Sherlock arched his eyebrows in a way that made John sigh. He looked, for all purposes, like he knew exactly why there was a wolf theme to this murder.

"What are you thinking Sherlock?" John asked wearily, knowing that he wasn't going to receive a straight answer.

"I think that Molly could probably use a coffee break right about now." He said reclaiming his small triumphant smile and striding towards the nearest exit leaving a nearly baffled Lestrade in his wake.

"Hold up, I'm not—"

"Text me the images and whatever else you find." Sherlock said disinterestedly as John shuffled through the mob of police officers to catch up with the detective who seemed to glide over the crowds on a pocket of air.

"Lestrade!" a young Detective Inspector barked over the murmuring crowd to the graying man who jolted upright as though he'd been electrocuted.

"We need you over here, triple homicide takes precedent."

John said a silent apology to the wearied inspector, who gazed off to where Sherlock was vanishing with a forlorn hope in his tired eyes. He had said once that he was desperate when he went to Sherlock for help, and now in the gray fluorescent light filtered from the ceiling in the yard John could really see it.

In a flash it vanished and Lestrade spun around to face the young Detective "Dammit Dimmock!" He exclaimed, but the rest of his stern conversation was drowned out by the roar of the busy police station.

John caught up to Sherlock just as he burst through the exit door and into the dingy gray light on the street. The flush of crisp air invigorated John and fueled his indignation.

"That was not good Sherlock." He panted, straightening his jumper with a few remedial tugs.

"Not good?" He asked, sounding almost childish.

"No." John said trotting to keep up with his long-legged partner. "Lestrade came to you for help; you should at least hear him out. What ever happened to collecting data?"

"I have what I needed from the Yard, now what's important is what we find on the body."

"What's important is treating your friends with honest decency." John countered, slipping calmly back into his seemingly permanent role as Sherlock's personal fortune cookie. "And not just when you want something."

Sherlock snorted "Decency is indecent." He threw out his arm, bellowed for a cab and one immediately slowed to a halt beside the curb.

As he climbed into the car, with John right behind him he added a noncommittal "And honesty is dishonest."

John settled himself into the car seat, pondering the meaning behind his flat-mate's cryptic responses. It wasn't unlike him to philosophize, but 'Honesty is dishonest'? What was that supposed to mean? Sherlock was Mister Honest, even when the situation called for a gentle white lie. One could always count on Sherlock to be honest to a fault, painfully honest. He would never lie to a person's face when the truth would hurt them more. Unless he had a good reason, like for a case or something.

After a few seconds of agonizing deliberation John decided he was not fit to probe Sherlock's twisted, complicated mind and he opted to take the straight-and-narrow path to the answer. The only route that Sherlock himself would never take.

"What do you mean by that?" he asked.

Sherlock turned to him, surprised etched around his cold blue eyes.

"You didn't really mean anything did you?" John asks.

Sherlock shrugs and turns to look out the window as the car speeds away from New Scotland Yard with a calming hum.

"You never say anything just for the hell of it, so what did you mean?" John pressed.

Sherlock gave John a careless little shrug, and expected John to be satisfied with that as an answer.

#

The ride to St. Bart's was silent and contemplative. John was half-stuck in a haze between mulling over his flat mate's curious change in behavior and running through the video of the wolf-man again.

In the time John had spent with Sherlock he no longer had the need to ask obvious questions, such as the clichéd "Who could do such a thing?" The world could be a sick place and it was definitely filled with sick people; but he still had to wonder what on earth the man had been thinking when he decided he was going to play a werewolf in front of Scotland Yard delivering a body.

"Wasn't it bad enough killing the poor girl?" he thought counting the candy-colored bicyclists that were pedaling en masse in the opposite direction across the street from where the cab was halted at a particularly stubborn red light. "What on earth is there left to gain by making a spectacle of her?"

John pushed thoughts like that out of his head. The criminals he met almost daily were a twisted and unique breed that followed a code all their own. It didn't matter what seemed to make sense to the rest of the world; "Normal blokes like me" John reminded himself; all that seemed to matter to them was fulfilling their own macabre desires and upholding their own perverse codes.

"Clearly." Sherlock murmured under his breath.

"Sorry?" John turned, thinking that he was finally being acknowledged.

"Obviously." Sherlock's eyes were scanning the London streets with their usual cold blue intensity, but from his expression John could guess that his true thoughts were probably miles and miles away. Perhaps with the girl wrapped in the sheet they were on their way to see.

"Oh, still talking to yourself I see. Well, don't mind me then."

"John would you please stop making noise, it's distracting." Sherlock snapped.

John stared at him incredulously. He had known the man for quite some time, and yet Sherlock never ceased to surprise him with his sheer callousness towards others.

"Right." John thought turning straight in his seat. "Nothing's changed then."

#

He smiled as St. Bart's loomed over the buildings just ahead of their taxi, gray and unassuming just like most of the nearby buildings. But, also like most of the buildings in London, St. Bartholomew's hospital had a few remarkable traits and a fascinating secret history that most of the alumni graduating this year were still completely unaware of.

It was by far the oldest hospital in London, built in 1123, and renovated just three years earlier right before the fall incident. It was also John's alma mater and still held a myriad of cherished memories; bar the one horrible memory.

The cab pulled up to the curb and Sherlock remained frozen where he sat as John prepared to exit the vehicle.

"Hey, are you alright back there?" The cabbie craned his neck around and stared at the petrified detective, who couldn't seem to peel his eyes away from the pavement for a moment.

"He's fine." John assured him pulling a few bills from his wallet and paying the man in cash. When the transaction was complete and the cabbie went back to his thoughts gripping the wheel with both firm hands John reached out and nudged Sherlock in the shoulder.

"Come on, we're here." He said as the detective blinked a few times confusedly.

"You were so excited to get here a few minutes ago, what happened to all of your energy?"

Sherlock batted away another tender nudge and with a brisk sweep of his hand and in that one fluid motion he dispelled any hope of John's questions receiving an answer.

"Alright, fine; don't answer me, but at least get out of the nice man's cab?"

Sherlock crawled out of the cab sulking slightly. He knew he had to get out of the cab, but he still resented being talked down to, like a child.

#

"Is Molly working today?" John asked as they stood outside the looming hospital listening to the cab veer away from the street and disappear into the hum of all the other cars.

"Yes." Sherlock said cutting across the street and into the, thankfully, halted traffic.

John felt his jaw drop, completely involuntarily, and he chased after his reckless friend, arms outstretched ready to grab the collar of his black belstaff coat and wrench him back to the safety of the sidewalk.

"What are you doing?" He exclaimed checking both ways for any speeding cars careening forward ready to smash into them with an almighty shriek of metal and glass. When he was confident that none were apparent he trotted beside his friend, urging him across the street quickly.

"It is normal social procedure to offer something before asking for something, therefore I was thinking of getting Molly a cup of coffee in exchange for her help." He said innocently pointing at the trendy, albeit empty, coffee shop across the street from the hospital.

John felt his heart slowly return to its normal beating pace and asked, in the least exasperated tone manageable: "Didn't your parents ever teach you to look both ways before crossing the street?"

"Oh, is that what they were going on about? I must have deleted it." Sherlock stated in a bland, uninterested tone.

"Can you do my heart a favor from now on? Don't delete the life-saving things, okay?" John said glancing up and down the street, still nervously waiting for his palpitations to end.

#

They both decided on a tall caramel coffee for Molly and they each got themselves a small cup as well. John forced Sherlock to wait for traffic to stop before they crossed the street and entered the hospital.

The first thing most people will usually notice about a hospital is the antiseptic smell which permanently lingers in the air and on the doctors as well, even once they've left the hospital. The second thing someone might notice about a hospital might be the cheesy décor, which looks faded and washed out under the fluorescent lights, or the cheap art work on the wall, or if you happen to be particularly lucky a pretty nurse at the front desk.

The first thing John and Sherlock noticed upon walking into St. Bart's was the horrific screaming of a woman in terrible pain and the glistening ruby blood that left a splattered trail on the polished linoleum.

A young blonde woman had somehow limped into the hospital and now clutched at the front desk emitting ear-splitting, blood curdling, horrified screams for help. He foot had been completely severed from her leg and was nowhere to be seen, and a gaggle of doctors in flapping white coats hovered over the woman, alternately gasping and grimacing at the bloody stump while the woman insisted in a shrill bird-call that she was "Bleeding To Death."

"God, someone help me, please someone! I'm Bleeding To Death!"

One brave nurse pried the woman's arms from the front desk and held her hand, letting her lean against her stout figure and chanting soothing words into her left ear while another nurse waved her red-taloned fingernails over the woman and shouted questions into her right ear.

"It's going to be okay. The best doctors are here to help you. You're going to be just fine…"

"Can you tell me your name? Where are your parents? What is your name?"

"Help me please, I'm Bleeding To Death!"

"What is your name?"

"I'm Bleeding To Death!"

Sherlock steered John away from the bustle of the small drama and down an empty narrow hallway which led to a secluded room far, far, far away from the living patients; the lonely and cold Morgue where Molly Hooper spent her cheerful days.

John walked beside Sherlock in silence, listening to the echo of the woman's pained shrieks fade away. Even when he no longer heard her pleas for help, he imagined the tortured screams and a shudder ripped down his spine like a snaking bead of cold water.

"I wonder what happened to her." He asked looking down upon Molly's cup of coffee which he clutched too tightly with his steady hand.

"Huh? Who?" Sherlock said turning halfway to John.

"The woman. Without a foot?" John gestured behind them, wondering secretly if Sherlock had really forgotten (Or deleted) the episode already.

"Oh," He said carelessly. "My guess would be a family member with one of those small electric saws."

He seemed to fluctuate a bit, his head rocking slightly, as though he were shaking up his thoughts with a gentle rocking; stirring the sediment in his mind until it rose to the surface.

"Statistically more likely to be a father, though if I was forced to guess I'd probably say step-father."

John stopped in the hallway, blinking in utter amazement.

"How on earth…" He asked trying to grasp at what clues might have led his slightly amazing flat mate to his seemingly miraculous conclusion.

"Okay, I follow you up to band-saw, but how on earth could you –possibly- know it was her stepfather?"

"Come now John, a magician never reveals his tricks." Sherlock said with a sly smile.

John shot him a confused glance. "Deduction is not magic, and you always reveal your tricks. It's your –thing-."

Sherlock's sly smile became a Cheshire cat grin as they approached the doors to the morgue, but he remained silent.

John couldn't tell what new phase of his mood this was, but he was cautious anyway.

#

"Good morning Molly." Sherlock stated snappily at the brunette who was bent over the prostrate body of an older man. His sudden arrival caused Molly to jolt with a frightened squeak and knock her clip-board to the floor with a deafening clatter.

"Oh! Oh my, Sherlock? Wh-what are you doing here, I mean I can guess what you're doing here, you probably want to see a body or use the lab, but I meant to say, or I guess what I said…"

"John brought you some coffee." Sherlock said pointing to the Styrofoam cup in John's hands. John dumbly extended his arm and offered the steaming beverage to a very grateful mortician.

"Thank you John." She gushed immediately sipping the foamy-sweet drink with little-suppressed relish.

"Now, Molly, we do need to see a body." Sherlock said rubbing his hands together greedily.

"You know I'd be happy to show you any body. Well, not just anybody, what I meant was any corpse… but I guess you know that…" She equivocated nervously.

"Thank you Molly." John said at once, sensing that Sherlock wasn't going to.

"I'll… I'll just need a bit of help getting Mr. Rogers here back into the freezer. Would you two mind donning some gloves and lending me a hand. Or, I mean… helping me lift him off the table. I know it's weird when someone who works in a morgue asks for a hand, not that your hands aren't lovely; I mean, for men, which isn't to say…"

"Sure, we'll help; won't we Sherlock?"

Sherlock grunted in reply, but went to fetch latex gloves anyway.

Mr. Rogers was covered in thick gray hair from the tip of his thin, ovular head to the patches of silver on each of his toes. One yellow snaggle-tooth jutted from the bottom of his lip and pushed his lips apart in a post-humus snarl. But most importantly he was a heavy set gentleman, just shy of six feet tall and easily two-hundred and sixty pounds. Much bigger than what John thought the young mortician could carry by herself.

Molly directed each man to one of the feet and instructed them to seize the ankles in a firm, but not bruising, grip. She readied a stretcher beside the table and dug her slender hands into the rolls of flesh that were splayed over top the gleaming silver table.

"On my mark." She warned them, spreading her legs apart and preparing for the lift.

"Three…two…LIFT!"

John heaved the man with all his strength and gasped in surprise at how heavy his dead-weight was.

In a flash the three of them had slung Mr. Rogers to the stretcher, which groaned under the surprise of his bulky frame and Molly finished loading him, gently, into the freezer.

"You're remarkably strong for a woman of your stature." Sherlock commented removing the gloves with an audible snap.

"Oh, well… I work alone most days, so I guess I've just gotten used to moving bodies around. It was nice to have help for a change."

"Scotland Yard probably dropped this body off early this morning; it should be mostly destroyed by, apparently, some form of animal attack."

"I'm sorry?" Molly asked.

"The body, we need to see the body now." Sherlock said slowly, a tinge of frustration in his words.

"Oh, yes… of course." Molly said retrieving her clipboard from the floor. "Um, let me just see… oh, the Jane Doe who was eaten?"

"The same." John nodded.

"I have most of her here in freezer number twenty-three, but there isn't much left. The thing she was wrapped in was taken by a forensics team from the Yard."

Sherlock groaned.

"Let me just, pull her out for you." Molly said unlocking one low-lying door and rolling out a slab.

John had seen plenty of bodies; as a doctor, in the army, with Sherlock. But every once in a while there was a body that would leave him sick to his stomach and wishing that the thing in the ally, or in the house, or in this case on the slab wasn't human to begin with. The mangled body parts on the cold metal table could easily have been many things before human, they were almost unrecognizable.

Except for one, mostly whole, arm and leg.

Sherlock had fetched himself a new pair of white gloves and he pulled them on excitedly, bending over the body hungrily. In his great dark coat he seemed like some gaunt wraith, or specter performing some grisly final passage with utter delight.

He hovered over the remains of the open torso, nose almost pressing against one tattered breast and his dark curls nearly brushing against the cold marble skin. He slid his gaze down across her navel, and, not finding anything, onto her thigh. The thigh had, for the most part, been wrenched off and the only thing suggesting it having been there in the first place was a red stump.

"Sherlock." John felt ill. He was a doctor, and had already performed a cursory analysis over his friend's shoulder. "Aren't those bite marks."

The white skin was pocked with bright pink cuts in a perfectly parabola across the cheek of her butt and some of the stomach which remained.

"I believe they are." Sherlock said continuing his weary path down the ruined body with a stone-face and bright, darting eyes.

"Then she was certainly eaten by a wolf?" John had to ask, though he knew the answer too well.

"It would appear that way, though I wouldn't rule out domestic dogs yet." He said prodding the open flesh with one bleach-white finger and pulling it away sticky with congealed blood.

"I would." Molly chimed confidently.

John spun around to look clearly at her and Sherlock glanced up at her over his shoulder and all of the confidence she had put into that one statement crumbled away. She stared shyly at the ground and murmured an excuse for herself.

"I found a few molds in the school, for teaching… I mean, for teaching about the bodies. They were… They were dogs teeth, um, molds for dogs teeth. Or, that's to say their jaws. Anyway I chose a few likely candidates and I borrowed them from the classroom… before you ask, there were quite a few, actually there were a whole lot, so I thought I had covered my bases pretty well, that is to say…"

"Spit it out!" Sherlock exclaimed.

Molly stood erect with fear, her eyes squeezed shut and her mouth curled in terror, but the words flew from her lips freely.

"I matched the bite radius with a dozen or so of the largest domestic dogs Bart's had samples of, none of them were as wide or large. A huge dog made those bites, or a wolf."

She gasped and opened her eyes, surprised at her outburst and at how smoothly she had composed a sentence. She waited for the awkwardness, or for something to seem wrong or off, but nothing was. She had merely stated her mind. It was strangely freeing.

Sherlock steepled his fingers beneath his chin and rested his head on the peak. His blue eyes looked gray under the fluorescent lights and his eyebrows were knitted together in deep concentration.

Just then his phone rang; once, twice, three times. He paid the thing no mind at first, but finally he was so fed up with the noise he scooped the phone out of his pocket and slammed his finger against the button, angrily answering with a sharp growl of indignation.

"Hello?" he barked.

"Yes?" he said with genuine curiosity. The voice on the other end of the line chattered.

"Sure?" He sounded almost concerned. The voice spoke a little more fiercely.

"Not much." He said leaning against the metal slab. "Just that she was a prostitute who worked part-time at the Tesco's in Westminster, cared for her elderly grandmother with Alzheimer's, was approximately four-foot-ten-inches before she was eaten and that she was carrying something heavy right before she was killed."

John felt his eyes bulge and his jaw drop, again, involuntarily.

"Uh-huh. Keep me informed." Sherlock nodded and ended the call.

He turned and met John's incredulous gaze and shrugged in a way that said "you-know-what-I'm-like".

"Um, a prostitute? I don't see how…" The shrug was lost on Molly who struggled to connect the strings of his deduction.

"Sherlock, how do you know she's a… um, well. How did you deduce…?"

"Easy. I knew her."

"You knew her?" Molly wrestled with her emotions and attempted to suppress the urge to wail, smoothing all of the wrinkled creases and frown lines that rippled across her face into a cool mask of indifference.

"Via the homeless network. She hung around quite a bit." He said pulling out his phone and typing something into the search browser.

"She has a name?" John asked.

"Anne Rutledge."

John looked down to the woman's sole remaining hand; two fingers vanished giving the rest of the slender hand a lop-sided appearance. The three remaining fingers were turned up to the ceiling and John finally noticed the black ink Sherlock must have seen immediately. Tar-black ink in neat little ovals marring the fingertips where forensics had pressed them into the infamous black inkpad in an attempt to salvage some sense of her identity. Her face and most of her body had disappeared, obscuring her forever, except for her fingerprints.

It was endlessly sad to him whenever a person was reduced to just their belongings and their fingerprints. Now at least she also had her name.

"Thank you Molly." Sherlock said pulling off his gloves and pocketing his phone.

"Come on John." He beckoned his friend with an encouraging nod, heading straight for the exit.

"Wait! You have to wash your hands before you go out." Molly told them, chasing Sherlock briefly, yet stopping just short of the door as though she were tethered to her operating table.

"Don't worry; I have some hand sanitizer in my pocket." Sherlock said.

"That's not…" Molly started but when she noted the pleading tone in her voice her words died away.

John gave her an apologetic smile, as he often had to after Sherlock had finished doing damage, and followed the tall detective on his heels leaving Molly, again, quite alone.

She hated having company in the morgue; for when they leave, as all people ultimately do when visiting the morgue, the silence of the dead is all but crushing afterwards.

###


Sherlock's bouncing around is really wearing me out! But on the brightside I've figured out a (twisted, convoluted, crazy) way to add chapters! I don't feel like such a total n00b anymore! Fun with Anderson next!