Chapter Four - Crime Scene

The following day, Adrian gathered the eyewitnesses and placed them where they'd been during Benjy's accident. The street was closed, Disher was acting as the driver who'd hit Benjy. He was behind the wheel of a dark blue, police-issue Ford Crown Victoria. To Adrian, it looked exactly like the one Stottlemeyer had driven when Adrian had become the reluctant Leland's partner several years prior to his promotion to Captain. It also reminded Monk that they needed to see the results of the paint match. It might be a pointer to the exact car that hit Benjy. He hoped the results showed something unusual or blatantly different.

Adrian was amazed, but not completely surprised by what he heard from the witnesses. He listened to each person with growing consternation. The same time of day, same location, same accident, and he got twenty different opinions… from the average eye witness accounts…" a dark car," or

"Late-model, American car" or

"Maybe maroon or burgundy…you know, deep purple" or

"No idea about a plate, I ran to call 911" … to the blatant lie,

"There was no one in the car" …from the possible,

"The car came from south of Market Street"… to the bizarre,

"A very tiny person was driving; I could only see the top of a head with a baseball cap on." Sometimes too many clues were definitely worse than too few.

The eyewitnesses seemed to be a dead end. Stottlemeyer organized a sweep of the local body shops looking for a purple or burgundy late model American car that needed repairs done without insurance claims and that had been asked for quickly. Disher was now driving Monk to the first shop on the list given to him by the officers who were doing advance site visits. They drove in silence, both thinking of Benjy and too uptight and worried to speak. The look Monk had shot Randy when they started out and Randy began chattering was enough to send the young lieutenant into his own head for a change. Randy was a moderately careful driver, despite his botched car chases, and Monk appreciated that with a little "encouragement" he could be quiet now and then too. He let his mind wander.

Think, Adrian, think. He had to try and coldly, rationally, sort the few facts that they had. He had to try to observe dispassionately and with an objective eye. When all he really wanted to do was sit with Sharona at Benjy's bedside, even though it meant returning to the hospital… and going inside… and being in the presence of germs. Rationally, he knew that wasn't going to help any of them. But, when was the last time that I had a rational thought…eight years? Ten? Well, then, this was a first for the millennium. He mentally shook himself. Okay. He breathed out and tried to focus. Obvious facts: Benjy was somewhere he wouldn't ordinarily have been, so he either was the target, which Adrian almost dismissed out of hand, who would want to hurt Benjy? Or was this just a random accident?

Something bothered him about each of these scenarios, and as his companion Randy might have said, were he to speak, "Your 'spidey-sense' is tingling, Monk." Not completely comfortable with the allusion to spiders, or superheroes for that matter, Adrian rolled his shoulders and tried to clear his head. He had the sense that this wasn't a random accident. Now the question truly was: Who would hurt a child and why? To hurt or get to Sharona? To warn her about something? Who would gain from hurting Sharona? She had nothing to give anyone who would blackmail her…and over what? The pictures were the only thing she'd had to hide…he hoped. He'd have to ask her – as painful as it might be for both of them. The questions raced around his brain and he felt the onset of a headache

explode behind his eyes. He rubbed them with his left hand then looked up as he was jolted around in his seat. The seatbelt pushed him back down. The car had stopped short outside of "Bobby's Body Shop."

"Sorry. Here we are." Randy said.

"Why are we here? How did they decide this was a place we should – st-stop?" Adrian replied as he looked at the unsavory neighborhood and the burly men smoking outside the shop, who surely, upon closer inspection, would have grease under their fingernails.

"Well, it's a crappy neighborhood and this is the type of establishment that's been known to 'chop' cars or play with the insurance companies."

"Al-alright. No. No, you go, I'll keep a lookout."

"For what?"

"Burgundy cars?" Adrian shrugged and tilted his head, decidedly uncomfortable.

"Monk…" Randy said with just the same amount of kindly exasperation he'd seen Sharona use with great success. "It's for Benjy and Sharona," he added when the kindly exasperation route didn't work.

Monk shrugged, rolled his right shoulder uneasily, and reached for the door handle with a handkerchief covered hand.

They didn't find out too much information from the shop's namesake, Bobby, or any of his questionable, both in the legal sense and the intellectual sense, employees. The shop had given him the heebie-jeebies. Calendars with scantily clad or completely unclad women hanging crookedly, the glass of the office windows caked with years of cigarette smoke residue and fingerprints… Adrian shuddered at the memory. He couldn't straighten, everything was too filthy. He couldn't clean; nothing came to hand to clean with…therefore, he couldn't think. Eventually, Randy took the interviews into the street, just so Adrian could concentrate. After all of the effort, it was barely worth it. The second shop on the list was much the same. Appalling in every sense.

By the time they reached the third shop, Adrian felt like he was going to lose his mind completely, but to his surprise, they found that the third shop, Al's Auto Appeal was …clean. Organized. They went inside and as Randy repeated his previous spiel, asked for the owner, and flashed his shiny badge, resentment flashed briefly through Monk's mind once again.

A tall redhead came out, wiping her hands on a yellow shop rag. She held out her hand to Disher and said "Hi. Lieutenant Disher? I'm Al."

"Al?" Adrian piped up.

She turned her green gaze on him and said, "Yeah. Short for Alison. Alison Willis. I'm the owner of this shop, you were looking for me? I thought my husband told you everything there was to know this afternoon." She held out her hand to Adrian and he just ignored it.

"We were told you weren't here at the time, so we wanted to follow up in – in person." Adrian fixed his gaze on her hands; there was a slash of burgundy paint on the back of her left hand.

"Well, as my husband told you, we haven't had any cars matching the description with the particulars you were interested in."

"I don't believe you," he said matter-of-factly, as Randy stepped back slightly and watched him do his "Monk" thing.

Adrian pointedly looked at the back of Ms. Willis's hand, "You appear to have had an accident yourself…with some burgundy paint."

She looked down at her hand and laughed. "Mr…. ah…"

"Monk," Disher supplied helpfully.

"Mr. Monk," the redhead laughed again, "Come with me."

They followed her to her office and found an approximately three-year-old version of Alison sitting at a small table with an upturned bottle of nail polish on the table next to her crayons and there were burgundy stains on the child's white pinafore dress, one sock, in her auburn hair, and a large maroon scar on the beige carpet.

"This is my daughter, Melanie. She gets into everything and then everything gets on to her…" She bent to retrieve a piece of green crayon from the rug, even if the damage had already been done.

"I see," said Adrian, confidence in his observation skills waning. Just like when Trudy died, I'm not thinking clearly he lamented wordlessly. I'm ready to jump at the slightest evidence, I can't look beyond the obvious. Disher was ready to wrap it up, Adrian could tell from his impatient stance. After exchanging a few more inane pleasantries, Disher ushered them out the door. Adrian didn't utter another word. He looked over his shoulder at Alison Willis with something akin to disappointment mixed with uneasy suspicion but they took their leave to get to the next stops on the list. A nagging feeling troubled him. That "spidey-sense" thing that Randy yammered about still felt strong inside him. Something was off at Al's Auto Appeal – he knew it, but was unable to pinpoint what exactly bothered him. All he knew was the pat and perfect answers he'd received there were as unsettling as the disorder and chaos of all of the other shops.

It was late in the evening when Disher dropped him back at the hospital after they stopped at the last shops on the list, each with about the same amount of success as the first few. With promises to faithfully pick him up while the investigation was ongoing and then drop him at the hospital when all possible work had been exhausted for the day, Randy took his leave. Adrian looked up at the façade of the hospital and trembled inside. I hate hospitals, he reminded himself – as if he'd needed the memory prompt. But Sharona and Benjy were inside, and the only way to see them was to be inside with them. He briefly thought about going home to get some sleep, he realized that Sharona might need the same, and probably the only way she'd get it was if someone else – someone she trusted - sat with Benjy through the night. It scared him that he could know what her thoughts on this subject would be and that he was absolutely certain in his knowledge. He didn't appreciate or stop to think about how well he really knew her until this tragedy had occurred. Maybe I just took it for granted all of these years.

If he'd thought more about it, instead of acting on emotion, he'd have been more petrified to realize that he'd given up his warm bed and his own personal needs and comfort to help Sharona again. The fact that this was a huge leap for him, didn't register as much as the need to help her did. Resolutely, he went to be the sentry that Sharona and Benjy needed.

Stottlemeyer had guaranteed Adrian that he would have a car service or a uniformed officer to bring him home after he'd spent some time at the hospital each night, and he was good as his word. Although he hated to leave Sharona sitting by Benjy's bedside day and night, he had to work on the investigation before what little that had to go on got too cold. As the days passed, frustration mounted. Neither of them could do anything for Benjy, and as Adrian was the trio's sole support, he grasped that he needed to keep getting some sleep, working, and being paid by the SFPD in order to pay Sharona so she could pay the medical bills. He also needed to solve this crime – to punish the person responsible – this was all he could do for them. He hoped she understood why he kept leaving. But as the days passed, her frustration mounted both with the medical profession and the law enforcement profession, which for the moment, unfortunately, seemed to include him.

A week passed, then two. March turned into April. Benjy's drug-induced coma had allowed some stabilization the first night, but he'd had two harrowing surgeries the next day… one to repair his perforated right kidney and his fractured liver, then, another to repair some internal bleeding being caused by the damage to his ribcage. His lung reinflated about two days after that, but he was still on a ventilator and still comatose by design. The doctors were telling Sharona that they were now "cautiously optimistic" that they could raise Benjy to a shallow level of unconsciousness the next morning and then allow him to fight his way to the surface of the man-made coma later in the day. But while Benjy might have been slowly improving, Adrian saw that his mother was slowly deteriorating.

Sharona looked exhausted and thinner than ever. In Adrian's estimation, she'd been perfect before, now she was making herself sick. He distressed himself further by realizing he was able to compare the current Sharona with the mental pictures of her that he subconsciously carried everywhere. Where had these snapshots come from? Why were they so embedded into my memory? Sharona laughing – eyes sparkling, Sharona angry – eyes snapping, Sharona dressed for a date that he interrupted, Sharona making a snow angel when they visited New Jersey, Sharona, full of fury for him and sharing his anguish when things with the department didn't go his way, Sharona engrossed in a book, Sharona cooking dinner for him and Benjy, Sharona helping Benjy with his homework, while she kept one eye out on him, too.
Suddenly, the words to a song that Sharona often sang and hummed around the house or in the car tumbled into his mind. "I know you by heart; you're so much a part of me; I know you by heart... can't you see?" It was from one of those sob-fest movies she liked…Beaches? Maybe. All he recalled, aside from the song, was that it was about best friends who through years and years were loyal and dependable – through good times and bad. It dismayed him to think of all of the ways Sharona had stood by him, stood up for him, and even took a stand against him when it was for his own good. He'd never once thought about reciprocating until now. In so many ways other than the literal ones she'd been his nurse, his employee, his friend, his partner, his confidante, his cheerleader… and he couldn't remember depending on someone more, or being surer of someone's loyalty and understanding. He needed to do that for her now. He had to make her sure of his loyalty and his ability to support her and help her. He needed to be the one who solved this case, and who held her when she cried…no matter what it cost him emotionally to do it.

She'd had terrible nightmares that he'd witnessed in those first nights after the accident. She slept fitfully, curled up on a waiting room couch, crying in her sleep, calling for Benjy, calling Adrian's name too. He woke her gently each time, and the first few times she had clung to him, disoriented, and she had continued to cry because the nightmare had come true and she was now living the horror both in her sleep and in her waking. She'd pull away from him to stand alone and silently at the window, contemplating something he either couldn't see or that was simply inside her own head, leaving him with a shirt damp with her tears and a feeling of helplessness. In those moments, he didn't know what he wanted more – a dry shirt or to be physically able to go to her, wrap his arms around her and hold her the way she had wrapped her arms around herself, rocking noiselessly to hold it together. She stopped clinging after the fourth or fifth nightmare and actually turned away from him… he was uncertain if it was because she was repulsed by needing him, the person whom she faulted for the accident, or because she understood that even in her greatest despair and need it wasn't he that could comfort her. He agonized over that – knowing it was only his own fault – his inability to get around his own fears - that Sharona felt she couldn't turn to him for comfort and support.

Once her mother, Cheryl, had come from New Jersey, he stopped hanging around late at night and got a uniform to drive him home each day. But something else gnawed at him, so the second night after Benjy's accident he paid a private security firm a considerable sum of money to keep an eye on Sharona and Benjy when he had to leave. What if, like Trudy, this was some twisted effort to get at him? It wasn't his ego that spoke to him, telling him to do this, making Benjy's tragedy about himself, because in actuality, he still had no idea if he was to blame for Trudy's death, but he knew either way it was his fault that Benjy had been in the right place and time to be hurt. So if it was an attack on him or merely an accident, he was still to blame. He had no tangible proof of either but he was leaning heavily towards the accident being a deliberate act. In any case, he wanted someone to watch over them when he was away from them. The un-uniformed men took positions around the ICU, feigning visitation so that Sharona wouldn't notice their presence. It sort of saddened Monk that in the state she was in, Sharona barely gave a passing glance to the handsome men he knew that she'd flirt with openly on any other day. On the other hand, he mentally noted to call the security firm and ask for less… less virile-looking guards. Each night the guards watched over the people he couldn't admit, even to himself, that he loved, while he tossed and turned in his bedsheets soggy with sweat from his own set of nightmares. He dreamed about losing Trudy over and over, and now he dreamed of Benjy tossed through the air, bleeding, broken on the ground, and Sharona crying without end.

In the two weeks since the accident nothing had happened, that was unusual, strange, or extraordinary. The guards were bored and Monk was frustrated because the major happenings were visitors that came and went. Most of those weren't let anywhere near the ICU, except Sharona and him, and even they couldn't stay for too long. Of course, he didn't want anything to happen to Benjy or Sharona, but if something was tried, at least they'd solve or be closer to solving the case.

Earlier, one of the guards had alerted him to a note that had been left at the nurse's station for Benjy. It had been saved until he had arrived after a long day that led nowhere. It would have to be given to the police for fingerprinting, eliminating the nurse who had handled it and anyone else who'd had contact with it. He checked on Benjy and then discretely slipped from the room to check-in with the guards. He'd looked at the note through the plastic evidence bag into which it had been tucked. The folded note had a fingerprint on the back of it in a medium that could have been chocolate – or blood, or any other sticky, dark brown substance. On the folded note's cover, it said, "Benjy" in square and regular handwriting… it was almost too perfect. He maneuvered the evidence bag so he could open the note without touching it. On the inside it said simply, "H." Adrian puzzled over it and couldn't figure out what it meant. He slipped it into his pocket and went back in to sit with Sharona.
Now, hours later, he remembered it and he rose from his damp sheets and looked in the pocket of the jacket he'd worn earlier and placed in the dry cleaning hamper. He stared at the note as if willing it to give up its secrets.