Holmes will maintain, until he reaches his more permanent grave, that there is no such thing as the perfect crime. Not in practice. Theory is one thing, but the practice depends on a human criminal. Humans leave traces, have motives, make mistakes. There is no such thing as the perfect crime because no criminal is perfect.
But the Death Mask incident came bloody close.
The Incans imagined their kings as sunbursts and showers of gold, an image that was carried into the afterlife. In his second year dead, fourteen were gathered at the Museo de la Nacion, and fourteen vanished in a night.
No footprints, no fingerprints, no alarms, no CCTV. Not a trace.
People keep a crime from being perfect. People like fences, who can't hold their tongue. People like buyers, who need to show off their new piece. All he has to do is wait. The traces, the evidence, will appear.
People like thieves keep a crime from being perfect. Each Perspex case had had a smiley face drawn on its glass in fourteen different colours of permanent marker. Whoever it was, they might as well have screamed his name from the roof.
Still; fourteen large heavy masks of turquoise and gold simply faded from existence. A crime will never be perfect. He never said it couldn't be beautiful.
