Hey! This is the first case fic I've ever done. So it might be a little... rough.
This is part one of three. Enjoy!
"Shit," The writer muttered to herself. There was nothing left to write. No words that had yet been unspoken. No ideas that hadn't been thoroughly used and abused and tossed aside like a sticky condom. It was as if the universe had run out of ideas. As if life itself had run dry.
"Maybe I'll think up something new in the morning," She sighed to the empty room, shutting off her computer and stumbling, defeated, to her bedroom. In her melancholy, she failed to notice the subtle click of her front door unlocking. She changed out of her baggy, worn 'house clothes' and, after a moment of consideration, decided against pajamas. It was going to be a warm night. Later, she might come to regret this decision. But she wouldn't regret it for long. Besides, it wouldn't have mattered either way.
There was a scream in the night.
"He calls himself 'the muse'," Said the forensic investigator named Anderson, pointing out the words scrawled on the door frame as they entered.
Lestrade groaned. He really wasn't fond of these dramatic types. Sure, they were ultimately easier to catch, what with their arrogance and need for attention. But the crime scenes were always so gruesome. Not to mention the panic when the media sunk their teeth into it.
John tried to make some sort of sense of his current situation. Sherlock told him he was going to a murder scene, but he never explained why. Or why John needed to be there... Or why everyone investigating the crime were looking at him like he was responsible for the murder.
Inside the room, a small army of people in sterile blue plastic buzzed about the small apartment taking samples, snapping pictures. They all began to disperse even before Lestrade called for a ten minute break. Anderson lingered, unable to resist putting in his own opinion. "No one's seen anything like it. But if I had to guess... I'd say he's some sort of satanist fanatic."
Lestrade pretended to consider that possibility before dismissing him. Sherlock made a show of biting his tongue and not saying anything.
"She," Sherlock corrected the second Anderson left, shutting the door behind him. He walked in circles around the bedroom-turned-crime-scene, crouching at regular intervals in an effort to look at the scene from different angles. From where John stood, it almost looked like a strange dance. "Oh, I love a female serial killer. They're always so... inventive."
"Inventive? Sherlock, this is a murder," John choked out, trying not to vomit at the gruesome sight before him.
Sherlock said they were going to investigate a murder, but nothing could prepare him for this. The poor girl was strung up from the ceiling with fishing line, her arms outstretched like a bizarre crucifixion. Her skin was carved up strategically with delicate spiraling lines. Some of it hung off of her arms and sides like fleshy ribbons. And her face. John dared not look at it a second time. He'd seen people die in Afghanistan. Explosive deaths, traumatic deaths, slow deaths, he's seen them all. But all of it seemed pale in comparison to the expression on her slashed up face.
Sherlock grinned, his eyes sparkling. The army doctor was suddenly very aware that the room he was in contained both a vampire and quite a lot of blood. He began to watch his flatmate's actions much more carefully. "Ooh, not at all. This... This is a painting."
"Painting? How?" Lestrade asked, although he was already beginning to see it. Sherlock was definitely one of those dramatic types. He had figured that out early on. The detective inspector was infinitely grateful that Sherlock preferred to solve murders than commit them."And how do you know it's a woman?"
"No man would call himself 'the muse'. Stop being boring. The murder is only a medium. A means to an end. Killing this girl was not her goal. Her goal was to create this scene. Look at the care she took in positioning the subject. The attention to detail in the line work. She even put in the effort to frame and sign it. This murderer is an artist," Sherlock purred before throwing himself entirely into studying the scene.
John was disgusted. It sounded like Sherlock was praising this 'muse' killer. He circled around the victim, taking in the sight like a connoisseur tasting wine. Looking at her as if the poor, unfortunate victim of this brutal act was nothing more than what the murderer had made her into. His eyes gleamed like the edge of a newly sharpened knife. He stalked around the small, clumsily decorated bedroom like a shadow, searching through everything but disturbing nothing. The harsh lights deepened the shadows of his face, the stark contrast making his pale face into something more than human. John was fascinated. And suddenly very aware that he was standing in a room with a vampire and quite a lot of blood.
He leaned closer to Lestrade. "Is it a good idea for him to be here. What with all the..."
The man shook his head, aging fifty years in a single breath. "... If anyone found out about this, I'd be out of a job. But we need him. All of the others would rather rip out their tongues than admit it, but we do. Without him, cases don't get solved in time, criminals escape and good people die. It's not pleasant, but... you... were talking about all the blood, weren't you."
"A bit, yeah."
He snickered. "Sherlock's a big boy. He can handle it." John didn't look entirely convinced. "Look, I've been around their kind for awhile. They consider it rude to go about killing randomly."
"John, you're a doctor. Tell me your opinion as a medical professional." Captain John Watson took a deep breath and curled his hands into fists. It took every ounce of his strength to step away from the edge of the room and walk into that ghastly tableau, but once he was in it, examining the body of the victim became as easy as breathing.
"She seems to have bled to death. None of the wounds are very deep, so it would've taken awhile. These marks left by the fishing line looks like she struggled while she was being tied up, so she was conscious for at least the beginning. But she didn't fight very hard, or the cuts would have been messier... The killer must have had some way to incapacitate her." The horror of knowing that his young woman was probably awake and aware for every cut and slice didn't hit him the way he expected. Mostly, it just seeped into his subconscious and waited for a more convenient time to make itself known.
Sherlock nodded approvingly at the doctor, his lips twisting into a sharp grin that put a shiver down John's spine.
He addressed the room in the same manner that an actor would address an audience. The harsh lights illuminating the scene only added to the dramatic effect, bleaching his skin bone white and deepening the shadows of his eye sockets and cheekbones."It was vital to the killer that she be conscious during the process, yes. But that's not what's important here. The killer obviously intended this to be a painting. So we must examine it as a painting. To find the artist, we must identify her signature."
Lestrade sighed at the man's theatrics. Sherlock always got to his point eventually, but Lestrade didn't have the patience to wait for it today. "Could we just... skip to the end?"
"The question we should be asking ourselves is 'why'. Why this girl? She isn't astonishingly beautiful, she's too young to have done anything of importance. She obviously wasn't very social. Why would our artist choose her as the subject of an art piece?" Lestrade considered the question. "...Maybe she was an easy target."
"There are a hundred people in this apartment complex who would have been easier to kill. Just next door, there's a blind old lady who has a bad habit of leaving her door unlocked."
John gaze landed on a photograph on the victim's bedside table. It was of her and what must have been her parents. She was smiling. "She looked so ordinary," he mumbled to himself, feeling distantly sorry for the parents.
Sherlock grinned, his eyes narrowing into needle sharp points. It occurred to John that he said something right, but he wasn't sure what it was.
"Lestrade, dig through this girl's history. Find out what she had in common with the other victims. Have the victim's laptop, notebooks and journals sent to baker street. Anything she might have written on. Oh, and email me the crime scene photos" Sherlock ordered the detective inspector, sweeping out of the room like a very well choreographed murder of crows leaving a cornfield.
"Other victims!?"
"You can't be serious." Sherlock groaned, turning back with all the insolence of a teenager. "look at the amount of detail. The precision. Do you think she was just born with that kind of talent? This killer's had practice. A lot of it." He pivoted away again, flipping his collar up as he began the trip down the stairs.
John pretended to ignore the searing glares the forensics team gave him as he followed. "Sherlock, what am I doing here?" John growled under his breath. A twinge of pain flared up in his thigh, like a grain of burning sand lodged between his thigh muscles.
Sherlock made a point of not answering him. "Are you hungry? I understand that noon is widely considered lunchtime among you mortals." He paused a few feet away from the front door to pull his scarf a little tighter and adjust his gloves. After rearranging a few curls of hair to cover his ears, he pulled open the door. "I know this little Italian place. Angelo's. The owner's been eager to repay a favor to me for years now."
