Murder with Lens: A Sherlock Holmes Case (221B Baker Street Series)

by S. K. Lloyds

  “Who’s ‘everyone’?” asked John.

  She held up her hand, “Frau Young and Lewis – God Lewis can’t shut-up about it – and then Lestrade came in my black-out-room and talked to me about trying to work with him, not against him. I mean, that really hurt. I like the Detective Inspector, but clearly, he’s never experienced what a rabid clique of backstabbing weasels true geniuses can be. But I’ve been trying, here. I want to work with him. There’s a lot he can teach me. And I can teach him.”

  “That thing you did with the videos tonight… amazing.” John glanced up from checking Sherlock’s vitals. Sarah moved in with a blanket. “What do they call that?”

  “It’s called Clustering with Feature Extraction.” She sat back with a sigh. “Basically, I’m a card carrying Non-A.I. Data Miner. I’m ranked Class A. But that’s not what I call it. I call it Cluster-fu-”

  “We get it,” John interrupted and then laughed a little at the craziness of the conversation, and the feel of having Sherlock’s pulse kicking under his fingers.

  “Oh. Okay… only with Feelings Extraction, because it can screw you between the ears and leaves you numb.” Reese reached down and experimentally touched one of Sherlock’s curls. “The name Sherlock means bright hair. It’s soft. I wouldn’t have thought that.”

  “I think we all need some rest,” Sarah sighed. She gave Reese’s hand a squeeze.

  “I stay where he is,” Reese said with finality.

  “She’ll take the couch,” John got to his feet and checked the lock on the door. “Just everyone turn off their phones for now. I’ll set up on the floor and monitor him.”

  They moved around the apartment like zombies. Reese, with her exhausted data-mining head pillowed in couch cushions, was asleep in minutes. She’d changed into a night shift that Sarah had brought out for her. Sherlock was heavily asleep on his side, his head on another cushion. John slept sitting up in a corner beside him. This seemed excessive until Sherlock started to get up in the predawn darkness. He did this more than once, and each time, John caught him and steered him back to the pillow again. Sherlock seemed to understand he had to escape, without fully comprehending that he already had.

  “It’s me. It’s John….” They’d only known each other for a matter of months. “Doctor John Watson? Flatmate?”

  It was like talking to a stump.

  “You’re safe, mate,” John told him as he settled Sherlock back to the cushion he refused to lie on for more than 30 minutes at a time. “Have some pity. Lie down and stop waking me up.”

  Slowly, Sherlock’s glassy green eyes shut.

  ***

  John woke to the home phone. No one moved to answer it. It cut off without waking Reese. John figured she had to be utterly knackered considering what she’d done the night prior, a terrific feat that would have caved John’s head in and-

  John shot to his feet. Sherlock was gone.

  Sarah staggered out of her bedroom. She fastened her robe around her middle and smiled at him. “Do you realize it’s almost 1 PM?”

  It was another shock to his system.

  She held up the cordless. “Is your Detective Inspector friend named ‘Lestrade’?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Mr. Lestrade?” she reached the phone toward him. “No. He just left a message.”

  John had already moved on, “No, Sherlock. Sherlock is-”

  He hurried into the kitchen. Sherlock was seated at the small table there, his head in his hands. John heaved a sigh that tangled relief with fear. “Dear God, Sherlock, tell me what happened to you?” He walked into the kitchen and Sarah leaned on the door frame.

  Sherlock didn’t move. Didn’t speak.

  John felt a sudden blast of fear. Damn. He pulled open the fridge and started pouring orange juice into plastic tumblers he pulled off the drying rack. Sarah diverted around him to change the filter and start the coffee maker. She’d selected the strongest blend she had and then gone to lean on the arch to the kitchen again. Then Sarah glanced from John to Sherlock and back, anxiously. It was her ‘do something’ look.

  He set the cup down beside Holmes and reached his hand, his intention to clap Sherlock’s shoulder. The action was met by an immediate: “No.” Even though Sherlock hadn’t moved and couldn’t see, he’d known what to expect from John who retracted his hand with a glance at Sarah.

  Sherlock’s stiff and frozen posture was quite out of line with the sun flooding the window. It was worrisome behaviour, and they still didn’t know what had happened to him. John leaned on the table beside Holmes. “It’s okay, Sherlock. Go by steps. Tell me what you’d like for breakfast?”

  Sarah darted to the fridge. “Pancakes? I have fresh blueberries.”

  “Oh. Well I’d like 50 milligrams of cocaine in a 30 gauge needle for my morning push,” he said tightly and still didn’t move. “And then some heroin. Or I’ll be impossible to live with.”

  Sarah closed the fridge and leaned on it, then turned to John. Her lips compressed in a line of sorrow. John knew exactly how she felt.

  “Look at me.” John ducked down to try looking in Sherlock’s face.

  “Go away.”

  “Yeah, not likely. So, you been up long?” John sat down across from his friend.

  “I…” Sherlock’s voice dropped in frustration, “No idea.”

  John was stunned by this. He didn’t know what to say at first. “Did they hurt you?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Now John looked at Sarah and shook his head. This was bad. They needed a hospital. “Are you in any pain then? I looked you over last night and you seemed all right.”

  Sherlock closed his hands over his face. “Ugh – stop talking. Talking. Talking means time is passing.”

  “Of course time is passing,” John cocked his head at the man and thought about it. “You’re not sure how much longer you can hold on without going for more cocaine, that it?”

  Then Sherlock’s whole body shivered. It was violent enough that John got to his feet and hurried over in case he was about to fall or puke. Once he caught Holmes on the shoulders, John could feel he was trembling. He checked Holmes’ pulse. It was running fast. “Do you know what they gave you?”

  Sherlock sagged at the table. “I don’t know, John. It didn’t come off the menu. All I remember is the restaurant. I remember it went dark and you were telling me-” he shook his head. “The bulbs, they’d been-”

  “I know,” John nodded at Sherlock. “There was a girl. She unscrewed them in exchange for, uh-”

  Holmes shoved his hands through his dark hair.

  Not encouraging. Sarah pushed past and caught one of his fists as it smacked the table before him. “We’re going to get you something to eat-”

  He yanked his hand away. “No.”

  “Don’t touch him,” John said softly. Sarah eased away her hands.

  “Then drink the juice, okay? It’s got vitamins. And I’ll fix you coffee.”

  Sherlock immediately put his hands up to cover his face. After a moment more, he sighed and laid both hands on the table. Then he picked up the orange juice and drank the whole glass down. He set down the cup and looked around him miserably. His craving was like a force that swept the room.

  “Everything’s so… slow.” His fingers opened above the table, like they might wrap an apple.

  “I know,” John said soothingly, even though he didn’t actually know.

  “Coffee’s done.” Sarah set out a cup that was snatched up immediately by Reese. She took a swallow so deep and scalding that it creased her forehead.

  Then she turned to look at Sherlock. He stopped moving and averted his gaze.

  “Good morning,” she said. “Want some coffee? It might help make a man out of the mess I’m seeing here. You realize the police are going to take one look at you and know you’re flying. It won’t be Freak then, it’ll be Tweak.”

  “I didn’t do this.” Sherlock said very stiffly.

  She lea
ned on the table. “A cocaine injection is hard pressed to last an hour. How much shit did they give you?”

  His green eyes studied patterns on Sarah’s table placing.

  “You don’t remember, do you? Oh that’s rich.” Reese stalked around the table with a sour smile making her young features – very young, without the make-up – hard. “Oh you’re a genius, you are. Got ahead of yourself this time, though. I watched these guys a couple of years before I got to lead the investigation as Primary. Do you have any idea how meticulous I’ve been? I don’t think so. Off you go and you smack into them: hurricane Holmes. And what did they do to you?” She guzzled more coffee and smacked the mug down. “They cleaned your clock. I mean… you don’t even know what they did.”

  Sherlock shut his eyes. He closed his hands together before him.

  She pushed in close to him and he turned his head, so as not to see her. “So let’s look at you. I mean, you’re the evidence now.” She unbuttoned his sleeve and rolled it back. The bend of his elbow was badly bruised. Reese straightened his arm and swallowed hard. She stared for a long moment before she cleared her throat. “Tearing. When they stuck you, you were struggling. That’s what the bruising is about. Ligature marks, wrist and I can just see the edge of them,” she tugged his shirt collar, “on the throat. You weren’t bound to a chair, or object, there’s no sign of that. But your knees are going to be as badly scuffed as those fancy trousers of yours are. These guys controlled you by hand – someone was on each rope the whole time you were with them. That’s why the bruise patterns aren’t uniform, and there are so many of them.”

  Sherlock undid the other sleeve and rolled it up. His skin was purple with bruises. Reese bent and sniffed him. She surprised him by using his own mini magnifier to study his arms. When Reese looked up, she was so close to his pale face he momentarily couldn’t avoid her eyes. “I thought they might have been shooting you full of speedballs. This looks more like it was coke in one arm, heroin in the other. These are two different people, giving these shots. The bruising is different. There’s a handprint, and the tearing is really bad. You’re lucky there’s no abscess. Also, there are fewer holes over here. If you were strung out on heroin-”

  “My pupils would be pinned.” Sherlock shaded his eyes by gripping his head again.

  “Right. And your eyes are sensitive because the pupils are huge – really blown. They’re not the size of pinholes. So, this arm was heroin. You got less of it than you did of coke. Now, one drug in one arm, and one in the other, is that how you used to do it?”

  He looked sickened and pulled away from her. Reese caught a two-handed hold of his shirt and pulled him slowly back. “Okay, maybe this isn’t getting to you through the high, but we spent all last night flipping out and thinking they’d cut off your head. Answer my question, please.”

  He shut his eyes and said, “No. I did the right arm. But I didn’t like to mix, or backload. I’d do shots of coke with a chaser of heroin. I never had a point in my left arm unless someone did it for me.”

  “Stupid,” she released him and stood back. “You should stop trying to destroy yourself.”

  “I was a kid. And you slit your wrists.” Sherlock snapped in retort.

  “Fine. Then so should I.” She heaved a sigh and hugged herself. Reese stared at him. “So, if you had help, would you split it out? Like let’s put the white stuff in the right, and the brown in the left?”

  “No. And no, whoever they were, they didn’t know me that well. Just well enough to make it look close.” Sherlock shook his head. “I need a blood test… see if I’m okay. Check me for disease.”

  “You’ll be clean. They didn’t want to kill you. They wanted to question you. But, yeah, I agree you need to go to hospital. In fact, I have news for you – you’re the crime scene. You aren’t doing anything until we go over you for evidence.” She told him and crossed her arms on her ribs. “I want a doctor to do that. Then we’ll need to do some head work with you. I saw you on security footage. You don’t remember what they did, but, inside, you were mashing the Record button. It’s in there. So it’ll be down to me against the drugs. This will work better if we start as soon as possible.”

  Sarah reached out and closed her hand over John’s shoulder. He really appreciated that, because he was afraid. There was no way the police were going to believe this.

  ***

  Lestrade looked like he’d aged overnight. The moment John and Reese walked onto his floor, the moment Sherlock stepped out of the elevator, his eyes on the floor, half Lestrade’s agents froze. Lestrade shoved through the CIA. He actually shouted. “What the hell is going on?!”

  Young hurried between the intervening desks and caught hold of Reese. They fell into a quiet conversation. Reese handed over a copy of the hospital report. It was from the evidence collection carried out on Sherlock and his clothes. Holmes seemed to be doing a little better after a shower and a change, but he wasn’t going to relish this next part.

  John could look at him and see that he still hadn’t come down. Cocaine flashed over the brain and was gone, sometimes, in half an hour. And this wasn’t right for heroin. John had spoken to the doctors about the urgency of the matter, but they said it was likely the results of the blood draw wouldn’t be in until evening, or tomorrow. They didn’t know what he’d been given. The hospital visit had taken three hours. Evening was closing in on them now.

  Lestrade walked through the gathering silence. His motions caused Sherlock to raise his head. It was impossible to miss the effects of the mystery drug at that distance from Holmes. The blood drained out of his face, and Lestrade looked at John. “What’s this about? What did he run off and do?”

  “Not my call.” Sherlock said dryly.

  “Let’s look at the positives here,” Reese broke away from her handlers and walked back to join Lestrade. “The Club broke pattern. Their people may have grabbed Sherlock, but he was brought before actual Club members last night. The reason why he’s in this condition should be obvious. First, you’re a cop. A cop would be much more likely to believe Sherlock did this to himself than had it done to him by a bunch of kidnappers, second they kept him docile and off his game, mentally. His resistance to coke is low to begin with. The Club would have done their homework and known what cocktail was most believable for him. I mean, sans me, you wouldn’t believe Sherlock, and it’s likely you’d suspect John was protecting him. These injections were designed to keep him functional, but not in control. I think we’re going to find that the cocaine injection was some kind of powerball. He’s got no conscious memory of last night. My best guess is they hit him with GHB.”

  “Oh, well – that makes it all perfectly clear,” Lestrade set his hands on his hips. “I had men all over the city looking for you, Sherlock. And you’re going to stand here and tell me someone forced you to do this and you didn’t go off the wagon?”

  “He didn’t do this at all,” Reese shook her head. “Two people stood by and shot him up.”

  “And if he did, his aim was off,” John said grimly. “Let’s pull the blinds in your office. I’ll show you the track marks.”

  “No you won’t,” Sherlock said stiffly.

  Lestrade gave Holmes a look that normally would have silenced him. But it was only by chance that Sherlock remained quiet. “You’d best start cooperating, Sherlock.” Lestrade turned and barked. “Donovan, keep them out of my office.” Lestrade had a mean head of steam going. They all followed him, Sherlock guided by John. He was in a daze, almost unaware of the staring police he drifted through.

  Holmes folded into a chair in Lestrade’s office. “Turn out some of these lights.”

  “His eyes,” Reese pointed at her own eyes on her way out to deal with her people. She flicked off the overheads and shut the door behind her.

  Moments later, John said, “They’re not infected.” Under the light of the desk lamp, with all the blinds closed, John slowly turned up a peacock blue shirt sleeve and pulled Sherlock’s pal
e arms straight. “Besides, if he did this to himself, why are there ligatures?”

  Lestrade laid down the copy of the evidence report Reese had handed him. He hadn’t had time to open it yet. He set it on his keyboard and got in for a close look at Holmes’ arms. “No… Sherlock on his worst day… never looked like this. He’s too precise for this mess. It’s a bloodbath.” The door opened and closed to admit Reese and Young. Young simply found a chair near the door and settled into it. Reese paced in front of the door.

  When John looked at him for a reaction Sherlock gave a bored shrug. Then he turned his head away. That was the true reaction. He wanted all of this to be over.

  “Banging away on both arms isn’t Sherlock’s use pattern.” Reese stopped pacing and added. “And there’s the fact we saw the videos. He was half carried out of that restaurant.”

  “He could have been shooting up upstairs for all we know. He went outside a couple of times. John didn’t know where he was.” Lestrade frowned. “That might have been a former junkie mate, or the dealer just tossing him out of the building – we don’t know.”

  John jolted. “We went there to eat. It was my choice, and I know that place-”

  “And maybe he knows it too, but for a different reason,” Lestrade said angrily.

  John thought of the area and realized… there was a possibility he’d put Sherlock badly in the way of temptation. He’d been struggling with his emotions. From the Met’s point of view, it was plausible Sherlock had recognized the place, gotten tired of waiting, and gotten high. John felt himself shut down when he realized he hadn’t had eyes on Sherlock through the entire first 20 minutes or so of being at the table. He’d been pouring over the menu and talking to the servers.

  It wasn’t true. But it could be made to look true.

  “If you think he did this. You have to prove it,” Reese challenged. “I have the timeline from the videos too, Detective Inspector. He was out of the way of the cameras in the downstairs only for about eight minutes before the blackout. From what I see right now, the Club’s blackout ended a bit too soon. I doubt they know we caught them dragging him out on tape. But those guys weren’t friends of his. Lestrade, don’t let this muddy the waters. Don’t listen to the office buzz. You’re not being clear now. You should have gotten some sleep last night.”