Sherlock Holmes in Orbit

by Mike Resnick (ed)

  The cocktail waitress set down my beer, sloshing some of the foam onto the scarred wooden table. Then she put down a glass of iced tea for Holmes, followed by a pitcher of milk and a bowl of sugar. With a sarcastic flourish, she produced a spoon and handed it to him, scooped my five dollar bill off the table, and left.

  “No,” I said reluctantly. “We haven’t.”

  “In addition, there was a small print from an—athletic shoe—and it had come from the opposite direction away from the car. I think you will find that the killer splashed the blood on the bumper as a way to lead us astray. The blood streak was a similar ploy, for it is too even and straight to have been caused by a body dragged to the edge of the embankment. The killer walked through the embankment in the pre-dawn hours, walked from one of the side streets, carrying the body with him. Since the incline from the road is so steep, I would doubt that anyone saw him.”

  I took a sip of the beer. My hand was shaking. I had noticed those things, but had not put them together. Holmes was right. I guess some details didn’t change over the span of centuries.

  “I believe,” Holmes said, “that if we discover who this woman is, we will have found our killer.”

  WEDNESDAY, 2:33 P.M.

  We sent the victim’s fingerprints and photograph to crime labs nationwide. Then we gave her picture to the press, who published it nationwide, then we hired a temp to monitor the phone calls.

  Holmes was amazed by some things: the amount of data we had at our fingertips; the way that information could travel across country in a matter of seconds. Of course, he expressed that amazement with calm, letting us know that such changes were logical extensions of the era in which he had lived. He also told me privately that he believed such intellectual ease had made us lazy.

  Birmar thought the remark funny. I didn’t. Holmes wasn’t making any points with me at all.

  By this point in the investigation, we had eight different psychological profiles on the killer. The profiles assumed the killer was male and strong (which seemed obvious, given the football player), deficient in social skills and with a deepseated hatred of famous people. Holmes disagreed with all of the experts on all of the points but two. He conceded that the killer had a hatred of the famous, and that the killer was strong.

  We had returned from the bar after a lunch of burgers, heavy on the grease. I had had the one beer and Holmes had downed four cups of tea, making him jittery. When we returned, we were summoned to the chief’s office, along with Birmar, for an analysis of the case.

  The office smelled of reconstituted air and old gym socks. The chief kept his workout clothes in his filing cabinet— “that way no one will snoop,” he would say slyly—and never opened his windows. His desk was littered with papers, and a computer hummed continually on the edge of a nearby table. The chief sat in an overstuffed chair behind the desk. Holmes and Birmar had taken the only remaining seats. I leaned against the closed door, arms crossed in front of my chest.

  The chief had gone over the newest psychological profile—which said nothing different from the others—and then asked for our opinions.

  “I would disagree with your experts,” Holmes said. “It would seem to me that our killer is quite socially adept. After all, he managed to get close to people who are continually surrounded by others—and in the case of the—stars— are heavily guarded. No, this is a person who has enough resources to be able to travel great distances quickly and unseen, a person with the ability to get close to the unapproachable, and a person with ties to Santa Lucia.”

  The chief and Birmar were watching Holmes as if he were god. I was beginning to resent the sound of that resonant accented voice. I had already figured out the Santa Lucia part—that seemed obvious—and I had told the chief about my theory that the killer had a job that attached him to the famous. I had missed Holmes’s third point, and I shouldn’t have. Maybe Holmes was right: maybe my access to technology was making me intellectually lazy.

  “It’s got to be a private plane,” I said. “He brought three of the victims in from the East Coast in less than two days.” “I’ll call the airport,” Birmar said.

  The chief shook his head. “Our killer would be too smart to land in Santa Lucia. We need to check the airports that handle small planes. Get some help on this, Birmar. Get the logs from all the airports within a day’s drive from here.” Birmar blanched. “Sir, I don’t believe he would drive all the way here from, say, Utah.”

  “One must never let one’s own preconceptions interfere with an investigation,” Holmes said.

  I stared at him. He looked perfectly at ease, sitting in a plastic chair, his feet outstretched, the chief’s computer humming from the table beside him. No wonder Holmes was not ruffled by being leaped into the future. When he was involved in an investigation, he checked his expectations of the world at the door.

  Holmes looked at me. “What type of job would a man need to get close to the famous?”

  I shrugged. “Journalists get passes. Police, security guards, hairdressers, drivers, caterers—there’s a whole list of support personnel that could get inside any citadel as long as they know how to open the door.”

  “Yes,” Holmes said, steepling his fingers, “but that door must be the same for each of these unfortunates.”

  “We already have a team investigating the links between our victims.”

  Holmes smiled. “We will find nothing yet. Until we know the name of our final victim, our killer has us at a disadvantage.”

  I deliberately uncrossed my arms, and let them drop to my side. “What makes you say that?”

  “We have all assumed the killer is male,” Holmes said. “It wasn’t until this very moment that I realized we are looking for a woman.”

  WEDNESDAY, 3:15 P.M.

  I was very glad that Rae Ann wasn’t in the office with us—or any of the other women in the department for that matter—since Holmes spent the next half hour explaining that the “fair sex” can be quite brilliant. He relayed his experiences with one Irene Adler and, while he implied that she was an exception to most females, he assumed that each century must produce at least one similar mind. Only this mind, the one we were seeking, was diabolically fiendish.

  The thing which convinced him that our killer was a woman was the shoeprint. Holmes claimed he had been turning the pattern over and over in his mind while we talked. Forensics had confirmed that the shoe was a bargain brand, bought at a discount shoe store, and that it was a male size four. Holmes said he had watched footwear for the next day and noted that many of the female officers preferred men’s tennis shoes to women’s. No men wore a size four, but a number of the women did.

  “That’s not proof!” the chief snapped. “That’s supposition. Besides, serial killers are always men.”

  Holmes sighed. “I understand that you have a lot of data on these killers. But there is nothing to prevent a woman from using these techniques for her own gain. There are several other things that point to a female hand. The victims were clothed, not naked, as seems to be common in these cases. And, while she seems to have done a lot of lifting— which I believe possible for the women I have seen since I have come here—the method of murder, the knife attack, relies more on surprise and a victim’s abhorrence of knives than any need to physically overpower someone. The knife, by the way, is an angry weapon, often chosen by people who have kept a great deal of fury buried inside for a long time. A woman’s weapon, if you will, since women are trained not to express their feelings.” Then Holmes smiled. “That much, at least, has not changed between our time periods.” Holmes leaned back in his chair and pressed his steepled fingers against his lips. He spoke softly, as if he were speaking to himself. “In fact, I would suppose that a number of the unsolved serial killings you have in this nation are unsolved simply because you are unwilling to admit that the fair sex is as capable of atrocity as we are.”

  At that comment, I turned my back on the discussion and left the office. Holmes’s cont
empt for our methods sent an anger through me that was counterproductive. He had worked on a handful of cases in Victorian London, a city with a population half that of Santa Lucia, Santa Cruz, and San Jose combined. Murder was a parlor game then, and the only serial killer, the infamous Jack the Ripper, had never been caught. If I had remained in the room, I would have said all of those things.

  Instead, I went to my desk, took deep breaths, and thought. The precinct was nearly empty, with most of the department working on various cases, and another group handling the Gato Apartment murders. In the background, a phone rang incessantly. Behind bubble glass at reception, a uniformed officer argued with a woman about wasting the department’s time searching for a lost cat. One of the dispatchers, a slender woman with black hair, wandered out of the radio room, and poured herself a cup of coffee.

  I wished there was more noise. I thought better when I had to screen out distractions.

  I hated to acknowledge that Holmes had a clarity of vision which I lacked. That our killer was a woman made sense. It would explain the two anomalies to our statistical analysis: the football player and the senator’s wife. A young man in his early twenties could be lured anywhere by an attractive woman—and not feel threatened by her. The senator’s wife with feminist leanings simply needed her sense of sisterhood invoked.

  That made our search easier. We weren’t looking for hairdressers or caterers or even journalists, which had been my initial bet. We were looking for someone who fit more into the profile of a person who owned a private plane. Someone who would have contact with all of these people and yet remain anonymous. A driver. For short promotion tours, a lot of studios, and publicists relied on a handful of people who were screened to drive the famous about. Most preferred women because women were perceived as nonthreatening. A driver with a private plane could be on call in several communities, under several aliases.

  I went over to the departmental computer, mounted and chained onto a desk in the middle of the room (someday maybe the department would spring for individual computers for all of us—a more cost-effective solution than hiring the Santa Clara Time Wizards) and pulled up the victim files. They didn’t go into the kind of depth I wanted, so I went into the newspaper logs instead, looking for any recent mention (before the murders of course) of the victims’ names.

  The door to the chief’s office opened and closed. I heard footsteps behind me and knew who they belonged to. I wasn’t surprised when Holmes pulled up a chair and sat next to me. He watched as article after article scrolled by on the screen.

  “Are you finding anything?” he asked.

  I nodded. The football player had been to three different cities so that he could meet the owners of the team that had picked him and get wined and dined separately by each. Both movie stars had been on promotional tours for films they had just completed, and the senator’s wife had been accompanying her husband on a junket around his home state. “Finding the driver who handled all of these shouldn’t be hard,” I said. “The companies should have resumes on file complete with photographs. But it is not illegal for someone to use an alias—as long as they’re using the correct social security number.”

  I grinned at Holmes’s look of confusion. I wished I could see that look more often.

  “But,” I said, “even if we show the link, we still don’t have enough to hold up in court.”

  Holmes leaned back in his chair. “I do not understand the fear with which you all seem to view your legal process,” he said. He had heard enough about it—I had heard the chief warn Holmes twice not to mess with evidence or interfere with forensic procedure—but I thought he had been ignoring the warnings until now. “But I do agree that we need more information. A case is not closed until we understand the motivation for our killer’s actions.”

  I had had enough. Too little sleep, too much coffee, and too many lectures. My patience snapped. “First of all, this is not ‘our’ killer. Secondly, I have worked on cases in which the killer’s only motive is a hatred of the color yellow. Thirdly, real life is not a murder mystery. Here, in the 1990s, we rarely tie up all the loose ends.”

  “Loose ends,” Holmes said softly, “are a luxury a stable society cannot afford to have.”

  Rae Ann’s arrival saved me from replying to that. She held out a fax, the cheap paper curling into a small roll. “We found her,” Rae Ann said. “Our latest victim. Kimberly Marie Caldicott. A housewife from Bakersfield, California.”

  “Bakersfield?” I said. I frowned. Bakersfield. Holmes had to be wrong. A housewife didn’t fit into this scenario. “Does she have any ties to Santa Lucia?” Holmes asked. Rae Ann nodded. “Born and raised here. Graduated from Santa Lucia High in 1970. Homecoming queen, valedictorian, and voted most likely to succeed. Teenagers aren’t good at predicting that sort of thing through. Who’d’ve thought she’d’ve ended up a divorced secretary, mother of two?”

  “She doesn’t fit the profile, Holmes,” I said. “I think we really have to entertain the idea of a copycat and look for information leaks in the department.”

  Holmes shook his head. “You are overlooking the obvious, my friend. Before we assume two killers with the same strategy, we must investigate this as a related death. My dear—” he looked at Rae Ann”—answer a question for me.

  I assume the items you mentioned in reference to Kimberly were honors.”

  Rae Ann nodded. “That’s the top of the heap in high school.”

  Holmes smiled. “Then we need to find out who got stepped on in Kimberly’s rise to the top. We need to find the young lady who came in second.”

  FRIDAY, 4:10 P.M.

  The Santa Lucia High School Annual had only one picture of the salutatorian from 1970: her official graduation photo. Lorena Haas was a pie-faced girl with coke-bottle glasses and a mid-sixties bouf-do, the kind of bookish intellectual girl who sat quietly in the back of a room and remained unnoticed even after twelve years with the same classmates. A few of them remembered her, and used words like quiet, shy, and moody. Only one classmate kept in touch, and she claimed Lorena lived back east, and drove a taxi for a living.

  “Lorena may have hated Kimberly,” the classmate said, “but there’s no way she woulda killed her.”

  Holmes had smiled at that. “Jealousy,” he had said to me, “is, perhaps, the most destructive of human emotions.”

  Whatever the motive, the evidence against Lorena Haas was mounting. Within a day of looking at the annual, we had found Haas’s pilot’s license, matched her voice prints to airline logs, and through that tracked her various aliases. We even had enough evidence to tie her to each victim—she had chauffeured all of them in company limousines.

  The discovery put the remains of the investigation in the FBI’s purview, although the Santa Lucia Police Department Special Homicide Unit would always receive credit for solving the case. The FBI found Lorena in a D.C. suburb, living under the alias Kim Meree. They brought her to San Francisco on Friday morning, for an interview, before they officially charged her with the crime.

  Holmes insisted upon seeing her. The chief had had to negotiate for that. Finally, Holmes’s fame had prevailed. Holmes was going to be able to speak with Haas alone.

  Holmes insisted that I accompany him. I was tired of being his Watson. Ever since Holmes arrived, I had played second fiddle. I really didn’t care why Lorena Haas had murdered a bunch of celebrities and her high school rival. I had already been assigned to a murder/suicide that had been called in this morning—easily solved, of course—but the kind of case that generated a pile of paperwork.

  I was still protesting as we climbed the steps of the FBI building in San Francisco, where they were holding her for questioning.

  “We’ve got enough to make a case, Holmes,” I said. “There’s no reason to talk to this nut.”

  I had been making the same argument all day. Holmes had brushed it off before, but this time he stopped at the top of the stairs and looked down at me. On this afternoon, he appea
red taller, and I suddenly realized what a striking presence he really made—in any century.

  “My dear sir,” he said, “one must always discover if one’s suppositions are correct.”

  “And if they aren’t?” I asked.

  Holmes looked at me gravely for a moment. “Then we solved the case by luck and happenstance, not by intellect.”

  I sighed to myself. “She’s not going to confess anything, Holmes. She’s too smart for that.”

  “I don’t need a confession,” Holmes said. “Merely a confirmation.”

  He pulled open the door and went in. I followed him. I would be so glad when he was gone. That patronizing tone, as if he and he alone saw the details of the universe, grated on me so badly that I tensed each time he opened his mouth.

  The inside of the building had a dry metallic dustless scent. Our footsteps echoed on the tile floor, and the people we saw—all wearing suits—did not meet our gaze as we passed. We passed door after door after door, all closed as if hiding secrets we could never be privy to.

  When we reached the designated room, Holmes took the lead, and had the agent show us directly to the interrogation area. Before we went in, we were instructed that our entire conversation would be taped.

  A guard stood outside the interrogation room. The guard nodded at us as we went in, as if memorizing our faces. The room itself was white, except for the one-way glass on the back wall. Even the table and chairs were white. Lorena Haas stood in front of the glass, peering at it, as if by doing so she could see the people hidden behind. She turned as the door closed behind us.

  Although I had seen recent photos, I was unprepared for her physical presence. She had come far from, her coke-bottle glasses days. Contact lenses had made her eyes a vivid blue. She had shoulder-length blonde hair, high cheekbones, and a small upturned nose. She moved with a litheness of an athlete. She could easily have carried those bodies. If I hadn’t known, I would have matched the 1970 Kimberly Caldicott graduation photo with the 1990s version of Lorena Haas.