Jim is thirteen when he finds Sherlock Holmes. He hasn't been idle during the years since his move to London. He's established a connection with a Chinese smuggling gang, designed thirty-four classy custom-made murders, and he has also engineered countless kidnappings. He has a bank account which his foster parents know about, which is fed a little money each month by another, much fuller bank account in Switzerland which doesn't officially belong to Jim. He tells his foster parents that he has a job at a bookstore, sorting things in the back room. His foster parents think he's at this job, the afternoon he first sees Sherlock.
He found Sherlock Holmes through an online forum, in the place he would have least expected it. Jim was annoyed that he hadn't found his rival earlier; after all, he was the cleverer one, he was the one who had outwitted Holmes with the Carl Powers case. Jim should have tracked down the young detective months back, but it had seemed from the beginning like a lost cause. Scotland Yard had, of course, no record of any detectives being advised by a child, and there was little to no way of identifying the person Jim had seen for a few seconds in the background of one fuzzy news broadcast. It was purely by chance that he came across this specific thread on a London-based social networking site. Jim was trolling about, as usual, on the threads connected to current events and specifically crime, giving one or another of his numerous email addresses to people he felt sure would need it. None of the people on these sites were ever very smart, but something about one post, a post that had triggered a long chain of replies, caught his eye. The author was identified only by their initials, SH. They were replying to a post on the recent trial for the murder of a two-year-old boy, James Patrick Bulger. From the evidence, it seemed that the murder had been committed by two ten-year-old boys. Previous commenters had simply mentioned the appalling nature of the crime, expressing their revulsion with anyone who would kill a two-year-old. Several had doubted the ability of a ten-year-old to do anything so vicious. SH had posted a lengthy response meant to address the initiator of the thread, who had said, in their post, '…kids should not be able to do this. I don't think that these boys killed him, that's too ridiculous and terrible.'
SH's post read:
You are wrong. Children are capable of anything adults are capable of. They are capable of cruelty and, as has been proven in trenches and farms and in first-world cities, of murder. All of the evidence in this case indicates that the boys tortured and murdered James Bulger: the paint on the shoes and clothes, the blood, the security feeds. It is unsurprising that these two young people should have killed a child, as adults kill children every day. Children are simply people without experience, who have no regard yet for the societal ideals which frequently prevent adults from engaging in taboo activities. Why is it that people regard children as somehow incapable of violence or cruelty? Anyone with ideas on this please re: . I am uninterested in hearing your ideas on the morality of my views.
Despite the last sentence, many people had replied to SH with specific judgments on the morality they felt SH lacked. They pleaded with SH to recognize that this murder had been an abomination, a rarity, a tragic accident. Jim smirked when he saw that SH had posted nothing else on the thread after the torrent of criticism. He clicked on SH's profile, and that was where he found the photograph. Jim frowned on people who put their photographs online where anyone could see them, but something about this photo was different. The boy, a young teenager from what Jim could discern in the picture, was staring at the camera expectantly, intently. The photo had been taken against a blank white wall, and from the angle the camera had been positioned about twelve feet away. The quality was poor, and Jim realized that the original picture had been a Polaroid. Something else was odd, though, apart from the fact that this young boy had got hold of a computer connected to the Internet. Jim recognized the likeness of the child on the news at the same moment he noticed the edges of the binding under the white shirt.
Now Jim is standing on a corner by the apartment building where the Holmes family live. He has placed a bomb in the mailbox across the street. He did it himself, this morning. The bomb is scheduled to go off in ten minutes. He looks at his watch, and then makes polite conversation with the woman walking her dog. Jim is not autistic. He knows how to relate to everyone just as he wants to. He is nothing if not a brilliant actor.
"It's a lovely day today, isn't it?" Jim asks, grinning. "This late in the year, you wouldn't expect nice weather like this. And the leaves still on the street trees, gives this whole area a lovely look. That's a great dog you have there." The dog in question is red, with long, floppy hair.
"Oh, thank you," the woman says. "He's very precious, my Albert. We got him when he was three or four. He was rescued from a puppy mill."
"Oh, wow," Jim smiles, showing teeth. "That's so amazing. So many people buy dogs without regard to the habits of the breeders. It's a shame. What breed is he?"
After two minutes, the woman smiles at him in a friendly way and excuses herself, continuing her walk.
Eight minutes to go, and this is when Jim sees the car pull up. The license plate number is the same as one that a Mr. Holmes secured four years ago for his newly purchased Fiat Bravo 4-door hatchback. Jim knows this because a lot of people, even people in the government, are very easy to bribe. Out of the car comes a middle-aged woman with light hair. After a moment the passenger door opens and Sherlock Holmes gets out. Jim smiles, very sincerely, when he sees Sherlock. Jim doesn't know his name right now, of course. The other boy is dressed as a girl right now, his short hair hidden under a cap, his legs exposed by a plaid skirt like those worn in public schools. His gaze is sharp and analytical, and his head swivels as he gets out of the car, taking in the street. His eyes catch for a brief moment on Jim, who winks and smiles in a flirtatious way. Sherlock's face goes blank and cold and he turns to the middle-aged woman and says a few short words. The woman shrugs it off and walks up to the apartment building door. They go inside. Five minutes later, the bomb goes off. Jim is not there to watch it, but he sees the smoke from a few blocks away. He hears later that there were no fatalities, and he is disappointed, because this means that the story is gone from the papers after a day, and there is no further word of the investigation in the press. Jim wonders, in years to come, if Sherlock made the connection between the winking boy on the corner and the bomb, delivered by mail to his neighbor. Jim wonders if Sherlock was even interested in a case where nobody had died.
The internet isn't really all that, in 1993. Mosaic, the graphic browser, has just been invented. Most people have never been on the net, and few kids own a computer that's connected to the world wide Web. Jim still manages to find the email address of a girl who goes to Sherlock's school. The school is just for girls, and Jim discovers that it has fewer than eight hundred students, only two hundred per class. The girl he meets online doesn't know Sherlock personally, but she's seen him. She is actually the one who brings him up first, after Jim asks if there is anyone odd at her school. She calls him Sheryl Holmes, like the birth certificate Jim found did, and says she's very smart, and says she must be a lesbian. Jim asks why she thinks so. This is over chat. The girl tells Jim that Sheryl's hair is very short, and her voice is very deep, almost like she is consciously lowering it. Jim asks if Sheryl shows romantic interest in girls, and the girl says she doesn't like anyone. Jim agrees that gay kids don't make friends as easily because of their differences. He flirts with the girl, and plays the sensitive, intelligent boy, and meanwhile he decides that Sherlock (he still doesn't know his name, though, so Jim thinks Sheryl, here) must have different values than he does, or just isn't a very good actor. He still wants to meet him, though, because Sherlock is the first person that Jim has seen who really understands, really gets what Jim gets from the world.
He'll always want to meet him.