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through thirteen thousand feet of porous lava.”
    “Only thirty days pass between when that water drops from the sky, falling through thick layers of airborne pollutants, and when it’s bottled,” he said. “I don’t want to drink smog, airplane exhaust, and bird gas.”
    “Bird gas?”
    “Birds have disgusting dietary habits,” he said. “They’ll eat anything.”
    I set the bottle aside and picked up another one.
    “How about Crystal Geyser? The water comes from springs at Mount Shasta in California, the Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee, and the Blue Ridge Mountains in South Carolina. You get the best water from across the entire nation in one bottle.”
    “You want me to drink mixed water? What are you thinking? That’s like drinking mixed nuts.”
    He was right. I should have known better than to suggest that one to him, not that his reasoning made any sense.
    I picked up the last bottle.
    “You can’t go wrong with Evian. It is gourmet water derived from rain and melting snow on the highest, most pristine peaks of the majestic French Alps.” I was laying it on thick but I wanted to make the sale. I was the Billy Mays of bottled water. “It takes fifteen years for the water to filter through deep aquifers of glacial sand before it’s bottled.”
    “Fifteen years? Don’t make me laugh.” Monk picked up a bottle of Summit Creek. “This is pristine water from the Ice Age, before the dawn of man. There’s simply no comparison.”
    He’d shot down all four brands. But I wasn’t discouraged. That was just round one and the game was rigged in my favor. There were a lot of bottled waters out there and I knew that Monk would have to pick one of them eventually.
    He licked his lips and let out a dry, wheezy cough. All of this talking about water had obviously made him thirsty. He took his bottle to the kitchen, found a teaspoon, and carefully poured some water into it.
    Monk slowly sipped the teaspoon of water, his eyes closed, savoring the taste of prehistoric Earth.
    “What’s our next move on the case?” I asked.
    “What case?” he said, opening his eyes and licking the spoon.
    “The murder of Mike Clasker.”
    “Who?”
    “The man who was strangled with piano wire in a locked car in a busy intersection on Van Ness Boulevard in broad daylight right in front of Captain Stottlemeyer and Lieutenant Disher.”
    “Did they see who did it?”
    “No, they didn’t,” I said, practically screaming at him by this point. “Didn’t you listen to anything you were told at the crime scene?”
    “Bits and pieces,” he said. “I can’t concentrate when I’m dehydrated.”
    “You had a drink of water ninety minutes before we went to the crime scene.”
    “It was a long, brutal walk in the blazing sun from the grocery store to that intersection.”
    “It was a few blocks,” I said. “It was hardly the Bataan Death March.”
    “I dry out quickly.”
    “Captain Stottlemeyer is counting on you, Mr. Monk. You need to focus on this case.”
    “I’ll get right on it,” he said. “After we burn my clothes.”

CHAPTER FIVE
    Mr. Monk and the Perfect Balance
    M y daughter, Julie, was curled up on the living room couch, texting on her iPhone, when I came into the house lugging a large plastic trash bag.
    Julie was taller than me, more of a woman than a little girl now, and that troubled me. Only when she smiled did I see the child in her again. But the smiles weren’t as frequent as they used to be.
    She was at that sullen, moody, hormonal stage of teenage life when everything I did was irrational, unfair, capricious, outrageous, dictatorial, immoral, unethical, and inconvenient. She had so many adjectives to describe how wrong I was about everything that I wondered if she consulted a thesaurus before our arguments. Then again, that would have required her to crack open a book, which I rarely saw her do anymore. Most of the time, she was at her computer, communicating with her friends or surfing