Lock & Mori by Heather W. Petty Read Free Book Online Page A

good, though.Those things are all illegal. How would our killer get his hands on a sword, short or not? There probably isn’t a single one in London that isn’t under lock and key in some museum or historical society.”
    He was right, of course, but wrong at the same time, because I knew of at least one such sword in London. It was up in our attic, without a lock or key to speak of. That is, if Dad hadn’t found it and tossed it by now. I even remembered the day my mother showed me where she kept it, in the shadows of one of the beams, where no one would think to look, she said. My mother had endless secrets. She loved to tell them to me, and still it felt like I’d never come close to knowing anything really important about her. That was what she was like. She made you feel like you knew what no one else did, but really it was something useless, like where the sword was hidden.
    â€œBesides, they’ll never look in a copper’s house for illegal booty,” she had said. She was running her aikido forms, one hand holding the sword over her head, parallel to the roof. She held the position for one perfectly still moment, then sliced the sword through the air, impaling an invisible opponent in the neck behind her, before spinning to stab him again through the heart. For just that next moment, she was ferocious, deadly. I could believe she was a warrior—capable of anything.
    But then she glanced from her ghostly opponent to me and winked. She was my mum again, and when she smiled, every trace of the warrior was gone.
    â€œThere are loads of weapons in the city,” I told Sherlock,deciding he didn’t need to know about Mum’s sword. “You know someone’s got one that was handed down to him from a family member or something.”
    He seemed to consider what I said, then dismissed it with a shake of his head.
    I shrugged. “It could have been any kind of long dagger. But do you think it’s possible to pierce a man through like that?” I followed my mother’s forms in my mind again and superimposed that over the crime scene, until they became one in my mind. Because if the killer had his back to Patel . . . “One to paralyze and one to kill him before he can even lift his hands to defend himself. Could the body have had two wounds?”
    He frowned. “Possible. But why two?”
    â€œOne through the throat, which, if it cut into the spine, would stop movement to the hands.”
    â€œAnd kill him just the same.”
    â€œBut what if it didn’t? What if the first missed the brain stem, the part that would kill a man instantly, but severed the spine in such a way that it created a C4 injury, so that he was left gasping and paralyzed. How high was the gash in the tree?”
    Sherlock nodded. “Yes. It was high up—perhaps too high for a thrust to Patel’s chest. Though I couldn’t see a second gash from where we were. But the blood could have obscured a second wound, yes?”
    â€œWhat if the killer really knew aikido? What if he was following a form he’d learned with a sword in class?” Withoutthinking, I lifted my arm over my head, holding an invisible sword just as my mom had. “Do you think we could have a trained assassin . . . ?”
    I let the ridiculous suggestion hang in the air before scowling at my own words. Sherlock seemed overly pleased by it, however.
    â€œYou tell me,” he said.
    â€œIf I knew, I would not have asked the question.” It would seem that every time I momentarily forgot how infuriating Sherlock was, he found a new way to remind me.
    Sherlock’s lips twitched before he spoke. “You obviously have some kind of martial arts experience.”
    â€œTook aikido classes with my mom when I was a kid, which I’m sure doesn’t count as—”
    â€œI take boxing. And fencing. We’re quite the army, you and I.”
    I started to