The Fearful Valley

by Steven Dalton

Computer hacker extraordinaire Jonathan Douglas is murdered in his private penthouse atop Birlstone Tower, with no way on or off that couldn't possibly have been recorded. But the case proves even more confounding when the entire crime scene disappears, leading Sherlock and John on a chase that involves both a secret society and a dead man. Read and review please!

1. Prologue

Prologue

Birlstone Tower sat on the corner of Porlock and Meander, the tallest private hotel in the neighborhood.

The clock struck ten as the hotel clerk closed the lobby for the night, placing the key in his pocket and then heading to the security room where he would probably wind the rest of the graveyard shift down watching Netflix or texting his girlfriend until she went to bed.

The monitors in front of him sat silently, each deep pocketed entrepreneur of the privately owned skyscraper sleeping soundly in their bed. It wasn't until around eleven, after he'd attempted to conquer a level of some simple game on his smartphone; that he noted the odd and repetitive behavior occurring on security camera alpha, the one for the penthouse suite.

Leaning forward he squinted his eyes and tapped on the screen and then decided to call over the walkies and let one of the guards check it out. "Hey Jim, there's some static at the penthouse, check it out will ya?" he called out.

After getting a short chirp as a reply he switched to the exterior of the roof, where the glass tube elevator ran up; the only way on or off the extremely private suite. The tall man shone his flashlight across the pool searching for any lights coming from the penthouse itself. Yet instead, what came was a short crisp reply to his superior muttering, "Collins, ya better get up here. We've got a body."