Howard Gordo, portrayed by Scott Adsit, was a forensics scientist for the San Francisco Police Department. In 2003, he showed Captain Stottlemeyer and Adrian Monk a dismembered torso that had washed up on the shores of San Francisco Bay (which was later identified as belonging to Larisa Zariyeva). While he was engaged in a scrutiny of the corpse, he failed to notice Monk obsessively cleaning crumbs off a computer keyboard, until it was too late to stop him from deleting years of forensic records.