Major Pieces, Chapter 5: Indirect Attack
Rating: PG-13 (for adult themes, not sex)
Pairings: Gen
Spoilers: Through The Great Game.
Warnings: Chapters 1 and 2 contain gory crime scenes. Trigger warnings for discussion of (off-screen) sexual assault and violence against women.
Special thanks to: stellar-dust, my beyond awesome beta, who managed to be both insanely quick and tremendously helpful. Thanks also to everyone who listened to me natter (particularly
melannen, that one night at Sarah's).
Summary: Sherlock knew that he could thoroughly rely upon John Watson's moral sense. And that's why he knew that Lestrade was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Chapter 5: Indirect Attack
The winning of a Pawn among good players of even strength often means the winning of the game. -José Raúl Capablanca, Chess Fundamentals
The laptop data was less than useless. Sherlock combed through every document and photograph and found nothing helpful. He was so uselessly irritated, and having no way to vent it put him at a loss. If John were here, he could complain at him until either John sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose in that fascinating way, or else he snapped back and then they had an invigorating row. He almost considered calling Dimmock so he could have someone to be bitingly sarcastic at, but it would not be the same, so instead he held the skull cradled in his hands and muttered complaints at it. It was not as satisfying, but he could at least imagine the empty grimace of its jaw was something like an expression of irritation.
There were no calls that day, only a couple of text messages from Lestrade, which Sherlock disregarded.
Message received
I need to take your statement
Message received
Fine, forget the statement. Tell me what you've found.
Finally Sherlock realized what had been missing from the laptop data: e-mail. Of course. John had an e-mail program installed but he hadn't found any archived mail, because John used an internet-based e-mail account. He scrolled through the files on the thumb drive and located the browser history data. There were multiple daily visits to a free e-mail site, the URL of which Sherlock typed into his own browser. The user name was easy, it was 'jwatson1' because John was nothing if not predictable when it came to his computer habits. The password was equally obvious: the original password from John's laptop, the one Sherlock had cracked so easily the very first week they lived together. The laptop password had been changed almost daily since, in an effort to keep Sherlock out, but as he had never felt a particular need to see John's e-mail, John had never taken precautions there. Predictable, but then predictability was very useful, if boring
Sherlock quickly skimmed the subject lines of the past week or two. A couple quick notes from Harry, a notice that John's credit card bill was ready for viewing online, some spam. The bulk of the mail consisted of letters from several of John's army comrades, with whom he evidently maintained a correspondence. The contacts were irregular and infrequent, suggesting that the soldiers were still in active deployments abroad and had only intermittent access to the internet. The contents of the e-mails bore this out: they of course did not mention any sensitive details, but there were frequent complaints about absent spouses and requests that John post particular brands of biscuit.
One of the more recent exchanges was with a "Tom Whitlock," who seemed to be the member of a unit to which John had once been temporarily attached, as they did not appear to have any friends in common. An e-mail sent the previous Wednesday talked about a period of leave, and arranged a time and place for a meeting in Southampton on Friday evening. The e-mail also stated casually that Whitlock had damaged his phone but that he still had his laptop and John could expect to hear from him that way if anything changed. Mid-afternoon Friday, a short e-mail explained that his leave had been unexpectedly canceled and apologized for the short notice.
Two phone calls later, Sherlock had learned that Lance Corporal Thomas A. Whitlock was reported killed in action over a month ago. A little more digging revealed that all the genuine e-mails from Whitlock were bounced through a British Army proxy server, whereas the e-mails sent after his death were not. Someone within the UK's borders had evidently hijacked Whitlock's e-mail account and was using it to send John e-mails. But what was really interesting was that the most recent e-mail was clearly written by a different person. The earlier messages were skillful imitations of Whitlock's writing style, whereas the Friday e-mail was terse and artless. The murders only started the previous week, but the setup had taken more than a month; someone was obviously playing an extremely long game. There had been no prior indication that the murderer had an accomplice, but this ruse suggested that someone else had set John up, with the murderer only stepping in to send the last crucial e-mail, which ensured John would stay overnight in Southampton without becoming suspicious.
Further, the Friday e-mail had only been sent through a single proxy. It was absurdly easy to trace the true IP address to an internet cafe in Lambeth. He left the flat in his characteristic clothing, grimly and efficiently shook off the minions following him, and ducked into a charity shop where he transformed himself into a totally different person. After all the effort, the cafe was almost a letdown, just another link in the chain: it was easy enough to establish a rapport with the bored woman minding the counter. In due time, she told him all about "Bri," a smart young businessman who worked with her sister-in-law, who dropped by once in a while but she hadn't spotted him in almost a week, and wasn't it too bad he didn't seem to fancy women. A few more minutes of gossip, and she gave Sherlock his address, which she had memorized when he handed her his ID to rent the computer for ten minutes on Friday.
When Sherlock stepped outside the cafe, he was being watched by Mycroftian security forces again. Now he was annoyed. Whatever Mycroft's intentions were, Sherlock had specifically warned him not distract Sherlock from the case, and that was absolutely what he was doing. It had to stop. Another text from Lestrade arrived just then, and Sherlock fired off a reply without thinking.
Message received
Stop ignoring me.
To: G Lestrade
27 Sawyer Ln. SH
Immediately after he sent the text, he realized the source of his Mycroft problem, and it was so obvious he could kick himself. The phone. He had deliberately disabled the gps function in this unit, in order to prevent unwarranted spying. However, Mycroft had Ofcom in his pocket and it would be no great hardship for him to utilize cell site tracking to triangulate Sherlock's position. In fact, given the number of cell sites in London, it would be criminally easy. Sherlock immediately changed direction and hailed a cab. He was going to take his mobile home and leave it there; it was irritating, but he was too close to the killer now to waste time on hacking, and he couldn't afford the risk that Mycroft's nonsense would distract his attention at a crucial moment. So he rode home, cursing bloody, bloody Mycroft and his insistence on bollocksing up investigations.
Sherlock did not really lose his temper, however, until he noticed the car pulling up to the curb outside the flat just as he got out of the cab. A black sedan with heavily tinted rear windows; it would be ubiquitous if Sherlock didn't recognize the driver as one of Mycroft's. Sherlock was meant to notice the car, of course, that was the point. Perhaps Mycroft was waiting in the car to swoop into the flat and pester him. Or perhaps it was his personal assistant instead, sending text after text about the expression on Sherlock's face as he turned and gave the car the two-finger salute before he went inside the flat.
He still intended to leave the phone, but the presence of the car called for a more specialized response. The first thing he did was raid John's nightstand for a box of condoms, then march to the bathroom, where he could be reasonably assured of privacy.
Sherlock had first twigged Mycroft's aversion to observing him in the loo while he was in his cocaine phase, and he took full advantage. Sherlock foiled Mycroft's attempts to keep him monitored at all times by masturbating in full view of the hidden cameras. At that point Mycroft had tactically withdrawn, and restricted himself thereafter to sending minions into the flat if Sherlock was in the loo more than fifteen minutes at a stretch. Equally as important as the privacy was the fact that 221B Baker Street's bathroom, to John's loud and consistent irritation, contained Sherlock's emergency backup supply of precursor chemicals.
Sherlock had always been interested in the more practical applications of chemistry. When he was 6, he'd accidentally set the toolshed on fire while researching spontaneous combustion of metallic elements as a method of arson (he'd decided it was too unpredictable to be useful). At age 8, he'd started selling stink bombs to his classmates; not only did this remedy a significant curtailment of his pocket money, it had taught him a number of useful lessons about olfaction and human nature (he had experimented with time-delay mechanisms, but his customers always forked them up). At 13, he had engaged in his first experiments with illicit drug use and began synthesizing methamphetamine, which made him sharper and stronger and more himself than he had ever been before (Mycroft had locked him in his room with a stack of medical journals, and when he had read about neurotoxicity he was so terrified by what he'd almost done that he never touched the stuff again). The summer before he entered uni at 17, he had been approached by a group of pseudo-anarchists who wanted him to weaponize hydrogen cyanide. He'd turned them down, because he didn't need the money and because they were idiots, but decided to create the poison anyway as an intellectual exercise (luckily Mycroft had caught him before the rest of the government did, and the whole thing had been successfully hushed up).
When he was 19, he'd resumed selling stink and smoke bombs with the encouragement of the students in his bio-organic chemistry tutorial. It was astonishing how much of a market for juvenilia there was amongst bored and usually inebriated students, and since Mycroft had found out about the exploding fetal pigs and persuaded Mummy to cut off his stipend, the money had come in handy. It was also rather nostalgic, and Sherlock found himself falling in love with low-concentration methanethiol all over again.
So when he needed something to annoy and distract Mycroft's minions, it was a matter of perhaps ten minutes to craft a truly noxious but ultimately harmless mixture of chemicals with a tendency to stick to organic materials.
He shed his phone in the bathroom, to be sure Mycroft would not immediately realize he had left it. There was one more stop, at the bookcase to retrieve John's handgun. He then left the flat at a brisk pace, hands in pockets, and headed directly toward the car. It did not move and Sherlock decided that this also had been intended. Mycroft was there after all then, using the car's very visible presence to lure Sherlock into an interminable lecture. Sure enough, as he approached within a few meters, the window began to roll down, reviewing an ever-wider slice of leather interior and a manicured hand resting on top of an umbrella. Perfect.
Sherlock pulled the condom-balloon from his pocket and viciously whipped it sideways into the car. As the balloon exploded against the interior of the opposite window, he cut a hard right and rolled over the boot, then ducked into an unmonitored alley as several security minions left their posts and converged on the car. Sherlock didn't need to see the aftermath; previous experimentation had given him a good understanding of the amount of splashback caused by a balloon which was twisted shut instead of knotted. In addition to being their own reward, his chemical efforts would ensure him several minutes free of Mycroft's surveillance. That was enough time to get well away before Mycroft realized that he had left his phone and attempted an alternate method of tracking. By then, Sherlock would be at the killer's flat.
Sherlock ran for perhaps a kilometer before he hailed a cab. As he settled inside, he couldn't help thinking, John would have enjoyed that. He would have chastised Sherlock and told him it was immature, but he would have run too, and laughed with Sherlock as they gasped for air. It was these empty moments in cabs that made it hardest to avoid thinking of John. Of course Sherlock still had cases where John wasn't there, where Sherlock worked alone and solved the case alone and it was fine; it was absurd to feel this ridiculous loneliness just because he knew John was in prison and not waiting at the flat for Sherlock to come home and tell him how the case went. It would be easy enough for him to pretend, to make himself feel normal, but Sherlock despised self-delusion. Somehow it was just different when he hadn't chosen to work alone.
No one was home at the killer's building and it had a deadbolt, so Sherlock had to force the door. It was rather inelegant, which he hated, but at least no one was watching, so the lack of finesse wouldn't cost him any of his examination time. The door to the flat itself was simple enough to pick, and Sherlock opened it onto a spare, neat space. The air of everything being just so, not a thing out of place, reminded Sherlock very strongly of John's room. It was probably something in the military mind, right next to the part responsible for tightly-made beds and precision haircuts.
He needed to focus his attention; the flat was an external hard drive overflowing with data, it could tell Sherlock everything there was to know about the killer, but if he tried to take it all in his own processors would overload and crash. So he grazed instead of feasting, opening drawers and cabinets but only really dipping in when he sensed something significant. The first thing he looked for was a name, because Lestrade would need to know. It turned out to be Brian Rufus.
Rufus was definitely an office worker, a soldier and a failed medical student. Interestingly, Sherlock learned he had been mistaken about Rufus being a poor student; the state of his textbooks told Sherlock that he had been an excellent one, conscientious and with an excellent memory. He had not even needed to consult his books before he began expertly practicing surgery and phlebotomy on his victims, even though he had left medical school two years ago.
The contents of his pornography collection were indicative of his profound dislike of women and his persistent failure to live up to a personal ideal of masculinity. Simple to deduce, almost boring, but it confirmed Sherlock's conclusion that the murders were not about sex. Rufus enjoyed hurting people, but was not sexually aroused by it. Interestingly, the data indicated two sets of hands in the murders; the genital mutilation had probably been Rufus' idea, but the main message of the killings had come from someone else.
No one had visited Rufus at his home in four to six months. His kitchen was well-stocked with beer, and a brief examination of his closet indicated a man who came straight home from work every day. No friends. No lovers, not in years, but there was an expensive woman's bracelet in the top drawer of the desk. Old girlfriend, likely an experiment with intimacy; a failed one, they were not close and he never would have given her such an expensive gift, so the bracelet wasn't something he retrieved when the relationship ended. The only way he would have it was if she was dead. It was very dirty and the clasp was beginning to rust, so not a memento, but kept close by and looked at often, so it meant something. A trophy, then. Rufus had definitely abused her, so it was possible her death was accidental, but the trophy suggested that the murder was intentional. Undoubtedly suspicion had fallen on Rufus, forcing him out of university and into a dull office job that was beneath his abilities. The timing was perfect.
Everything Sherlock had found supported his deductions and the vast differences between this man and John Watson. But he still hadn't answered the most important question: where did Rufus take his victims to kill them? It hadn't been their homes, and it wasn't in Rufus' flat. Nor would it be anywhere too nearby Sawyer Lane, given the careful way Rufus had cleaned the crime scenes of all traces of himself. Sherlock returned to the closet to peruse Rufus' shoes, all lined up in neat rows two by two. The trainers were the most likely, and he took them over to the desk lamp to examine the treads and the laces. Ah, there. Traces of grease on the laces, which Sherlock sniffed and studied, and traces of grime caught in the treads on the sole of the right shoe. Sherlock scraped some free with his fingernail and examined it in the light, then briefly touched his tongue to the filth.
Oh, Lambeth. Of course.
The e-mail Rufus sent to John while posing as Whitlock was written in a hurry from an internet cafe that was likely only a few streets from his body storage facility. He was in a rush because he had just loaded Barstow's body into his car and did not like to be away from it too long. He had sent the e-mail, gotten into the car, and driven to Southampton. Sherlock pulled up a mental map of the area surrounding the internet cafe he'd been to that morning, identified four possible locations that could accommodate a walk-in freezer and play host to a series of murders, and left Rufus' building at a run.
Finding the right place was just process of elimination then, the sort of dull lead-checking Sherlock usually left to the police. When he picked the lock on the third possibility and walked inside, though, he was deeply glad that he was there to see.
Oh, it was gorgeous. It was like fucking Guy Fawkes in his occipital lobes. Rufus' charnel house was a barren space with just an industrial sink, a walk-in freezer, a metal table with a row of empty liter jugs underneath, but just glancing at it gave Sherlock enough data to cross-check and confirm every deduction about the murderer's methods. And best of all, nothing was clean. It had all been inexpertly scrubbed with soap, and there were traces of blood everywhere. There was a bin with a small heap of clothes that did not include any gloves, so in all likelihood there were prints everywhere as well. Sherlock was extremely careful not to touch anything, but he was grinning uncontrollably because he was going to box this room up and give it to Lestrade like a Christmas gift and John would be out of prison by dinner.
Sherlock closed the door behind him when he left, ensuring that the lock engaged, then he crammed two straightened paper clips into the keyhole and broke off their ends. He would go directly home in a cab and text Lestrade, and the police could be here looking at proof of John's innocence in twenty minutes. Of course they still had to find the killer, but sooner or later he would return to his apartment, which showed no signs of flight.
Sherlock was just turning back from the door when a man swung into view around the corner. He had short, blonde hair and an undeniably military bearing, but Sherlock did not need to deduce any further because the man dropped the Tesco bags he was carrying and legged it back up the alley. Sherlock shot after him, gaining steadily despite Rufus' speed, and closed the distance even further when Rufus paused by a car parked on the high street, fumbling with keys. When he glanced up and saw how close Sherlock had come, Rufus' eyes widened and he dropped the keys, taking flight up the sidewalk once more. The street was not crowded, but Sherlock still had to push past several pedestrians as he plunged after Rufus into traffic on the cross street.
Sherlock was distracted momentarily by a small lorry clipping him on the shoulder with its side mirror. It spun him halfway around and disoriented him for just a moment, costing precious seconds that let Rufus extend his lead by some fifty meters. But as the killer reached the next intersection, a black car with heavily tinted windows sped past Sherlock, cornered sharply, and came to a squealing halt in the crosswalk in front of Rufus. The rear passenger doors slammed open before the scream of the tires had died, and two men in suits emerged, one from either side. The one on the side nearest Sherlock seized Rufus by the shirt and slung him bodily into the backseat, then got in after him. Sherlock charged the car, but the man on the far side produced a handgun from his jacket and fired at Sherlock over the roof of the car.
Sherlock flung himself behind a parked car and pulled John's gun from his pocket. The likelihood of hitting the man was low, given his cover, but it seemed the thing to do. He popped up and tried to take aim, but two quick shots pinged off a metal surface and Sherlock was forced to duck back behind the car. As he did so, a door slammed and tires squealed, and he leapt out of cover just as the car accelerated up the cross street away from him. Sherlock pointed his gun at one of the tires, but the car was going too fast and the risk of a ricochet striking an innocent bystander was too great. He couldn't help feeling that he'd allowed the car containing Rufus to escape. He became aware that he was being stared at, pointed at. A woman shrieked something about guns and he remembered that John's gun was still in his hand.
Sherlock pocketed it and dashed back the way he had come; this time people didn't need to be pushed aside, they dove out of his way, and soon enough he was back where he had seen Rufus first. The spilled Tesco bags smelled of bleach; Rufus had come to clean up. But someone had taken him. Not rescued, but abducted. Why? It was now more important than ever that Sherlock get back to the flat and talk to Lestrade. The Yard was closer, but there was no guarantee that Lestrade would be there and Sherlock needed a detective who trusted him to examine the scene quickly, without a lot of posturing. He sharply regretted leaving the mobile at home. In future, he would have to acquire a secondary mobile phone in case of emergencies. Or perhaps a series of phones, which he could let Mycroft learn of, then give to customers at Speedy's in order to confuse his tracking efforts
The cabbie was dully uninterested in breaking the traffic laws in exchange for more money, so Sherlock sat fretting in the back of the cab as it pressed its way slowly, slowly through the evening commuters. The adrenaline was like a shot of espresso to his reasoning and as he considered what he had learned, his mind moved quicker and quicker and his thinking accelerated until every thought in the sequence seemed to be happening in the exact same moment.
The entire case was an equation that only looked like it ended with Rufus; in reality Rufus was simply the common denominator in the killings. The numerator was something Sherlock could only think of right now as Variable X. The trouble was that X was also the solution to the equation. Rufus performed the murders and added his own touches, but X planned them. Rufus wrote a last minute e-mail to keep John in Southampton, but X spent more than a month keeping a dead man alive in John's mind so that he would go to Southampton in the first place. Rufus kidnapped and killed and disposed of bodies, but he could not do all that and watch John Watson, so X was the one who made the calls that told Rufus John was out on his own and it was time to move. He strongly suspected that it was X's hand that placed DNA and fingerprint evidence pointing to John Watson in the appropriate places.
X was on top of every fraction and inside every set of brackets. And X was at the end of the equation, when Sherlock was on the cusp of solving it and X yanked Rufus into a car and sped away. But Sherlock was still close enough even without Rufus, he did have all the data, and he could solve for X. X was the campaign manager for a killer. A fifth columnist who played the long game. A psychopath who engineered a series of murders in order to send a message that the murders didn't matter in the slightest. A schemer who destroyed an ordinary man whose only unusual feature was his connection to Sherlock. The sudden abduction was the last integer slotting into place, and Sherlock felt the deductions cascading into one another like waterfalls until finally, at the bottom, they all merged into a single pool that gave X a name.
Moriarty.
Sherlock climbed the stairs to the flat two and three at a time. People said that anger warped and destroyed and distorted, but it only ever made Sherlock feel hard and calm and clear. Perhaps it was because he had expected this moment, perhaps even longed for it, ever since he'd staggered from the wreckage of the swimming pool. He'd known that Moriarty was not going to walk away from him. Counted on it, in fact. The only real surprise to Sherlock was that there had been no games, no puzzles, just Moriarty quickly and efficiently removing John from Sherlock's orbit. It seemed unlike him; Moriarty was hardly a man to shrink from murder, and it would probably have been a lot less trouble than all of this. So if removing John was not the point in itself, what was? Interchangeable corpses and interchangeable killers. What was Moriarty trying to tell him?
Back in the flat, the first thing Sherlock did was to fetch his mobile from the bathroom and check the missed messages and calls; it was sheer habit. The first was Mycroft's text, sent less than a minute after Sherlock's departure that afternoon.
Message received
That was childish, even for you.
Then there were a number of missed calls from Lestrade, followed by an increasingly frustrated series of text messages.
Message received
Burglary reported at Sawyer Lane. Was that you?
Message received
No evidence of anything other than recent consultive detecting. What am I meant to find here?
Message received
Gunshots fired in Lambeth high street, one of suspects tall, dark hair, posh greatcoat. ???
Message received
You'd better be dead in a skip because if you're not I'm going to murder you.
Message received
Text me back you stupid git.
Only as he glanced up did he really observe the flat properly and register that something was very different. His eyes snapped to the coffee table and the phone dropped to the carpet, completely forgotten. The table had been cleared of all the photos and reports and scribbled notes, which were nowhere in sight. Instead there was only a single business card, arranged face up in the exact center of the table. Sherlock leaned over and read without touching. The card belonged to Brian Rufus and listed him as a "debt recovery advisor" at Veihnult Riesen. Sherlock frantically dug his laptop out from under a mound of books. A few moments' googling informed him that Veihnult Riesen was an extremely profitable financial services firm with large offices in London. The address on the front page of their very slick website matched the address on the card on Sherlock's table.
He contemplated the card for a moment. A message, though the meaning was unclear. Sherlock half-expected to hear his phone ring, but of course that was ridiculous; that clearly was not the game being played this time. He reached out and flicked the card over. On the reverse, someone had printed four characters in block capitals with a cheap rollerball; too few for Sherlock to deduce anything about the handwriting. The card said simply: "11 PM."
[ Previous | Next]
Pairings: Gen
Spoilers: Through The Great Game.
Warnings: Chapters 1 and 2 contain gory crime scenes. Trigger warnings for discussion of (off-screen) sexual assault and violence against women.
Special thanks to: stellar-dust, my beyond awesome beta, who managed to be both insanely quick and tremendously helpful. Thanks also to everyone who listened to me natter (particularly
melannen, that one night at Sarah's).
Summary: Sherlock knew that he could thoroughly rely upon John Watson's moral sense. And that's why he knew that Lestrade was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Chapter 5: Indirect Attack
The winning of a Pawn among good players of even strength often means the winning of the game. -José Raúl Capablanca, Chess Fundamentals
The laptop data was less than useless. Sherlock combed through every document and photograph and found nothing helpful. He was so uselessly irritated, and having no way to vent it put him at a loss. If John were here, he could complain at him until either John sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose in that fascinating way, or else he snapped back and then they had an invigorating row. He almost considered calling Dimmock so he could have someone to be bitingly sarcastic at, but it would not be the same, so instead he held the skull cradled in his hands and muttered complaints at it. It was not as satisfying, but he could at least imagine the empty grimace of its jaw was something like an expression of irritation.
There were no calls that day, only a couple of text messages from Lestrade, which Sherlock disregarded.
Message received
I need to take your statement
Message received
Fine, forget the statement. Tell me what you've found.
Finally Sherlock realized what had been missing from the laptop data: e-mail. Of course. John had an e-mail program installed but he hadn't found any archived mail, because John used an internet-based e-mail account. He scrolled through the files on the thumb drive and located the browser history data. There were multiple daily visits to a free e-mail site, the URL of which Sherlock typed into his own browser. The user name was easy, it was 'jwatson1' because John was nothing if not predictable when it came to his computer habits. The password was equally obvious: the original password from John's laptop, the one Sherlock had cracked so easily the very first week they lived together. The laptop password had been changed almost daily since, in an effort to keep Sherlock out, but as he had never felt a particular need to see John's e-mail, John had never taken precautions there. Predictable, but then predictability was very useful, if boring
Sherlock quickly skimmed the subject lines of the past week or two. A couple quick notes from Harry, a notice that John's credit card bill was ready for viewing online, some spam. The bulk of the mail consisted of letters from several of John's army comrades, with whom he evidently maintained a correspondence. The contacts were irregular and infrequent, suggesting that the soldiers were still in active deployments abroad and had only intermittent access to the internet. The contents of the e-mails bore this out: they of course did not mention any sensitive details, but there were frequent complaints about absent spouses and requests that John post particular brands of biscuit.
One of the more recent exchanges was with a "Tom Whitlock," who seemed to be the member of a unit to which John had once been temporarily attached, as they did not appear to have any friends in common. An e-mail sent the previous Wednesday talked about a period of leave, and arranged a time and place for a meeting in Southampton on Friday evening. The e-mail also stated casually that Whitlock had damaged his phone but that he still had his laptop and John could expect to hear from him that way if anything changed. Mid-afternoon Friday, a short e-mail explained that his leave had been unexpectedly canceled and apologized for the short notice.
Two phone calls later, Sherlock had learned that Lance Corporal Thomas A. Whitlock was reported killed in action over a month ago. A little more digging revealed that all the genuine e-mails from Whitlock were bounced through a British Army proxy server, whereas the e-mails sent after his death were not. Someone within the UK's borders had evidently hijacked Whitlock's e-mail account and was using it to send John e-mails. But what was really interesting was that the most recent e-mail was clearly written by a different person. The earlier messages were skillful imitations of Whitlock's writing style, whereas the Friday e-mail was terse and artless. The murders only started the previous week, but the setup had taken more than a month; someone was obviously playing an extremely long game. There had been no prior indication that the murderer had an accomplice, but this ruse suggested that someone else had set John up, with the murderer only stepping in to send the last crucial e-mail, which ensured John would stay overnight in Southampton without becoming suspicious.
Further, the Friday e-mail had only been sent through a single proxy. It was absurdly easy to trace the true IP address to an internet cafe in Lambeth. He left the flat in his characteristic clothing, grimly and efficiently shook off the minions following him, and ducked into a charity shop where he transformed himself into a totally different person. After all the effort, the cafe was almost a letdown, just another link in the chain: it was easy enough to establish a rapport with the bored woman minding the counter. In due time, she told him all about "Bri," a smart young businessman who worked with her sister-in-law, who dropped by once in a while but she hadn't spotted him in almost a week, and wasn't it too bad he didn't seem to fancy women. A few more minutes of gossip, and she gave Sherlock his address, which she had memorized when he handed her his ID to rent the computer for ten minutes on Friday.
When Sherlock stepped outside the cafe, he was being watched by Mycroftian security forces again. Now he was annoyed. Whatever Mycroft's intentions were, Sherlock had specifically warned him not distract Sherlock from the case, and that was absolutely what he was doing. It had to stop. Another text from Lestrade arrived just then, and Sherlock fired off a reply without thinking.
Message received
Stop ignoring me.
To: G Lestrade
27 Sawyer Ln. SH
Immediately after he sent the text, he realized the source of his Mycroft problem, and it was so obvious he could kick himself. The phone. He had deliberately disabled the gps function in this unit, in order to prevent unwarranted spying. However, Mycroft had Ofcom in his pocket and it would be no great hardship for him to utilize cell site tracking to triangulate Sherlock's position. In fact, given the number of cell sites in London, it would be criminally easy. Sherlock immediately changed direction and hailed a cab. He was going to take his mobile home and leave it there; it was irritating, but he was too close to the killer now to waste time on hacking, and he couldn't afford the risk that Mycroft's nonsense would distract his attention at a crucial moment. So he rode home, cursing bloody, bloody Mycroft and his insistence on bollocksing up investigations.
Sherlock did not really lose his temper, however, until he noticed the car pulling up to the curb outside the flat just as he got out of the cab. A black sedan with heavily tinted rear windows; it would be ubiquitous if Sherlock didn't recognize the driver as one of Mycroft's. Sherlock was meant to notice the car, of course, that was the point. Perhaps Mycroft was waiting in the car to swoop into the flat and pester him. Or perhaps it was his personal assistant instead, sending text after text about the expression on Sherlock's face as he turned and gave the car the two-finger salute before he went inside the flat.
He still intended to leave the phone, but the presence of the car called for a more specialized response. The first thing he did was raid John's nightstand for a box of condoms, then march to the bathroom, where he could be reasonably assured of privacy.
Sherlock had first twigged Mycroft's aversion to observing him in the loo while he was in his cocaine phase, and he took full advantage. Sherlock foiled Mycroft's attempts to keep him monitored at all times by masturbating in full view of the hidden cameras. At that point Mycroft had tactically withdrawn, and restricted himself thereafter to sending minions into the flat if Sherlock was in the loo more than fifteen minutes at a stretch. Equally as important as the privacy was the fact that 221B Baker Street's bathroom, to John's loud and consistent irritation, contained Sherlock's emergency backup supply of precursor chemicals.
Sherlock had always been interested in the more practical applications of chemistry. When he was 6, he'd accidentally set the toolshed on fire while researching spontaneous combustion of metallic elements as a method of arson (he'd decided it was too unpredictable to be useful). At age 8, he'd started selling stink bombs to his classmates; not only did this remedy a significant curtailment of his pocket money, it had taught him a number of useful lessons about olfaction and human nature (he had experimented with time-delay mechanisms, but his customers always forked them up). At 13, he had engaged in his first experiments with illicit drug use and began synthesizing methamphetamine, which made him sharper and stronger and more himself than he had ever been before (Mycroft had locked him in his room with a stack of medical journals, and when he had read about neurotoxicity he was so terrified by what he'd almost done that he never touched the stuff again). The summer before he entered uni at 17, he had been approached by a group of pseudo-anarchists who wanted him to weaponize hydrogen cyanide. He'd turned them down, because he didn't need the money and because they were idiots, but decided to create the poison anyway as an intellectual exercise (luckily Mycroft had caught him before the rest of the government did, and the whole thing had been successfully hushed up).
When he was 19, he'd resumed selling stink and smoke bombs with the encouragement of the students in his bio-organic chemistry tutorial. It was astonishing how much of a market for juvenilia there was amongst bored and usually inebriated students, and since Mycroft had found out about the exploding fetal pigs and persuaded Mummy to cut off his stipend, the money had come in handy. It was also rather nostalgic, and Sherlock found himself falling in love with low-concentration methanethiol all over again.
So when he needed something to annoy and distract Mycroft's minions, it was a matter of perhaps ten minutes to craft a truly noxious but ultimately harmless mixture of chemicals with a tendency to stick to organic materials.
He shed his phone in the bathroom, to be sure Mycroft would not immediately realize he had left it. There was one more stop, at the bookcase to retrieve John's handgun. He then left the flat at a brisk pace, hands in pockets, and headed directly toward the car. It did not move and Sherlock decided that this also had been intended. Mycroft was there after all then, using the car's very visible presence to lure Sherlock into an interminable lecture. Sure enough, as he approached within a few meters, the window began to roll down, reviewing an ever-wider slice of leather interior and a manicured hand resting on top of an umbrella. Perfect.
Sherlock pulled the condom-balloon from his pocket and viciously whipped it sideways into the car. As the balloon exploded against the interior of the opposite window, he cut a hard right and rolled over the boot, then ducked into an unmonitored alley as several security minions left their posts and converged on the car. Sherlock didn't need to see the aftermath; previous experimentation had given him a good understanding of the amount of splashback caused by a balloon which was twisted shut instead of knotted. In addition to being their own reward, his chemical efforts would ensure him several minutes free of Mycroft's surveillance. That was enough time to get well away before Mycroft realized that he had left his phone and attempted an alternate method of tracking. By then, Sherlock would be at the killer's flat.
Sherlock ran for perhaps a kilometer before he hailed a cab. As he settled inside, he couldn't help thinking, John would have enjoyed that. He would have chastised Sherlock and told him it was immature, but he would have run too, and laughed with Sherlock as they gasped for air. It was these empty moments in cabs that made it hardest to avoid thinking of John. Of course Sherlock still had cases where John wasn't there, where Sherlock worked alone and solved the case alone and it was fine; it was absurd to feel this ridiculous loneliness just because he knew John was in prison and not waiting at the flat for Sherlock to come home and tell him how the case went. It would be easy enough for him to pretend, to make himself feel normal, but Sherlock despised self-delusion. Somehow it was just different when he hadn't chosen to work alone.
No one was home at the killer's building and it had a deadbolt, so Sherlock had to force the door. It was rather inelegant, which he hated, but at least no one was watching, so the lack of finesse wouldn't cost him any of his examination time. The door to the flat itself was simple enough to pick, and Sherlock opened it onto a spare, neat space. The air of everything being just so, not a thing out of place, reminded Sherlock very strongly of John's room. It was probably something in the military mind, right next to the part responsible for tightly-made beds and precision haircuts.
He needed to focus his attention; the flat was an external hard drive overflowing with data, it could tell Sherlock everything there was to know about the killer, but if he tried to take it all in his own processors would overload and crash. So he grazed instead of feasting, opening drawers and cabinets but only really dipping in when he sensed something significant. The first thing he looked for was a name, because Lestrade would need to know. It turned out to be Brian Rufus.
Rufus was definitely an office worker, a soldier and a failed medical student. Interestingly, Sherlock learned he had been mistaken about Rufus being a poor student; the state of his textbooks told Sherlock that he had been an excellent one, conscientious and with an excellent memory. He had not even needed to consult his books before he began expertly practicing surgery and phlebotomy on his victims, even though he had left medical school two years ago.
The contents of his pornography collection were indicative of his profound dislike of women and his persistent failure to live up to a personal ideal of masculinity. Simple to deduce, almost boring, but it confirmed Sherlock's conclusion that the murders were not about sex. Rufus enjoyed hurting people, but was not sexually aroused by it. Interestingly, the data indicated two sets of hands in the murders; the genital mutilation had probably been Rufus' idea, but the main message of the killings had come from someone else.
No one had visited Rufus at his home in four to six months. His kitchen was well-stocked with beer, and a brief examination of his closet indicated a man who came straight home from work every day. No friends. No lovers, not in years, but there was an expensive woman's bracelet in the top drawer of the desk. Old girlfriend, likely an experiment with intimacy; a failed one, they were not close and he never would have given her such an expensive gift, so the bracelet wasn't something he retrieved when the relationship ended. The only way he would have it was if she was dead. It was very dirty and the clasp was beginning to rust, so not a memento, but kept close by and looked at often, so it meant something. A trophy, then. Rufus had definitely abused her, so it was possible her death was accidental, but the trophy suggested that the murder was intentional. Undoubtedly suspicion had fallen on Rufus, forcing him out of university and into a dull office job that was beneath his abilities. The timing was perfect.
Everything Sherlock had found supported his deductions and the vast differences between this man and John Watson. But he still hadn't answered the most important question: where did Rufus take his victims to kill them? It hadn't been their homes, and it wasn't in Rufus' flat. Nor would it be anywhere too nearby Sawyer Lane, given the careful way Rufus had cleaned the crime scenes of all traces of himself. Sherlock returned to the closet to peruse Rufus' shoes, all lined up in neat rows two by two. The trainers were the most likely, and he took them over to the desk lamp to examine the treads and the laces. Ah, there. Traces of grease on the laces, which Sherlock sniffed and studied, and traces of grime caught in the treads on the sole of the right shoe. Sherlock scraped some free with his fingernail and examined it in the light, then briefly touched his tongue to the filth.
Oh, Lambeth. Of course.
The e-mail Rufus sent to John while posing as Whitlock was written in a hurry from an internet cafe that was likely only a few streets from his body storage facility. He was in a rush because he had just loaded Barstow's body into his car and did not like to be away from it too long. He had sent the e-mail, gotten into the car, and driven to Southampton. Sherlock pulled up a mental map of the area surrounding the internet cafe he'd been to that morning, identified four possible locations that could accommodate a walk-in freezer and play host to a series of murders, and left Rufus' building at a run.
Finding the right place was just process of elimination then, the sort of dull lead-checking Sherlock usually left to the police. When he picked the lock on the third possibility and walked inside, though, he was deeply glad that he was there to see.
Oh, it was gorgeous. It was like fucking Guy Fawkes in his occipital lobes. Rufus' charnel house was a barren space with just an industrial sink, a walk-in freezer, a metal table with a row of empty liter jugs underneath, but just glancing at it gave Sherlock enough data to cross-check and confirm every deduction about the murderer's methods. And best of all, nothing was clean. It had all been inexpertly scrubbed with soap, and there were traces of blood everywhere. There was a bin with a small heap of clothes that did not include any gloves, so in all likelihood there were prints everywhere as well. Sherlock was extremely careful not to touch anything, but he was grinning uncontrollably because he was going to box this room up and give it to Lestrade like a Christmas gift and John would be out of prison by dinner.
Sherlock closed the door behind him when he left, ensuring that the lock engaged, then he crammed two straightened paper clips into the keyhole and broke off their ends. He would go directly home in a cab and text Lestrade, and the police could be here looking at proof of John's innocence in twenty minutes. Of course they still had to find the killer, but sooner or later he would return to his apartment, which showed no signs of flight.
Sherlock was just turning back from the door when a man swung into view around the corner. He had short, blonde hair and an undeniably military bearing, but Sherlock did not need to deduce any further because the man dropped the Tesco bags he was carrying and legged it back up the alley. Sherlock shot after him, gaining steadily despite Rufus' speed, and closed the distance even further when Rufus paused by a car parked on the high street, fumbling with keys. When he glanced up and saw how close Sherlock had come, Rufus' eyes widened and he dropped the keys, taking flight up the sidewalk once more. The street was not crowded, but Sherlock still had to push past several pedestrians as he plunged after Rufus into traffic on the cross street.
Sherlock was distracted momentarily by a small lorry clipping him on the shoulder with its side mirror. It spun him halfway around and disoriented him for just a moment, costing precious seconds that let Rufus extend his lead by some fifty meters. But as the killer reached the next intersection, a black car with heavily tinted windows sped past Sherlock, cornered sharply, and came to a squealing halt in the crosswalk in front of Rufus. The rear passenger doors slammed open before the scream of the tires had died, and two men in suits emerged, one from either side. The one on the side nearest Sherlock seized Rufus by the shirt and slung him bodily into the backseat, then got in after him. Sherlock charged the car, but the man on the far side produced a handgun from his jacket and fired at Sherlock over the roof of the car.
Sherlock flung himself behind a parked car and pulled John's gun from his pocket. The likelihood of hitting the man was low, given his cover, but it seemed the thing to do. He popped up and tried to take aim, but two quick shots pinged off a metal surface and Sherlock was forced to duck back behind the car. As he did so, a door slammed and tires squealed, and he leapt out of cover just as the car accelerated up the cross street away from him. Sherlock pointed his gun at one of the tires, but the car was going too fast and the risk of a ricochet striking an innocent bystander was too great. He couldn't help feeling that he'd allowed the car containing Rufus to escape. He became aware that he was being stared at, pointed at. A woman shrieked something about guns and he remembered that John's gun was still in his hand.
Sherlock pocketed it and dashed back the way he had come; this time people didn't need to be pushed aside, they dove out of his way, and soon enough he was back where he had seen Rufus first. The spilled Tesco bags smelled of bleach; Rufus had come to clean up. But someone had taken him. Not rescued, but abducted. Why? It was now more important than ever that Sherlock get back to the flat and talk to Lestrade. The Yard was closer, but there was no guarantee that Lestrade would be there and Sherlock needed a detective who trusted him to examine the scene quickly, without a lot of posturing. He sharply regretted leaving the mobile at home. In future, he would have to acquire a secondary mobile phone in case of emergencies. Or perhaps a series of phones, which he could let Mycroft learn of, then give to customers at Speedy's in order to confuse his tracking efforts
The cabbie was dully uninterested in breaking the traffic laws in exchange for more money, so Sherlock sat fretting in the back of the cab as it pressed its way slowly, slowly through the evening commuters. The adrenaline was like a shot of espresso to his reasoning and as he considered what he had learned, his mind moved quicker and quicker and his thinking accelerated until every thought in the sequence seemed to be happening in the exact same moment.
The entire case was an equation that only looked like it ended with Rufus; in reality Rufus was simply the common denominator in the killings. The numerator was something Sherlock could only think of right now as Variable X. The trouble was that X was also the solution to the equation. Rufus performed the murders and added his own touches, but X planned them. Rufus wrote a last minute e-mail to keep John in Southampton, but X spent more than a month keeping a dead man alive in John's mind so that he would go to Southampton in the first place. Rufus kidnapped and killed and disposed of bodies, but he could not do all that and watch John Watson, so X was the one who made the calls that told Rufus John was out on his own and it was time to move. He strongly suspected that it was X's hand that placed DNA and fingerprint evidence pointing to John Watson in the appropriate places.
X was on top of every fraction and inside every set of brackets. And X was at the end of the equation, when Sherlock was on the cusp of solving it and X yanked Rufus into a car and sped away. But Sherlock was still close enough even without Rufus, he did have all the data, and he could solve for X. X was the campaign manager for a killer. A fifth columnist who played the long game. A psychopath who engineered a series of murders in order to send a message that the murders didn't matter in the slightest. A schemer who destroyed an ordinary man whose only unusual feature was his connection to Sherlock. The sudden abduction was the last integer slotting into place, and Sherlock felt the deductions cascading into one another like waterfalls until finally, at the bottom, they all merged into a single pool that gave X a name.
Moriarty.
Sherlock climbed the stairs to the flat two and three at a time. People said that anger warped and destroyed and distorted, but it only ever made Sherlock feel hard and calm and clear. Perhaps it was because he had expected this moment, perhaps even longed for it, ever since he'd staggered from the wreckage of the swimming pool. He'd known that Moriarty was not going to walk away from him. Counted on it, in fact. The only real surprise to Sherlock was that there had been no games, no puzzles, just Moriarty quickly and efficiently removing John from Sherlock's orbit. It seemed unlike him; Moriarty was hardly a man to shrink from murder, and it would probably have been a lot less trouble than all of this. So if removing John was not the point in itself, what was? Interchangeable corpses and interchangeable killers. What was Moriarty trying to tell him?
Back in the flat, the first thing Sherlock did was to fetch his mobile from the bathroom and check the missed messages and calls; it was sheer habit. The first was Mycroft's text, sent less than a minute after Sherlock's departure that afternoon.
Message received
That was childish, even for you.
Then there were a number of missed calls from Lestrade, followed by an increasingly frustrated series of text messages.
Message received
Burglary reported at Sawyer Lane. Was that you?
Message received
No evidence of anything other than recent consultive detecting. What am I meant to find here?
Message received
Gunshots fired in Lambeth high street, one of suspects tall, dark hair, posh greatcoat. ???
Message received
You'd better be dead in a skip because if you're not I'm going to murder you.
Message received
Text me back you stupid git.
Only as he glanced up did he really observe the flat properly and register that something was very different. His eyes snapped to the coffee table and the phone dropped to the carpet, completely forgotten. The table had been cleared of all the photos and reports and scribbled notes, which were nowhere in sight. Instead there was only a single business card, arranged face up in the exact center of the table. Sherlock leaned over and read without touching. The card belonged to Brian Rufus and listed him as a "debt recovery advisor" at Veihnult Riesen. Sherlock frantically dug his laptop out from under a mound of books. A few moments' googling informed him that Veihnult Riesen was an extremely profitable financial services firm with large offices in London. The address on the front page of their very slick website matched the address on the card on Sherlock's table.
He contemplated the card for a moment. A message, though the meaning was unclear. Sherlock half-expected to hear his phone ring, but of course that was ridiculous; that clearly was not the game being played this time. He reached out and flicked the card over. On the reverse, someone had printed four characters in block capitals with a cheap rollerball; too few for Sherlock to deduce anything about the handwriting. The card said simply: "11 PM."
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