"I'm not done with that!" Max groaned, two hours later, when Adrian tried to take his almost empty plate of takeout food.
"I don't mean to rush you"
"Sure ya did." The detective retorted, though not very gruffly. He realized that if Monk hadn't delayed them in the bookstore, the favorable chain of events would not have happened.
"Don't go in there!" Adrian said to Jordan when she went into the bathroom and closed the door. When staying at a hotel, Monk loathed having other people use the lavatory in the room he was staying in.
"Just clean it when I get out." the medical examiner called back.
"Are you done yet?" He asked after a second.
"The bed is not too bad." Max deliberately sat on it to distract Monk from pestering Jordan.
"Don't sit there!"
The bar owner got up, and Monk changed the sheets.
"How many sets do you have?" Max asked.
"Many." Adrian opened one of his suitcases and got a plastic wrapped set of sheets. After he changed them, the sleuth cleaned the restroom.
The next day, at Monk's room, they talked to the detective in charge of the case the sleuth had to do to free Jordan and Max. To say the least, she was skeptical.
"You're saying that the fingerprint is fake?"
"Yes." Monk replied.
"And it's connected to these two other cases, one of which also has a fake fingerprint and the other a homemade gun?"
"Yes." The sleuth repeated.
"How did you come up with this 'theory'?"
Monk gave her a very detailed elucidation of why the prints from that and Emily Cavanaugh's case were fakes.
"The ridge endings on both of them end at an awkward angle" He said. "It should be a few degrees this way." He pointed to spots on both fingerprint transparencies.
"What else?" She couldn't see what he talked about.
"The flexure crease found in the fingerprint found at the Slank murder scene is too high, while the one from the Cavanaugh case is too low."
On an on he tried to explain, as the detective asked many questions.
"Perps get new tech, just like cops do" Leland argued at one point.
"This isn't a James Bond movie!" the woman countered impatiently. "Perps don't fake fingerprints! Murderers don't make guns from scratch! Look, I haven't got time to waste. Call me when you have something within the realm of reality." With that, the detective left.
TBC