Lestrade granting Sherlock's wish was the best and worst thing that ever happened to him. That was how he recalled it years afterward, but on that day when he got the text, just as he was leaving Uni for the summer holidays, all he could think was finally.
"Burglaries and hacking are never higher than fives," he'd complained. "Give me something hard. Please, I'm begging."
"Sherlock, you're good, but there's only so much I can entrust to an amateur. I mean, for Christ's sake, you're a student."
They had gone back and forth like that for weeks, and it looked like Sherlock had finally won. He wasted no time getting a cab over to Scotland Yard, backpack still hanging off his shoulders. By now the officers knew him and waved him right through security, some with envious glares. Idiots. They could advance much higher if they'd only listen to me.
The hardest looks of all came from Anderson and Donovan, who were standing just behind Lestrade. "Don't get too excited, it's an old case with a trail that's gone cold," Anderson sneered.
Sherlock lit up. "Ooh! This is a challenge." He loved old cases. They were his favorite subject to read about. The Uni librarians had given him more than a few stares as he checked out book after book, always imagining how he would have done it differently and mentally chastising the police who had bungled the whole thing. He sat down across from them now. "At least an eight, I hope?"
"This one's got to be at least that," Lestrade said, handing him a file. "Jane Watson, 19 years old-just like you-at the time of her disappearance. She was reported missing on April 4th, 1998, while she was at Uni. Last person to see her was her roommate, but police questioned her and couldn't find any leads there. Said Jane just went out one day, probably to the library but she didn't know, and didn't come home, and that was all she knew. We never found a reason not to believe her and couldn't find a trace of Jane. She's been missing for 20 years."
Sherlock had been sifting through the file. Jane had a beautiful, gentle face with the blondest hair he'd ever seen. Even he found her attractive. When he realized Lestrade had stopped speaking, he looked up. "That's it?"
"Pretty much. We searched for weeks but never found anything. There are a few photos of Jane and statements from her family and friends about her habits, but nothing more than that." Lestrade grinned. "Good, isn't it?"
"A near impossibility, I'd say." With that much time having passed, there wouldn't be a body left. Jane would have decayed to dust by now, which would make the chances of being able to identify her slim to none. Granted, she might not be dead, but that wasn't likely.
Uncertainty. He smiled. "This is more like it. Thank you, Lestrade." He closed the file and stood up. "I'll be in touch when I've solved it." Anderson and Donovan laughed and rolled their eyes. Sherlock narrowed his eyes. "And I have every intention of solving it."
"I'll hold you to that." Lestrade shook his hand, and Sherlock left the Yard with a spring in his step.
The case was the toughest Sherlock had ever had, and he loved it. The next week flew by as he reviewed the statements and photographs. Jane had been a stellar student and well-liked with ambitions for graduate school and a summer job, so runaway had been ruled out immediately. She and her roommate had gotten along, and the latter had testified that Jane went to the library almost every weekend.
I'm sorry I can't be a hundred percent certain; we didn't really tell each other where we went most of the time, her statement read. We lived separate lives, so when I saw her leave that morning, I didn't really think anything of it. I assume she was going to the library because she said she liked to go there to study every weekend, but I don't know that for a fact. She never said anything to indicate she wasn't happy other than being a tiny bit stressed for exams, but we all were. As far as I know, there was no one in her life who'd want to hurt her. When she didn't come home, though, I got worried and started asking around to see if anyone knew where she was. No one knew, so I finally called the police.
The family had echoed those same points, as had Jane's friends. They all said she was single, everybody liked her, that she was a warm and caring person. Everything the police had found, from Jane's school transcripts to her letters home, confirmed what they had said.
There wasn't much to go on, and Sherlock decided the only thing to do was visit the scene of the crime (or what he assumed was the scene of the crime) and see what he could learn there. Upon arriving at her school, he studied the path from her dorm to the library. This led him to a parking lot just behind the latter, which was full of cars now but probably wasn't always.
She left her dorm at 9:30 in the morning so she could get to the library when it opened at 10. That early on a weekend, it's unlikely this place would have had many people. He looked around and began to think out loud.
"The most deserted place between Jane's dorm and the library is this parking lot, so I'll assume the kidnapping happened here. However," he looked around and saw a few students on the sidewalk, distracted by phones but still very much there. "Given the public space, it still would have been too risky to use force, so there's at least a 60% chance he lured her to his car somehow. Probably told her some story, maybe he had car trouble or something of the like."
Sherlock paced the pavement, his mind going a mile a minute to recreate the scene. "So he lures her to his car…she was tall, so possibly a truck, tends to be the mode of choice for kidnappers, and then how does he get her inside?" He smirked. "Ah, simple. Since there's no record of any blood on the pavement, he would have had to drug her. Which means he would have had time to take her someplace out of the way, but still close enough that she wouldn't wake up before he got there."
Using his phone, Sherlock searched Google Maps for all of the surrounding neighborhoods and stored them in his mind palace. It was a long shot, but until he had more information, scoping out those neighborhoods was his best hope for now. Too many people liked to think that kidnappers took their prey out into the woods somewhere, but most of the cases Sherlock had read about had the culprit locking their captives up right in their own homes and backyards.
The first neighborhood saw nothing suspicious. Neither did the second. Or the third. Sherlock was about to think he should pursue another method but decided to check the fourth one anyway. The sun was going down, and this one was small enough that he could get it in before dark.
He walked down the tidy rows of houses, burying his Bohemian disgust at the ordinary working and middle-class cliché of a place. Depending on who lived here, either nothing could happen or everything could. He had just decided it was nothing when he saw it.
Sherlock had assumed identifying an abductor's house would be hard, but the fence that was taller than any of the others was a dead giveaway. "You don't have a fence that tall unless you're hiding something," he said to himself. As he got closer, his suspicions were furthered by a red truck in the driveway. He pulled up Google Maps again and looked up the distance between this address and the parking lot where Jane was likely to have been taken.
Six miles. Close enough that she would still be out when she got here, going by what he knew about drugs—too much, admittedly—but a decent distance from the scene of the crime. Sherlock couldn't help a little jump. He might have solved in one day what the Yard hadn't been able to solve in 20 years.
The house was quiet. The truck being here might mean the kidnapper was here, but the recently trampled grass near the front door was enough to make Sherlock question that. He decided to test it. Once he'd rung the doorbell and knocked, he rushed around the house and listened. No one came to answer. Sherlock crept to the side of the fence and jumped.
Good job he was so tall, he could barely see a huge yard with a shed in the middle of it. This just gets more and more promising. That would be the perfect place to keep a body. Best of all, there was no one in the yard. Sherlock peeked inside the windows. No one there either.
Lestrade wouldn't like it, but it was worth the burglary charge to find out. Sherlock walked around the house several times to find the best point of entry. He finally decided to try his luck picking the lock on the front door. Least likely to leave signs, anyway.
He took a paper clip from his pocket, which he kept just for such occasions, and began to unfold it and insert it into the keyhole. It was rough going, and he was so focused on turning the clip that he stupidly didn't notice the shadow behind him until seconds too late. Just as he let go of the knob and turned around, a cloth was over his mouth, and his muscles were relaxing until he fell into darkness.
