picked up Eddie Fleet.

"You keep Eddie company," Minnehan directed Breslin. He climbed up the stairs, Monk and Ainsworth following, to knock on the door Fleet had tried to enter.

It took several more knocks until a young woman answered, clutching the front of her white robe. She was in her early twenties, Monk guessed, with one eye swollen half shut in her scared, pretty face. It was Eddie Fleet's notion of foreplay, Monk supposed.