Elementary - scribbles and lies

12:07 am - Elementary

"How could someone have stolen the painting when all the doors remained locked?" the flummoxed police inspector blustered.

The famous detective could not resist a little smile. Truth be told, he let himself revel in it a tiny bit. "It's true the doors were locked when the family went to bed last night, and it's true the doors were locked this morning when the theft was discovered, but that…" (he strode to the back door) "…is not the same thing as 'remaining' anything at all."

He looked over the small latch with his magnifying glass. "Ah, yes. You see this slight tackiness? The unmistakable residue of a small ball of sap." He sniffed at it. "Maple, to be precise." He glanced up at the little ventilation window above the doorway. "No doubt lowered from above on a string to lift the latch… and then, on the way out, to put it gently back in place."

"But the window is eight feet off the ground. The thief would have had to…"

"Stand on something, yes," the detective agreed. Pushing out onto the porch, his eyes cast about. "Ah," he pointed to a massive bench sitting down by the carriage house.

The inspector scowled. "I can't imagine one man could have carried that hulking mass all the way up here silently, then all the way back down there."

"I'm not asking you to imagine any such thing," the detective waved him away. "Though these cobblestones largely mask the evidence of their passing, in the muddy cracks between I clearly see two different types of shoe. Two men carried the bench." He picked something off its surface, felt it between his fingers. "One of them stood on it and his boot scraped off a bit of mud and splintered wood that clearly originated at the southern docks. Where, if I'm not mistaken, a ship recently arrived bearing a load of Canadian maple lumber. Your thieves, I expect, are among her crew."

"That's amazing," the inspector breathed.

"Not a bit of it," the detective shrugged.

-

"I don't understand," the constable scratched his head. "If all the clocks in the house had been set back an hour and it was actually seven o'clock instead of six o'clock, then how did the thief have enough time to get all the way back from the well to the garage, where he ran Mr. Chase down in the process of stealing his automobile?"

Sister Maggie smiled beatifically. "Oh, there's no way any thief could have managed that." She glanced to Edwin Chase, who suddenly looked substantially less smug than usual. "Nobody ran back across the estate to assault Mr. Chase in his own driveway. There was no assault, no car theft, no thief. Was there, Mister Chase?"

The man leapt up from his seat angrily. "That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard!"

The constable waved reassuringly. "I'm not sure I buy it either, sister, and this is quite an accusation it sounds like you're leveling. So tell me this: if the diamond wasn't thrown down the well for safe-keeping, where *is* it?"

The amateur sleuth reached out and grabbed Edwin Chase's cast-laden left arm, the arm that had supposedly broken when he was hit, and with a quick flip of her hands she flung it back against the stone wall right behind him before he could stop it. SMASH! The plaster of the cast burst in a cloud of dust and fragments… and one bright, sparkling shard that fell to the stone floor with a clink. Edwin Chase turned to flee the room, but police hands were on each shoulder in an instance.

"I'll be damned," the constable said, bending down to pick up the diamond from among all the other debris.

"Oh, I like to think the Good Lord is more forgiving than that," Sister Maggie beamed.

-

"Why go through all of that for heroin, and then not bother to set up distribution to the local junkies?" Turnbull asked, still confused.

"Not heroin, Chief," detective Marks grinned, self-assuredly adjusting his sleek linen suit for maximally tousled effect. "Something way more valuable than that, these days." He lifted his foot, planting one tailored Italian shoe against the nearest stack of boxes to push them over. They smashed on the concrete, spilling their contents onto the warehouse floor.

The chief peered at it. "Looks like… sand!"

"Not just any sand," said detective Jackson, loosening his silk tie now that they were wrapping up the case. "Filtered silicon dioxide, perfect for semiconductor doping… Computer chips, Chief. Knock-off computer chips."

"Well that's the craziest thing I've ever seen," the chief said, rubbing his receding hairline.

"Wait until you get our expense report," Marks laughed as the two detectives headed back out to their waiting Ferrari.

-

"I don't get it," Supervisor Lassiter growled. "And when I don't 'get' things, you're looking at the end of your case, ready or not."

"There's nothing to get, boss," agent Coltrane reassured him. "The reason we couldn't come up with anything even close to a ballistics footprint for the round that killed Hansen is… it wasn't any known round."

"Hansen was shot with a sniper rifle that doesn't exist?"

"Oh, the gun exists, alright. Homemade. Burst battery on a superconductive frame. Ferromagnetic water. A railgun, boss. A railgun that shoots ice."

"Preposterous."

"At that velocity, anything's possible. Go right through you like a laser, explosively turn to steam as soon as your body forces it to decelerate."

"But who could build such a thing?"

Coltrane didn't often lower his sunglasses to make direct eye contact, but this time he did. Long seconds passed between them until suddenly Lassiter realized what was being silently conveyed. Then he grabbed up his desk phone.

"Security," he quickly said, "suspend Professor Likanov's lab access and detain him there or at his home immediately. He should be considered armed and dangerous."

Putting down the phone, he looked up at Coltrane, whose expression was already back to its unreadable, cryptic, usual self behind those shades. "Unbelievable," he said. "I would never have guessed."

"I'm sure you would have gotten around to it someday," Coltrane deadpanned.

-

"But the city covers dozens of square miles… millions of people!" the senior inquisitor lamented.

"We know that the perpetrator is female and was wounded in the leg during her escape," the analyzer reminded him. "I have collected, with the Veil's permission, one hundred thirty-five instances of ambient surveillance footage from the greater metropolitan area showing females with demonstrable limp that are a feasible time-and-distance radius from the robbery event."

"That's ambient footage, though. Most of those women could be anywhere by now."

"Only one of those women ultimately matters," the computer expressed through its holographic interface. "Though she disabled the cameras to mask her escape, the mic on the lobby desk phone picked up the sound of her getaway vehicle as it left the premises. Fast-fourier transform analysis is ninety-seven point two percent confident that she fled in an Audi R12."

"Nice car," the inquisitor raised an eyebrow.

"Though she does not enter or exit the vehicle in our sampled footage, one of our limping females-of-interest crosses a street on which an R12 is clearly parked, and where - I am assured by the Veil - it remains even now."

"When you say 'a' street…"

The hologram evoked a surprisingly humble expression. "The ambient footage is permitted to us only in an anonymized form, of course, but there is a quite distinct manhole cover on the street. Our lady of interest is on Avenue B."

"You're the best," the inquisitor had to admit.

"I'm not permitted to genuinely assess that probability," the mainframe sighed.

-

"The suspect disintegrated himself," wept the overseer. "Complete nanodissolution. Now we'll never know who he was. Could have a backup anywhere."

Collapsa-T clucked. "He wept a single tear while climbing the ladder. I have retrieved sufficient DNA to extend a partial quantum snowflake." The device retrograded briefly, folding all eleven dimensions like protein. "Success!" it finally decided. "In the 312th tier of the 99th fold of a relatively low-probability third-order curve, I have found a faint residual memory that yielded to electrical torture." A few calculations later, it had a sufficiently distributed bell curve: "The suspect is Hamma bin Tio. He is a combat algaeist, which explains the theft at the fungal refectory. His preferred backup venue is the Starbucks in Cairo."

The overseer signaled for a ramcopter. "Good job, hole."

The singularity's only acknowledgement was to fold up in itself and vanish in a blue-purple spark of Hawking radiation.

-

"Why does evil spirit take best idol?" Bumg wailed.

Zhogg slapped his buddy across the head. "No am spirit!" He pointed at the ground. "Look mud! Foot make hole! Man-foot! Man come and take your idol."

Bumg scratched his head. "But which man's foot?"

Zhogg traced the shape of the depression in the soft ground. "Tiny foot. Like girl. But big toes like boy." He stood up straight suddenly. "Morg have little boy feet on tall heavy body!"

A big, mean grin spread over Bumg's face and he picked up his heaviest club. "You best smart man ever. We go bash Morg now."

Zhogg laughed. "Yes! Easy!"

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For consideration: my dear Watson