Mind Games by Heather W. Petty

Author:Heather W. Petty
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Chapter 15

I’m not sure why I decided to descend into the bowels of the theater instead of going to chemistry. Was it perhaps that going to class seemed a waste of time now that I’d already taken our final exams? Or that, if I had to sit next to that moron Marcus Gregson for even one more hour, I would probably explode with all the insults I’d managed to keep at bay the entire school year?

I was surprised to find Sherlock there, directing his beakers and pipettes as though his mother wasn’t presently dying in a hospital bed.

“What is it?” he asked without looking up. “Busy.”

“Are you?”

He spun in place to find me with eyes as wide as if I’d rattled ghostly chains. But then he smiled and said, “You.”

I’d never seen that side of Sherlock Holmes and found I missed it as soon as he recovered, which was much more quickly than I liked. “Me.”

“How did you know to find me here?”

“I wasn’t looking for you. And what on earth are you doing in this basement that is more important than being with your mother?”

Lock scowled and hunched back over his experiment, which seemed to have something to do with how far different volumes of the same liquid spread across different kinds of flooring. He had various sizes of carpet samples and a table full of pipettes and beakers that were all filled with the same red liquid. “Mycroft kicked me out.”

“For no reason at all, I assume.”

“We might have had words about his habit of saying useless things.”

I frowned in solidarity with Lock. “He’s a bossy thing.”

Sherlock barely responded to that with a grunt. He was already absorbed in his experiment once again. I watched him for a while, but there’re only so many times you can watch pools of liquid expand through cut sections of carpet fiber before you find you would rather carve the periodic table into your skin than continue on. And still I sat and watched. There was something comfortable in this dank basement lab of his.

“This liquid has the same viscosity as blood,” Lock said, as if I had asked him what he was doing. “If we imagine a wound dribbling blood in a steady stream onto a floor—”

“Because who doesn’t?” I interjected.

“—and we know how the blood will react with the surface, we can estimate the victim’s blood loss based on how far the pool of blood has expanded.”

“And the point of knowing that is?”

Lock watched the last of his liquid bleed out onto a tightly woven carpet, like the kind one might find in an office building. “For when a bloodstain is all you have.”

“You mean at a crime scene. If the victim is no longer in the room, you want to know if you’re looking for a corpse or a living victim.”

He shot me an impressed look and then set his beaker aside. “I can tell you that the man who left this stain most likely survived long enough to get to the hospital, but this man .

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