Mr. Monk Gets Even by Lee Goldberg Page A

said. “I hope that album was worth the enormous risk you took scaling the bookcase without rappelling gear and a safety net to get it.”
    “It was,” Monk said, bringing the album to the coffee table, where Julie and Devlin joined him. “Do you recognize that scent?”
    “What scent?” Devlin asked.
    “The wonderful aroma of Windex,” Monk said. “The cover and spine of the album have been sprayed and wiped with it to remove fingerprints.”
    “I have no doubt that you can recognize the smell of Windex, since you probably bathe in the stuff,” Devlin said, “but how do you know that’s what it was used for?”
    “Because he’s a careful killer who wanted to remove any prints he left behind.” Monk opened the album, which contained family photos held in place by a thin layer of transparent plastic film that pressed them against the sticky surface of the underlying page. “And he also didn’t want us to know which pages he looked at because it could reveal his identity.”
    “You mean there are photos of the killer in here?” Devlin asked.
    “No, but there might as well be,” Monk said.
    “I don’t understand,” Devlin said.
    “You’ll notice that several of the pages are stuck together. That’s because they were damp. He sprayed them with Windex and wiped them down before he put the book away. Those are the pages that Carin showed him, and that he touched.”
    With that buildup, Julie expected some dramatic photos. But the pictures weren’t that remarkable, just various shots of Carin’s kids at different ages, on trips and at sporting events. They were the kinds of photos that every parent has of their kids. I have boxes of them.
    “So Carin was proud of her kids and was showing them off to the friend who came to kill her,” Devlin said. “I don’t see how that incriminates anyone.”
    “Carin was very careful about the pictures she chose, picking key pages throughout the book rather than just flipping through it from beginning to end,” Monk said. “She only chose pictures that showed her kids alone or with her. She didn’t show him any photos that included her husband.”
    “You think her killer was an old lover or boyfriend,” Devlin said.
    “I don’t think so,” Monk said. “I know so.”

CHAPTER NINE
    Mr. Monk and the Mistake
    M onk gave Devlin plenty to go on in the investigation and he had no problem walking away and letting her work on the leads without him.
    That’s because he wasn’t the kind of detective who detected, at least not in the traditional sense of doing research, interviewing scores of people, and going through the forensics.
    He was the kind who made his discoveries through the observation of people, places, and things, noticing what wasn’t quite right in what he saw, or what they said, or what they did, and putting it into order.
    So he’d take whatever facts Devlin came up with and use them to interpret whatever he’d observed and, from that, make his brilliant deductions, seemingly from out of nowhere.
    And it really pissed off Devlin, because she knew better than anyone that his startling “out of nowhere” deductions were often based on facts that she’d worked very hard to dig up, even if the conclusions that she’d reached from them were wrong.
    But regardless, it was his deductions that got all the attention and that moved the investigations forward. Her work was usually forgotten or simply ignored. She rarely got any credit for any of the work she did that helped Monk make his stunning deductions.
    I could understand her frustration and anger. But what she didn’t understand was that it wasn’t personal or intentional. Monk didn’t care about getting credit or attention. For him, it was all about restoring balance, cleaning up a mess, and making things right. It never occurred to him to thank or acknowledge anyone for their contribution to his process. The way he saw it, we were all fulfilling our obligation to maintain the natural