“Simple!” Jane burst out. “Jenny’s been kidnapped twice, even though we did everything we could to protect her. The only explanation is that he got one of these people to betray my uncle.”
But Holmes just shook his head and said, “If so then it is coincidental. It is very much his own work he is about. While you were asleep, I buried myself learning something of Hunt’s affairs. As you know, he is one of the main stockholders in many of Wyoming’s uranium mines, as well as the owner of a large amount of land in the area, but he has no political aspirations or any apparent enemies. I cannot yet see why he interests Moriarty.”
“Money,” said Jane simply. “Anyone who has people that he loves can have money extorted from him by a man like Moriarty.”
“It is clumsy, Watson,” said Sherlock. “Money in any form can be traced, if the plans are carefully laid, and there would finally be enough of a case to place him under indictment. No, such a kidnap has not the stamp of Moriarty upon it. It gives no satisfaction.”
Jane waited until nine to question Jenny again, and practically had to fight Josephine to talk to Jenny alone.
“Hello, Jane,” said Jenny. “I haven’t had breakfast yet. Have you?”
“No,” said Jane. “I thought it would be better to see if you were doing okay, first. How do you feel?”
“I don’t like it,” she said. “I don’t wanna go there again.”
Jane’s heart ached to see Jenny so upset, and she said tenderly, “I need to know everything. Was it the same man again? The Professor?”
Jenny nodded.
“Did he take you to the same place?”
“No,” said Jenny. “It was a barn, I think. There was a lot of straw. It prickled, and there was nothing to do.”
Jane almost smiled at this, but held back. “How did he get you out of the nursery?”
Jenny’s face scrunched up as though she were thinking hard. Finally she said, “I don’t ’member.”
“Did he carry you, or did you walk?” suggested Jane, trying to jog her memory.
“Don’t ’member. I think I walked.”
“Down the back stairs, maybe?”
“Don’t ’member.”
Damn, thought Jane, She was probably drugged. Jane went back downstairs to tell Holmes what she knew. She found him reading a letter that, apparently, had just been delivered.
“This is the reason, Watson!” he said. “And in true Moriarty style. You were correct in your deduction.” He handed her the note.
My Dear Hunt,
I see that you have called in Sherlock Holmes. How predictable Watson is! But it will avail you nothing. I can still take the child any time I choose, and you will be helpless to do anything about it. However, if you should choose to sell 90 percent or more of your shares in the Black Thunder Coal Mine, at whatever the current market price is, then I shall trouble you no further.
Moriarty.
“Why would he want Uncle Rob to sell his stock?” asked Jane. “What good would it do him?”
“It would start a panic and plunge the value of the entire mine,” replied Holmes. “Very probably of the other mines in the Powder River Basin, in the fear that Hunt knew something damaging about them. Any denial he might make would only fuel speculation.”
“And then Moriarty could buy all of that stock dirt cheap.”
“Exactly,” agreed Holmes, “and not only that, but appear as a local hero as well, saving the livelihood of all the workers. This is the true Moriarty, Watson. This has his stamp upon it. Now, what have you learnt from the child of how she left here?”
“Almost nothing,” admitted Jane. “I think she was drugged.”
Holmes listened to what Jane knew, and then said, “We shall go back to the house. There may be something to learn from a fuller examination, and then seek the barn, although I have no doubt Moriarty has long left it now. But first I shall speak to Hunt, and persuade him to do nothing regarding the shares—”
“You can’t ask him to do that!” shouted Jane. “We can’t protect Jenny! Twice he’s gotten her, and we’re helpless to stop it from happening again.”
“It is not yet time to despair,” said Holmes calmly. “I believe we have some hours. It is only six minutes past ten. Let us give ourselves until two of the clock. That will still allow Hunt sufficient time to inform his stockbroker before close of business today, if that should be necessary, and Moriarty may be given proof of it, if the worst should befall.”
“Do you see an end to it?” asked Jane, starting to lose hope. “Uncle Rob would give up anything to save Jenny.”
“Except his honor, Watson,” said Holmes rather quickly. “It may tear at his very soul, but he will not plunge a hundred families into destitution, with their own children to feed and to care for, in order to save one, even though it is his own. But we have no time to stand here debating. Have the car ready for us, and as soon as I have spoken with Hunt, I shall join you at the front door.”
“What’s the point if Moriarty’s gone by now?” asked Jane.
“Men leave traces of their acts, Watson,” replied Holmes. With that, he went to Hunt’s office.
• • •
Less than half an hour later, they arrived.
“Well?” asked Jane.
“I persuaded Hunt to delay action only until two,” said Holmes, tight-lipped.
“I asked around the neighborhood,” said Jane. “Either the townsfolk are more loyal than candid, or my uncle is pretty well-liked around here. He’s wealthy in real possessions, the house and land and the mines, but he doesn’t have a huge amount of ready cash. The worst thing they had to say about him is that he’s got a slight temper.”
Holmes frowned and became more withdrawn as he listened to the praise. It told him nothing helpful. They eventually found the tall house again, and the neighbors gave a description that matched Moriarty to a T.
While searching the upstairs, Jane called to Holmes and said, “I found the room where Jenny was kept.” She got down on the floor and examined every inch, finding a few crumbs that indicated the cupcakes Jenny told her about.
“Look,” said Holmes, “a fine yellow hair.” He picked it up from a couch cushion. “Come!” he said, heading down the stairs. “There is nothing else to be learnt here. This is where he kept her, and he intended us to know it. He even left crumbs for us to find. Now why was that, do you suppose?”
“Carelessness,” said Jane, “and arrogance.”
“No, Watson, no!” said Sherlock emphatically. “Moriarty is never careless. He has left them here for a reason. Let us find this barn. There is something . . . some clue, something done, or left undone, which will give us the key.”
But Jane knew that Sherlock was speaking more in hope than knowledge. He would never admit it, but she had seen in him a streak of kindness that didn’t always sit well with reason. Of course, she never said so to him.
There were only a few farms left in the area, and even fewer with barns. The most obvious one was just outside of town, but Holmes insisted that they first try the second most obvious, which was a little farther out.
The barn was just like Jenny described it. Holmes immediately entered to begin his search, but Jane was skeptical.
“Holmes,” she said, “Do you really expect to find anything like footprints, hair, or whatever with all of this straw? We—”
Holmes cut her off with a triumphant shout as he held up a little white sock.
“What?” said Jane angrily. “So it’s Jenny’s sock. She was here. How exactly does this help us?”
Holmes responded by looking at his watch. “It is half past one already!” he said with desperate urgency. “We have no time to lose at all. Take us back to your uncle’s house as fast as the car can go!”
Jane kept her foot on the gas the whole way back, and when they got inside, she saw on the clock that it was only a few minutes till two.
Holmes ran into Hunt’s office, held up the sock, and yelled, “
Bloodless! Tell me, what time does the ice-cream man play?”
Hunt looked at Holmes like he’d lost his mind.
“Believe me, sir,” said Holmes fiercely. “I am deadly earnest! Your daughter will be perfectly safe until the ice-cream man comes . . .”
“You’re nuts, kid!” yelled Hunt. “I’ve known Percy Bradford almost my entire life! He wouldn’t—”
“With no intent,” said Holmes. “It is the tune he plays. Look!” He held up the sock. “You see, it has no blood on it! This was left where Moriarty wishes us to believe he held her last night, and that this sock was somehow left behind. But it is not so. It is no doubt her sock, but taken from the first kidnap when you were not guarding her, having no reason for concern.”
“What difference does it make?” asked Hunt.
“Send for the ice-cream man, and I will show you,” said Holmes. “Have him come to the gates as is his custom, but immediately, now in daylight, and play his tunes.”
While Hunt ran off to call Percy, Holmes grabbed Watson by the arm and moved for the staircase. “Come,” he ordered. “I might need you, Watson.”
• • •
About a half-hour later, Watson and Holmes sat in the nursery with Jenny, waiting for the ice-cream truck to begin playing. Finally, as it arrived, the lilting sound of “The Entertainer” began to fill the air.
Jenny suddenly became still, and sat as straight as a board. Her pupils dilated to the point where her irises almost disappeared. Finally, she got up and walked out of the room.
“Follow her,” said Sherlock to Jane quietly, “but do not touch her. You may harm her if you do.” Accompanied by Josephine, the three of them followed Jenny on tiptoes as she climbed up the stairs, into the attic, and finally stopped at a small cupboard. There, she wrapped a blanket around herself and closed the door.
Holmes turned to Josephine and said, “When the clock strikes eleven, I believe she will awaken and return to normal, confused but not physically injured. She will believe what she has been hypnotized to believe, that she was again taken by Professor Moriarty, as she was in truth the first time. No doubt he took her to several different places, and she will recall them in successive order, as he has told her. You will wait here so you can comfort her when she awakens and comes out, no doubt confused and frightened. Do not disturb her before that.”
A few hours later, both Jane and Sherlock sat on the plane that would take them back to Seattle. Jane was tired, but she was also pleased with herself. She had managed to help Holmes score a decisive victory over Moriarty, and proved her worth, if only to herself, as a Baker Street Irregular.
“Tomorrow, Uncle Rob will issue a statement denying any rumor that he might sell his holdings in the mine,” said Jane.
Holmes nodded and replied, “I had Mycroft advise him that, if he can raise the funds, it would be advantageous to purchase a slight amount of more stock. We must not allow Moriarty to imagine that he was won anything, don’t you agree?”
“I do,” said Jane. “Do you think Jenny will be okay?”
“Of course, my dear Watson,” said Holmes, smiling. “A visit or two to a competent psychiatrist, and Jenny’s mind will be purged of Moriarty’s evil influence.”
“Yeah,” said Jane, yawning. “You did good, Holmes.”
“No, Watson,” said Sherlock. “We did good.”
SHERLOCKS
BY AL SARRANTONIO
“Sherlocks,” Al Sarrantonio’s story set in the near future (it may be here before you read this), doesn’t actually feature the great detective, but his legacy runs all through it; and an industry that named a nuclear submarine after Jules Verne’s Nautilus would almost certainly honor the World’s Greatest Detective by christening one of Sarrantonio’s devices after the great detective. No doubt the legendary John Henry would also approve of this story of Man vs. Machine.
The hotel room smelled like rosewater. It was twelve foot by twelve foot square, with a few sticks of cheap furniture stuck in the corners, green wall-to-wall carpeting that curled up as it reached the walls, a rumpled bed with an open suitcase on it, and one small, dirty window that gave a good view of the metallic wall on the hotel a few yards away next door. A man lay on the carpeting in the center of the room. He was long and lean, with thinning blond hair and a youthful face with a lot of angles in it. There was a startled expression in his eyes, which were open wide. He lay on his stomach, with his head to one side, and there was a very large kitchen knife with a plastic handle standing straight up out of his back.
Lieutenant Henry Virgil, a small man who looked as much like a weasel as any creature that was not in fact a weasel possibly could, was circling the corpse nervously as his assistant Buckers bent over it. Virgil’s black pebbly eyes stabbed this way and that, out through the doorway, daring anyone who stood out there, myself included, to enter the room.
I looked at the two old-line cops who were with me in the hall, waiting to photograph and bag the body, and they looked at me, and the three of us had the same look of resigned disgust on our faces.
Inside the room, Virgil said, “Well?” to Buckers, who then lifted the slim black tentacles of his sherlock from the body and checked the readout on the flat box strapped to his shoulder that the tentacles led into. “The light’s still green, sir,” he said in a small voice. He was a large, square man, but was scared to death of Virgil. “It’s still collecting.” Virgil nodded briskly, and Buckers bent over the body again. Four other technicians, clean-shaven and efficient as whisk brooms, were minutely combing every inch of the walls, floor, ceiling, and furniture with their own machines.
I stood watching until I became uncomfortable, and then I shifted my weight against the doorjamb and said, in as pleasant a voice as I could, “The guy’s dead, Virgil. Can’t you go back to your computer room and let these poor fellows out here do their dirty work?” Virgil seemed to leap across the room at me. “That’s it, Matheson,” he said. “I agreed to let you up here on the condition that you didn’t open your mouth.”
He took me by the arm and pulled me towards the elevator. I didn’t resist. I gave appealing looks to the cops in the hallway, but there was nothing they could do.
“I’d like to squeeze your arm right off,” Virgil said. I tried to talk reasonably but he cut me off. “I don’t want you bothering my people. Just because someone was stupid enough to hire you to look into this murder doesn’t mean you can follow my crew around like a gawker with a bag of peanuts. I don’t care how many old friends you have on the force. I want you to stay away from me.” His anger subsided a bit as the elevator doors opened. I stepped into the car without saying anything. The doors were closing when Virgil stopped them with his hand. He shook his head in mock sadness and said, “I really feel sorry for you, Matheson. Why don’t you stop playing detective and get yourself a job?”
He let the doors close.
He wasn’t so far from the truth. I hadn’t had a solid investigative job—even a wife-cheating assignment—in six months, and ever since the sherlocks had become commercially available two years before, my caseload had been down about sixty percent. Most of the big agencies were using the machines now, and almost all the younger PIs were using the things, coupled with a databank service. I was starting to feel old.
That morning, though, I’d suddenly found myself involved with a murder case when I’d got up to find a note pinned to the pillow next to my head and an open window where whoever had pinned it had entered and exited. The note had read:
$2000 HAS BEEN CREDITED TO YOUR ACCOUNT. FIND OUT
WHO MURDERED VINDEBEER AT THE SEDGEWICK HOTEL.
There hadn’t been any signature, but after checking with the bank and finding that the money had indeed been deposited, I’d decided there was nothing to do but put on some clothes and go down to the Sedgewick. There I’d found Virgil and his sherlockers, and a dead body, presumably named Vindebeer. And that’s where I stood now.
It was getting dark by the time I
reached home. I had a little haven in the middle of all the high-rise metal spires on 212th Street, because about seventy-five years ago, when all the forty-floor monsters were springing up everywhere, a gray-haired old lady named Mrs. Cornelius had refused to sell her two-floor Victorian. They built right up to the border of her eighth-of-an-acre plot, but she ignored them. I’d bought the place from her daughter about ten years ago and blessed Mrs. Cornelius every time I stepped through the gate.
I blessed her now, but when I stepped through, I noticed that the front door was wide open. No one was inside, but I found a folded note attached to my easy chair in the den. This one read:
GO TO THE NORTH DOCKS TOMORROW AT 2:30 PM
AND STAND BY THE EAST TOWER ELEVATOR.
This one was also unsigned. I didn’t really like the game with the notes, but there didn’t seem to be anything to do about it at the moment. So I ate dinner, read a Perry Mason for a couple of hours, then went to bed.
• • •
In the morning I went down to the North Manhattan police station to see Jack Rutgers. I poked my head into the computer terminal as I walked by and saw that Lt. Virgil was pacing around nervously, shouting instructions to Buckers and his other assistants, leaping from panel to panel and adjusting the dials and reading meters. When he saw me he growled, so I hurried past.
Rutgers was a nearly bald man in his middle fifties. He wore an open vest, sweated a lot, and had a round, thoughtful face. He wore round spectacles, which he was always taking off and cleaning with his handkerchief. He was the only old-timer left who had any control at all over Virgil. He had been pretty friendly to me over the years. His office was cluttered with plants; when I walked in, he told me to move a couple aside and find a place to sit.
“I’m glad you’re here, Phil,” he said. He took off his spectacles. “I’d like to bat some ideas back and forth with you.”
“I’m working on the Vindebeer case,” I said.
His eyebrows shot up. “You know his name? Did Virgil tell you?”
“I don’t think Virgil has thought of looking in the guy’s wallet yet. Someone left me a note with the name on it, though.” I told him about my anonymous client. “The only thing I was able to figure out from the short time I was at the hotel yesterday was that this fellow hadn’t been there very long since he hadn’t even bothered to unpack. Is there anything you can add to that?”
Sons of Moriarty and More Stories of Sherlock Holmes Page 6