CH 5
Sherlock - Holmes - John - Watson
They'd managed to return to the Baker Street address, nearly winded from their invigorating run. They laughed together and huddled in the entrance way, slightly breathless.
Still chuckling, John observed, "That was ridiculous. That was the most ridiculous thing I've done."
"No it wasn't," Sherlock said. "You invaded Afghanistan." The two men giggled like boys.
"That wasn't just me," John sobered slightly. He breathed in deeply and asked, "Why didn't we go back to the restaurant?"
"They can keep an eye out," Sherlock replied. "It was a long shot anyway."
"So what were we doing there," John asked.
"Oh, just passing the time and proving point."
"What point," John asked.
"You," Sherlock said with a gentler smile. He turned to shout down the hall, "Mrs. Hudson, John will be taking that second bedroom after all."
"Says who," John asked with a confused frown.
"Says the man at the door," Sherlock replied as he turned to listen to Mrs. Hudson come out of her flat with a worried expression.
"Oh Sherlock," Mrs. Hudson said. She'd wrung her hands and asked, "What have you done?"
John was pre-occupied by the sudden knock at the door, but not by the man standing there. He'd smelled the restaurant owner come up the short stoop.
"Hello there Doctor," Angelo said. "Sherlock texted me, he said you'd forgot this." He held out the walking cane that John had been using for his limp, ever since he'd been discharged from his unit and army responsibilities.
"Thank you," John said and looked back through the door. "Thank you," he repeated and the man waved at him, as he returned to his restaurant. Dr. Watson ran back into the flat and followed his flatmate, who had raced up the stairs.
Sherlock strode into the flat and demanded, "What are you doing here?"
John had followed and noticed that Detective Inspector Lestrade was sitting, relaxed and calm, in Sherlock's chair.
"Well, I knew you'd find the case," Lestrade told them. "I'm not stupid."
"You can't just break into my flat," Sherlock growled out.
"You can't withhold evidence," Lestrade returned. "And I didn't break into your flat?"
"What do you call this, then," Sherlock demanded.
"It's a drugs bust," Lestrade told them.
"Seriously," John stated, as he came into the room. "This guy? A junkie? Have you met him?"
"John," Sherlock warned.
"I'm pretty sure that you could search this flat all day and you wouldn't find anything that you could call recreational."
"John," Sherlock barked at his new flatmate to get him to stop talking. "You might want to shut up now," he said in a low tone.
"Yeah, but come on," John said and then he really looked at the younger man. The clenched jaw and the tensed muscles all sang to his senses that his flatmate wanted to stop the conversation cold. "No...," he said.
"What," Sherlock asked without going further into the question.
"You..." John was just shocked by what he'd just learned and then his senses kicked in. 'Bloody hell,' he thought. 'I'm the one that just moved in...this flat isn't clean.'
"Shut up," Sherlock growled at him and then he said, "I'm not your sniffer dog."
"No," Lestrade agreed and said. "Anderson's my sniffer dog."
"What An...," Sherlock looked around quickly and found the man in question, routing through some cupboards in his kitchen. "Anderson, what are you doing on a drugs bust?"
"Oh," the man in question replied in a smarmy, grinning tone. "I volunteered!"
"They all did," the Detective Inspector said. "They're not strictly speaking on the drug squad, but they're all very keen."
"We found the case," Anderson pointed at it gleefully. "According to someone, 'the murderer has the case', and we found it in the hands of our favourite psychopath!"
"I'm not a psychopath, Anderson," Sherlock sneered with full contempt against the weaselly, rat-faced man. "I'm a high-functioning sociopath. Do your research!"
"So you what? You just set up this pretend drugs bust to bully me?" Sherlock glared at the Detective Inspector, while he was outraged at the fact that policemen were rifling through his flat. He had noticed that not one of them was a Sentinel, for which he was grateful, yet it was the principal of the thing.
"It stops being pretend," Lestrade stated. "If, they find anything!"
"I am clean!" Sherlock declared, loudly for everyone in the room to hear.
"Is your flat," Lestrade questioned. "All of it?"
"I don't even smoke," Sherlock said, as he rolled up his sleeve to reveal the nicotine patch on his arm.
Lestrade did the same and exposed a similar patch on his own arm. He only stated, "Neither do I."
AG Donovan had just come out from another part of the kitchen and held up a jar with several eyes floating in some kind of liquid. "Are these human eyes?"
"Put those back," Sherlock motioned to her. He knew that she was a low level Guide, but even low levelled ones got lucky from time to time with their empathic ability to sense a person's panicking emotions. That's why she was a good police person.
Sally's expression soured, as she said, "They were in the microwave."
"It's an experiment," Sherlock stated with a glare at the woman for questioning the contents of his microwave. He turned to look back at the Inspector and asked, "What did you find out about Rachel?"
Lestrade just rolled his sleeve back down and said, "She was Jennifer's dead daughter."
Sherlock caught the past tense and asked, "When did she die? What were the circumstances of her death? There has to be a reason why she scratched that name."
"There were no circumstances to Rachel's death, technically she never existed," Lestrade explained. "Rachel is Jennifer Wilson's stillborn daughter."
"Ridiculous," Sherlock huffed. "That gives me nothing to go on. The death of a child so many years ago is inconsequential to this case."
"Sherlock," John said in a tone that caused the younger man to look at him.
"What," Sherlock said and then looked at the faces of the people in the room. He noted that they looked offended or angry, he could never tell which. He turned back to John, who only looked at him with concern and asked, "Not good?"
"Bit not good, yeah," John confirmed.
"But think about it John," Sherlock pressed. "If you were dying, would you be thinking about a child that died so many years ago, you'd have had the time to work through your grief by now. What would you really be thinking?"
"Please God don't let me die," John answered him.
"Use your imagination," Sherlock huffed.
"I don't have to use my imagination," John replied with a shadowed look to his face, as some thoughts of the war crept back to the forefront of his mind, with absolutely wretched timing.
"Rachel has another meaning then," Sherlock said softly. He blinked and frowned. The noise of the intruding officers was beginning to bother him. "Shut up everybody, shut up! Don't move, don't speak, don't breathe! I'm trying to think. Anderson, face the other way you're putting me off."
"What," the man said. "My face is?"
Lestrade commended them, "Everybody quite and still. Anderson, turn your back."
"Oh for God's sake..." Anderson huffed.
"Your back now," DI Lestrade said. "Please!" The man grudgingly turned so that his back was to the living room.
Sherlock concentrated on all the details of the case and realized that he'd overlooked a small thing. "Oh, she was clever. All the best of the Yard and the dead woman was smarter than all of you combined. Rachel wasn't the name of her daughter."
"What does it mean, then," John asked.
Sherlock moved to sit down at his laptop and said, "John read me the web address on the label."
John rattled off the long address, as Sherlock explained to them, "She was a successful business woman, probably traveling for her job, as a media representative. Plus juggling all those lovers she wouldn't just leave that information lying around; not at home or at work. She did all her business with her phone and she had to have a good one. Meaning not only was it top of the line, but a Smartphone, meaning it's GPS enabled." He typed quickly and then stood up to continue informing the police what they had missed. "With that address, all we needed is her password, Rachel, and we'd be able to locate it and with it the murderer. She knew she was going to her death, so she planted her phone."
John sat down in front of the computer to wait for the signal to focus on the phone's location, while Sherlock told their land lady that he hadn't ordered a cab for the second time that night. "Sherlock," he said in a confused tone. He called out again this time getting the man's attention by the tone of his voice. "Sherlock!"
"What," Sherlock asked.
"The phone's here," John said. "It's here, in Baker Street."
"Maybe it was in the case when you brought it back," Lestrade said. "And it fell out somewhere."
"What?" Sherlock said in a questioning tone. "And I didn't notice it?" He stressed the word, "ME! Not notice something so basic. The killer's got the phone, but it's somewhere in Baker Street, that just doesn't make any sense at all." He was confused about it.
Mrs. Hudson hovered in the doorway, but Sherlock immediately noticed the shadowed figure behind her. He blinked and then received a text message on his own phone that said: Come with Me!
"I need to get a bit of fresh air," Sherlock said in a distracted tone.
John didn't like it. He sensed the presence of another person in the flat, but he couldn't tell if the person was new or if it was just one of the 'volunteered' policemen that he hadn't noted before. He watched the younger man leave.
Outside on the street a Cabbie, held a pink phone in his hand. He pocketed it, as soon as Sherlock saw it and stepped out closing the door to the flat. The strange man smiled and said, "Taxi for Sherlock Holmes."
"I didn't order a taxi," Sherlock said.
"Doesn't mean you don't need one," the Cabbie replied.
"You're the one who stopped outside of Northumberland Street," Sherlock confirmed. "It was you, not your passenger."
"See, no one ever thinks about the cabbie," the man said. "It's like you're invisible. Just the back of an' ead. Proper advantage for a serial killer."
"Is this a confession," Sherlock asked.
"Oh yeah! I'll tell you what else," the Cabbie told him. "If you call the coppers, I won't run. I'll sit quiet and they can take me down, I promise."
"Why?"
"Cause you're not going to do that," the man said.
Sherlock looked at the other man and asked, "Am I not?"
"I didn't kill those four people, Mr. Holmes. They killed themselves. I only spoke to them and they killed themselves," the Cabbie told him. "If you get the coppers now, I promise you one thing: I will never tell you what I said to them."
"No one else will die though," Sherlock stated. "I believe they'll call that a good result."
"But you won't ever understand how those people died," the Cabbie said. "What kind of result do you care about?"
Sherlock paused for half a moment to think about what was being offered by the obvious serial killer. "If I wanted to understand, what would you do?"
The Cabbie grinned, since he knew that he had this man dangling from his fish hook now. The bait he'd used was the curiosity that he could clearly see, "Let me take you for a ride."
"So you can kill me too," Sherlock said.
"I don't want to kill you," the other man said with a shake of his head. "I'm just gonna talk to you and then you're going to kill yourself."
Sherlock turned to look up at his flat's window. He turned back, stepped into the taxi and let the serial killer drive him away.
Meanwhile in the flat, Lestrade shook his head and asked John, "Why did he do that? Why did he just leave?"
"You know him better than I do," John answered with a shrug of his shoulders.
"I've known him for five years," Lestrade said. He shook his head and replied, "And no I don't!" He motioned for his officers to pack up and leave. He knew that they wouldn't be getting anything more out of the 'Consulting Detective & Guide'.
John was surprised at that and confused. "So why do you put up with him?"
"Because I'm desperate, that's why," Lestrade said, as he shrugged on his overcoat and watched the last of his men leave. "Because Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and I think that one day...if we're very lucky...he might even become a good one."
John saw them out, but not before handing DI Lestrade his cell number on the back of one of Sherlock's business cards, that had been lying around, in case they found the man before he did. Then he returned to sit at the laptop. He re-ran the query and this time he noticed that the phone of the dead woman was traveling away from the flat.
"Bloody hell," he whispered. "I'm going to kill him."
He quickly put on his coat, loaded up the email address to his cell phone and logged into the woman's information. He sighed, as the GPS information came online. 'Idiot,' he thought, as he flagged down a cab of his own. 'I may not be certain that you're my Guide, Sherlock, but you should have found a way to let me know about this, you great bloody prat.'
Although, he was honest enough with himself to know that they haven't had the time to develop any such signals. 'I wish he'd been in the military,' he thought, as he instructed his cabbie to turn right on the next street. 'With his mind, he should have known the common signals to let me know where he was going, but maybe he just didn't think about it or perhaps he couldn't because of the police in the flat.'
John sighed and guided his cab in the direction where Sherlock's cab seemed to have stopped. 'I'm going to clean that flat top to bottom when I get the chance,' he thought, as the cab slowed for a stop light. 'There's no way that a drugs bust, fake or otherwise, will ever make him nervous again.'
Dr. Watson may not have known it, but he was deep in the throws, of something called, "Protect the Guide Syndrome," that the SC had had classified as a real, medical issue that prevented Sentinels from being charged with any kind of public offense...something quite like the killing of a person or persons known or unknown in defense of a Guide...any Guide no matter their bonded status.
Sherlock - Holmes - John - Watson
TBC...