Homicide Detective Ned Zaleski resents the chief’s decision to enlist Sherlock Holmes’ help in Zaleski’s latest murder investigation. Zaleski fails to see how Holmes, newly transported to the 1990s from his own time by the Santa Cruz Time Wizards, can shed any light on a modern-day serial killer. But Zaleski soon learns Holmes’ earned his reputation for insight honestly. And that insight might lead Zaleski down a path he cannot bear to go. First published in Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, an anthology authorized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate, “Second Fiddle” offers an intricate series of unexpected twists and surprising turns that only Kristine Kathryn Rusch can deliver.
“Second Fiddle” by USA Today bestselling writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available for $2.99 on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, Omnilit, and other e-bookstores.
Second Fiddle
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
WEDNESDAY, 5:36 A.M.
HOLMES LOOKED OUT OF PLACE as he crouched on the pavement, staring at the streak of blood. I had already put Vicks on my nose and lit a cigarette. The stench on the side of the road had nearly gagged me—a ten-year veteran of homicide and fifteen on the force. The area smelled as if someone had run over a herd of deer three days ago, then left them in the sun. Holmes had merely wrapped a scarf around his face before examining the blood streak as if it contained the secret of the ages.
I had already followed that blood streak. It led down an embankment to a mutilated female body lying in the drainage ditch against the chain wire fence. The killer had been daring this time, dumping the body next to one of the busiest interstates in the area, only yards away from Cabot Hill, Santa Lucia’s newest—and ugliest—housing development.
But the location didn’t seem to catch Holmes’s attention, and neither did the rusted-out 1970 Oldsmobile abandoned on the roadside, with blood on its fender. A member of the forensics unit was scraping off the blood into a plastic bag. The photographer was straddling the drainage ditch, snapping pictures of the body. Three men from the unit were scouring the car, and two other detectives were scanning the roadside looking for other clues.
I was standing beside the squad car listening as Rae Ann, the only woman on the team, hunched over the radio, requesting a few more hours at the crime scene. It would play hell with the morning commute, but Holmes had requested it. And since the department had paid over a quarter of the budget to get the only privately run time travel company to bring the Great Detective to Santa Lucia, it had to honor his requests.
I had been watching him since they brought him into the force twenty-four hours ago. He was thin, of average height, with a hawk nose. I had expected a taller man, and perhaps by Victorian standards he had been. His suitcoat was a bit more tailored than I had expected, but he did wear a deerstalker cap, and he carried a curved pipe which he put away when he discovered that a person who owned something made of elephant ivory was subject to verbal abuse in California.
I had protested Holmes’s arrival, but the chief insisted. Our small department had had a running rivalry with the FBI for years, and since there was no actual proof that the murderer was kidnapping his victims and running them across state borders, the chief was doing all he could to prevent FBI involvement. Holmes was merely the ace-in-the-hole, a last-ditch effort to prove to the feds that the homeboys could solve one of their own.
From the moment Holmes arrived, he listened a lot, asked few questions, and asked for information on the era, on California, and on Santa Lucia in particular. I had snorted when they told me that. He may have been the greatest detective that ever lived—although I would wager greater detectives had existed in relative anonymity—but his information was one hundred years out of date. How could a man who had made his reputation by observing the small details discover a twist none of us—good detectives all—had failed to see?
And believe me, we had looked. I had had four hours of sleep a night since the task force was formed a month ago. That’s when we realized that Santa Lucia was as much a victim as the mutilated bodies we found. The killer was preying on the rich and famous—two young movie stars, a former child television star, a Princeton football player who was this year’s number one draft choice, and the wife of one of the state’s most famous senators—a well known sculptor in her own right. Each of his victims was famous enough to make the evening news across the country, and all of the bodies had been found here, in Santa Lucia, even though most of them had disappeared—alive—from somewhere else.
Holmes followed the bloodstain to the crusted grass on the embankment before putting a hand over his nose. Then I nodded. He seemed to have a diminished sense of smell, probably from snuff, or his pipe smoking.
“What the hell you think you’re doing, Ned? You too good to scour the crime scene?”
I glanced over my shoulder. Birmar was standing there, his tiny eyes running and his round face pale and greenish. He was a different kind of detective than I was. Holmes had been his idol as a boy and Birmar had been the brains behind calling the Santa Cruz Time Wizards for help in this case.
“I’m working,” I said in a tone that brooked no disagreement.
“Looks like you’re watching Holmes,” Birmar said, but he walked away, his overcoat clinging to his frame like wet sandpaper.
I had been watching Holmes, but I had already surveyed the crime scene. I had been the first member of the team to arrive. My house was a block away. That galled me. I was the spokesman on this case. If the killer was following the press coverage, he knew about me. And even though my address and phone number were unlisted, it wouldn’t take a lot of effort for a guy this smart to figure out where I lived.
“Officer Zaleski.” Holmes was looking up the embankment at me. “Would you join me for a moment, please?”
I sighed, leaned over, and stamped out the cigarette in the squad’s ashtray. Then I approached the embankment, careful to avoid the blood streak. A low irritation was building in my stomach. Whenever this guy wanted a consult, he chose me, not Birmar. And I had better things to do than babysit someone who was wasting more of the department’s money than the chief was.
“Do we know whom this unfortunate woman is yet?” he asked. Even with the Vicks and the cigarette, the smell was nauseating. A body, decaying normally, shouldn’t smell that strong. “No,” I said. “Well,” he said. “This one may be exactly what we have been looking for. She does not have much in common with the others.” I looked down, reluctantly, holding up all my training as a shield. The body was not a person; it was the king in a chess game, the reason for the fight and no more. But the killer had left her face intact, and the look of horror in her wide blue eyes would haunt me if I let it.
I made myself examine her for the clues Holmes was talking about. Her teeth were uneven and discolored—certainly not the product of million-dollar attention. The remains of the dress she wore showed a store-bought label. Holmes reached down and held out a piece of fabric to me. The cuff of a sleeve. One button was missing. The other had been sewn on rather ineptly.
“Jesus,” I said. “Copycat.”
Holmes leaned on his haunches and peered up at me from beneath the brim of his cap. “Copycat?” He clearly didn’t understand.
I pulled myself out of the embankment. “We got two of these nuts on the loose. One of them is killing for weird personal reasons and the other is reading the press coverage and imitating.”
Holmes clambered up beside me, remarkably at ease with his body although he looked as if he never exercised. “Nonsense,” he said. “Such a thing is preposterous. The odds of having two killers with the same—”
“It happens all the time,” I said. I walked to the squad. Rae Ann’s cheeks were flushed. She was fighting with dispatch. “They’re already rerouting because of a multicar pileup on 1-5,” she said.
“Let me talk to them.”
“There is no need.” Holmes was standing behind me. “As long as your photographers are finished, we may return to the station. You and I must discuss the way these copycats work.”
WEDNESDAY, 11:53 A.M.
THE LAST THING I wanted to do was sit at my desk and talk basic criminal theory with a man who had died three decades before I was born. But he absolutely refused to work with Birmar (“I am afraid, my dear sir, that the man does not understand nuance.”), and the chief told me my job was on the line if I ignored Holmes. Wonderful. It seemed that the Great Detective needed a foil, and he had chosen me as this century’s Watson.
The chief was using his office to brief a new team that would handle a double murder reported to the Gato Apartments. No privacy anywhere. So I took Holmes to my favorite dive, a bar just off Fifth that had been passed over by ferns, gold piping, and neon lights. The place hadn’t seen daylight since 1955, and the windows were painted shut. The interior smelled of cigarette smoke layered so deep that the walls were half an inch thicker. The floor was littered with popcorn and sticky with spilled beer. Someone had to be bribing the city health authorities because logically the place should have been closed in its first year.
To my surprise, Holmes said nothing as we walked in. He followed me to a booth and slid in as if we were both regulars. I ordered a light beer and he ordered an iced tea “heavy on the sugar and cream,” then smiled at me. “I have grown quite fond of that in the last few days,” he said.
I was in no mood for idle conversation. “So you want me to explain copycats.”
He shook his head, a slight smile on his narrow lips. “I think I grasp the concept. However, I thought I should let you know that I believe you are wrong.”
I felt a heated flush rise in my cheeks. The man knew how to get to me. I had been decorated three times by the State of California for my work, recognized as one of the best detectives in the nation by The New York Times, and had been portrayed in a TV movie based on one of my cases.
“Look,” I said. “I’ve investigated more homicides than I care to think about, and I’ve been on teams that have captured six different serial killers. Someone who doesn’t follow the pattern is inevitably a copycat.”
“But the pattern was followed,” Holmes said. “All the way up to and including the directions of the knife wounds, as well as the advanced odor of decay. Some of the flesh was not hers, and beneath her were the bits and pieces of another corpse. An animal, as in the other instances. In the past the killer has used this technique so that a hidden body will be discovered, and has done so this time. I do not believe you have put these details in the press, have you?”
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. 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 deep-seated 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 contempt 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 résumés 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 though. 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 appeared 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.
“I’m not talking to anyone without a lawyer,” Haas said. She had the flat nonaccent most Californians specialized in. She leaned against her chair instead of sitting in it, and she kept gazing at Holmes as if he were familiar.
“I merely wanted to meet you,” Holmes said, and stuck out his hand. “I am Sherlock Holmes. I am sure you read about my involvement in the case.”
She didn’t take the offered hand. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “The world’s greatest detective. I suppose I should be honored. Well, I’m not. People like you, they make their way by focusing on the inadequacies of others.”
Then her gaze met mine. Those intense blue eyes sent a shudder through me that I couldn’t hide.
“You must be Ned Zaleski. The newspapers mentioned you, too. You were the one who led the investigation until Mr. Holmes came and took it all away from you.” Her words had an accuracy that hurt. I had never mentioned my displacement to Holmes as a problem, but I had resented it. More than I ever expressed.
She smiled, slowly, as if we shared a secret, and I remembered that morning, so long ago it seemed, when Holmes took his first action on the case. The last body had been discovered near my home. And until that point, I had been the focus of the investigation, the cop made famous by Lorena’s work.
She knew. She saw. And worse, she understood. Jealousy, Holmes had said, is, perhaps, the most destructive of human emotions.
Lorena Haas had allowed jealousy to destroy her. Who would know what remark one of her famous passengers made that set her violent emotion free. But once freed, it led her back to Santa Lucia, to her home, the place where coming in second had destroyed her life. It didn’t matter that Kimberly Marie Caldicott had not succeeded. What mattered was that in high school, Kimberly Marie had become a symbol of everything Lorena could not have.
A symbol she killed over and over again with the weapon of anger. A knife. Holmes had been right again. Without asking her a single question, he had managed to confirm both her guilt and her motivation.
He was right, and I despised him for it.
Lorena’s smile grew and I had to look away.
Holmes half-bowed to her, ever the English gentleman. “I thank you for your time,” he said, and knocked on the door. A guard let us out of the room.
I said nothing to Holmes as we walked back to the car. My skin was crawling and I was deeply thankful that he was scheduled to leave with the Santa Cruz Time Wizards the following morning.
When he returned to his home, he would not remember me. But, like Lorena with Kimberly, I would always remember him.
FRIDAY, 6:05 P.M.
IT SHOULD HAVE ENDED THERE, but it didn’t. As I dropped him off at the chief’s house for a celebratory dinner that I was not planning to attend, a voice pierced through the static on my police radio, announcing a body had washed ashore from the Santa Lucia River. The body was that of a young girl, missing for two days, and she had obviously been strangled.
As the dispatch fed the information, I imagined the scene: the bloated, black-faced body, tongue protruding, the neck a mass of welts and bruises washed clean of evidence by the river herself. A homicide unrelated to any other that would probably go down in the books as unsolved.
Holmes was watching me. “Loose ends happen,” he said, “only when we permit them to exist.” My mouth worked, but I said nothing. Who had appointed him my teacher, anyway? I was just as good as he was.
He took his pipe out of his pocket and then pulled out a pouch of tobacco. “What Miss Haas failed to realize,” he said, “is that such jealousies prevent us from seeing ourselves clearly. She already had the perfect revenge: a good income, several jobs that put her in touch with something your society values. She had an interesting life, but instead, she constantly compared herself to an imaginary figure from the past.”
My jaw was clenched. After this evening, I would never see the man again. Yelling at him would do me no good.
He filled his pipe, and put it in his mouth, then shoved the tobacco in his pocket. Then he reached out a hand. I shook it, more out of a desire to get rid of him than courtesy.
“I am quite sorry,” he said, “that I will not be able to take my memories of you back to Baker Street. You have one of the keenest minds I have ever encountered.”
Then he let himself out of the car, and walked up the sidewalk to the chief’s house. The face of Lorena Haas rose in my mind. History would never record what the young Kimberly Marie Caldicott had thought of her. Perhaps Kimberly looked at her with respect and admiration, or perhaps she had noted, once too often, a talent that went unused.
I could follow Lorena’s path, and make Holmes a hated icon on which I could blame all my inadequacies. Or I could move forward.
I glanced out the car window. Holmes stood on the steps, his pipe in his mouth, his cap pulled low over his forehead. I nodded once to him. He nodded back.
Then I wheeled the car onto the road, picking up my mike and reciting my badge number. I would go to the river, with no preconceptions, and forget about technology. I would look for details, and I would open myself to nuance.
I never wanted to see Holmes again, and there was only one way I could make sure that happened.
I had to stop relying on suppositions, experts, and computers. I had to sharpen my own mind, and think for myself.
Second Fiddle
Copyright © 2014 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg, DAW, 1995
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Squidmediaro/Dreamstime
Send to Kindle