Author's Note: The plot thickens… Keep a lookout for the clues. Try to solve the mystery before Watson and Holmes do! Let me know what you think about this story by writing a review. Thanks for reading!
Sherlock and John walked up the steps to the doors of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. The attendant at the front desk didn't even bother to ask why Sherlock was carrying a firearm. After all, it wasn't the strangest thing she had seen him carrying into the hospital. The award for that category probably went to the riding crop.
They made their way straight into the DNA lab, where tests regarding forensics and ancestry were done. The room looked like a much cleaner version of Sherlock and John's kitchen in 221B Baker Street, complete with rows of microscopes, electrophoresis tanks, and all kinds of medical paraphernalia.
Sherlock threw the rifle none-too-gently onto a table and took a swab from a nearby container. Using the swab, he took a sample from the trigger, which he had been careful not to touch for fear of infecting the sample, and ran it through a DNA sequencer.
"I've input the DNA code into the computer," said Sherlock. "It won't be done for a few hours, but-"
He trailed off, quirking his head as if he was straining to perceive something at the edge of human hearing.
John tried to listen for any sound out of the ordinary, but the years of shelling in Afghanistan had greatly reduced his hearing ability and he listened in vain.
"What is is?" asked John.
"It's coming from over here," said Sherlock, walking over to a cabinet just below the window. He knelt down and tried to open the cabinet.
"Ugh," said Sherlock, straining his muscles against the cabinet handle. "It's locked. John, hand me that hairpin, will you?"
As John bent down to grab the hairpin, a low, rhythmic ticking sound filled his ears. His heart sank with dread; it was unmistakably the ticking of a bomb.
Sherlock picked the lock with ease. With a heavy tug, Sherlock wrenched open the large cabinet.
Inside ticked a large, menacing bomb, strewn with a jumble of colorful wires and equipped with a central console displaying the time until detonation. The numbers that glowed crimson on the screen read:
00:00:03
"Oh, no," breathed John.
In a split-second decision, John leapt forward into the cabinet and wrapped his arms around the bomb. He had no idea what made him do it; there was no way he could possibly smother it. That kind of smothering only worked with small bombs, like grenades.
John closed his eyes, barely registering the last two ticks of the clock and bracing for the inevitable explosion.
But it never came.
Hardly daring to breathe, John frowned. The ticking had stopped, but the bomb had not exploded. In a daze, John emerged from the cabinet. Sherlock was halfway across the room, still sheltering behind a flimsy lab table that would've done little to protect him if the bomb had indeed gone off.
"What?"
Sherlock pulled herself from behind the table and walked over to where John stood shuddering.
"You tried to smother it!" yelled Sherlock angrily, turning on John. "What were you trying to achieve with that?"
"No need to get angry, Sherlock," responded John, who hadn't expected Sherlock's enraged response. "I just… did what I was trained to do."
"In the army they trained you to smother grenades," said Sherlock, "But if a bomb of that size had gone off, an attempt to smother it would have resulted in your innards getting splattered all over."
John had no response to that. Instead, he made his way back over to the unexploded bomb.
The bomb was silent and unthreatening. Sherlock stepped forward and saw that a red wire was loose from the main device.
"Whoever set this was no expert in bombs," said John, eyeing the loose wire.
"That's odd. From the complexity of the first bomb, I would say that the bomber was an expert in pyrotechnics," responded Sherlock.
John, meanwhile, had called the police at New Scotland Yard. "They're on their way," he said. "How would someone get access to this room to place the bomb? The window is locked. This room is under constant surveillance by the security cameras."
Sherlock looked up from the bomb to scrutinize the lab. There were security cameras stationed around the perimeter of the room.
"Let's access the video from these. Maybe, if the criminal was too lazy to cover their tracks, we can figure out who it is," asked Sherlock, gesturing at the security cameras.
They walked to the security control room that was behind the front desk. Sherlock elbowed the security guard out of the way, flashing Lestrade's stolen ID card at him.
Quickly, Sherlock pulled up a sped-up video of the DNA lab that showed the past few days. As the images came to a stop, Sherlock said, "How unusual. No one has accessed that cabinet in the past four days."
Sherlock pressed a few buttons and selected the video from five days ago.
"Hang on," said Sherlock, pausing and replaying the playback. "What was that?"
John leaned in closer to see the clip Sherlock had selected. This camera angle showed the window and the cabinet just beneath it.
The only thing they could see through the window was empty darkness. Then, they saw someone wearing a clean lab coat walk up to the cabinet. The figure leaned down and placed a large object inside. The person hunched over the cabinet and secured the lock they had seen. Then the figure turned away towards the door and walked out of sight.
"Go back a few seconds," said John.
Sherlock did as John said and paused the playback just as the figure on the small screen turned around. He zoomed in to focus on the bomber's face.
"What!" cried Sherlock, looking closer in disbelief. "That's impossible."
"It's her," said John, equally confused. "Molly."
"This… doesn't… make… sense!" said Sherlock, rubbing his temples in time to the words. "Molly can't possibly…"
Sherlock trailed off and hurried out of the security room.
"Where are you going?" asked John, following his flatmate closely.
"Off to deduce something," he responded, taking off in the direction of the offices. They came to Molly's office near the morgue.
"Ah," said Sherlock, his eyes rapidly scanning the desk and taking in the many details. "It appears that Molly is not here today. As a matter of fact, she hasn't been here for the past four days… ever since the bomb was placed. Finally! The pieces are coming together!"
Sherlock rammed his eyes shut and stood stock still. His arms were raised in front of him like a zombie and he moved his hands to and fro as if he was assembling a large, invisible puzzle.
Within a minute, his eyes popped open. "Got it!" he said cheerfully. "As soon as Molly placed the bomb, she crept off to set up more bombs around London. It didn't matter where she went, so long as she vacated the building. Since Molly worked in the DNA lab, she knew that that cabinet was rarely opened and used it to hide the bomb inside. Because this bomb was set by a timer, I get the idea that she intended for the bombings to continue, even after we were supposed dead by the first bomb."
"But… Sherlock, this is Molly we're talking about," said John, who was having a hard time believing the whole thing. "Since when was she an undercover bomber and sniper? And since when did she want to kill us? If she had harbored this intent at us for so long, why didn't she kill us sometime earlier when our backs were turned?"
"Maybe she had to wait for a sign from abroad to signal that the go-ahead was safe."
"You mean the Austin bombings?" asked John.
Sherlock frowned. "Not exactly," he said. "Once the bomber's strategy against the Austin police was supposedly successful - and it would've been successful, mind you, if I hadn't intervened - the bomber signaled to Molly part of the information she needed to proceed in London. But when he was captured by the American police, he was unable to send the last part of the recipe for the bomb, and Molly's time bomb failed to go off as a result."
"Originally, I suspect, the bombs in London were intended to be just random terror strikes. But when I captured the Austin bomber, I angered Molly and transferred the intent of her bombings to me."
"I don't believe it," said John dubiously. "Frankly, I can't believe it. I haven't known Molly for all that long, but it doesn't seem to me that she could bring herself to harm anyone, much less be an undercover bomber."
"Sometimes the worst of criminals are hidden under the guise of innocence," countered Sherlock.
"How do you explain the wire, then?" said John. "If Molly was really an experienced bomber, she wouldn't have made a mistake. And why did she not erase the video from the security logs to hide her identity?"
"Simple. Even the most practiced criminals make mistakes, especially if they are under stress. Take, for example, the cabbie in the case you call "A Study in Pink." He was completely incognito until we discovered that he had made a slip-up with the pink bag. Molly made the same error, albeit somewhat earlier in the chain of events. Next, she did not feel it necessary to delete the security camera footage because they would've been deleted automatically had the bomb exploded as she intended.
"My theory is that Molly created the apartment bomb as a diversion to keep us away from the hospital while she destroyed her evidence. Moreover, any deletion in the logs by an inexperienced hacker would result in an immediate alarm to the chief of security."
John nodded slowly. Much as he hated to admit it, Sherlock's conjecture was sound. He abhorred the idea that Molly might be a criminal. It was just too much for him to fathom.
He followed Sherlock into the area surrounding the desk. Sherlock ransacked the cabinets of the desk and rifled through their contents.
While John waited patiently for Sherlock to find anything of importance, his eyes drifted over to a stack of papers on Molly's desk. A particular word on the first page caught his eye. He reached down and picked the sheet up.
It looked like a death notice Molly had logged, the most recent one since her disappearance, judging by the date stamped in the corner. The first few lines were written in Molly's neat handwriting, whereas the majority of the words were slanted to the right and scrawled savagely, as if the pen that had written them had been on fire.
Patient: Alfonso Alberto Aragon
Time of death: 19:00
Cause of death: Heart attack
Witness: Molly Hooper
Summary:
At seven o'clock, the patient died from a heart
attack. The patient had previously said his good-
byes to his living relatives, including a young
man who was his only living son. The patient
had a pale countenance, a normal occurrence
given the circumstances of his death. Just
under his eyes there was a slight greenish and
navy blue tint. There were no abnormalities
save the discoloring. I will check in lab for the
meaning of this bruising. Perhaps I will resort to
Sherlock's riding crop technique to find answers.
Because of this unusual bruising, I have had to
occupy the complaints of the patient's son, who
may be concerned that the discoloration and the
bruising will remain during the funeral. More data
in the DNA Lab.
Meanwhile, Sherlock had risen from his cabinet-raiding.
"What's that?" said Sherlock, taking the sheet from John.
"It's the last death notice Molly wrote before she left. She mentioned your name in the middle… something about a riding crop?"
But Sherlock didn't acknowledge. He was transfixed, staring at the letter like it was made of pure gold.