Mr. Monk Is Open for Business by Hy Conrad Read Free Book Online Page A

confusion and carnage.
    We were in radio silence for what seemed like forever. Everyone was staring at the three-story building, listening for shots. The door to the roof opened and two SWAT members emerged, scanning for an escape route that hadn’t been used.
    “Two more down,” came the next voice from inside. “Both dead.”
    “What about the shooter?” Captain Stottlemeyer and the SWAT team commander said it almost in unison.
    “No shooter. Send in the EMTs. Our survivor looks critical.”
    “No,” the SWAT commander barked back. “Stay locked down. Do another sweep.”
    “Did it twice. He’s not here.”
    “How can he not be there?” Stottlemeyer shouted. “We saw him.”
    “He must have gotten through.” A little angrier this time. “We know what we’re doing. He’s gone.”
    “Keep locked down,” the commander ordered. “We’ll send in an evac team for the survivor.”
    Stottlemeyer kept staring at the radio on his vest, then finally clicked it off. “This isn’t good.”
    “Of course it’s not good,” I said. “How could he have escaped?”
    “No, I mean, it’s really not good. Devlin was in charge of site access. She’s not SWAT trained.”
    “Are you saying she let the shooter slip through?” I shook my head. “Amy wouldn’t make a mistake like that.”
    “It doesn’t matter,” said Monk. “When something like this happens, they always look at procedure. Anything out of place, that’s what gets the blame.” He was right. Sometimes I forget that he’d been a cop and knows how the system works. “Devlin will be getting the blame.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Mr. Monk on the Rebound
    L ess than an hour later, the four of us were at work in the building.
    At first glance, the lower two floors of East Decorative Imports were a funhouse of eerie delights. Or perhaps a nightmare. That was what it must have been for Sarabeth Willow, when the lights were off and the place was encased in shadows while a fellow employee, out of his mind with homicidal rage, stalked her through the warehouse.
    Buddhas of all shapes and sizes congregated in groups, like gently smiling juries. Multi-limbed gods from India danced in place, entertaining the rows of fat, elephant-headed boys. Wooden crates, still unopened from their long voyages, stood guarding the corners. The more valuable items—at least I supposed they were—sat inside locked cages: jewel-encrusted daggers, golden masks, and more Buddhas. Hundreds of them. Everyone seems to love a good Buddha.
    “It would be easy to miss something in this mess,” Monk observed. It was a little hard to understand him, possibly due to the gas mask he’d borrowed from the hazmat van theSWAT team had brought along. To protect from dust, you know. Asian dust, which carried all sorts of exotic, incurable diseases, at least in his mind.
    “We kept the place locked down,” said Lieutenant Devlin, “until the whole building was searched. Except for the survivor and the EMTs, of course.” She shook her head in disgust. “How’d I let myself get into this?”
    Monk was tilting his head from side to side. The warehouse was giving him plenty to frame. Then slowly he followed some invisible trail, invisible to normal humans, and wound up in a cubbyhole made from two crates and a massive teak chandelier, set in a loose triangle. “This is where she hid from him,” he said. “Where they found her.” With the gas mask on, he sounded like an adenoidal Darth Vader.
    “That’s right,” Devlin said in a surprisingly cooperative tone. Her usual reaction to my partner was to be caustic and impatient. She generally saw him as the captain’s human, dysfunctional cheat sheet, a way for him to close cases that she herself could solve, given some more time and manpower. But in this particular case, with her professional reputation on the line, she was playing nice. Monk didn’t seem to notice the difference.
    He spent a minute framing Sarabeth’s hidey-hole—the