Captain Leland Stottlemeyer was a little uneasy about some of the skills he was developing lately.
When he had first joined the force, new things to learn had come thick and fast. Later, things fell into a routine, and it wasn't until he was placed into the Homicide division when he found himself learning at a furious pace again, recognizing the common patterns of the cases he saw each day, learning what to look for, and what those clues meant, and where to go next.
Things fell back into routine after that for years (except for a real fiasco shortly after one Randall Disher joined the division). And then there was some shuffling in the department, and Stottlemeyer was assigned to be partners with Detective Adrian Monk.
Stottlemeyer's world turned upside down. He thought he knew detective work, the patterns, the clues, the usual suspects and the ones that were harder to guess. Monk changed that for him. His eye was drawn to things he would never have looked at before. He never reached the Monk caliber of noticing details and inconsistencies, but he did develop a much better eye for things that were a little off.
And then when Trudy was killed and Monk was given a psychological discharge, it affected the entire division. At first, Stottlemeyer, now newly appointed as Captain, figured that it was the emotional shockwave that caused a sort of slowness. Some of his officers missed obvious clues. Others took weeks on cases that could have been wrapped in days. And in the months following the incident, the Captain could hardly blame them. Half of the San Francisco police had been involved in the Trudy case, and it had horrified everybody, first when it happened and then when nobody was able to find out who did it.
Things got better as time passed, but it was a year before the captain could admit to himself that Monk was so good that his absence affected every officer he had previously interacted with. It wasn't that Monk was assigned to every case, but if somebody came across some weird circumstances, they ran it by Monk and Monk would think about it and give them a few possible interpretations of the situation. If somebody had some odd pieces of evidence and Monk was around, they would grab him to come look at it. Occasionally, somebody would get really stumped and just hand the case over to Monk.
But Monk was gone, decided Stottlemeyer, a year after Trudy's death. It was time for the force to move on, even if Monk couldn't. Stottlemeyer's lieutenant had just moved over to the forensics department, so his first move to wake the place up would be to promote Randy Disher.
Stottlemeyer couldn't quite believe it, but the kid who had caused a major incident and nearly gotten fired years before had grown into a highly competent officer. Stottlemeyer had seen that Disher was excellent at following orders, but could step up and take charge when needed. He clearly cared about people, and was often seen sitting by a frightened, injured victim or bystander while everybody else asked gruff questions then rushed for the evidence. Most importantly, Disher still had energy. The unsolved mystery of Trudy and Monk's reaction had seemed to make Randy take his work more seriously, and he brought persistence and vigor into the department when it felt like everybody else wanted to give up and take a nap.
Even though a few of his superiors cursed aloud when Stottlemeyer told them his choice of Lieutenant, he stood by his decision. Sure, Disher was going to need a little babysitting now and then, but Monk did, too. It was worth it, bringing life back to the division.
That was the next period of learning for Stottlemeyer. He and his new Lieutenant worked hard at building a highly competent force, and encouraging the confidence and morale that came along with that competence. A small handful of officers left the division, and a few even the profession, the first few years after Trudy's death, and Stottlemeyer was frustrated and saddened by this as it was happening, but looking back later, he felt a surge of pride at just how few people left.
Stottlemeyer really learned to be a leader during that time, even though he had been captain for years at that point.
He remembered learning to just let Randy make rambly announcements in the bullpen and then impulsively declare he was going to go buy everybody coffee. He learned the way to talk to each of his officers, how to sandwich criticisms in praises for some and to speak more plainly with others. Stottlemeyer learned when to speak and when to shut up, and more importantly, when to let Randy speak and when to tell him to shut up. He learned how to hire somebody who would fit into his division like a puzzle piece.
But a different lost piece nagged at him. It was getting close to three years now, and Monk was still not doing well at all. Stottlemeyer had screwed up the courage to visit him the other week, and all Monk had done was sit there, on the couch. No talking. No eye contact. Only a flinch, when his nurse yelled at Stottlemeyer because Monk didn't eat well if he had a visitor.
And then, a few days later, Stottlemeyer was at his wife's cousin's house for some reason he could never remember later, and struck up a conversation with the neighbor, a head nurse for a psych ward. Of course, he told her about Monk. And she smiled and told him about somebody who sounded to him a lot like another piece of the puzzle that was Monk.
It took a lot of work for Stottlemeyer to get Miss Sharona Fleming situated in the position. He wasn't one of Monk's guardians, after all, so he had to pull strings and argue with Dr. Kroger a few times before anything even began to happen. But finally, everything was in place, and the captain felt that he could forget about Monk for a while. Leland had done his due diligence as a friend and gotten a good person to help the man out. He didn't need any more of that sadness in his life at the moment, not when everything else was falling apart.
Leland and Karen were going through quite the rough patch, for one thing. For another, in spite of the sharp increase in his division's performance, the police commissioner was putting pressure on them for even more. There had been a few major problems in Oakland recently, and the city government of San Francisco was trying to separate themselves from that government's errors in the eyes of the media and the people. The captain was getting in near daily arguments with one of his superiors or another when Monk made a reappearance, at last.
Stottlemeyer didn't even hear from Monk, he just heard from the office of the Mayor after the campaign incident in the financial district. And suddenly, Monk was back, consulting for the division, but it wasn't the same Monk. The great detective was now rearranging Stottlemeyer's desk, wiping down any available surface, and pulling pushpins out of their precise places on a map. It wasn't just quirky anymore, it was obnoxious and counterproductive.
It had been a lot of work for Stottlemeyer to build his division into something that was excellent, efficient, and functioned without Monk. And now he had done it, and what was his reward? His superiors had pushed Monk back to work anyway, insisting what the Captain had done wasn't good enough for the really hard cases. Monk wasn't ready to be back, anybody could see that.
It was hard for the Captain to see that this was his friend, doing something that he loved for the first time in years. Instead, the first few times Monk showed up on a scene, the Captain just saw him as a big, annoying sign that said "Your work isn't good enough."
But slowly, things got better for Leland Stottlemeyer. After the quick resolution of a few big cases (some with the help of Monk, others without) the police commissioner decided to go bother some other division. Karen and Leland got back onto good terms. And Stottlemeyer started to see his friend, the great detective, behind the annoying man who showed up when one of the city bigwigs thought the captain was in over his head.
Stottlemeyer started calling Monk on his own when cases got weird. That began another period of learning for him, but this time he was developing the skill that made him really uneasy: the ability to know which cases Monk would be needed.
He didn't want to admit it to himself at first. It was good, he told himself, to get things solved quickly and cleanly, without fuss or anybody making a fool of themselves. His team could solve these cases, but not without Disher sharing a half-baked theory with the deputy commissioner, or Officer Lane showing up really late to a meeting with another department, or some other craziness. Monk made his department look polished and professional, partly because things got done quickly when he was around, and partly because everybody in the division looked very sane compared to him. At least that's what the Captain decided.
He told himself that lie for a long time. Then, Sharona quit, and Monk disappeared from the division for a few months.
At first it seemed like Stottlemeyer was right. Without Monk, everything worked fine, although things were a little slower and everybody's weirdness showed up more. But that was before there was a pair of break-ins at a house belonging to a Mrs. Natalie Teeger.
Stottlemeyer watched as the fish swam around in the tank. That fish didn't know that there had been two break-ins in that house in the past week, or that Stottlemeyer's idea of how his department worked was falling apart.
The part of Stottlemeyer that was a proud captain of an excellent division protested loudly, but the part of Stottlemeyer that was Monk's friend, and the part of Stottlemeyer that was a good policeman and a good leader, and the part of Stottlemeyer that just wanted to see this woman and her daughter safe all took him over.
He didn't want to admit that his department needed help on some cases, and that he had learned to tell, at a glance, when to call Monk to get that help. But he swallowed his pride, and told Mrs. Teeger that there was a guy. He might be hard to get ahold of, but he was the man for this case. He scribbled down Adrian's address on a scrap of paper and hoped, for the sake of Natalie, Adrian, himself, the division, and the city of San Francisco that Monk would return. Defective detective that Monk might be, he was needed by everyone.