Stupid, stupid, stupid.

[Louis de Saint-Just]

Stupid.

That's what it was.

Stupid.

So stupid that Basil didn't even know what to do with it.
What kind of a case was this? There were no clues, no witnesses, no suspects, nothing that connected any of the victims, no ancient meanings to the things knifed into the corpses, no secret societies...
There were no possibilities for math to save the day, and no matter how long Basil looked at this dumb file, he couldn't make heads or tails of it.

He was sitting in the middle of the basement. The exact middle (and he knew this because he had calculated it during what he believed was hour twelve), in fact. He had carefully put every single file into an order that may not have made sense to an untrained eye, but definitely made sense to him.
It looked like, from very high up, a map of Shawl. Basil had plotted out roads with blank paper, and had positioned each of the victims' respective files where they had been found, and the files of the makers of each weapon at their manufacturers, and the information fount at the morgue at the morgue, and some pictures Caden had taken of Shawl at the locations (because he had run out of files)...

And that hadn't made much sense, and it was now hard to walk on the floor of his office. He had even moved his desk off to the side before starting.

Then, the air conditioning had weakened, and Basil had been forced to map out a graveyard in his map of Shawl. Soon it was too warm for a trench coat, and it was almost too warm for a shirt, except this was a place of work, of course, and shirts were required.
So were shoes, unfortunately.
And Basil didn't want to move to get a popsicle, because it would have made him more comfortable, and he was feeling too miserable to change that.

He had decided, after about four hours of mindless sitting, to pull a small table over into the map, right on top of the graveyard. He had then taped the pages of one of the files to the underside, and had positioned himself right underneath it so that he could read the files.

If only Caden had taken more pictures, and Hecate had dissected bodies more carefully, Basil was sure that he would have solved this stupid, stupid case by now. Yes, it was definitely their fault. Their fault that he couldn't find any links between two victims.
None of them had been children so far, which was good since it meant that the list of possible victims was slightly shorter.

"Stupid," Basil muttered, eyebrows knitting together. "And nobody is even helping me solve this stupid case. That insufferable woman detective is distracting me with her dumb vampire case and Caden isn't even here, and Jason and Daphne are probably off doing something horrible together.
Stupid upstairs detectives, being too dumb to help me with this.
Ugh."

It wasn't even like that vampire case was of any significance, either. "Just some stupid random killing," Basil grumbled, hands folded on his chest. "Doesn't relate. No vampire deaths here. But oh no, it is important enough to bother Basil with. Hah. Bet I showed her, sending her away and stuff...
And new mayor...messing with my schedule...lions and books and just stupid, stupid, stupid..."

[Maximilien Robespierre]

The only reason Caden knew he wasn't dead was because being dead couldn't be as painful as the California summer. He peeled himself off the upholstery of his car and dragged himself up the steaming pavement to the front entrance, flashing his ID at the guards before being admitted to the poorly air conditioned interior. It wasn't as though the goddam guards didn't know who he was, the fucking sadists. They did it on purpose, he was certain, just to make him nearly as miserable as they were, standing out there in the summer heat. He waved feebly at a coworker across the lobby and stumbled over to the elevator panel. He pressed the down button and leaned heavily against the wall, praying that the elevator would be quick.

It wasn't.

He lay there in the lobby, watching imagined heat waves rippled across the room. He wondered if he would melt into a puddle. At least he wouldn't have to give Basil the bad news. Well, anyone else would have said it was good news. Basil, however, seemed to think that everyone still being alive and well was an absolute travesty. Caden wasn't going to argue with him that it was dull, thought. Lately, that was all their job had been: fucking dull. It was showing. The elevator binged! its arrival, and he slunk in, finding another vertical surface to collapse again. The box was blissfully empty as he rode toward. After all, they were the only basement, and few dared to venture down to chat with Basil. At the ding! that announced their arrival at the basement, he stepped out of the elevator as the doors slid open. Even they seemed slower than usual in the unseemly heat. In four paces he crossed the linoleum-tiled hallway and he opened the door.

He looked.

He stared.

"Fuck," he said.

"You know I organized that yesterday, right? Those files that you have so charmingly spread across your office floor?" He leaned against the door jamb. What had he expected? Honestly, it was so like Basil to do something like this. Then, it dawned on him. "Oh, for the love of— Is that Shawl?" He looked at his boss, sitting serenely under the table. You sick fuck.

[Louis de Saint-Just]

Basil didn't move, althoug he heard the elevator rising and opening. From his cleverly chosen vantage point (from where he could see the door), he did his best to glare at Caden.

"Hah," Basil said, without any humour, as he looked (glared) back up at the file. "It doesn't matter how well you organized them, since unless we know how they're connected we won't be able to solve it. Unless you organized them in such a fashion that I would be able to solve this case in an instant, which I highly doubt, then you can just stop your bellyaching. It certainly doesn't help in this heat."

Basil didn't dare move a muscle, because he knew that if he did, he would start sweating bullets. And that just wouldn't help this case at all.

"You aren't doing me any good just standing there," Basil said, deciding that he would just move so quickly that he would reach the small refrigerator by the time that the heat struck him. He started walking through the 'streets', trying not to disturb the papers too much.

"What did you find? Anything useful, or just another thing that I'm going to scoff at?" he asked, rather darkly. "Because I'll tell you right now. The heat is not improving my tolerance much."

Neither was the fact that the popsicles were so far away. Maybe he would just have to flip over into the shadow world. There was no heat there...But then again, Caden's shadow was always boring to be around...

[Maximilien Robespierre]

Caden sat down, careful not to sit on Folder Frill Lake. He stared across the office at Basil. "Do you know what I found? After hour after burning hour, I searched around, following your instructions, trying to find anything, anything might even vaguely resemble a clue. I searched and searched and searched. D'you know what I found? Nothing." He slammed his hand down on the nearby photograph forest. He peered at one. It wasn't bad. He'd have to try that trick with the shallow plane of focus again. It was pretty neat looking.

He probably shouldn't have come back to Basil without anything. He did not look best pleased. Then again, it might just have been the heat. The heat got to everyone, especially Basil. It was the shadow thing. Anything warm seemed to make him cranky. Caden flashed back to the house entirely in darkness, not even a lightbulb to heat it if Basil could get around it. He shivered. Where was that damn cat? Knowing Benjamin, he would be preparing to pounce and rub all over Caden, shedding all the while.

"Basil, can I have a popsicle?" he asked, misery seeping into his voice. "I've been out there all morning. It's dreadful. I only came back because it was noon, and I was afraid to be outside in the heat with all that misery."

[Louis de Saint-Just]

The comforting coolness of the freezer lay at the edge of this sweltering wastelnad of an office, and Basil was determined to reach it. He knew that once he did, he would be alright: at an appropriate temperature for his substance-lacking half, and at a comfortabl enough temperature for his human half so that he didn't feel like hurling himself off of a cliff just so that he would get the rush of cool air before crashing into the ground.

Of course, the temperature of the basement (seventy degrees above hot) was almost too much to bear, especially since Basil was having trouble balancing on the paper streets of Mini Shawl. He attributed this both to the fact that he hadn't slept last night, since he had been working hard, hard, hard at this stupid, stupid, stupid case, and also to the fact that he hadn't eaten for at least ten hours, if not more. When one was busy staring morosely at an unsolveable case, there was no time for finding food. None whatsoever.

"You," Basil said, after almost falling over (and narrowly avoiding the Post Office! what a relief), "can most certainly not have a popsicle."

He hopped off of Shawl and onto level ground, where he began to saunter towards the freezer, glad that the streets of Shawl were once again safe. Basil had already let Caden sleep for a full entire night, what more could the man possibly want? And to have the gall to ask for a popsicle after bringing him no help at all?
Surely the insomnia caused by this horrible case was going to give Basil ugly, face-destroying wrinkles, and circles under his eyes that looked like makeup but never came off, and he was going to have those disgusting lack-of-sleep-induced eye veins...

Suddenly, the walk to the freezer seemed too far, and Basil just stopped, and sat down on the ground. It was depressing, how few clues they had, and how the killer seemed to be able to kill whoever he or she wanted to kill, and how all the people of Shawl were going to die and there was nothing Basil could do about it.
He let his face fall into his hands, and he sighed. Why was he wearing black again??

"Only...only if you get me one while you're at it," Basil said, his voice muffled by his hands. He could sleep if not for the awful truth of his impending failure...

[Maximilien Robespierre]

Caden stared. Basil looked, well, beyond dreadful and into the realms of the fucking awful. "Yeah, all right," he said without question, tiptoeing over the miniature streets of Shawl toward the freezer. What had gotten into Basil? He was never so— so passive. Basil usually fought Caden over his eating a popsicle without prior invitation, let alone his going into Basil's private freezer. He bent over, rummaging through the freezer. Popsicles, popsicles, popsicles. No food. Huh. You'd think that he'd keep Hot Pockets or something in here. Anything to warm up on a hot day when he didn't want to go out. He pulled out a box of popsicles, producing cherry-, grape- and lime-flavored popsicles from its sticky contents. "Which flavor d'you want? Am I allowed to choose my own?" he said automatically as though he ought to ask permission first. Basil, needless to say, had them all very well trained.

Unwrapping a lime popsicle without waiting for Basil's express approval, he stuck it in his mouth for a minute, setting the box on top of the freezer. Pulling the popsicle out of his mouth, he said, "So, you get anything out of rearranging all our files into a miniature of Shawl? Is there a scale? Should I go out and buy some tiny dolls that look like Jason, Daphne and me, so you can move them around and keep track of where we are at all times?"

What was up with him? He looked lackluster, even for Basil. Was he sick? Was he hungover? Was he high? Admittedly, that was something that Sherlock Holmes had always done to keep himself amused between interesting cases, but Basil was not one to be under the influence at work. At least, up until then he hadn't. Somehow, Caden didn't have a hard time imagining it. Still, that wasn't it. He wasn't loopy. He was sort of sad, deflated, a tad miserable, and sure, Basil never faired well in the heat but it was hot all year round. After all, they lived in California. Caden had always wondered why Basil didn't move somewhere cooler like Canada, but he put it down to force of habit. Basil was not a man to change his ways. That was what had him worrying.

Sherlock Holmes. Of course. On really interesting cases, the master went for days without eating. (Or sleeping, but Basil never seemed to keep normal hours for that.) "Hey, Basil, did you have lunch?"

[Louis de Saint-Just]

Basil didn't look up. The feeling of his hands pressed against his eyes was oddly soothing, although he could vaguely see images of dancing dead people off in the distance.
He sighed, a long, drawn-out affair of a sigh, before patting the ground beside him in a rather dismal fashion. "Line them up, please."

The thought of needing popsicles momentarily banished from his mind, Basil managed to latch onto whatever Caden had said before it, and he squinted up at his lackey, a grim expression (which, translated from Basilspeak into English was approval of a sort) on his face. "That would be marvelous."

"Actually," he said, leaning back on the ground, "It is a good idea to have someone imprint this onto the floor in a permanent sort of fashion. We could use permanent markers, for example, which will greatly aid us in the pursuit of this killer. He is some sort of ruthless machine, and this may be the only way that we will be able to stop him."

After deciding that Caden was taking far too long, Basil lurched to his feet, and snatched one of the popsicles out of Caden's hand. "I'll have you know," he said, matter-of-factly, as he opened his popsicle, and waved it about a bit, "That I most certainly have not eaten lunch. Does this time look like it is suitable for lounging about and eating? I most certainly hope that it does not!"

Basil breathed in the cold, refreshing aroma of the popsicle, before holding his hand open and motioning for Caden to give him the other popsicle. He wasn't hungry, but he did feel rather faint, and he didn't want to faint, since it might possibly disturb the fragile pages on the floor.

[Maximilien Robespierre]

Following Basil's instructions, Caden removed another popsicle (or two because he was a tad worried about his boss if truth be told) and set the rest down by Basil's side as indicated. He felt vaguely personally responsible for the entire debacle, having managed to not find a single clue. Basil was clearly depressed by the whole affair. It was getting ridiculous, their not being able to find anything.

Caden stared at him. "Yeah, okay, have you got photos of us from three hundred and sixty degrees? Some close ups of our faces? I can probably get a doll-maker to whip up some pretty good—" No, he shouldn't encourage this because it was fucking ridiculous and Basil needed to be restrained. If his penchant for control weren't curbed, they would all have tracker collars within weeks. That would be too much, even for Caden who barely had a will to call his own anymore.

"Somehow, I don't think the management would approve of you drawing on the floor for one particular case. In fact, they might say it was an obsession and tell you to move on. Besides," he said, "this thing is totally useless because you've definitely left out part of downtown. Where's the town square gone? Where's my— our street?" He stood up to survey the entire mess, sprawling across the office. It was really quite detailed. It would certainly be worth documenting by photograph if not permanently preserving in Sharpie.

"All right, Sherlock, grab your coat. You've pulled. I'm taking you on what I'm sure you have not been on in many a year, a lunch date, and you aren't allowed to say no," he said matter of factly, adding, "and don't get your coat, Basil. It's just a line."

"You can bring the popsicles," he conceded. "Come on, I'll drive."

[Louis de Saint-Just]

"But," Basil protested, lips firming into a straight line, "I'm not done."

He couldn't very well leave when he wasn't done, could he? The popsicles were fine for food, Basil thought to himself, before his stomach decided to protest against its emptiness.

This made Basil grimace. "I'm fine. Fine, fine, fine."

His stomach growled again, and he sighed.
"Fine," he snapped, and walked towards the exit. "The death of countless others is on your head, then, if they die while I'm gone, eating lunch."

He had forgotten their street? How the hell had he forgotten their street? It was the one he lived on, and the one he usually started with whenever he made maps. How was he supposed to solve a crime when he couldn't even locate his own house on a map? Or even worse, Caden's house?
Surely he should have put that on there. Maybe he was more hungry than he thought.