Murder with Lens: A Sherlock Holmes Case (221B Baker Street Series) (6 page)

“This may be her source. It may not. I’d say yes. He’s an American exchange student from a relatively wealthy, politically conservative family, particularly inclined toward physics, politics, and law, but his strong nonconformist tendencies have trained him to be secretive. He hasn’t got tattoos. They aren’t subtle enough. All outward signs must remain nailed down. That dissonance increases the thrill for him when he takes risks. He’s an adrenaline junky; smokes weed to slow down – small traces left in both pockets, so it’s a habit; and a gold chain with diamond solitaire, good chance he’s gay. She wouldn’t have called me here if she knew him on sight, but she doesn’t know, because she’s only ever seen his picture and interacted with him remotely over secure channels. And here we are. Coat. Where’s his coat?” Sherlock rose to his feet and walked around the blood soaking into concrete. He scanned the room with the Maglite. Anderson winced in the doorway as the light passed over him. Sherlock’s eyes swept the room and came to rest on Reese. Her head rose a little. He said, “Yes. I know.”

“I want them dusted.” Reese said. She held up a bulb by the metal contact.

“Anderson is many things, but he’s not a bad hand with evidence collection.” Sherlock indicated the hawk-nosed man leaning in the doorway again, and noted Anderson’s attention was reserved for Reese. Holmes turned around again, his voice quiet enough that only John heard it. “Nor is he subtle.”

Reese climbed down and crossed to Holmes. “I can’t say for sure if that’s Lawrence Waters, or not. This sucks. But I can tell you this is a warning for the CIA teams looking into these people. I wonder if this is how I’d look now, if they could manage it. It’s why I don’t get to leave Langley, much.”

Sherlock backed up and opened his arms. “So how many people in the room?”

“It looks like there were initially at least twelve people, at least four of whom were women; three are smokers. Lots of genetic material scattered across the cups left sitting around. Mix of coffee, wine, tea, and soft drinks, so we’re talking a wide range of tastes and possible ages.” Reese nodded her head. “But don’t be fooled. These cups and cigarette butts you’re seeing are dead ends. They plant all sorts of evidence. This stuff will lead off in every direction, some of it promising; some of it will go off to totally unrelated crimes; some of it is just trash; all of it bogus. None of what we’re seeing here is real. Except the body. And the lights. The red lights.” She looked at John, “The rods of the eye are not sensitive to red. The rhodopsin that gives you night vision, you know, it’s exhausted much more slowly on long red wavelengths, and once it’s spent it will take about 30 minutes to regenerate.”

Sherlock walked the room, scrutinizing it. “Did you see the shop times on the front door?” He stopped by the chair Reese had been on, and picked up the coat hung over the back. He snuffed it, though how he might smell anything in the stench was hard to imagine. John watched Holmes rifle the pockets and study the ceiling and walls. He seemed to be searching for something specific there. Reese crossed her arms.

Faint smell of weed.

Blood and hair on table edge.

Head impacted with table.

Slight drag marks in carpet.

Victim dragged head first.

“This store is open until 8PM on Fridays.” Reese said. “So this club was gathering down here without store knowledge.”

John drifted up to stand beside Reese, watching Sherlock hunt through the room.

“They came in under cover of darkness.” Sherlock made a quick span of his hands in air as if measuring something that appeared inside his mind. He gestured at the door. “Your man came in first. This was routine, so the coat came off, and he was relaxed. He’d done the homework, knew his percentages, plus, he’s comfortable with risk. He framed the scene, put up the flier on the door, planted the cups and smokes, other false evidence. He’s their roadie.” The back of one hand clapped into the palm of the other, “He sets the stage. That was your mole’s job.”

Reese followed this with, “His fingerprints will be on the bulbs. He might have worn gloves to change them, but there was the handling he did before coming here. He would have changed the white lights out with these red and reversed them after. It’s his night vision that took the pounding when he did that.”

“No night vision in a dimly lit room.” Sherlock opened his arms.

Reese nodded her ducked head, “Equals good night, Gracie. And that makes that dead man Lawrence, particularly if we can pull anything we can match to the CIA database off the bulb.” She cupped a hand over her nose and mouth. “God, the smell….”

“Meaning your initial assessment was right, and he’d gone dark for a good reason.” Sherlock saw John’s lips tighten into a line. “Uh… bad reason; for a reason. Let’s get air. You’re blacking out.”

“What?” John said abruptly. But he didn’t need any further explanation when Reese began to buckle toward the floor.

John caught her on one side, and Lestrade rushed in to get her on the other. Reese struggled to get her legs locked under her, and bent at the waist. She was slim. It would take nothing to lift her.

Sherlock turned toward the door with an exclamation. “Oh this is capital! Get in here and dust for prints Anderson.” He threw his hands out, excitedly, “The night’s looking up!”

On his way out, Sherlock momentarily shut them all in nearly blinding darkness so that he could snatch the flier from the back of the door.

***

“I don’t understand the need for this,” Special Agent Young pushed a lock of white blonde hair off of her face and warmed her hands on a cup of coffee.

“Freak doesn’t eat when he’s on a case,” Donovan sighed. They had the table beside the door of the soup and sandwich shop in which the team sat. “We’re doing this for John. And John’s a nice guy.”

Young’s grey-blue eyes narrowed as she looked at Lestrade. “You run it differently over here. It’s very… unstructured. I mean, are you sure you’re getting everything you can out of him with your method? If you… have a method?”

“It’s the question and answer method. Sherlock isn’t one for holding back,” Lestrade had to look back over his shoulder to take the American team in. This was because he was facing John, Sherlock, and Reese at the table in the back corner, and because he didn’t approve of the CIA’s methods. “And then again, Sherlock hasn’t sliced up his wrists, so I count myself pretty effective.”

“Hm.” Young glanced back from Lewis and Scott who stood outside. “How’d he get shot?”

Donovan snickered, “Not everyone’s a fan.”

In the back, at the table directly under the vent expelling warm air into the room, Sherlock sipped tea and watched John polish off his hearty vegetable soup and black forest ham. Beside him, Reese stared at nothing. Her face was blank, but at least she was warm again.

“I knew him,” she swallowed hard and then looked down at her latte. “That’s what’s gotten into me. I knew him for months.”

“It will pass,” Sherlock said calmly. He turned from John to study her.

“Yeah. Okay. Why don’t you just ask?” she cocked her head.

Curiosity.

Holmes sipped his tea and looked at the wall clock. But he said nothing. John looked from genius to genius with a certain amount of pity for them.

“There are eight of us in Langley,” she told Holmes without being prompted. “There’s me and two other girls. The rest are guys.”

“All adolescents?”

She looked up at him. “I’m 19.”

“Girls, guys,” Sherlock’s hand made a lazy little reel in air. “Not women, men.” Sherlock looked out of the misted glass, and there was no way to read his expression, really.

“True,” she said over the steaming rim of her coffee cup. “Only suits and apes call me Reese. All the other specialists call me Ree. You’re one of us.”

“Ree,” Sherlock said. “You call yourselves ‘specialists’.”

“It’s better than Asset. So… when did you start?” she picked emptily at the scone before her and asked Holmes.

“I was young.”

She nodded and accepted that he wasn’t going to share a figure with her. “There’s no MI6 program around here for developing children of outstanding IQs into-”

“No.” Sherlock shook his head. He glanced down at the scone that was slowly travelling across the table in his direction. The plate bumped the back of his hand and came to a stop.

John, though he had noticed the overture, kept his eyes on his meal. He wanted to lay low. It was fascinating watching them try to relate to one another. And there was something going on with Reese for sure. She studied Holmes closely. Not just in terms of scanning him either.

“You could have used that program,” Reese sat back. “It would have helped you figure out where you belonged. You mightn’t have gone through all those problems with the drugs.”

“I don’t eat on a case.” Sherlock pushed the plate carefully back in her direction.

Reese straightened, “Why the hell not?”

John launched into the standard speech he’d learned for this occasion. “The process of digestion pulls blood from the extremities to the stomach-”

“Yeah, it does!” she frowned. “To fill it up with nutrients and shoot it back up into the head.” But she looked down at her scone crossly and gave it a gentle push away. “I should have had it with some jam, anyway.”

John looked up at her in agreement.

“I would die doing that, like, not eating on a case. This case has been going two years now. It’s been through four Assets before me.”

“It’ll go faster now,” Sherlock glanced down at Watson’s diminishing meal.

Reese snickered, “Oh, because you’re here now, hey Sherlock?”

Sherlock looked up at her. “Yes.”

She held his gaze for several seconds. John began to feel like he should really excuse himself to the loo in case something came of this, and while he didn’t expect them to attack one another across the tabletop by any stretch, he felt the deep tug of some undercurrent that told him to make himself scarce. Only now he didn’t dare move a muscle. It was everything he could do not to smile.

“Okay, big boy. I’ll cut you in. Which hand you want?” she laid down her coffee, flexed her hands, and made fists. “Right or left?”

Sherlock sat back and considered her fists on the table. “Left.”

Reese opened her left hand and passed him a lapel pin. “University pin in the inner coat pocket of the coat back at the crime scene.”

“Coat.”

On chair.

Far corner of the room.

Under red lights.

Lawrence died, and fell, from there.

She pointed out, “I didn’t place the chair-”

“I know.” Sherlock nodded at her right fist. “Let me see.”

“Why? You have your assignment. Rock it out and report back.” She put her fingertip on his hand, wrapped around the school crest, and pushed it back from her. “Be grateful I shared with a near-ape like you, at all.”

Sherlock spoke slowly, “If you steal things from the crime scene before I have an opportunity to look at them, then I’m working with an incomplete picture. Not only won’t this case be solved, you’ll never know if you’re better than I am. And status is what it’s all about, correct?”

Her expression shut down. Reese’s colourless eyes found the table. She stared at it blankly for several seconds. Then she turned over and opened her right hand. Inside were a couple of evidence baggies. Sherlock’s eyes narrowed then he settled back. “Take that and return with Donovan. Go back to Scotland Yard.”

“I want your lab.”

“I don’t have a lab.” John recognized this was a half-truth. It was Molly’s lab he used.

“Bullshit.”

Holmes leaned forward, “Idiot. Watch my face. I don’t have a lab.”

John’s head came up. She’d swung and missed.

And her temper exploded. She made a fist, stood up, and punched the table. “You love their rules, don’t you?! I thought I had it bad with Young and the others riding my ass – do it this way, do it that way – no matter how stupid. But you actually lie down for people like that.” She swung her fingertip until it came to rest on Donovan.

Many deli staff from the back hurried out to see what the shouting was about.

Sherlock rose from his chair and said, “I do not, however, react well to bratty children shouting in my face. It’s irksome.” He strode past the table, whirling in a flare of wet coat, only to say, “John?”

“Oh, I’m done.” John got up and wiped his palms, hastily, on napkins. He was beginning to think that Holmes never had to pay for anything when he ate out. It was as if he stopped at all his favourite haunts and found some sort of mystery to solve, or trouble to square away.

Sherlock didn’t wait. He had almost reached the door. He swept by Lestrade, who didn’t move a muscle to stop him, even though Young looked dumbfounded. She seemed to think that Donovan and Lestrade had to follow Holmes around everywhere he went. Sherlock had already likened his behaviour to a dog owner with a baggy over his hand, and made it clear this would not be tolerated.

Reese shouted at him, “You put too much faith in the apes, Sherlock. They’re dead weight; they’ll slap limits on you; it’s always got to be their way, even if their way is for idiots. You need to start working like I do. Work with me. We’re not like them.”