Mercy

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Monk hated surveillance. He stood in the shadows of a weeping willow watching Dr. Renard's house, waiting to make certain

she had gone to bed so he could return to his motel room and catch a few hours' sleep. He would have to listen to all the taped telephone calls first, of course. He rubbed his thigh as though to console himself because he'd torn his best pair of khakis

climbing the telephone pole when he'd placed the tap.

While he stood there, hour upon hour, waiting and watching, he thought about past assignments. He liked to go over each minute detail. He wasn't being ghoulish, and he certainly wasn't getting any perverse pleasure thinking about his victims. No, his goal

was to review his performance and then analyze it. What mistakes had he made? What could he do to improve himself?

He'd learned something from each job he'd taken. The wife in Biloxi kept a loaded gun under her pillow. If her husband knew about it, he'd failed to mention it to Monk. He had almost gotten his head blown off, but fortunately he'd been able to wrestle

the gun away from her. Then he'd used it to kill her instead of wasting valuable seconds trying to suffocate her. Expect the unexpected. That was the first lesson.

And then there was the teenager in Metairie. Monk's performance that night had been less than perfect, and looking back, he realized he had been lucky that no one had walked in on him. He'd stayed much too long. He should have left the second the

job was finished, but he watched a movie on television instead. What made that all the more remarkable was the fact that Monk

never watched television. He felt he was far too intelligent to stare at the trash the networks put out to numb the already numb minds of beer-guzzling couch potatoes.

This movie had been different. And vastly amusing. The film had just begun playing when he'd broken into the victim's bedroom. He still remembered every detail from that night. The pink-and-white-striped wallpaper with the tiny pink rosebuds, the assortment of stuffed animals on the client's bed, the pink frilly curtains. She had been the youngest client he had ever taken on, but that fact hadn't bothered him much at all. A job, after all, was simply that. A job. All he cared about was getting it done and getting it done right.

The music from the video, he recalled, had been blaring. The client had been awake, half-stoned on a joint she'd just smoked.

The air smelled sweet, heavy. She was dressed in a short blue T-shirt, her back against pillows and the headboard of the pink canopy bed, a super-sized bag of Doritos in her lap. She mindlessly stared at the screen, unaware of his presence. He'd murdered the teenage girl with the acne-ravaged face and the oily brown hair as a special favor-and for twenty-five thousand-so that good old Dad could collect on a three-hundred-thousand-dollar policy he'd taken out on his only child six months before. The policy had a double indemnity clause, which meant that if the cause of death was proven to be accidental, Dad would receive double the face value. Monk had gone to great lengths to make the murder look accidental so that he would receive double his fee. The father had been most appreciative of his work, of course, and although it hadn't been necessary to explain why he wanted his daughter murdered-the money was all Monk was interested in-he confessed that he was desperate to get the loan sharks off his back and was only doing what he had to do.

Ah, fatherly love. Nothing like it in the world.

While he was killing her, he listened to the dialogue from the movie, and within a minute or two, he was captivated. He shoved

the deceased's feet out of his way, sat down on the foot of the bed, and watched the movie until the last credits came on, all the while munching on Doritos.

He had just stood up to leave when he heard the garage door opening. He'd gotten away in the nick of time, but now, thinking about the foolish risk he'd taken, he realized how fortunate he'd been. What lesson had he learned from that experience? Get in and get out as quickly as possible.

Monk believed he'd vastly improved since those early murders. He'd dispatched Catherine without any problems at all.

He glanced up at the doctor's bedroom window again. She was staying up much later than he'd expected, but then, she was entertaining a man. When Monk had followed her to The Swan, he'd spotted the man in the crowd of loud, crass teenagers.

He'd only gotten a brief look at his face and shoulders. The adolescents completely surrounded him as they shouted to get his attention. They were calling him Coach.

Expect the unexpected. He'd called Dallas, read the license plate number on the rental car, and asked for a thorough background check.

The light finally went out in her bedroom. Monk waited another half hour to make certain she had gone to bed before he quietly made his way down the side of the gravel road to where he'd hidden his vehicle. He drove back to the motel in St. Claire, listened to the tape he had made of her phone calls, disappointed there was nothing significant there, set his alarm clock, and finally went to bed.