THIRTY-FIVE

Now Sung Kim was puzzled.

Monk had been in the FBI field office for two hours, then come out and driven his Saab like an Indy racer toward the Key Bridge. It had taken every bit of her skill to stay with him, all the way to a grungy-looking warehouse near the foot of the bridge. He’d gone inside for less than an hour, then come back out and driven just as recklessly back to the field office.

What the hell was he up to?

She’d managed to jam her Volvo station wagon into an illegal parking space across the street from the down ramp into the WFO garage, but she didn’t know how long she could hold on to it. She sat with one eye out for a cop, one eye on the ramp, and tried to relax. Monk was simply doing his job, she told herself. Just another day at the office. But despite her efforts to believe it, Sung Kim couldn’t help the feeling that she might just as easily be wrong.

Monk made it back to WFO well before five, and was standing near the charge-out slips on the long chest-high wooden counter in Betty Clement’s office on the third floor. It was a large office, although most of it—the room containing the thousands of pending and closed informant files—was hidden from view behind the locked door beyond her desk. Betty was sitting at that desk, her back to him. Her computer screen was blank, Monk saw. She was working with a number of hard-copy files, two sizable stacks sitting on the desktop next to her computer.

Monk moved a few feet to his left along the counter, then set his red and white Igloo cooler on the counter as close to her keyboard as he could manage. He adjusted the cooler’s position slightly, then moved away from it. He coughed discreetly and Betty Clement turned around.

“Yes, Mr. Monk.” She glanced at the Igloo. “That thing yours?”

He nodded.

“Make sure you take it with you when you leave. I’ve got enough bugs around here as it is.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t forget.” She could bet every cent she had on that.

“What can I get you?” Betty asked.

“I’m trying to get my 137’s ready for a file review next week. Can you check the computer to see when I last posted 137-1527?” Informant files had to be “posted”—information sent to them—at least once every thirty days.

Betty swung to her keyboard and her fingers began to fly.

Monk turned away, turned completely around until he was looking back into the corridor outside her office. He could hear the rattle of the keys as she typed, then a few moments later the sound of her voice.

“You posted to that file on August third,” she told him. “You’re okay for another couple of weeks.”

Monk pretended not to hear, as he stood picking lint from his red golf shirt.

“Mr. Monk,” Betty repeated, louder this time. “Did you hear me?”

He turned to her. “Sorry, I was daydreaming. Did you say I was current on that file?”

“I did. Is there anything else while I’m in the system?”

“That’ll do, thanks.” He turned to leave, but hadn’t made it to the door before she stopped him.

“Hey!” she said. “Wait a minute.”

He looked at her.

She pointed at the cooler. “You forgot your food.” She shook her head. “FBI agents. I don’t know how you find your way to work.”

He was back at the SOG by six o’clock. Now there was no longer any hurry. He couldn’t go back to Betty’s office until later, much later, and he could take his time downloading the video from the camera in the Igloo.

Monk parked the Saab in an empty space in the big garage, between a black and chrome Harley-Davidson and a light blue Ford pickup truck, then made his way through the other vehicles until he arrived at the equipment room at the rear of the building. Pushing through the door, he moved to an empty table near the television gear stacked on metal shelving against the back wall. He set the Igloo on the table, opened it, and pulled the miniature digital camcorder out of the cooler, then removed the microcassette and turned to an array of playback machines on a separate table. He inserted the cassette into one of them and watched the seventeen-inch monitor to see what he’d come up with.

The fish-eye lens in the tiny video camera had done its job beautifully. There was a second or two of white noise—static—at the beginning of the tape, then a slightly walleyed look at Betty Clement, a view just enough off to her left side that her fingers were clearly evident as they flashed over the keyboard.

He waited until he could see the yellow letters on her monitor that asked for Betty’s password, then reached for a switch on the playback machine to reduce the speed to super slow motion. Betty’s fingers were barely moving now. Monk twisted another knob and the picture came into sharper focus. He took a pad of paper, ready to copy. He ignored the string of asterisks that appeared on the screen, watching instead her fingers as they touched the keys.

“S” was the first of the keys she struck, then, “K-I-N-S,” before her fingers stopped moving.

SKINS.

Jesus, Monk thought. He’d known Betty Clement for at least ten years. Who’d have thought she was a football fan?