• • •
A bitter wind rattled at the window panes. I drew my thick thermal curtains across them, hugging in the warmth from the fireplace. We hadn’t spoken since our return from New London. We just sat, simmering in the electric silence. Tim had confessed to the murder of Ivy Morton almost immediately. Detective Adams smoothed over our speeding indiscretion as payment for our assistance, and we had been free to go.
I was too curious, too high on the adrenaline of the evening to stay quiet. “That’s quite a lot to have inferred from a few days of chatting with people.”
“Not really. I learned early on that Ivy was uncharacteristically flighty this year. Indicates she was meeting someone she didn’t want her friends to know about. Then we find out that she had a previous relationship with a tall blond fellow.”
“Right, but how did you know it was Tim, and not Roger? That description could have matched either of them.”
“Exactly, John! You told me when you saw the picture of Roger with his roommate that you thought they were brothers. And I trusted in your report that Roger stated they had both gone to prior conferences. Ivy’s friends said her lover couldn’t hold a job because of his temper. No chance anyone hired at Baker School, even as an occasional substitute, would have such a record. Then Bobby told us a janitor came into art class that day. Janitors would not be called in to clean up a little spilled paint in the middle of an art class. I deduced that must have been Tim, using Roger as an excuse to be on the Baker School campus. He must have swiped Bobby’s green crayon before he left.”
“That’s a pretty big leap, there,” I said, impressed nonetheless.
“Perhaps on its own it would have been. But everything else added up.”
“Do you think Roger knew Tim was seeing Ivy? Why didn’t he mention Tim’s visit?” I asked.
“Would you mention in an interview that you’d allowed a friend to visit on your first day? No, I don’t think he knew. By the way, I’m pleased you thought to mention the appointment with Logan you saw marked on the house calendar. I knew immediately it signified the Boston airport, of course. If you hadn’t noted it, Tim may have been on his way to freedom first thing tomorrow morning.”
We lapsed into silence again.
“Do you know, I think I’m finally starting to enjoy working with children. They notice so much and filter so little. Where would we have been without the investigative skills of Sarah and Bobby?”
He stood.
“I’m off for home now.”
He paused at the door.
“Watson, where could I purchase a large pack of crayons? I have a very particular shade of green to locate before Monday morning.”
A Study in Space
BY
Derek Beebe
2087, AD. Outside the city of Armstrong on the Moon.
The first thing Watson noticed was that the victim’s eyeballs had exploded.
The globes themselves were fine, but had violently left their former home and were now connected by only the flimsiest of ligature. The joys of explosive decompression. Thanks to the zero gravity and Watson nudging the body, they slowly knocked back and forth to trace the outline of a circle. He found it oddly soothing.
He craned his head around awkwardly in his space suit to take in the surroundings of the cramped escape pod, its doors wide open. Strange glyphs written in smeared blood covered the walls. Instant DNA swabs confirmed the blood was that of the victim’s, one Enoch Drebber, convicted drug dealer. His specialty was SCC, named for the complicated formula which Watson never bothered to remember, affectionately known by its users as ‘essees.’
“Can you run your scanner over the glyphs some more, John?” Lestrade’s voice piped into his helmet.
“Copy that,” Watson said. He waved his hand around slowly.
“Plex isn’t making anything out of that.”
He grunted. “Must be gibberish, then. If it was really the victim in his death throes, it’s probably just wild flailing.”
“Looks like letters on this end, John.”
Watson cocked his head at the strange marks. “Hypoxia does funny things to a brain. He might’ve thought he was writing something profound at the time.”
“Could you stop his eyeballs from bouncing around like that? Some of us are trying to keep our breakfast down.”
Watson smiled. “I think it’s relaxing. Anything relevant from the crash site?”
“Negative. No sign of damage or equipment failure in the wreckage. Near as we can tell, it was a perfectly fine shuttle when he decided to pop out in a pod.”
“Not even acidic blood eating through the floor?” Watson asked in mock disappointment.
“You watch too many movies.”
Watson smirked. “I preferred the remake.”
“Didn’t copy that, John. You said you wanted your suit vented?”
“Forget I said anything. Am I cleared to remove the body?”
“Roger.”
Watson gingerly attached a tow cable to Drebber’s belt and slowly maneuvered outside of the gaping pod door. He was now certain this was a murder scene.
• • •
The autopsy lasted only fifteen minutes.
“Not a single red flag,” the coroner reported. “No poison, no trauma, nothing. He was a habitual drug user, but his system was relatively clean at the time of death.”
Watson frowned and crossed his arms. “He died from space, then?”
The coroner bobbed his head. “That’s right.”
Lestrade typed something onto his wristlet. “No signs of a struggle whatsoever?”
“None.”
Watson leaned forward and rested his hand on the window to the examination room. “No indication of what led him to jettison from a perfectly fine shuttle? Or why he would write strange letters in his own blood as he was dying of asphyxiation?”
The coroner shook his head. “Negative.”
“Any signs of another occupant in the pod?” Lestrade asked Watson.
“No, but when people wear spacesuits, and the area is violently decompressed, there’s not much evidence to find.”
Lestrade groaned. “We have a locked-room mystery. I hate those.”
Watson looked back at the body through the window, and then grabbed his briefcase. “Crisis equals opportunity, Inspector.” He waved goodbye and headed toward the door, dashing from the precinct’s front entrance and into the crowd of police and passersby filling the sidewalk, including a few robotic policemen. A small army of parked cars and bikes sat against the curb, while flying and grounded traffic moved along in the street.
His thoughts of lunch were interrupted by a strange voice. “Mister Watson, come here. I want to see you.”
Watson turned around while his hand fell to his pistol.
It was a lanky teenage boy with an unruly mop of black hair. His long, charcoal grey coat hung almost to the ground, and an unnecessarily elaborate scarf puffed up about his neck. His eyes darted about like hummingbirds, seeming to take in everything at once. He barely made eye contact.
Watson took a cautious step towards him. “Do I know you, son?”
The boy spoke in a rushed and jerky manner as if he was perpetually late for an appointment and quite chuffed about it. “No. My name is Holmes. Sherlock Holmes. You are lead investigator on the Drebber homicide, yes?”
Watson slowly cocked his head. “I wasn’t aware it was a homicide.”
“Yes, you are,” Sherlock said quickly and forcefully.
“And what if I was?”
“The killer left writing on the walls, didn’t he?”
Watson gently undid the latch on his holster. “And how would you know that?”
“The letters were written in a language that you—”
Just then, a pair of passing police automatons made an about-face and grabbed Sherlock by the arms. They spoke in unison in a clearly mechanized voice. “Halt, citizen. You are under detainment for questioning.”
Watson’s eyes fell onto the nearest automaton. It had the intentionally artificial-looking metal body and blue-and-black uniform of any normal police bot, but still, something looked off.
“Do not resist, citizen,” the bots continued. “You will be transported to the nearest police station for questioning.” They lifted him off his feet and began swiftly walking towards an open-top police car sitting at the curb. Watson followed behind them, hand still on his weapon.
Sherlock attempted to gesture towards the building they stood in front of. “We’re right in front of one, you bumbling bobby!”
Watson looked closer at the bot’s upper arm. The metal piece looked strange to him.
Sherlock craned his neck around to look back. “Watson, stop gawking around and do something, for God’s sake!”
It clicked into place. Watson drew his pistol and aimed it at the back of the rightmost figure. “Hey! Stop right there, bot!”
In a flash of motion the bot mule-kicked backwards, its leg rotating in a way impossible for a human, knocking Watson’s gun out of his hands. He fired as it happened, blasting a small divot in the bot’s armored right shoulder.
“Rogue bots!” Watson bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Hostage!”
The two bots pulled Sherlock into their car and took off into the sky. Passing policemen drew their weapons and fired into the underside, but the vehicle was already gone, Sherlock’s voice echoing into the distance.
Watson spotted the nearest police bike and shoved the young woman off of it. “Put out an APB!” he shouted at her as he flew away.
More officers followed. Their sirens screamed through the wind whipping at his face. The rogue car banked hard into the intersection and peeled around the corner. The bike had a higher top speed than the car, and Watson slowly closed the gap.
One of the bots opened fire with a sidearm. Red flashes of light nearly hit Watson, forcing him into evasive maneuvers.
In a brief moment of level flight, Watson spotted Sherlock attempting to attack the driver bot, which was still holding his arm in a vice-like grip.
They passed through another intersection and a pair of tactical police trucks swerved in to join the chase. The second bot stopped firing at Watson and picked up a rocket launcher from the back seat. Watson gunned his engine forward while a missile shot out and exploded on the nose of one of the trucks. It fell back to the street in a barely controlled dive, trailing smoke and fire.
Watson took a moment to tap his ear. “They’ve got rockets! We need more tactical units!”
The bot with the launcher lifted it up again to track the second truck. Watson’s hand fell to his empty holster on instinct.
As they passed through another intersection, a car appeared out of nowhere and T-boned the remaining tactical truck. It spun out of the way and smacked into the side of the building.
“Damn it!”
Watson drew closer to the rogue car and dipped below their line of sight. He heard more approaching sirens screaming in the distance. Small-arms fire flashed over his head and took out one of the pursuing bikes.
He passed the engine efflux coming out of the back and drew alongside the car, still out of sight. Setting the bike to cruise control, he leapt up over the lip of the car door and into the backseat.
The second bot’s head snapped around to look at him in momentary surprise. It was in the middle of reloading the launcher in the backseat. They both grabbed for it at the same time; Watson got there first and twisted the tube around to face the bot. He pulled the trigger and the concussion of the missile’s exhaust nearly blew him away. The projectile, programmed not to explode in such close proximity to the launcher, blasted the automaton out of the car.
“Good shot, my dear fellow!” Sherlock enthused from the front seat, still struggling.
The remaining bot’s head swiveled back and forth several times, lost in indecision. He could not drive and hold Sherlock and murder Watson with only two hands.
Watson hesitated as well, lacking any weapon to harm him with.
“Do something, you nitwit!” Sherlock shouted over the wind.
The bot activated cruise control and smacked Sherlock hard enough in the head to daze him. The boy slumped against his crash restraint. Watson leveraged himself to throw the bot out of the car, but the machine weighed twice as much as him. It lunged over the seat towards him; Watson dove across into the front seat at the same instant.
Before the bot could turn around and grab him, Watson snatched the control stick and flipped the car upside down. He dug his feet into the driver’s leg space and wedged his knees against the console to stop from falling out. The automaton plummeted out of the car.
Watson was about to right the car when they crashed through a window into an office building.
His body smashed against the seat. Automatic braking activated, and the vehicle slammed to a halt, turning around to face upwards. Watson flew out of the car and slid along the floor. The car hit an interior wall before finally stopping itself.
Watson willed himself to raise his head and take in his surroundings. It was early enough in the morning that the office was empty. The only light came in from the windows…and the rather large hole he had just created. He groaned noisily as he got to his feet, but was relieved to discover that nothing was broken.
“Hey…kid…you in there?” he called out.
He limped over to the car to find Sherlock safe and slowly returning to form.
“You…idiot…” Sherlock muttered. “I wanted you to rescue me, not use me as a battering ram…”
Watson produced a pen knife from his back pocket and cut the boy free from his crash restraints. “Any landing you can walk away from.” He helped Sherlock to his feet. “You want to tell me who dressed up some PMC bots as policemen to snatch you?”
Sherlock rubbed his temples. “Private Military Contractors? How would you know that? Not that I didn’t,” he added quickly.
Watson tapped the boy’s upper arm. “Their arm pieces weren’t police issue. Everything else looked legit, but they were too bulky. Too armored.”
“A fascinating deduction,” Sherlock said bitterly. “A pity you hadn’t realized it prior to my abrupt departure.”
Watson stared him down. Sherlock looked away, his eyes darting all around the office. “Son, you don’t seem to understand who has the authority in this conversation.”
Sherlock flicked his fingers dismissively. “Yes, yes, of course. I bow to your incredible provincial power.”
“I was just about to eat, you know,” Watson grumbled. “This is not going to put me in a good mood.”
The boy was still looking out the window. “Wasn’t the coffee cake enough?”
“Excuse me?”
Sherlock looked back at him with disdain. “The coffee cake you had for breakfast. You had two pieces. And washed it down with two cups of coffee, no cream, no sugar.”
“And how in the world would you know that?”
Sherlock spoke with quick derision. “As if your breath wasn’t enough of a storyteller, when first we met there were crumbs on your shirt and under your nails, the stench of coffee on your hands, and a bubbling symphony going on in your stomach.”
“How utterly observant of you,” Watson said, not particularly impressed.
“I am a student of human behavior.”
“You’d think you wouldn’t act like a total creep, then.”
Sherlock scoffed. “I could not care less what the rabble thinks.”
Watson turned back to the crashed vehicle and opened the glove compartment. He fished out a pair of heavy pistols and hefted them. “Well, on behalf of the rabble, we could not care less what you think, either.”
Sherlock was not in fear of his situation. “We need to get back to the precinct, Detective. The game is afoot, and there’s a killer on the loose.”
Sirens ap
proached from outside the jagged hole in the wall, and a police bot appeared on a bike. “Is the situation secured, officer?” it asked.
Watson kept both pistols in his hands, his hands at his sides. “Yes. Stand down.”
The bot jumped off the bike and into the building. The bike continued to hover outside, obscuring the view. “Do you require assistance?”
“Yes. Go back out and secure the perimeter. There may be other assailants.”
The bot continued to walk towards Watson and Sherlock. “There are many units outside, sir. I should help you secure this floor.”
Watson aimed at the bot. “I am ordering you to leave.”
“Yes, sir,” it said, still walking forward.
Watson shot it in the head with both guns. It fell over backwards, still active. He jumped forward and fired point blank into the neck and arm joints until it fell still.
Sherlock rested his rear against the car, rubbing his forehead. “Perhaps I’ve made a mistake going to the police…”
Watson ran to the hole in the wall just as a fireball exploded outside. He saw two different sets of police bots on bikes shooting at each other, but they were too preoccupied to pay him any mind. He turned back to look at Sherlock. “Why do you have an entire army after you?”
Sherlock straightened up and walked over. “Oh, there can’t be that many. I’m sure our quarry would only be able to reprogram so many bots with his own limited means.”
Watson arched an eyebrow. “Our quarry?”
The boy grinned. “Your mysterious killer, of course. The one I’ve come to help you catch.”
He stared at Sherlock disbelievingly for a moment, then held out his wristlet to Sherlock’s face. “Hold still.” He took a picture of Sherlock and started a search.
Sherlock looked offended. “Are you Plexing me? Don’t you know who I am?”
Baker Street Irregulars Page 17