“Was it the cleaning lady, the pool man, their son with the online gambling problem, her sneaky ex-husband, his bitter ex-wife, or the contractor who was building their home theater?”

“It was none of them,” Monk said.

I didn’t know any of the facts of the case but I didn’t need to. I was more interested in Danielle’s reaction to her first experience with Monk’s process, which has less to do with deduction and more to do with noticing the mess.

“Who else is left?” she asked.

“The dog trainer.”

“But the trainer worked with the dog in the backyard,” Danielle said. “He didn’t have any access to the house.”

“The dog did,” Monk said. “The trainer taught the dog to steal the diamonds and bury them in the backyard.”

“The dog?” she said incredulously.

“That explains why there was dirt in the house,” he said. “The dirt really bothered me.”

“That’s a surprise,” I said.

“I don’t remember seeing any dirt,” Danielle said.

“There were some grains,” he said.

“Grains?” she said.

“Mr. Monk can detect dirt that isn’t visible to the naked eye,” I said. “Or even the most powerful electron microscopes.”

“The trainer plans to retrieve the diamonds the next time he works with the dog,” Monk said, and checked his watch. “Which is in two hours.”

“Incredible,” she said, reaching for her phone. “I need to call Nick so we can catch the trainer in the act.”

“While you’re at it, you should tell Mr. Slade that the insurance company is right: The tennis pro is faking his arm injury,” Monk said, sliding her another file. “His sling is on his right arm.”

“That’s because that’s the arm he injured when he tripped over the crack in the country club’s parking lot,” she said. “He can’t bend or extend it. His doctors say his arm is locked at a ninety-degree angle.”

“And yet in the surveillance photos, you can clearly see his keys are in his right pocket,” Monk said. “How does he get them out if he can’t straighten his arm?”

She opened the file and squinted at the picture. We both did. If I had a bionic eye, I might have seen the keys, too.

“How could we have missed that?” she asked.

“You’ll find yourself asking that question a lot around Mr. Monk,” I said. “But there’s another question you’ll be asking even more often…”

Monk picked up another file. “And you can tell Mr. Slade that the spy at Joha Helicopters who is selling trade secrets to the competition is Ulrich Sommerlik, the disabled engineer.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“That’s the one,” I said to her. “I’m thinking of putting the question on a little sign that we can just hold up.”

Monk opened the file and held up a photograph of a slender man in a cardigan sweater sitting in a manual wheelchair.

“He claims that he’s been in a wheelchair since a cop ter accident four years ago. But in this picture taken for his photo ID when he was hired six months ago, he has blisters on his hands. If he’d been pushing himself in his wheelchair all that time, he’d have calluses by now.”

We both squinted at that photo, too. I couldn’t see the blisters, but I knew that when it comes to open sores, Monk has an eagle eye.

“My guess is that he’s using secret compartments in the wheelchair to smuggle out drawings, disks, and anything else he can get his blistered hands on,” Monk said, putting the photo back into the file.

“I’ll call the security chief at Joha Helicopters and have Sommerlik detained and his wheelchair seized,” she said. “We’ll take it apart.”

“Notify them that the entire facility needs to be evacuated and decontaminated,” Monk said.

“Why?”

“Because Sommerlik’s hands are blistered,” Monk said. “God knows what else he’s touched. The whole place is probably dripping with his bodily fluids.”

Danielle stared at him, not quite sure what to say. I couldn’t blame her. I probably looked the same way the first few days I’d worked with Monk.

“You are amazing, Mr. Monk,” she said. “You catch details that nobody else sees. You’ll have to teach me how you do that.”

“It’s a gift,” Monk said. “And a curse.”

“I’ll take my chances,” she said with a smile, flirting ever so slightly. It was cute and probably calculated to be. The flirtation was wasted on him but not the flattery.

He gave her the file and she added it to the stack in her arms. She took the files and went off to call Slade. Monk turned to me.

“I think we’re going to be very happy at Intertect,” he said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Julie nearly fainted when I showed up at home that night with the new Lexus. The first thing she wanted to do was drive it. I let her drive all over San Francisco with the windows rolled up, because we didn’t want to lose one precious whiff of that new-car smell.

She also insisted that we cruise up and down Twenty-fourth Street, the main drag of our Noe Valley neighborhood, for an hour on the off chance that one of her friends might see us.

It was the first car we’d ever had that she wasn’t ashamed to be seen in, so she wanted to be seen. I did, too. I was hoping word would get around that we had a Lexus and that it might delay any plans to drive us out of the neighborhood with torches.

“Please don’t ever lose this job,” Julie said as she steered us on our twelfth pass down the street.

“Now that we have two cars, you can have the Buick all to yourself.”

She looked at me in horror. “Why don’t you drive the Buick and let me drive this?”

“Because this is the company car,” I said. “Technically, you shouldn’t be driving it now, but I am in a charitable mood.”

“I would rather walk to school than arrive there in a Buick,” she said. “I might as well show up wearing Grandma’s housedress and clutching a colostomy bag.”

“Grandma doesn’t have a colostomy bag,” I said.

“You’re missing the point,” she said.

“I’m just teasing you,” I said. “I totally understand your embarrassment. I’m not thrilled about driving the Buick either. It’s not a car that makes men take a second look at you.”

“Unless you’re driving up to a retirement home,” she said.

“I’ll drop you off at school in the Lexus,” I said. “We can keep the Buick for emergencies.”

“Like what?”

I shrugged. “Grandma might want to borrow it to impress a man on a date.”

“She’s got a BMW,” Julie said.

“I’m thinking of a man her own age,” I said.

“You may be but she’s not.”

I was afraid to ask Julie exactly what she meant by that, or what she knew about Grandma’s love life, so I didn’t.

Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

The rolling cabinet was nearly empty of files and Monk’s dining room table was covered with photos when I walked in the next morning.

He was studying the photographs very carefully, moving methodically from one to another.

I glanced at the pictures. I saw a dead man sitting in a leather easy chair in his home study. There was a knife buried to the hilt in his chest. He looked to be in his forties and well-off, judging by his monogrammed shirt and the wood paneled study where he’d been killed.

“You’ve gone through just about all the cases that Danielle brought you,” I said.

“This is the last one,” he said.

“You must have gotten an early start this morning.”

“I didn’t stop,” Monk said, cocking his head from side to side as he examined the pictures.

“You stayed up all night?”

“I had a lot of work to do,” he said.

“But you didn’t have a deadline,” I said. “There was no reason you had to do an all-nighter.”

“I tried to go to bed,” Monk said. “But I could feel all those unsolved cases out there. I couldn’t leave them like that.”