Young Writers Society

Eli couldn't move, not even to check how he landed. She was just stuck in a face of mid-shock/panic. Sheri on the other hand exclaimed a variety of expletives and ran toward the shattered window and propped her head out as far as she could then came back in and shoved the badge in her pocket.

"Well that's a dead end."

"Holy Cheese!" Eli muttered, still standing perfectly still.

"Get it all out." Sheri said blatantly, then shoved her head under the desk.

"Did he just...?"

"Yes..." she said come back out from under the desk and beginning her search of the bookshelf. "Congratulations, Watson, you just witnessed your first suspect suicide. Now could you call the police station and tell them that are murderer is not able to come in for questioning."

"Out the window..." Eli muttered.

"Geez, do you need to get a bag?" Sheri pulled a large red book out, flipped through the pages for a second then muttered "boring" under her breath.

"No, I'm fine..." She said trembling. She pulled her phone out and dialed Lestrade's number.

Meanwhile Sheri did a deep scan of the room, taking information from every object and connecting them together with invisible strings. She could take in three rooms of evidence at a time and comprehend every piece of information, but this room was not about mental capacity. Given that it had very little information etched into its pores, she had to look much deeper into every tiny wear into the room.

She thought of rooms as a two-way door into a persons mind-set. If she had the room, but no person. She could use the information into the data when she was trying catch them. But if she had the person she could use that data to find the hidden information in the room.

There was not much that could escape Sheri's eye and deductive power, and Kemon's office was no exception. Upon inspecting a blue bound textbook, Sheri noticed it was the only one that had been opened.

Not unusual for the over-confident business types to have a wall full of books that they'd never read, but to have only one that they had read over and over again it was a bit suspicious.

Not only was it the only one that had been opened, it wasn't a book at all, but a series of pictures and names stuffed into a hollowed out book. One of them being Dr. Sipps.

"Hello, Lestrade?" Eli said from behind her, "The murderer just jumped out a window."

Sheri lunged from her spot at the bookshelf and grabbed the phone.

"Lestrade!" she commanded, "I need your ten least irritating officers and a warrant to search MoLander's headquarters." and before he could even ask why, Sheri closed the phone and gave it back to Eli.

All in all it was the most boring arrest Eli had seen yet. Mr. MoLander did try to run, but with ten officers on his tail, he barely stood a second before they handcuffed him and stuffed him in the police car. Eli and Sheri stood, propped up by the front wall of the building as the officers finished their investigation of the building.

"I have to say, this was one of the most tedious projects I've ever worked on." Sheri said, "And I finished three-hundred Rubix cubes in a day."

"Are you serious?" Eli asked. Sheri looked at her confused, "I've never been so on edge in my life."

"You care too much for people, Watson." Sheri told her, cleaning her ear with her pinky. "You need a thicker skin for my kind of work."

Sheri turned her head like a cat hearing a noise. Eli followed her gaze to two paramedics holding a stretcher with Harry Kemon's limp body on it. They looked like they were a little overwhelmed by the weight of the enormous man. Still Harry's corpse looked in worse condition.

Sheri watched Harry closely. Her mind turning as she did.

"The only thing I'm still working on," Sheri announced, "Is why he didn't put up a fight. It's not natural for a man that size to just run from two girls. Plus, given his background, he would have been good at keeping secrets from a mere investigator."

"Maybe he knew who you were, I mean, you're all over the internet."

As usual, Sheri had another idea. Sheri ran immediately into the building and up the stairs. Eli watched her leave through the glass windows of the building.

***

Sheri stopped at a white, well lit office on the top floor. Mr. MoLander's office. She understood that it used to be a clean, futuristic white office. With bookshelves surrounding the door and a desk sitting right in front of the windows, but now it was a mess of evidence being carted out. The only thing left on the desk was a computer which was being looked over by an experienced computer nerd who worked for the police department.

She walked up behind the desk and pushed the nerd out of the chair and sat down. He landed with thud on the carpet.

"Sorry Marcus." She said, her voice sounding as if she were in a trance. "Need to borrow this." the gangly man opened his mouth to speak, but closed it as he noticed who had knocked him out of the chair. Instead, he stood up and watched her type on the laptop computer.

"What is that?" he asked watching the computer screen change to a black backdrop with green writing, as she typed.

"Evidence, now shush." She scrolled through the green letters, which seemed to be a conversation between MoLander and a man person referred to as"M"

"How did you get this to-" she didn't have to say "shush" again when the screen reached the final words. At that moment, the elevator "dinged", and Lestrade and Eli walked into the room.

"Sheri, what are you doing?" Lestarde said as he walked in, "You caught-" suddenly he stopped noticing Sheri and Marcus's shocked faces as they read the computer screen. He and Eli walked around and read the words at the bottom.

"M: She's got you. Times up."

Below it was MoLander's futile attempt at trying to convince "M" to save him, but there was no response from M.

Suddenly there was the sound of a gunshot four floors below. Lestrade, Eli, and Marcus all raced to the window just in time to see Mr. MoLander's body being pulled out of the police car they were putting him in just as the bullet hit him. They could already see that it was a fatal blow to the head.

Sheri already knew what was out the window, she was far more interested in the computer as M wrote his response.

"M: Your move, Sheridan Holmes."

"Moriarty." Sheri cursed, and they all turned back to her and read the message.

"So MoLander was working for him?" Lestrade said, repeating what they all knew. Sheri would have insulted him, but she was too busy trying to trace the hidden chat room.

Suddenly after a minute of everyone biting their nails behind her, she stopped. M was writing again.

"M: My turn." was his first response. Then following that, he wrote "M: Check."

Suddenly Sheri got up from her chair and looked at all three of them. "Bomb." she said running as fast as she could out of the room, the others following close behind.

They ran out gasping for air, convinced that the building was going to fall behind them at any second, but after a minute they all turned to Sheri who was scowling at the building confused.

"Then what did he mean by 'check'?" Eli asked, her last words cut off by a bang and the billowing of smoke in the air.

But it was not the building they were all standing in front of.

The smoke showed that it was far from the MoLander building.

"I was right." Sheri muttered.

Then a police radio in the nearest cop car sounded and Lestrade rushed toward it. Eli and Sheri both listened in carefully, but all they could hear was the police cars scrabbling open.

Lestrade popped his head over the car roof. "You two live on Maple street, don't you?" Both of their eyes widened.

***

Miraculously, the building that was destroyed was three blocks down and it was the perfect time of day that only two people were seriously injured. But the building was completely destroyed. Sheri and Eli found themselves standing in front of it along with a few police cars and a crowd of concerned civilians.

"But why not the MoLander building? He could have killed you off then." Eli asked finally. Sheri thought seriously about that.

"I'm not sure right now." She admitted.

"Really?" someone said from behind her, they looked over to see officer Stevens walking toward them, "You usually have an answer for everything."

Sheri's face crinkled in anger as she turned to face him. "It's stupid to come up with a theory before you get proper data, Mark." she almost screamed at him. Then something clicked in Eli's head.

"Mark?" she asked.

"That's my name." he said unsure.

"First name." Eli corrected. Sheri turned back to Eli, curious as to where she was going with this. "Harry, Linda, Susie, Ted, Mark. You call everybody by their first names-"

"And?" Sheri asked.

"Except for me and Lestrade." Sheri suddenly smiled, realizing that for once Eli had made a deduction. "You've been pretending to think I'm stupid all along, haven't you." Sheri pretended to mull it over for a second.

"Not the stupid part." She said only partially joking.

"Oh goodie." Mark said in his highest pitched voice, "We're all friends again. Now we can go shopping and braid each other's hair." Mark chuckled as Sheri's face darkened and her fists clenched. Then he decided to walk away as fast as possible, still laughing.

Sheri yelled her usual arrangement of expletives over to him well after he couldn't hear her anymore.

Eli finally did get her to calm down though, it only took two minutes and a painful blow to Eli's stomach that Sheri didn't even notice when her hands were flailing around in anger.

Also Lestrade helped. Or perhaps did all the work in calming her down when Eli was crouched on the ground in agony.

"We're trying are hardest, but most of the information exploded." Lestrade told her when Eli could finally hear again through the pain. She stood up slowly, still clutching her abdomen.

"That's fine, given this Moriarty character, I'm not so sure there'd be much evidence to find." Sheri pursed her lips, looking genuinely upset about not being able to do something about it.

"You mean were just going to give up and go home?" Eli groaned. Sheri turned to her friend and frowned.

"It's an unusual situation, yes, but I don't really know what else to do about it." Eli sighed, the idea of giving up while this lunatic was still out there made her uncomfortable, but if Sheri didn't think she could do anything, then there wasn't a thing they could do.

"Just one more thing." Lestrade said, and Sheri looked back up to him. He was motioning behind him to a female officer who was walking over with a large black box. "We found this in the rubble..." he rubbed some ash off the front of the safe box.

The words "Sheridan Holmes" were written in gold on the front of the box.