Sheridan Holmes: Home Sweet Holmes PART 2

The next week was no easier. Eli still couldn't find a job, the occurrence of Sheri vacating the halls became daily, and her apartment was still unappealing. The only thing that made the days go faster was the fireplace she lit every night.

It was still a calming presence even after the burns had healed finally. Throughout the day she'd collect scraps of paper and sticks to burn. It was exhilarating to see the pieces of paper crumple in the flames. She even set some marshmallows on fire for smores. She always did prefer black marshmallows.

She did her best to search the internet for any sign of Sheri, to make sure she was really safe in this apartment. Though she wasn't quite as good with a computer as Sheri seemed to be, she did find only one female Sheri with a police record labeled Psychopath. Sheridan L. Holmes. Once she had that she could find her other crimes

Assaulting an officer on twenty four accounts, shoplifting only once, grand theft auto twice, several break-ins. All leading to running over a nun. From there she could find where she was sent to for her anger issues.

From all this information she could assume that Sheri had a pretty avid criminal life and a strong knowledge of self-defense.

It was only the next Monday that broke the usual habit.

She was walking back in the building for an umbrella when she saw some one coming out of 6A that she didn't recognize.

"Oh, hello." Eli said to the woman.

"Hey." the woman muttered quickly. She had straight red hair and a flowery yellow and pink dress. Her face was covered with more make-up than necessary and she had strange pink, finger-less, pleather gloves.

"Who are you?"

"Heather, Heather Falls." she clicked across the hall in her pink heels faster than what's recommended in three inch heels. Before Eli could inquire further Heather was gone.

Later that afternoon Sheri came back sporting a major black-eye. When Eli asked she just countered with questions about the tuft of hair missing from the back of Eli's neck, which quickly shut her up.

But it didn't make her less curious.

She knocked on Sheri's door, demanding to be let in. She didn't even flinch when a knife went through the middle of the door. Instead she turned the knob and walked in. Sheri was sitting on the couch with an ice pack on her face.

"You know you really need to lock your door." Eli said.

"And you need to mind your own business." Sheri rubbed her forehead and stood up.

"Why do you have a black eye?" Sheri looked through a cabinet drawer.

"I got hit."

"With what?" Sheri pulled a large knife out of the drawer, which made Eli step back a little bit.

"Oh relax," Sheri put the knife on the counter and pulled a First aid kit out after it, then went back to the couch. She lifted her right leg onto the table. Her dark jeans was soaked in red sticky blood, she rolled it up her pant leg and went to work on an almost circle shaped wound in her leg. She pulled bits of glass out of the wound with a pair of tweezers, cringing every time she pulled a piece out. Until, finally, Eli couldn't stand to watch anymore.

"Let me." she said, kneeling next to Sheri and grabbing the tweezers. She began to pluck sticky bits of glass out. Sheri, meanwhile, was attending to her eye with a pained look on her face. "How did this happen?" Sheri didn't move a muscle. "Please tell me."

Sheri rolled her eyes, "I'm fine!" Eli pulled a particularly large piece of glass out and Sheri sucked air in through her teeth.

"There's a hole in your leg and you eye is bruised. You are not fine!"

"I've had worse." Eli looked around her leg to see that there were in fact a large array of scars cluttering the pale skin. "Once I fell off a bridge and broke three ribs."

"Why were you on the bridge?" Eli asked curiously.

"I was chasing another Psychopath."

"Why?" It seemed like a pretty dangerous thing to do, knowing now how violent Sheri could be when you upset her.

"Call it a part time job. How long have you been in medical school?" Eli shrugged, "Eight years." she then continued in a hushed tone, "I could have done it in two. What about your obsession?"

"What obsession are you talking about?"

"The fire thing. Twenty-three years?" Sheri looked around the room, as if bored.

"What do you mean 'fire thing'?"

"You know, your Pyromania. You like starting fires." Eli just stared. She never thought of herself as a Pyromaniac, she should have though. She'd been setting fires since she was three, and she loved the adrenalin rush she got from starting them. The burns on her person certainly showed that much.

"How do you know about that?" she went back to tweezering.

"You can smell it. The smoke on your clothes, the burn cream on your neck, the blisters on your fingers. Not mention the scars. I'm kind of surprised they let you live here. 'Course they let me in, so..." Sheri looked lost in thought for a second, her pupils dilated and she sat motionless. Then she was back to talking, "If that wasn't enough information, every night this week, when you come out of your apartment. You know when I have to evacuate the floor, I see a fire in your fireplace-"

"People set fires in fireplaces, it doesn't make them Pyros." She smiled wildly.

"On seventy degree nights, in Buffalo. I find that hard to believe. Besides the heater in your apartment was just replaced by the last tenant, if you were cold you'd just turned the heat up. You wouldn't fill your pit with trash for just a few degrees."

"How do you know I've been burning trash?" Eli looked offended.

"I have twenty one-twenty vision." Sheri announced proudly. Eli scoffed in response. "What's the matter?"

"It's twenty-twenty, not 'twenty one-twenty'."

"No, I meant what I said."

"But that's not possible." Sheri glared, her eyebrow twitching. For a second Eli was nervous that she was going to hurt her, but then she took a deep breath and...

"There are twenty pieces of glass on my coffee table and twenty-three in my leg. Your eyes are hazel with blue streaks around the pupils. On the back of your neck is a burn that is still brick red, it's burned up two inches of your hair. The tag on the back of your shirt says it was made in China and 100% polyester. There are precisely two hundred fifty three beads on the design of it. In the window," she pointed to a window next to the couch, "There is a pigeon holding a piece of hot dog in it's beak. It's sitting on an apple tree with three hundred seventy two buds visible from here. Is this enough proof?"

Eli squinted out the window. The pigeon was a little far, but she could see it was holding something in it's beak. Probably hot dog.

"Yeah, that's good."

"Good. Now back to you." she pursed her lips and looked over Eli. Her eyes twitching back and forth unnaturally fast. "You've been passed down from family member to family member. Three visits to the Hospital for burns? One recently the other two separated by four or five years. The most recent one was probably a house fire and someone died."

"How do you know that?" she winced as another piece was taken out.

"You are in Buffalo without a job or family in town. Your accent says that you've been living out of state for a while, but for some reason you are here in Buffalo where there are no job openings and no family or you'd be with them. Sentimental reasons? You lived here, I'm guessing, when you were much younger and you lost someone. Not recently because you don't seem depressed, like you lost someone important enough to come back. Parents, probably, because you want to come back. I'm guessing you had been playing with fire again. Am I right so far?"

Eli nodded sadly.

"You had been playing with it for a while because even after loosing them you still play with fire. So freak accident with fire, no one pins it on the kid, you are passed to a family member, but after several freak accidents you are passed to a cousins' family, someone you weren't close to. You set a fire and the cousin dies. It's close to your eighteenth birthday so you decide to comeback to Buffalo where your parents lived. Correct?"

She nods again, "How do you know I wasn't sent to an orphanage?"

"You went to medical school, orphans don't tend to have that kind of money."

"You have my biography from just looking at me?" Sheri nods absently. She's lost in thought again.

"Do you know anything about chemistry?" she said snapping out of her minute long gaze at a wall.

"What?" Sheri watched her patiently for a few seconds, "Yes," She sighed, "A little bit." Sheri smiled and jumped off the couch, expertly avoiding Eli's face and the tweezers.

"Wonderful." She walked to the bedroom, blood trickling down her leg as she walked. "Could you grab a towel from the kitchen cabinet?"

Seeing no way out of whatever Sheri was dragging her into, she stood up from the dark brown carpet and searched Sheri's cabinets for a towel. It was harder than it sounded, the cabinets were just as confusing and cluttered as Sheri was. She found loose buttons, spices and multi-cultured foods, paints, a trumpet, and several pickled animals. Even a severed hand was shoved into a cupboard and almost fell out when she opened it. Luckily by that point Eli was already ready to catch falling objects.

It was after she almost dropped it the second time that she found the dark, suspiciously stained towels stuffed behind the jarred hand. Bringing the towel and first aid kit with her, Eli went to Sheri's room, not exactly sure what to expect.

And she was correct to expect that. The Psychopath's room was unlike any other bedroom. For one thing the bed had a thin layer of dust and ash over the houndstooth covers. It hadn't been used in days. The other extraordinary factor was the large chemistry set on the mahogany desk. Test tubes and beakers littered the floor, stains and ash covered the carpet. Sheri was standing with her leg propped up on the seat of her chair, her eyes fixed on a microscope. Her right hand was adjusting the dials on the side and her left was holding a stopwatch that she clicked with her pinky as Eli entered the room.

"9 minutes and 17 seconds." she said, holding the pocket watch out for Eli to check. Eli examined it carefully.

"And point three-"

"Point three five six four two one seven... Shall I continue?"

"I ran out of numbers at six." Sheri smiled vaguely.

"You beat my original guess by sixteen seconds. You aren't as moronic as you let on. Towel." she held her right hand out. Eli gave her the towel angrily and Sheri dabbed it on her wound. Never once lifting an eye from the microscope.

"What are you looking at?"

"Blood." She said calmly. Eli, who nearly lost her lunch as soon as she heard the word, tried very hard to act naturally.

"Who's?"

"Not mine. Any other questions?"

"Yes," Sheri finally looked up. Scribbling a note on a piece of paper next to her, looking straight at Eli. "Who's hand?" Eli pulled the jar out from behind her and placed it on the last spare room on the desk. She smiled.

"A very interesting question. It was the same fellow who donated this blood. Sampson Quincy. He was hit by a truck."

"Ah... And you are looking at it because?"

"Have you heard of donating corpses for scientific research?" She nodded, "Sampson here," She tapped the pickle jar top, "Had sickle cell anemia, a blood disorder common in Africa because it helps with prevent many blood diseases, but it also causes the blood to clot and decreases the life span of the person.

"You mentioned a part-time job?" Sheri nodded, taking another look at the microscope.

"This is part of it."

"So you're a medical person then?"

"Detective." Sheri pointed blindly at a cork board on the wall behind Eli. It was littered with paper clippings, maps, and connecting wires. "Well, consulting detective."

Sheri looked up from the blood sample and watched Eli curiously as she went over the cork board, as if she were waiting for a question.

"Consulting Detective? Is that a thing?" Sheri smiled evilly.

"Yes and no."

"Which is it?"

"No the job didn't exist until I invented it."

"Okay," Eli started, "What is a consulting detective then?"

"When the police need help figuring out a case, they come to me and I tell them what they're missing." Sheri looked elated to be telling someone all this.

"And this has to do with the hand because..." Sheri's smile disappeared, as she rubbed her face.

"Oh forget the hand!"

"I can't! You have a hand in your kitchen cabinets! What kind of person keeps that sort of thing!" Sheri rolled her eyes.

"If you must know, I'm taking the information from this to use when I'm out in the field working on a case."

"I thought they just asked your advice, you go out to the crime scenes?"

"Well, of course, how I am I going to see the evidence if I'm not there?" Sheri glanced down into her microscope and scribbled something on her notes.

"Is that what you were doing when you hurt your leg and face?"

"Uh...No." She dabbed her leg dry again, and Eli realized that she should probably be pulling glass out still. She grabbed the tweezers and went to work again. "No, I'm not even allowed near a crime scene until next week, when I was arrested they shut down my investigations until they thought I was 'rehabilitated'. They even took the keys to my apartment and lab space."

"So that's why your apartment is rented under Linda's name." Sheri shrugged.

"I used to have a penthouse worth $190,000." Eli didn't have to say anything, her eyes said it all when they widened into grapefruits. "I'd like to have that back, and my lab specimens. I had a whole walrus back there in my lab-"

"What does a walrus have to do with the detective business?"she said pulling a piece of glass out.

"That's what the Psychologist said." Sheri sighed, blindly writing notes down one her paper.

"So, if you weren't on a job, how did you get so banged up?"

"So," she said imitating Eli's voice eerily well, "If you are unemployed why do you ask so many questions."

"What does that have to do with me asking questions?"

"There you are asking questions again, and I was going to hire you as my forensics assistant." Eli was shocked, but she hid it as best she could.

"Forensics assistant?" Sheri pulled the slide out and taped it to the jar lid.

"Sure, you've spent more time in a hospital than I have, and you seem to have basic first aid down. I say a few months of study and you'll be solid."

"First aid is one thing, Sheri, cause of death is the complete other side of the world." Sheri heard the clink of another piece of glass on the table. "I don't know the first thing about a crime scene." Sheri grabbed at a violin on a stand that was in the dark space of the desk, and began to play the melody to a new pop song on it. After a minute of playing she suddenly stopped and pointed to a bookshelf across the room and next to the foot of her bed.

"Third shelf Fourth, fifth, and seventh books from the left side." Then Sheri started off from where she left off on the violin. Her eyes were closed. Eli set the tweezers down again and inspected the books. Forensics for Morons, Cause of Death, and Investigating the Crime Scene: What did you Miss?

"If you want the job, I suggest reading those before Next Thursday." Sheri was still playing her song, but it was now one of Beethoven's symphonies.

"How am I going to do that?" she flipped through the pages of one of the larger textbooks. "These are all like five hundred-."

"I'm paying a thousand dollars for each crime scene you look at."

"Then I'd better get started."