Missing Parts

880 Studios, Oakland. July 23rd. 10:00am

It had been two days and too long. If Sherlock was any closer to figuring out the whereabouts of their forlorn little punk band’s latest record, he wasn’t giving any clues about it. Instead, he was precisely the way he always was; distant, shrouded in careful, pensive silence and lost inside that brilliant mind of his.

John had spent the previous evening tapping away on his laptop, half-listening to the angry scratch of graphite on a crumpled sheet of scrap paper, accompanied by a distracted muttering that almost formed a guitarist’s name.

He was consumed, just like always – every case was a new obsession, after all – but he was interested too and John might even have believed his friend cared what had happened to the mysterious mastertape, if he hadn’t known him far, far better than that.

John just wanted some clues.

They had scheduled another meeting with the band and their manager that morning, for all the good it would do. Talking to them hadn’t helped a jot so far, at least as far as John could tell. One as intense as a tropical storm cloud, one so laid back he was rarely found to be upright and one that just seemed to want all of this to be over so he could pick up his bass and get back to keeping rhythm and pretending he was fine, even if he quite plainly wasn’t. Either way, it was nothing to do with them. Usually, Sherlock found having a conversation with anybody an unnecessary trial and attempting to stage-manage the detective’s social interactions before he stomped too far over the line and got himself socked in the face was a challenge in itself.

The band were late and Sherlock was waiting for them in Studio Five, crouched low in the middle of the floor, his dark curls falling in his eyes as he trailed the tip of his finger across the carpet then brought it close to his face to inspect it, thoughtfully.

“Alright, I’ve got it…” John announced, confidently. “It was the fire escape… wasn’t it? They didn’t come in through the main entrance, so… they came in via the fire escape… only… they couldn’t have used the fire door because… the doors are alarmed. So… they used the one of the windows? This one?”

Sherlock smiled, getting to his feet and walking, slowly, towards the large window that John stood, triumphantly, at the side of. He leaned on the windowsill and looked out, watching the twinkling cars buzzing along the highway under the hot California sun.

“It’s a good try…” he conceded, “I think you’re getting better. And you’re almost right… it was the fire escape.”

John gave a self-satisfied smile, then leaned on the ledge next to him.

“But you forgot one thing,” Sherlock continued. “… The windows are alarmed too.”

John sighed, placing his hands on his hips and glancing up at the ceiling for a moment. He wracked his brains for a second attempt, then decided he had no option but to give Sherlock the usual satisfaction of being the only one with a cat in hell’s chance of figuring this out.

“Go on then,” he conceded.

A crooked smile touched the detective’s lips. He clicked his fingers and whipped around to push the bar on the fire door. John slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans, as they stepped out into the sunshine.

“What do you notice about this fire escape?”

John looked around for a moment, then turned back.

“It’s... yellow? Who paints a fire escape bright yellow? It looks ridiculous. You wouldn’t get this in London, I mean, people just wouldn’t have it. Apart from that, no idea. I don’t notice a thing.”

“Sometimes the answers are right there in front of us, John. You’re right, the colour is interesting. The windowsills, on the outside, are also yellow… why didn’t you notice them?”

John frowned.

“They’re… less yellow?”

“Precisely. The same colour, but older. The fire escape has been repainted, yet they didn’t paint the windows. Last Tuesday – I checked.”

“What does that mean?”

“The studio manager said the paintwork was getting to look scruffy and, as it’s in view of the car park, he thought it was making the side of the building look run-down. He said there were scuffs in the paint along the rails…. here.”

Sherlock reached up to run his hand along the railing.

“The blokes in the band use it for cigarette breaks,” John told him, “But… how would they scuff it there?”

“Exactly,” Sherlock nodded. “They wouldn’t. Unless they were using it to climb onto the roof.”

John’s eyes widened in understanding.

“I asked Armstrong what the view was like from up there,” Sherlock continued, looking up. “I thought… being that brooding, arty… emotional type, he was the most likely to be the one sitting up on the roof looking out at the city. He said they never went up there.”

“And you believe him?”

“I have no reason not to. I know he didn’t do it.”

“How can you be sure?”

Sherlock smiled.

“I can always be sure, John.”

*

“When you came in the next morning… July the first. If the tapes hadn’t been taken… if you were running to schedule… would you have rearranged the last track?”

“Probably,” Mike replied, at the same moment that Billie Joe said, “Probably not.”

Pat leaned forward in his seat and Tre stopped tapping the side of his head with his drumstick. Billie Joe and Mike turned to look at each other.

“It was your song,” Mike shrugged, “You wanted to rearrange it. With a clear head, the next day… I’d have let you do what you wanted.”

Billie Joe shook his head.

“I was sick of fighting with you, Mike. I’d rather have left the song as it was than get into all that again.”

Pat frowned, from across the room.

“Really, Billie? Because that doesn’t sound like you. You’re a perfectionist. You never let us leave anything if you aren’t happy with it.”

Billie Joe sighed, shifting. It was warm in the room and his tousled dark hair was sticking to his forehead. He ran a hand through it, thinking before he continued.

“I was tired,” he explained, quietly, “Still am. The track sounded fine. Right now… I can’t even remember what I wanted to do to the damn bridge.”

Sherlock watched Billie Joe, carefully, trying to catch the guitarist’s nervous, darting gaze.

“So… that was the last track. You’d have left it, just like that? That would have been the release?”

“Well, we had twenty tracks… we’d have needed to select maybe fifteen of those but… yeah.”

Billie Joe looked Sherlock right in those grey eyes of his, as he delivered this answer and he watched the detective blink. He was looking at him like he didn’t believe him, like he knew making such a rash decision was out of his character. He looked away, wondering if he was going crazy. Sherlock didn’t know him at all.

“I need a smoke,” he announced, standing up.

Sherlock chewed his lip, thoughtfully, as he watched him leave.

*

The weather was turning. Billie Joe lit his cigarette and swore up at the bleak, rolling clouds that had begun to slide in from the West. They brought with it that familiar chill the Bay Area was famous for, and he reached down to yank the zipper on his hooded black sweatshirt right up to his chin.

“Where are the copies?”

He exhaled, strongly, at the sound of Sherlock’s voice, forcing a stream of silver smoke out into the damp air.

“I need a break, Holmes. I feel like I’m in an episode of fuckin’ Columbo. Remember that guy? My mom used to watch that show every day. Just when you think he has nothing left to say, he’s back again, all… ‘Just one more thing’… like it’s nothing, like… the copies… are something he’s only asking about for shits and kicks. Y’know? And that last question, that’s always the clincher.”

Sherlock leaned against the bricked wall of the studio building and looked up at the sky. Billie Joe watched a warm smile touch his lips, just barely, before it disappeared again as though it had never existed.

“Of course I remember. So my question about the copies… do you think that’s the clincher?”

Billie Joe sighed.

“Beats me.” He reached into his pocket and took out his cigarettes, then held them out into the space between them. “Smoke?”

The detective held his offering gaze for a moment, then took one and sat down. Neither said a word, as Billie Joe flicked a lighter and Sherlock leaned into the flame, close enough that he could smell the guitarist’s cologne. He leaned back, reinstating the foot of space between them.

“We have copies on the main computer in the control room,” Billie Joe murmured, after a pause. “But you can’t work from the copies. You need the masters.”

“So the copies are useless.”

“Pretty much,” Billie Joe confirmed, cocking his head to one side, “In that they couldn’t ever be released. We could use them to help us re-record, of course.”

“Except, in the three weeks since the theft… you haven’t.”

“No.”

“Will you?”

Billie Joe stubbed his butt out on the wall, then tangled his fingers into his hair. He could smell the rain, as the first laden drops splashed the concrete.

“I want to know who did this, Holmes… I really do. I’m mad as hell that someone walked in and took what’s mine…”

He let the end of his sentence hang in the air, suspended and perfectly still, while Sherlock stared at him, his cigarette burning out between his fingers.

“And yet…”

Billie Joe turned to look at Sherlock, his green eyes burning with a guilt the detective sensed was painful to bear.

“I don’t care,” he whispered. “I don’t care about the damn record and I don’t fuckin’ care if I never get it back.”

Sherlock looked down at the ground.

“You…” Billie Joe frowned. “Why are you smiling?”

Sherlock sighed, taking another drag and squinting up at the sky.

“Because it’s exactly as I suspected. I heard you were an idealist. A perfectionist. A stickler for the details. I heard you worked through the night, drove people away, insisted on excellence and refused to have your time wasted by anyone that would settle for less. I had thought that you and I weren’t really all that different but… when I looked at you for the first time that morning, I couldn’t see any of that fire in your eyes.”

Billie Joe looked down at his fingernails, feeling his chest begin to fill with a swelling knot of emotion that he had to hold his breath to keep inside. He’d known he was underselling himself right from the start, known the sleepless nights that Adrienne thought he had spent writing had been spent tearing paper and kicking, furiously, at their basement wall. It was gone, whatever talent he had once had, and the part that hurt the most was that Tre and Mike seemed too afraid to do anything but look the other way. He wondered how long they’d stick it out for, if they even knew he was dragging them down into a forgotten underworld of has-beens and wannabes.

“Why did you take this case?” he croaked.

“I like puzzles. This was an interesting one. The theft, though apparently clever, is simple. The questions were who and why. An inside job… possibly. But why would anyone risk a position working side-by-side with famous musicians in a state-of-the-art facility? An over-eager fan… potentially. But to take credit for such a leak would be to not only admit guilt to a crime carrying a prison sentence but to admit guilt to their greatest idols - and who would want that? To leak it anonymously is an option, obviously… but why go to the trouble? In a few months time they could have pirated a finished version off the Internet. Of course, as you say, it was finished… but how was anyone else to know that?”

Billie Joe rubbed his eyes. All these questions were making his brain hurt.

“You want to go get something to eat?”

Sherlock raised his eyebrows, surprised. He flicked his cigarette ash to the ground, then took another drag.

“… I don’t eat on a case. Makes it hard to think.”

“It’s been two whole days,” Billie Joe replied, incredulously. “C’mon, man… I need some time out of this joint. I know a great diner on Seventh.”

He wasn’t sure how inviting Sherlock along would achieve any ‘time out’ at all. But there was something about his strange, quiet company that was calming his bones.

“I suppose I could do with a coffee,” Sherlock conceded.

Billie Joe smiled.

“Let’s go.”