The first few minutes of the cab ride to the police station were spent by Veranda rubbernecking. She exclaimed at each landmark they passed and Sherlock quickly grew tired of her excitement. Apropos of nothing he blurted, "I don't believe 'Morgan' or anyone else you know is in any position to be looking for you."
She stared at him with wide-eyed horror, struck dumb by his words. Her lower lip began to quiver and she began to feel a little faint as what he was implying began to sink in. "If you're one of the good guys...that means there are bad guys. Are you trying to say that they're…dead? How? When? Who? What about me?"
He glanced over at her, his expression unreadable. "I didn't say 'dead'. I do know why your phone is not working and it's fortunate you did not bring your computer. You cannot be allowed to log into your email, nor can you use your bank card. You cannot leave a single digital footprint or whoever indisposed your coworkers will realize you are not among them."
It was getting difficult to hear him over the rush of blood in her ears. She swallowed dryly and murmured, "So they are dead. You're certain? How long have you known?" Tunnel vision set in until all she could see was Sherlock's pale blue eyes watching her with detached pity.
He shrugged and broke her gaze. "Since before you touched down on British soil. I was sent to collect you and thwart those who would have you departed as soon as you arrived. You have attracted the attention of many powerful people. Whether that is good or bad depends on how much you actually know."
"I don't know anything!"
"Not surprising."
"Jesus Christ." Veranda buried her face in her hands. "How many times has your nose been broken, Sherlock?"
"Only once. Are you insinuating that you would like to make an attempt?" He was smirking slightly and looked unconcerned about whether she would actually assault him now or ever.
"No. I'm stating explicitly that you should learn to put your brain in gear before running your mouth. You act like an insolent teenager and it isn't pretty or cute. You should probably give it up before someone kicks your smart ass." She looked up at him with the expression of a nun about to whack one of her pupils across the knuckles with a ruler.
"I'll take that under advisement. We're here."
Veranda rubbed her temples briefly and wondered how she always managed to run into trouble that must have started out to happen to other people.
They began bickering as they walked from the curb toward the entrance under the rotating sign proclaiming New Scotland Yard.
"At least you didn't start to cry," Sherlock declaimed.
"I wasn't going to. Crying never fixed anything." Veranda was nearly jogging to keep up with his enormous strides.
"You were about to cry."
"I was not."
"Suit yourself." He gestured gallantly at the door that opened automatically and he ushered her into the lobby.
Sherlock was obviously a well-known personage, as the fresh-faced officer manning the front desk called out to him by name and waved them to go straight back to the office cubicles. Once in the labyrinth they encountered a youngish black woman with a slight overbite and an obvious chip on her shoulder. Veranda was bewildered by her palpable vitriol as the woman looked her up and down with distaste. Finally she sneered at Sherlock, "Freak and the geek. Lovely."
Sherlock sniffed derisively, "Sally Donovan. I am disappointed. As I have told you on a number of occasions, I am not a 'freak'. I am a…"
The woman cut him off. "A high-functioning sociopath. Yes, we're all quite aware of that by now. Follow me. He's waiting for you." She gestured toward the door near the end of the hallway.
Veranda had no idea who this Donovan woman was, but she had gotten onto her wrong side right-quick. "Listen here, lady...and I use that term loosely...ack!" Sherlock had elbowed her in the ribs, quite roughly, but he succeeded in derailing her verbal beat-down before she could get herself in real trouble.
When they got to the conference room, Sherlock grabbed Veranda by the sleeve and dragged her inside. She turned on him with a hiss and said, "Get your hands off me! Who do you think you are? I am sick of being…hello?" At that moment she noticed the man across the table who had just stood up. She tried to switch gears, but ended up wearing a stupid, shy smile as they shook hands. He introduced himself as Detective Inspector Greg Lestrade. She tried to squash the observation that he, too, was damned handsome. Why here? Why now? Why me?
The door behind them shut and the woman sat down beside D.I. Lestrade. He gestured to her and said, "Detective Sergeant Sally Donovan, this is…"
"I've read your notes." Donovan looked like she'd rather be anywhere but where she was.
Lestrade looked to her, a flummoxed Veranda, back to her and finally to Sherlock...who was decisively staring into space. Lestrade sighed and shook his head. "Whatever." He waved at the chairs and said, "Sit down. We'll get this over as quickly as possible."
Veranda sat and put both hands on the table. "What is 'this'? What the hell is going on and why do I seem to be the last to know? I got hornswoggled at the airport yesterday by…him," she pointed an accusing finger at Sherlock, "and I am tired of being kept in the dark. How did my friends die?"
Lestrade looked sharply at Sherlock. "Why did you tell her?"
Sherlock replied, "I told her nothing. Hence, her marginally justifiable anger."
Lestrade grimaced. "You'll have to make a formal identification of the bodies before they can be released to the US consulate for repatriation, but we…" He was interrupted by Veranda slamming her head into her hands on the tabletop.
Everyone looked at her in stunned silence. She moaned and seemed to hyperventilate for a few seconds before sitting up straight and visibly trying to stifle her emotions. She was ashen and her voice was shaking when she said, "Please. Don't mind me."
Lestrade looked unconvinced and swallowed loudly before continuing, "We have been keeping the deaths quiet until we have more information…about the decedents, the perpetrators, possible motives…your involvement...not in the murders, of course, just with everyone…in general." He felt awful for Veranda in that moment. Her eyes had gotten wide when it sounded like he was accusing her of being party to the deaths of her friends. His gut instinct told him she had nothing to do with it, which aligned with his implicit trust in what Sherlock had told him earlier about Mycroft's concerns. He was already getting a headache, as tended to happen early and often when he got involved with the Holmes'. However, he had 7 Americans on his hands; 6 were already dead, but this one was still alive and needed to stay that way.
He folded a page back on his legal pad and placed it on the table. "Let's begin with yesterday. Four of your coworkers flew out of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport and two of them departed from Denver International Airport. Your flight originated in Phoenix. Everyone was to meet up at Heathrow?"
Veranda took a deep breath. "Yeah. We all bought tickets that would get us here within an hour of each other. Morgan called me when she checked the flight tracker and saw that my flight was delayed—she wanted to know how late I was going to be. It was only supposed to take an hour to fix the plane, but I ended up sitting around Sky Harbor for 3 hours. They thought they fixed it, but something else went haywire after they pushed back from the gate so they were going to have to ferry in a plane for us. It was going to take, like, six hours so I got myself on a puddle jumper to DFW and rolled the dice by going on standby to get here. Thank God I travel light or I wouldn't have my luggage, what with all the screwing around and transfers."
"Anyway, I left Morgan at least a dozen voice mails. I was even calling poor Gerry, trying to keep him apprised of what was going on. Eventually he and Viktoria got on their plane in Denver and that was the end of that. By the way, Viktoria is...was...just Gerry's girlfriend. She didn't work with the rest of us. Gerry said she was waffling about coming along because she was 5 months pregnant. She finally decided at the last minute to join us."
Lestrade asked, "What did she look like?"
"Oh, she was gorgeous. She's a model, but on hiatus because of the baby. She's pushing 6 foot with long, platinum blonde hair. And her eyes. Good God, they're the brightest blue you've ever seen. Not that you'd have a fashion magazine around here, but if you did, I could show her to you."
Sherlock decided to not mention the fact she was slipping in and out of present and past tense about her deceased companions.
Lestrade jotted a couple of notes down. "Would anyone ever confuse you with her?"
"Maybe if they had the vaguest description ever…like a Caucasian woman about so tall and so wide with long white hair. Maybe from the back? I should be so flattered. She's stunning…and 25 years younger than I am…and famous."
"I've heard enough. I'll be at my desk." Donovan got up and narrowly avoided slamming the door behind her.
Veranda was nonplussed. "What is her problem?"
Sherlock snorted. Lestrade said, "Hmm? Not important. Please, continue."
Veranda rubbed her forehead. "Oy vey. Anyway, I was pretty much beside myself when I got into Heathrow almost 8 hours after everyone else. Then...when my phone wasn't working...I was a gnat's eyebrow away from a complete breakdown. I was about to lose my mind when he," she was pointing at Sherlock, "showed up and was acting very sensible and very British and…I dunno…especially when John got there. Yeah. I followed two complete strangers home. Not very bright, I guess. There was some other angry-looking guy there who seemed to be watching me and it freaked me the hell out. I made a reflexive decision that was poorly considered, if at all, even under dire circumstances."
Sherlock chuckled quietly. Veranda glowered at him askance and he shifted in his seat. He held his hands up placatingly. "Nothing. Nothing at all."
Lestrade waved his pen at Veranda and cleared his throat. "Getting back to matter at hand." He looked down at his notes. "There is video footage of your friends meeting up with each other in Heathrow. You were the only one to not arrive on schedule. The other six are shown getting into a white van, presumably a courtesy shuttle, and leaving the premises. There were four reservations for hire cars. Why would your friends not pick up their cars?"
"They had to be tired as hell, too. Why would they want to drive to the hotel if a van was there to pick them up? If you're exhausted and faced with not only getting the damn car, but also trying to drive on the wrong side of the road…I'd gladly take the shuttle and deal with picking up the car later. All you have to do is call the rental place and tell them what's going on."
"Which no one did."
"That would be…really weird…really out-of-character…for nearly everyone but me. I mean, Morgan is practically OCD. Her contingencies have contingencies…that's what makes her a really great COO. She's got everything under control at all times. Yeah, I blew off changing my rental reservation, but I was already way, way overdue so it would have been automatically canceled anyway and my phone wasn't working besides. Morgan would never have let a detail like that slide voluntarily."
"Did anyone from your party know exactly when you would be arriving?"
"No, not exactly. I got myself on standby with every single flight that was headed in the right direction…Dublin, Orly, Edinburgh…I was kind of desperate. I got an overhead page and I legged it for the gate, where I found a guy had starting throwing up while standing in the boarding queue. They kicked him out, paged me and shoved me in his seat the instant I showed up. They printed out my boarding pass, but I never even saw it. They just looked at my driver's license and away I went. I had no idea what flight number I was on and by the time I found out, I had to turn my phone off so I couldn't call anyone. They knew I would be super late and I figured they would find out I was there when I showed up. I was elated that I was actually going to end up at Heathrow after all."
Lestrade was chewing thoughtfully on the cap of his pen and rereading his notes with some care. Finally he looked Veranda straight in the eye and without malice said, "Not a skeptical lot, are you?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Getting into random white vans…following strange men home…not the acts of cynical, jaded world travelers, are they? It all seems a bit…naïve…to be perfectly honest."
She shrugged helplessly. "I'm sure whoever brought the van around had a really good story. It's completely plausible that a fancy-schmancy hotel would have livery cars. And even though it hadn't been part of the original plan, it wouldn't have been at-all suspicious. Me? There's just no excuse, I guess. I don't think I'm that gullible or I wouldn't still be alive after all these years. But the way this guy just barnstorms into your life…" She hooked a thumb at Sherlock. "It's over before you know it. He's telling you your life's story and prying into cracks and crevices you thought you'd papered over and he doesn't even know your name yet. It's the most disconcerting thing I think I've ever experienced. Couple that with being frazzled and disoriented? I'd have probably tagged along after Jack-the-Ripper, frankly."
"Mmm, yes. He does that." Lestrade looked slightly startled at himself. "The prising business. Not Jack-the-Ripper. Not that we know…yet."
Sherlock somehow managed to make rolling his eyes a full-body movement and sat back with a moue of annoyance distorting his features.
"OK," Lestrade mumbled to himself. "Please, tell me about..." He looked at his previous page of notes. "EMF, LLC. What did you and your coworkers do?"
"We were always arguing because our name was a huge misnomer. We engineered fuel cells. Our name implied we made electric motors or, God help us, electric cars. Gerry insisted on something short and punchy, even if it was wrong. That's what CFO's do, I guess. Beancounters. He was a good guy, but completely non-technical. He had really nice hair."
"What was your title?"
"Lackey? I didn't have one. I worked on the human interface, documentation, procurement, suppliers, prototyping, mockups, graphic design...all that sort of stuff. If it annoyed the engineers or involved other humans, it was my job. I did everything. I was even a low-level code jockey. Whatever they wanted, I did. I loved them like family. They were all I had and I'd have done anything for them." Veranda was blinking rapidly and looking at the ceiling.
Sherlock took an audible breath and sat up a bit straighter.
"Shut up, Sherlock," Veranda said without looking at him.
He slumped back into his chair and crossed his arms in a resigned posture.
Lestrade was rubbing both temples with one hand and seemed to be thinking very hard. "Where were your headquarters? How did you store all your confidential material?"
"We didn't have a proper office. We worked out of the Carlsson's guest house in Bellevue, Washington. That's where all the hush-hush stuff took place. Carl, Marc and Elliot were the engineers and they all converged on Bellevue. The two of us not involved in the actual engineering of the product could be anywhere because what we did wasn't actually 'top secret'. Everything sensitive was handled in person. Sometimes I stayed at my summer house in Astoria, Oregon for months because I was up in Washington so often during some development phases. I didn't really like to stay with them for long periods because...well, I don't really like people. Even people I like, I don't always like...if that makes any sense?"
Lestrade stared at her and then looked at Sherlock. He mouthed, "Are you related?" Sherlock glanced away and wouldn't dignify him with an answer.
He sighed loudly and rubbed his eyes before asking, "Do you have any work materials with you?"
"Hell no! I'm on vacation. We were all on vacation. We were just a bunch of friends going on vacation together. OK, the company was paying for it to celebrate our first big rollout, but it wasn't for work...not as such."
"Roll-out of what?"
"Product." Veranda had folded her hands in her lap.
"What kind of product?"
"Our product...that we produced." She looked to Sherlock for help, but he seemed to be enjoying her sudden discomfiture.
"Is it classified? Was it for the government? These are fuel cells, are they not?" Lestrade's voice had an edge that sounded like the beginnings of annoyance. He'd pull off the kid gloves if he had to.
"It's...it's proprietary. They're...really special kinds of fuel cells. Like, really special. Really...small." She held up her thumb and forefinger about a centimeter apart. "And I don't know anything about them."
"Nothing?" Lestrade wore his disbelief openly.
"At all. Zip. Nada. The only ones I know anything about are the ones we were selling to...I can't tell you that either. But they weren't nearly so special." She made a gesture about the size of a shoebox.
Veranda glared sideways at Sherlock who was watching her closely and with a look of fascination. She knew she was giving away a thousand secrets that her employers would have had a fit over, if they hadn't already been dead. She also knew that her evasion and obfuscation meant nothing to Sherlock; he could see right through her and he was going to make her life more difficult in 5, 4, 3, 2...
"She's lying." Sherlock looked supremely pleased with himself.
Goddamn him.
Lestrade threw his pen down and leaned back in his chair. "I know that. I don't know about what."
"Most of it." Sherlock smirked as he leaned onto the table and laced his fingers together.
Lestrade scrubbed at his eyes again and heaved a loud sigh. He sat up and said, "Ms. Erickson...I'm here to help you. He's here to help you." He pointed across the table at Sherlock. "God help us all. However, we cannot do anything for you if you are not completely open and honest with us. Who do you think is behind all this?"
"That's not the correct line of questioning."
"God dammit, Sherlock! Do you want to run this? Should I just take notes?"
"That won't be necessary." Sherlock turned to Veranda. "Where is your backup hard drive?"
She blinked at him as her eyes grew wide.
His voice was droll as he explained, "Your companions are dead, although we do not currently know by whom. You did not come to grief last night or this morning and you are presently seated at Scotland Yard. Ergo, you are amongst people who do not intend to harm you and, indeed, would like to ascertain who killed your companions so that the wrong-doers may be brought to justice. Your futile attempts to plead ignorance are unproductive to both your interests and ours. I suggest you be more forthcoming."
"I said that already. And with half as many 20£ words." Lestrade sounded legitimately insulted.
Sherlock ignored him. "Where is your backup hard drive, Veranda?"
"In my purse."
"And what's on it?" Sherlock was trying, and failing, to not be condescending.
She looked at the ceiling and blew her bangs up in frustration. "All sorts of stuff. But I swear...to anyone with authority...that there is nothing on there of...particular importance. No formulas, no schematics...not even anything for our patents. Nothing of any use to anyone. Most of it isn't even useful to me."
"Then why do you have it?" Lestrade was back to taking notes, even if Sherlock didn't care.
"Habit? I never..." She pointed at Sherlock for emphasis, "...and I mean never, ever had access to material that was technically crucial to our product. I can tell you who our plastics supplier is and I can give you the MSDS's to a dozen different chemicals; if you can reconstruct something that took a nuclear engineer and two chemical engineers 5 years to develop..."
"Nuclear?" Lestrade interjected.
"Elliot was on a boomer for 10 years..."
"A what?" He wasn't have an easy time of it.
"Ballistic missile submarine, Lestrade. Would any of the others have brought any potentially sensitive material with them, Veranda?" Sherlock was focused on her.
"I really doubt it. The guys...the engineers...were super tight-lipped and rightfully paranoid. There was a lot on the line. I could be sloppy because you couldn't build a Lego block out of what I know. Even at that, the drive is so heavily encrypted that no one but me can get into it."
Sherlock snorted. "It could be broken."
"I don't think so. It isn't commercial software and the friend who wrote it is dead. And before anyone asks...he died of a heart attack two years ago. Anyway, I personally burned...literally a huge bonfire...I burned every damn thing of his, as requested in his will. He had a hobby of figuring out what was wrong with cryptography software and then writing his own. It's like frickin' Fort Knox."
Sherlock sat silently with furrowed brows and his clasped hands tucked under his chin.
Lestrade watched Sherlock thinking for a moment and shrugged. He asked Veranda, "Do you have any idea who could be behind this?"
"Silence! I can't think with you two blathering on." Sherlock was rubbing his temples. Veranda buried her face in her hands and whimpered. Lestrade rolled his eyes, but stayed quiet.
"There must be something...something...no one this organized kills indiscriminately..." Sherlock was mumbling to himself. He pointed violently at Veranda. "You! What do you do?"
"What? I didn't kill them!"
"No! What do you do? For a living? Before these people?"
"I'm a jack-of-all-trades...master of none. I've worked for big corporations, for myself...and everything in between. I've had a thoroughly undistinguished life. My career trajectory looks like a seismograph! I have a B.S. in Electronic Engineering, a B.S. in Industrial Engineering and a couple assorted Associate degrees because I got bored. I'm nobody!"
"Mmmmm." Sherlock was rubbing his temples more determinedly.
"Sherlock?" Lestrade ventured quietly, "Can I tell her what happened?"
"What? Oh, of course."
"Ms. Erickson..." Lestrade paused to choose his words with care. "There have been 4 house fires in America. I would presume they were all set deliberately."
She put her elbows on the table and sat with her chin in her hands, staring unseeing at the table.
"A house in Flagstaff, Arizona exploded. It may have been preceded by an arson-set fire."
Veranda swallowed loudly and looked a bit ashamed. "Yeah...a couple of my hobbies will do that. Oops. Was anyone hurt?" Sherlock was watching her out of the corner of his eye with barely-contained interest.
Lestrade absently tapped his pen on the table. "There were no injuries reported."
"Thank God. I'm glad Shelley, Brandon and Kortsen are all at college. They are OK, aren't they?"
"Who?"
"The kids. Carl and Morgan's kids and Marc and Elliot's son. Are they all right?"
"I believe. I'll have to find out for you. Were they involved in the company?"
"No. Not by a long shot. They're just children. Working for Mommy and Daddy and...Daddies' business was the last thing on their minds."
"Ah, ha! That's it. Of course. It's so simple." Sherlock pointed at Veranda and nearly bopped her on the nose in the process. She recoiled from him.
Lestrade, grown used to Sherlock's theatrics, merely asked, "Would you care to enlighten us?"
"They're collecting the pieces of a puzzle. Then they destroy what's left so it isn't apparent what is missing. Very clever. The engineers encoded something...something incredibly important...and distributed it amongst all of the employees so that no one person held the key. Only they knew what it was, even. And it is useless with even one piece missing..." He jabbed his finger back at Veranda and she was tempted to bite it just to make him stop pointing at her.
"That's simple?" Lestrade's shoulders slumped, defeated.
"Don't be stupid, Sherlock." Veranda was getting angry. These were her friends and employers that he was accusing of being masterminds...of something...probably something not good. She and Sherlock bristled at each other. "What the hell would they be hiding? We had the contract, we had the...product. It was all in the bag. Why would they make it more complicated than it already was? And who the hell do you think is trying to kill us all so they can have a bunch of disconnected data points? Huh? Frickin' genius. My God. Where did you get this guy?" She was enquiring of Lestrade. He held his hands up in surrender and shook his head.
Sherlock was adamant. "It must be. There's no other explanation for a group so focused and well-prepared."
Veranda shot Sherlock an icy glare. "You don't shave with Occam's Razor, do you?"
He scowled and said, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
She snarled inchoately and gestured like she wanted to strangle him.
Lestrade looked back and forth between the two of them repeatedly, but it did nothing for his confusion. "Would you mind clarifying your statement, Ms. Erickson?"
She pursed her lips and sighed in resignation. "The simplest, most straightforward scenario is the most likely. Not whatever wild theory Mr. Too-clever-by-half here can spin out of thin air as he wields Crabtree's Bludgeon. Basically, when you hear hoof beats you should think horses and not zebras."
Lestrade nodded slowly and pretended to grasp the concept.
Veranda wheeled on Sherlock and spat, "Why don't you start with the likely? Then you can worm your way around to the impossible? Everything we did was completely above-board and 100 percent legal. But we had competitors. What about them? What about common, everyday industrial sabotage?"
"Why?"
"Why not? It's not any less reasonable than three guys throwing away their life's work on some James Bond super-spy crap."
"Six people have died..."
"And they're gonna kill me! What will it get them?"
"They think they've already killed you! That model woman...they mistook her for you." Sherlock was gesticulating fretfully.
"Oh, God." Veranda folded her arms on the table and laid her head on them. "Oh, God. We've had our falling-outs, but tell me this isn't real."
"The truth..."
"Pffft." She shook her head. "The truth is overrated."
"Nihilist," Sherlock replied dismissively.
Lestrade was staring at his notes sitting on the table. They looked so innocent. How were they at the root of the world's worst headache? He put his head in his hands. Sherlock...Mycroft...and now this Veranda woman...they were the source of his migraine. He was starting to appreciate dead people more and more; they argued less...both with him and each other. He gestured weakly across the table at the man and woman sulking at each other. "You're free to go. I have a place to start. Thank you."
"You do?" Sherlock was attempting to banter with Lestrade, but it came out a bit too sarcastic.
"I do. Leave. Please." He groaned in relief as Sherlock matter-of-factly hauled Veranda out into the hallway...hissing and spitting invectives all the way until they were out of earshot.
AN: I wrote this whole story primarily as an excuse to berate Sherlock, who I think deserved a drubbing. Of course, the only way to talk to a fictional character is with another fictional character. I really tried to make this whole thing hew as close to canon as possible and maintain the BBC Sherlock characterisations while bending them to my authorial will.
Somewhere along the line, I ended up with a plot-like series of contrivances and an OC with her own story to tell. It is slow, it is talky and there are no zombies, vampires, or mystical silliness. I wanted it to be plausible how the characters interact and how the story plays out. I am writing for "realness". I realise this isn't everyone's idea of a good time.
However, I would genuinely appreciate if anyone should choose to leave a review and let me know if I'm seriously off-base or just another fanfic writer labouring under delusions of her own writing ability.
Bueller? Bueller?
