Murder with Lens: A Sherlock Holmes Case (221B Baker Street Series) (17 page)

“It’s too cold out here for no coat,” Reese shivered, even in her pink leopard faux fur.

“How far?” John had his heart pounding in his throat. “I should have brought a torch.”

“It would make us a moving target.” She told him. “Within 120 feet.”

Forty yards.

“Go left and go straight.” She raced along, dividing attention between where her feet landed, and her iPad. “About 100. That’s 33.3 yards to a Brit.”

Within 20 yards, it couldn’t tell them any further detail. It indicated they had found their target. Frustrated, Reese threw the iPad down on the grass and trotted along the path before her without it. “They had to take a path. He’s a tall drink of water, Sherlock. Stay on the path.”

John hurried along beside her. The path they were on opened to lovely cobbled mall John dimly recognized now that it was dark. He looked aside at the ornate street lamp and the benches. His heart dropped, “Behind the bench.”

They raced to the still and curled figure leaned against a dead light. He was cold, insensate, and he didn’t react to their presence, but he had a strong and healthy heartbeat, wasn’t bleeding, and had all his fingers and toes by the looks of him. The designer clothes he wore weren’t thick enough for the unseasonable chill and his jacket was on the ground beside him, so John covered Sherlock in his coat at once.

Reese, meanwhile, paced beside him. She waited for John’s pronouncement on his condition. John looked up at her. “Alive, strong pulse. No signs of damage. Not awake or aware we’re here. He may be experiencing hypothermia.”

Finally, Reese dropped down beside Holmes. She was shaking badly and picked up his hand in both of her own, an action that stopped anything further coming out of John’s mouth. She examined first one, and then the other, rubbing a bluish fingernail until it turned pink. “Cold. Not hypothermic,” she said firmly, “he’s very cold.”

She shifted her position and levered him up so that his back lay against her. His curls bumped against her jaw. Sherlock wouldn’t have allowed any of this, if he’d been awake. He didn’t like closeness.

Reese reached around and unbuttoned a shirt cuff. “You’re wrong about the blood. There’s a spot on his inner elbow. It looks like they’ve given him something else to think about.”

John pushed up Sherlock’s sleeve. Track marks, some pale around the edges. Some not.

He froze. “Why?”

“He’s easy enough to discredit,” Reese settled back and held Sherlock to her chest. She rubbed his upper arm in a steady rhythm. “They did the same sort of thing to Lawrence early on, but with pills – barbiturates, or speed. I thought this was just the Club being careful how alert he was when he communicated with even their puppets, and Lawrence on his best day didn’t have a mind like Sherlock’s. This might be standard procedure. But they didn’t shoot Lawrence full of cocaine. Sherlock, who has a history of drug problems, and even arrests, him, they give cocaine.”

***

“Oh my God. Could be a test.” John forced himself to slow his breathing, roll Sherlock’s sleeve down, and button it again. “How long should this last? I’m sorry – illicit drugs… not my area.”

“Don’t know how much they gave him, what it was cut with, or how pure it is,” she said softly. “I mean, this is all wrong for a guy on coke. He should be wild. This is some kind of mix.” Reese rested her head on his curls and closed her eyes. “I’m keeping him warm. Just get us out of here. Make it happen, John. I’m done handling shit for tonight.”

John sat back on his heels and watched them a moment. And then he tucked Sherlock’s arm back under his coat and made a decision. He woke up Sarah and asked her to drive into a high crime neighbourhood to meet them.

It would do no good to go to Baker Street. They would take him to Sarah’s apartment.

Sherlock didn’t wake in the 45 minutes it took for her to get to them. It took three of them to get him out of the park and into the waiting car. Sarah, kindly, didn’t ask any questions on the way home, good enough for John, who fell asleep almost immediately in the warm car next to her. By the time they were parked, it was evident that Reese had fallen asleep in the back as well.

Sarah nudged John awake gently. “John, what the hell is going on?”

“I’ll explain,” he told her and then added. “Thank you for the rescue.”

She gave him a tired worried look and then jerked her chin at the rear-view mirror. “They look like a pair of runaway lovers, fast asleep back there. Is that what this is?”

“Not hardly,” John whispered and then shook his head. “Not tonight. Help me get him upstairs. There’s been bad business, I’m afraid. He’s been missing. We need to wake him.”

“He’s warmer now,” Reese said tightly. She unbuckled and started working her way out of the car. This involved untangling from Holmes’ long limbs. John shot a pained look to Sarah, who pressed her lips together and got out of the car.

Sherlock was tall and heavy. He was slender, but quite well constructed and solid. His eyes opened on the elevator, but there was little sense in them. He watched the numbers scroll. He looked up again at the apartment number as they opened the door. They didn’t make it to the couch with him. He slumped to the floor in the front room and started to curl up with a soft hiss of breath.

“What’s happening,” Sarah started unbuttoning his shirt to give him air.

“He’s been drugged,” Reese took off her coat, balled it up, and put it under his head. “He’s been missing for hours.”

“He didn’t do this, did he John? He’s been confused. I mean-” Sarah glanced at Reese, unable to finish the sentence. He’d been confused about Reese’s arrival in London – a person not unlike him that he badly wanted to gravitate to, and fiercely wanted to push away.

“See?” Reese sat back, opened her arms, and nodded at Sarah. She caught John’s coat and tugged him her way. “That’s exactly why you give him cocaine. It will discredit his side of the story before he opens his mouth. If we hadn’t caught the girl who fiddled the bulbs – I mean that’s just suspicious – this would look like he went off the deep end, walked off on you-”

“He has a history of doing that,” John admitted.

“-and then started slamming anything he could lay his hands on in the neighbourhood. This guy knows how to find drugs on short notice. It’s lucky we caught them moving him… and even that’s suspicious. But trust me. They orchestrated this. And it will hit home,” she looked at the floor for a moment, “if he’s as screwed up by me coming here as everyone seems to think.”

“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.”