The truth was that this investigation had left Sherlock with a hundred different questions and not a single answer… that he was willing to accept right now. The rule still held true: when you’ve ruled out the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable must be the truth. But letting her know that was letting her get the best of him and no matter what, under no circumstances would he let on that someone was baffling him. That was a quality he was sure he’d carry to his deathbed and yes, he was proud of it. No one was an open book, that’s why he had to pry people open in his line of work, break them down, bring all those dirty little secrets into the light whether they allowed him or not. But this was… uncanny. The first thing he’d run across in years that he couldn’t explain away with some time spent in his mind palace, passing the rows and rows of indexes before he happened across some little note with the detail he needed to put the picture together.
The way her mouth snapped closed afterwards was admittedly a little foreboding, as if she was showing him what she could’ve done to his fingers if she so chose to, but he looked at her, steely, resolute, undaunted. He didn’t step back, he didn’t react as she spoke, he stood his ground and observed her nails on the desk and looked for bloodstains, but it was hard to make them out if they were there on the patterned rug under the mahogany desk and the dark wood of the floor. Perhaps his next line of action should be to comb the floor and carpet. This wasn’t leading him anywhere useful, in fact, she was mocking him. She was aware her skin was cold, that line about ‘eating people’ made him sigh and he fixed his most unimpressed look he could manage before her and said, “Right, yes. So, vampire it is. Guess my work’s done here.” Far bloody from it, actually.
Well, if she was inviting him to check her pulse, he would. He did, in fact, without asking. At first, his two fingers came to rest at her carotid pulse and he waited, frowning slightly as he searched for it. He shifted his weight on his feet, betraying a hint of frustration and checked his own, yes, there it was; and went about finding that exact place on her neck. He stared at his own fingers to avoid her eyes. Nothing yet. God, she was cold. That was probably the eeriest thing about this other than her apparent lack of salivation and any signs of a pulse. Then he went for her radial pulse, nothing. Sherlock was forgetting himself in the heat of the search and went for her brachial pulse next, pressing his fingers with more-than-sufficient force to the skin and… noticing it didn’t yield as easily as it looked. She looked soft to the touch, but she was cold, her skin was almost rigid… one last place. He got down on his knee and slipped her shoe off without a word and felt for the pedal pulse on her foot. Nothing. Silence. Dead silence, no movement, no pumping of the blood. At this point, his face blanched a little if his pale skin could be further void of any color to it.
Sherlock paused, head down, eyes darting around her, then he lowered himself to look under her desk, pulling out his phone with the flashlight on. No syringes. It would’ve been easy to inject something into him when he was examining her, he might not have even felt it and that was his last grasp at an explanation. Inhaling sharply through his nose, a look of wariness on his face, he stood back up. “I seem to have forgotten myself. Excuse me.”
He’d been frantic is what he’d been and he needed time to gather his wits. He should’ve known that she’d worn water-proof, non-smudging lip stick and when the drawer opened on its own, he took a step back but then stopped himself, eyes following the sand, straying to her hand uncovering the color of her nude lips. They weren’t blue. She seemed oxygenated as far as her coloring went but it didn’t match at all with her coldness, rigidity, lack of a pulse or the involuntary intake and exhale of air.
Watching silently as the sand and makeup remover returned to the drawer, he could feel his heart pounding, he swallowed thickly and with a slight tremor in his voice, made his next assessment.