A Study in Charlotte

But I kept thinking how the Sherringford killer was insistently re-creating the Sherlock Holmes stories. Those past wrongs that Sherlock and Dr. Watson had made right were being pushed into our present, and the details of the good deeds they’d done were being used to hurt us and the people we knew. Sure, maybe the killer had a personal vendetta against Holmes, but it felt to me like it was something bigger than that, something older, something reaching back more than a century.

Anyway, I couldn’t ignore the way the word Moriarty made my skin crawl.

I focused on four of them. The four Moriartys whose whereabouts weren’t dictated by respectable jobs, who’d been sloppy enough to have their shadier dealings dragged into the public eye. Whoever was doing this to us was sloppy, there wasn’t any doubt of that, and I meant to use it to my advantage.

Hadrian and Phillipa were a brother-and-sister pair of art collectors whose fortune, rumor had it, was used to buy favors from dictators in countries they wanted to plunder. Lucien was August’s older brother, an adviser for some of the more scandal-ridden members of the British Parliament. I read a profile of him in the Guardian that had hinted strongly that Lucien Moriarty knew how to throw his money around to clear just about anyone’s name.

And then there was Lucien’s younger brother: August.

For this, I didn’t have to look through Shepard’s records. It was as easy as plugging August’s name into Google and clicking a button.

The first article that came up was from his college at Oxford. August had presented some complicated theorem at an academic conference in Dusseldorf. The reporter took special care to mention his age: he’d been doing his doctorate in pure math at twenty. He must’ve been a genius to be doing that work so young. The article described his dissertation (fractals, imaginary numbers) in layman’s terms, and I still couldn’t begin to understand it.

But it was dated two years back. I needed newer information, to know if he was still at Oxford, if he’d graduated or been hit by a car or moved to, I don’t know . . . Connecticut.

The rest of the search results linked to academic journals and fellowship competitions, all dated that same year. Not a word about his personal life or about him dating Charlotte Holmes. Just a list of his achievements: August, recipient of a prestigious Institut Zalen grant. August, publishing on vector spaces and the cosmos in Mathematics Today. August, flown to the Arctic Circle to collaborate with scientists studying something called “ice fractals.”

After that, there was nothing. Not a word had been written about August Moriarty in the last two years.

I put it all up on the wall anyway.

At three o’clock precisely, Holmes swung open the door to 442, humming something under her breath. “Hello, Watson,” she said before she’d even seen me, “you’re here early,” and then she stopped in her tracks, staring at the wall.

I realized, too late, that I’d pretty much re-created the murder den we’d found in the access tunnels.

“Oh,” she said.

I waited for the explosion.

She sighed, dropping her backpack on the floor. “It’s a place to start. I came to tell you that Milo ran down John Smith’s prints in some of the more . . . unusual databases. He’s worked as a domestic for the last five years.”

“A domestic?”

“A servant, Watson. He was Phillipa Moriarty’s driver until his disappearance four months ago. There’s our link to the family, sorted. The question is if he was doing all this alone, or . . .”

“You don’t think he was. So, Phillipa then?”

We looked at the wall, side by side.

“Have you ever heard of a rat-king?” She reached out and touched the corner of Hadrian’s photo. “The Moriartys—their disgusting tails are all tied together. Let’s not try to separate them just yet. We’ll start by finding out which of them came into this country, and when.”

On her direction, ship manifests went up onto the wall, freighters that had traveled from England to Boston and the names of the sailors who manned them. (“Seaworthy,” she muttered, taping them up.) We went through lists of private airstrips and private jets. Helicopters. Rowboats. We scrolled through records in New England and in England both. Moriarty was a horrifyingly common last name, but things became even worse when we began running known aliases. Our series of papers grew, day by day, until they engulfed the wall.

Phillipa spoke at a gallery opening in Glasgow. Lucien was photographed with the British prime minister. Hadrian showed up on some German talk show to chat about the Sphinx. How could it be any of them? Were they taking care of business in Europe, flying by night to Connecticut to ruin our lives? It seemed absurd, even by our standards. I spent every moment in 442, working like a madman. (I was even growing the beginnings of a madman’s scratchy beard, which I secretly thought was kind of awesome.) And she worked right beside me with a fury I hadn’t yet seen. Almost everything else went out the window.

Especially for Holmes.

She’d stopped battling me on August Moriarty. Every time I tried to learn something, anything, about what happened between them, she regarded me with a weary tilt of her head, like I was a fly she couldn’t quite get rid of. I was relatively sure she wasn’t eating or sleeping. But it wasn’t just her attitude. Her eyes were somehow both glassy and dry, and as she scratched absently at her scalp, going over her millionth passenger manifest, her hair made a crackling sound that hair really shouldn’t make. I kept stifling the urge to ask her if she was okay, to touch her forehead to see if she had a fever. To take care of her.