Within twenty minutes the police arrived on the scene. Captain Leland Stottlemeyer quickly blocked off all the exits. "Go find the guys who brought the food," he instructed his officers, "I want a good long word with them. Get this punch down to the lab; I want whatever they put in it analyzed ASAP."
Several officers pushed the concession table with the punch out the door. Stottlemeyer walked up to the former detective. "So what do you think, Monk?" he asked him.
"About the case?" Adrian asked.
"No, what the pope does when he's taking a shower; yes, the case!" Stottlemeyer groaned.
"Well, I think some blood-thinning drug of some kind had to have been put in for her to cough it up," Adrian theorized, "Probably warfarin. I'm guessing from how fast she died that they put a lot of it in there."
"This could have been worse," Natalie told Stottlemeyer, "I looked; Clarissa was the only one to take a drink from the bowl before it happened. Otherwise we might have had a higher body count."
"Captain," Lieutenant Randall Disher jogged up, "The caterers left before it happened. We're calling the company to see who they assigned here."
"Well for all we know they may well have not known," Stottlemeyer mused, "Someone may have spiked it when they weren't looking, in which case…"
The door to the gym slammed open. A large well-built man ran in looking terrified. "Are you in charge?" he asked Stottlemeyer breathlessly, "They called me at home; tell me it's not…!"
"You're Eric Hart?" the captain asked him.
The man nodded. "I'm sorry," Stottlemeyer put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder, "There wasn't much that could have been done."
"Oh God, why?" Mr. Hart sank to his knees and collapsed into hysterics, "Why did it have to be her out of hundreds of…OH GOD!"
"I want you to know that I've got some of my best men on this," Stottlemeyer told him, "One of them happened to be here at the time it happened and he's an expert at these things."
"I hope you don't…" Mr. Hart looked up and saw Adrian standing off to the side. His expression immediately hardened. "Not Monk," he told Stottlemeyer firmly, "I don't want him on this."
"Detective Monk is one of the best minds in this city and I think he is well-qualified to…" Stottlemeyer started to say.
"Captain, read my lips: I don't want Monk!" Mr. Hart shouted, "I don't want to see him on this case, or I'll file an injunction against both you and him, got it?"
"Sure, no problem," the captain said numbly.
"Come on, why don't we go get a statement?" Disher took Mr. Hart's hand and led him off. "Well, that went well," Natalie commented, "He's got a serious problem."
"Not really," Adrian said, "Just never really got along with him in school. He and his wife were in the popular group, so you can guess what they thought about me."
He sighed deeply at the thought of past memories. Over in the corner he could a glimpse of Julie balled up and in the middle of hysterics of her own. "Why don't you go talk to her?" Natalie whispered in his ear.
"Me?" Adrian frowned, "I don't….I…I'm not a guidance counselor."
"She trusts you," Natalie flashed him a look that he couldn't refuse. Adrian shrugged his shoulders several times and walked over to the girl. "Hey, it was a nice dance anyway," he blurted out the first thing that popped into his mind.
"I've known her since we were four,' Julie didn't care about how good the dance might have been, "She didn't deserve it to happen to her! I already miss her terribly!"
"I understand, Julie, and all I can say is…all I can say is…" Adrian thought frantically for something, ANYTHING to be able to say in comfort, "…all I can say is…enjoy it now, because the pain only gets worse through time."
Needless to say, this did not make Julie feel any better. She flashed him a painful, teary look that made him shiver and rushed off sobbing even harder. Adrian stood frozen in disappointment. He'd never wanted to see that look from anyone.
"'The pain only gets worse through time,' Mr. Monk?" Natalie was still chiding him about it the next afternoon.
"I told you I'm not a grief counselor," Adrian protested, rearranging the balls on the Teeger family Christmas tree, "And it's true, the pain only gets worse. I know that firsthand." He turned to face her. "And I think you do too."
Natalie grew silent, nodding slowly. Adrian knew he'd made a point. "Is she feeling any better?" he asked her.
"She doesn't want to get out of bed," Natalie shook her head, "They'd been friends for almost a decade."
"I can't blame her," Adrian made some hand measurements with the tree, then began pulling the strands of lights into positions where they were equally distant from each other, "I stayed in bed for three years after I lost Trudy."
"I'm counting on you to solve this one for her," Natalie told him, "She deserves a closure."
"I'd like to, but you heard what Eric said, he doesn't want me on the case," Adrian said, screwing in a loose bulb.
"Forget what he said!" Natalie snapped, "He's an idiot anyway. We don't even have to tell him. You could be behind the scenes."
Before Adrian could respond to this, the doorbell rang. "Oh," he said, a slight smile coming to his face, "I forgot; they were coming in today; we were supposed to get them at the airport."
He left the tree and walked toward the door. This was a moment he'd been waiting for for several months now. He took a deep breath at the door before opening it and saying, "Hello Sharona, how was your flight?"
"Where were you Adrian?" Sharona Fleming growled, "The cabdriver stiffed me for ten dollars I'd still have if you'd shown up on time!"
"We've had a bit of a tragedy lately; hello Sharona," Natalie waved at her. She'd frequently called Sharona over the last several months since their first meeting in Chicago whenever she'd felt lost by Adrian's mannerisms. "Let me take your suitcases there," she said, relieving the nurse of them, "Was your flight in smooth?"
"All except for a stretch over the Rockies," Sharona collapsed onto the sofa, "I'll tell you, all those years I operated on Pacific time, now it's so hard to get used to it again."
"Hey Mr. Monk," Benjy Fleming had filed in after his mother, "Look what I've been doing."
He handed the detective a thick stacked of papers. Adrian looked at the cover, which read OBSESSIVE: THE STORY OF ADRIAN MONK, A SCRIPT BY BENJAMIN FLEMING. "You making a movie of me?" he asked, intrigued.
"One of my friend's dad's a member of the Writer's Guild; he says he'll make a provision for me if I finish it," Benjy told him, "Your life's just made for the movies."
"Interesting," Adrian leafed through it, "At least I know it's in the hands of someone I can trust. What exactly is this about?"
"Your big comeback," Benjy said, "I'm starting it when you were still on the force, and it goes through your big comeback when you worked on the mayor's case."
"He's been working hard at it for three months," Sharona smiled at him, "I think it'll work as well."
"I don't know if I'd say this," Adrian frowned at one particular page of dialogue, "Or this."
"So is she here?" Benjy asked Natalie. He'd become a constant Internet correspondent with Julie since their day and a half of captivity together in Chicago; indeed, Julie had made a point of writing to him with details of every case Adrian had solved.
"Upstairs, but she's not really in a happy mood," Natalie told him, "One of her friends died last night."
"It wasn't pretty at all, trust me on that," Adrian said, squinting at a line of direction in the script, "Who's this guy? I never met anyone with that name."
"Adrian, it's a fictional work," Sharona told him as her son went upstairs, "It's not supposed to be true word for word."
"Oh," Adrian put the script down in the exact center of the kitchen table. "So, I guess he's not traumatized anymore, then?" he asked. He could only imagine the pain Benjy had gone through watching his father shoot his mother right in front of him.
"He's getting better now," Sharona told him, "Now that I'm working at Bellevue, I got the top psychiatrist there to work it over with him. He's starting to come out of it now, but for a while he closed up completely. He was glad to come back here, though. There's no bad memories out here for him."
"And it's good to have him back her for Christmas vacation, even for only two weeks," Adrian couldn't help smiling himself.
The phone rang. Natalie picked it up. "Hello? Oh, OK. The lieutenant," she whispered to the two of them, "So that's what it was? I see. You sure? OK, we'll be waiting on the porch."
She hung up. "They've identified the poison that killed Clarissa," she told Adrian, "You were right, warfarin was in it. So was rat poison, paint thinner, and—get this—a byproduct of toxic nuclear waste."
"Nuclear waste?" Adrian frowned, "Then why weren't we all killed?"
The lieutenant says the radioactive properties were taken out before it was added to the punch," Natalie explained, "Whoever put it in there was an expert chemist."
"What's this all about?" Sharona interceded.
"Last night we witnessed a tragic death," Adrian told her. He related the full events of the previous evening to her, closing with, "I kind of don't have a choice but to help solve it, or Natalie'll kill me."
"I didn't say I'd kill you," Natalie said, but she had a glint in her expression that hinted she might, "Anyway, he and the captain are coming by in ten minutes. The only place with nuclear waste around here is the Howard Nuclear Power Plant in San Jose, so we're going to check it out to see if any of their waste happens to be missing."
"Nuclear power plant," Adrian frowned, "With toxic waste? We're going to need more than ten minutes; I've got to go back to my apartment and prepare."
"Prepare? Prepare for what?"
"I can't just go into a toxic waste plant unprotected," the detective protested.
"I'll take him," Sharona rolled her eyes, "We'll never get there if we don't. Give me your car keys."
Natalie tossed them to her. "Come on Adrian," the nurse gestured toward the door, "I can't believe it; I'm here only ten minutes and already I'm babying you again!"
"Feels good doesn't it, reliving old times," Adrian told her. He for one was going to enjoy Christmas vacation this year.