Chapter 4

It was almost seven o'clock by the time we reached St. Bartholomew's. Sherlock had texted Molly, asking if she would stay and help with the tests. Except for emergency cases, the radiation labs would not be in use during the evening and overnight shifts, so there should not be a delay in what we were doing. Since I had privileges at the hospital I could authorize the tests, but it was a matter of what tests we wanted. I wanted to expose her to as little radiation as possible, but if Moriarty was involved, he could have implanted anything anywhere in her. I decided on a full-body X-ray to begin. It might show us what we needed without further subjecting her to anything else.

Molly met us in the lab when we arrived. "Oh, John," she said, "I heard on the news about what happened at your clinic this morning. Are you and Mary all right?"

"You, see, Sherlock?" I said. "That should have been your first question when I called you."

He ignored me and introduced Molly to Chelsea. Chelsea held out her hand to Molly but when Molly tried to shake hands with her, Chelsea yelped and quickly pulled back her own hand. The little girl slid behind Sherlock for protection.

"Did I do something wrong?" asked Molly. "Chelsea, I didn't mean to frighten you."

"It's been a long day for her," I said. "She's just tired."

Sherlock and I explained the situation to Molly and she agreed that an X-ray was probably the best place to start. "We can leave her clothes on if there's no metal in them. Just take off her jacket because of the zip."

I do not think Chelsea had let go of Sherlock's hand since we left the flat. When we walked into the Radiology Unit, her eyes widened and she once more huddled behind Sherlock. While the lab tech, who looked like he should still be in school, looked over our paperwork, I knelt in front of Chelsea and explained what we were going to do. I know the sterile surroundings and the machines must have been frightening to a five-year-old. Sherlock knelt, too, and renewed his promise that it would not hurt.

"Can Brownie get X-rayed, too?" she asked.

"Sure," agreed Sherlock.

"I didn't even think about the rope," I whispered to him. "It could contain something."

The technician helped her into position and Molly and Sherlock and I reluctantly stepped through the door into the shielded area, but where Chelsea could still see us through the glass. She did not take her eyes off of Sherlock during the entire procedure.

After it was over, we hurried back to Molly's lab. She could access the images from her computer there. While she and I meticulously reviewed them, Sherlock kept Chelsea entertained with a microscope and various slides.

"Well?" Sherlock asked after about fifteen minutes.

"Nothing," I admitted.

"Except here, John," Molly said, pointing to an area on Chelsea's back that was displayed on one of the screens. "Something's not right. There on the scapula. I wonder if she's had surgery."

I looked at the area she indicated. "I see. Along the scapula spine and medial border. It's on both of them." I looked over at Chelsea who was on her knees on a lab stool and peering into a microscope. "There should be visible scars. Let's take a look." I walked over to her. "Chelsea, I need to look at your back."

She straightened up so quickly she just about fell off the stool but Sherlock, standing beside her, caught her. "No!" she screamed. "No one can chee! Dad taid! It the law!" She tried to squirm out of Sherlock's grasp and get to the floor but he held her tight.

"Chelsea, honey," said Molly. "We're not going to hurt you. We just want to look."

"No!" she screamed again.

Sherlock kept a firm grip on her and held her to the stool, facing him. "Why is no one supposed to see your back, Chelsea?"

"Becaude."

"That's not an answer," he said sternly. "Now sit still and let us look."

Molly raised the little girl's shirt, but neither of us was prepared for what we saw. "Oh my God," escaped from Molly's mouth before she stifled it with her hand and all I could say was "Jesus."

Two wide, vertical scars with uneven borders tore down opposite sides of her back. The top of the scars were each intersected by two diagonal slashes. "That's wasn't surgery," I said. "That was butchery."

Still holding her tight, Sherlock stepped around so he could see what had caused our reaction. "Who did this to you Chelsea? Did your father do this?"

But there was no answer from her. She had gone rigid just as she had done earlier that day in the park. Her eyes were shut tight and her breath was coming in short gasps.

"What's she doing?" asked Molly. "What's wrong with her?" She released the hem of the girl's shirt and let it slip back down over her back, hiding the horrible mutilations.

Sherlock stepped in front of her again. "Chelsea, it's all right. No tears."

"No teard." She opened her eyes and looked at him. "I'm not going to cry." She visibly relaxed and Sherlock picked her up in his arms. She laid her head on his shoulder.

"I don't understand," said Molly.

"None of us do," I said. "But I want a CT scan of her back, her head, too."

"I'll call Radiology," said Molly. "We'll need to put a gown on her."

In contrast to her outburst a few moments before, Chelsea was unusually compliant during the CT scan which was delayed because of two patients who had come in through the emergency room. Before the CT test, Sherlock suggested we get a DNA sample from her and a blood draw. The DNA cheek swab was painless but the blood draw did violate Sherlock's promise of not doing anything to hurt her, but she soldiered through it with little more than a wince.

It was past eleven o'clock by the time we returned to Molly's lab to examine the CT scans. Chelsea, still in the hospital gown, curled up under the lab table while the three of us were intent on the computer screens, gleaning what information we could about whatever had been done to her. Well, Molly and I were doing that, anyway. Sherlock was working with a microscope and another computer, researching other avenues of his own investigation.

After just a few minutes of looking at the scans, the screen was becoming so blurry I could barely make out anything. "Sherlock, I'm sorry, I need to call it a day. And we've kept Molly hours past when she should have gone home and she probably has to be back here early tomorrow. What are you looking at anyway?"

Sherlock sat upright on the stool. "What if something was implanted in her using nanotechnology?"

"That's not what made those terrible scars on her back," said Molly.

"No, but I think those scars have sidetracked our original reason for coming here this evening. If nanobots could be used to deliver drugs to certain areas of the body, couldn't they be used to implant something more harmful?"

"Sherlock, you're talking about something that's still in research and development phase."

"But if Moriarty were involved somehow in all of this, he had the financial and technological resources at his disposal to execute it."

"But we're talking way outside my area of expertise," I admitted. "I wouldn't even know where or how to start looking for nanoparticles in her."

"Nor I," said Molly. "And I really don't know what else we're going to find tonight. But I think we have subjected her to enough for one day, although with those scars like that, I think we're obligated to report her to the authorities. That certainly looks like child abuse to me."

"Another day or two," said Sherlock. "I want to give her father time to show up. But maybe you're right, John. Maybe we should call it a day. Here." He picked up my jacket that had lying on the table near him and tossed it to me, then slipped into his own coat. He bent over to look under the lab table for Chelsea. "She's gone, John!" He straightened up and stood up and looked around the lab.

"We've all been right here," said Molly. "How could she have left without one of us seeing her?"

"Stay here, Molly," ordered Sherlock. "She couldn't have gone far. Come on, John." Sherlock and I headed out the door closest to where she had been under the table.

Out in the corridor, we stopped. "Which way?" I asked.

"Follow me," said Sherlock with just a moment's hesitation. He sprinted off. We stopped at a small alcove that housed a few vending machines. There was no one there. "She hasn't eaten since noon. We passed these on the way to the scans. I thought she might have come back here." He put his hands on his temples. "Where would you go if you were five years old, John?"

"As far away from this place as I could get."

"Come on." He was off again, running down corridors, pausing only enough to look down intersecting hallways.

As we neared the exit, I grabbed his sleeve to stop him. "You don't think she went outside? It's bloody cold tonight. She's bare-footed with just a hospital gown."

"Oh, John," Sherlock's face was ashen. "Look." He pointed to the end of a rope sticking out from the bottom of the exit door.

Sherlock opened the door and bent to pick up the cotton rope that Chelsea had kept a tight grip on all evening. At that moment a car's screeching tires drew our attention to the street.

"Christ, Sherlock!" I yelled. "There she is!"

In the dim glow of the street lights, we could see the little girl fleeing down the pavement opposite us. Sherlock stuffed the rope in his pocket as we ran across the street after her, almost getting hit ourselves. She turned down a side street just as we reached the pavement but we were not that far behind her. When we got to where she had turned, there was no sign of her but the street lamps were fewer here.

Sherlock put an arm out to stop me. "Hold up, John. Listen."

There was no traffic on this street at the moment and no other people, either, but a child's plaintive wails could clearly be heard coming from somewhere ahead of us. "In here!" Sherlock turned down a dark alley and whipped out his torch from the pocket of his coat. I had to follow after him in the dark since I did not have one. I had recently begun using the torch app on my mobile which, unfortunately, had been smashed that morning.

The wails became higher pitched screams as we drew closer until, finally, Sherlock's torch revealed the little girl, huddled in the dark against a rubbish bin.

"Oh, my God, John…"

"Jesus Christ…"

We both stopped short of her as the circle of light shone on her back. There on her hospital gown a huge letter M was written in the blood seeping through the material, the lines of the letter perfectly matched to the scars on her back.

Chelsea was screaming and crying so loudly, I am not even sure she was aware of our presence until Sherlock knelt beside her and said her name. That prompted her to spasm violently as she sought to escape. Sherlock pinned her arms and yelled for me to use my phone to take a picture."

"I don't have my phone!" I yelled back.

"Mine's in my pocket. We have to have proof before it's gone."

I fumbled for his phone, while he tried to contain her against her flailing body and kicks. Her cries had coalesced into words. "No!" she screamed over and over and "No one can chee!"

He pulled up the back of her gown, lifting it straight up and away from her skin so as not to smear the pattern. I took two pictures then wrapped my arms around her, as well, which made her cry out even louder.

"You're hurting her, John! Let go!"

I stepped back. The light on Sherlock's phone revealed that my attempts to control her had smeared the blood which was still flowing from what had appeared earlier in the evening as long-ago healed wounds. I pulled the hospital gown back down to cover her.

Sherlock kept saying her name over and over, but it appeared to have little effect on calming her.

"It on fire!" were the latest words that I could make out that she was saying and "I want my Dad!"

"Chelsea," said Sherlock, "what does your Dad do when this happens? How does he make it stop hurting?"

"You think this has happened before?" I asked.

"I know it has. That's why she doesn't cry, John. That's why she stops herself from crying."

Between wails came the somewhat garbled words, "He hold me."

John, come around here and hold her arms. I need to get my coat off." Sherlock and I switched positions and he shed his coat and also removed his jacket, then put his long coat back on. "Chelsea, I'm going to put my jacket over you. It's going to be all right. You're going to be all right," he repeated several times.

Sherlock's gesture actually did have a calming effect on her or perhaps whatever this phenomenon was had run its course. Her cries subsided to sobs. "OK, Chelsea, I'm going to pick you up. I'll try not to hurt you." Sherlock lifted her to her feet and wrapped his jacket securely around her, then rose from the pavement with her in his arms in one smooth movement.

"John, call Molly and tell her we've found Chelsea and that I'm taking her back to the flat."

"Not after what's happened here," I argued. "We've got to get her admitted to hospital tonight and figure out what's going on, what's caused…this."

"No. She's been through enough. I'm taking her home. I'll get a cab and you go back to the lab and collect her clothes and have Molly put the scans on a flash drive so we can study them at our place…at my place… and then come on over."

"No," I answered.

"What?"

"It's midnight, Sherlock. I'll get her things and the scans from Molly and then I'm going home…to Mary. I'll be round your place tomorrow morning. Here's your phone back. But if anything happens to her tonight, it'll be on your head."

"What could possibly happen that could be worse than what we've already seen? And if it does, it will be safer if she's in an isolated flat and not a crowded hospital."

We walked together back to the main road where I hailed a cab for him. He held Chelsea, wrapped in his jacket, tightly to his chest. When he got into the cab, I noticed that her blood had made it through in a few spots to the outside of his jacket.