Page 12 of Holmes Is Missing
Marple slipped out of her apartment with her laptop and tiptoed down the hall to the firm’s private library. She always relished the peace and quiet after everybody else was asleep. She pressed the code on the security pad and heard the subtle click of the lock release. Inside, the surroundings were as warm and comforting as an English parlor. No wonder: Marple had designed the room herself.
She settled into a cozy armchair, surrounded by bookshelves that held the greatest mystery stories of all time—the collected works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, and Agatha Christie—and opened her laptop. The internet connection on the Ithaca trip had been patchy and slow. But concealed in the shelves of the library were modems and signal boosters that rivaled the Pentagon’s. Thanks to tweaks by Holmes, speeds here were absolutely blazing. If Marple was in the mood to download a movie, she could do so in seconds. But she was here for business, not pleasure—in fact, about as far from pleasure as she could imagine.
The first thing she did was cover her laptop camera. Considering where she was headed, she wanted to be sure that her exploration was one-way only. She clicked on the Tor browser and started her descent into the dark web.
In seconds, she was surfing through a morass of sites hosted on private overseas servers—anonymous, untraceable, nearly impossible to shut down. It was like gliding through a bazaar of sleaze and decadence. Marple could practically hear the greedy merchants shouting out their offers of stolen credit cards, elephant ivory, homemade explosives, false identities. It was all there for the taking—for a price, of course, and from some very malevolent purveyors.
Marple’s search was specific and depressing. With a few more clicks, she easily accessed a trove of black-market adoption sites. There was a seller’s market for healthy babies, no questions asked, as long as your money was good and your ethics were flexible. Babies to order. Hair, skin, and eye color of your choice. Vaccinated or not, according to your personal medical convictions.
Marple uploaded photos the parents had given her of the six missing St. Michael’s babies to compare with online images, butshe realized that the infants had been mere minutes old when their proud parents had snapped those pictures. It was the longest of long shots, so remote that she doubted the FBI had even tried it. Even with the latest biometric software, facial recognition was notoriously sketchy for infants.
Marple set her laptop to auto-scan, watching thumbnail images of babies zip by like tiles on a game board, until they melded into a single blur. A distinct tone and a freeze-frame would indicate a match. But after thirty minutes, there was nothing. The search was merely wallpaper. The babies of St. Michael’s had simply disappeared off the face of the earth.
Marple had no clue where they were, but she had a theory about why they’d been taken. And it cut right to her heart.
CHAPTER16
THE NEXT MORNING, Brendan Holmes woke up in his own bed for the first time in months. It felt like waking up in a prison cell. Instead of windows open to the lake breeze and the sound of chirping robins, the sole window over his bed was clamped shut against the honks and hums of Brooklyn traffic.
And the odors! Holmes was a hyperosmiac—a super-smeller. It was a blessing and a curse. A blessing when it helped him quite literally sniff out a buried body or hidden explosives. A curse when he gagged on the stench of uncollected garbage on the street below. This morning, even the aroma of fresh coffee from the first-floor kitchen hit him wrong. There was no other way to put it: his apartment didn’t feel like home anymore. He was miserable. When he’d walked out the day before, he’d seriously considered catching a cab to JFK and just getting on a plane, any plane, to anywhere. Then he’d realized that he didn’t have his wallet. Or his passport. Or his pills. Poor preparation. Not like him.
Holmes stood up, reached for his prescription bottle, andtook his daily dose of withdrawal medicine, sticking the little orange pill under his tongue. He had studied every detail of the chemistry, of course—the sublingual absorption, the low intrinsic activity at the opioid receptor, the reinforcing subjective effect—all properties that were supposed to make him feel something close to normal. Instead, they just made him feel dizzy. As soon as the pill started dissolving, he felt like throwing up. But he didn’t.Stick with the program,he told himself.All twelve steps. One day at a time. One pill at a time.
When he opened the front door of his apartment—still in his pajamas—he could feel the buzz of activity downstairs. He looked over the balcony. Virginia was busy at her desk, her eyes locked on her computer screen, headphones on, fingers flying across her keyboard. Baskerville sat like a sentry by her workstation.
As Holmes walked down the staircase, he picked up a thread of conversation from the kitchen. His partners were talking about the kidnapping case.
Correction. Hisex-partners.
Marple looked over as he walked up to the counter. “Put some clothes on, Brendan. We’ve got a meeting with the task force in an hour.”
Interesting ploy,thought Holmes. Marple had obviously chosen to deal with his resignation by pretending that it simply hadn’t happened. Treating him like he was still part of the team. Appealing to his sense of responsibility.
Nice try.
“Maybeyoudo,” said Holmes. He walked to the far end of the counter and plucked a pumpkin muffin from a plate. He saw Marple glance at Poe, who slid off his stool and picked up the pursuit, with a slightly different tack.
“Brendan. Please. We need you on this. This could be the biggest case the firm ever had. The most important case. They’rebabies,for God’s sake! If you had been in that maternity unit with me and Margaret, you’d have been on board in a heartbeat.”
“Emotion clouds efficiency,” said Holmes. He tore a piece from the muffin and popped it into his mouth.
“That’s exactly why we need you,” said Marple. “Your logic. Your objectivity. Auguste and I stared into those poor parents’ eyes.”
“We promised them help,” said Poe. “We promised themyou!”
“You had no right to speak for me,” said Holmes. “You knew where I was.”
“We did,” said Poe, his tone sharper now. “But we didn’t realize you’d given up.”
That cut a bit. Holmes tossed the rest of the muffin into the trash and headed back toward the staircase. “I need rest,” he said. “My medication makes me drowsy.” His foot was on the first step when Poe called out.
“Do it for Helene!”
Holmes stopped. He turned around.
“That’s right,” said Poe. “You have no idea what she’s going through. Captain Duff, the new head of the Major Case Squad, is a nightmare. He’s trying to cut her off at the knees. She’s operating on zero sleep. Her own maternal hormones are probably not helping…”
Poe was laying it on a bit thick, but Holmes liked Detective Lieutenant Grey. She was a tireless investigator, and she’d brought the firm in on a couple of career-changing cases. Holmes straightened his shoulders and walked back into the kitchen.