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Malefactor as he smoothes out his long black coat.
    “Your world can’t be any safer with a murderer on the loose.”
    “He isn’t on the loose,” says the thief without thinking.
    “Oh?”
    Malefactor looks like he’s let the cat out of the bag.
    “Move along, Sherlock Holmes.” He glances over his shoulder toward his little thugs, nodding at Grimsby and Crew, who step forward. They love to beat on their victims, and both carry iron-hard hickory sticks for the purpose. Dark Grimsby likes to talk, blond Crew says little. They grin maliciously at the slender boy.
    “If he turns and walks now, no hand shall strike him,” says Malefactor. The lieutenants’ shoulders sag.
    Sherlock has noticed that the boss’s slight Irish accent grows stronger when he is irritated. The two eye each other. They are both tall boys: skinny with large heads, though the leader has nearly an inch on the half-breed truant, his forehead bulges where Holmes’ is flat, and his eyes are sunken while Sherlock’s peer out. They both have a way of constantly looking about, suspiciously turning their heads – Malefactor the reptile, Sherlock the hawk. Their hair, an identical coal-black, is combed as perfectly as they can manage.
    Malefactor first saw the boy on the streets many months ago and picked him out as different, drawn to him as if he were something shiny. The thug couldn’t resist harassing him, but has yet to allow his followers to truly do him harm.
    Sherlock turns and walks.
    He is half a block away when a rotten tomato, fired like a bullet, catches him flush and splat on the back of his neck. His head turns like a falcon’s. But they are gone.
    He stands still for a few seconds. “Curse you!” he finally blurts, frantically wiping the red slime from his coat. “I’ll never get this clean!”
    “No
’and
shall strike ’im!” echoes a voice from around a corner, trailing off, laughing maniacally as it fades into the London day.

    He reads the papers again that morning. There is nothing new. The police have made up their minds. It strikes him that they think in straight lines and never have new ideas. He sits in the center of Trafalgar Square, among the tourists and the pigeons, stealing the odd chunk of bun from the fat gray birds. From time to time, he dips his necktie in one of the fountains and scours angrily at the red stain on his collar, until he nearly scrubs through the cloth.
    The Irregulars don’t know who murdered the woman. He can tell. But they know something. At least Malefactor does. There is no one on the streets of London more cunning than that constantly calculating boy. His minions not only fear him, but accept him as their better. Sherlock doesn’t just imagine that Malefactor is of higher stock, he knows it. There’s an indisputable clue: that long black coat with tails. Though it is tattered and frayed, the gang leader wears it every day, as if he prizes it deeply, not as if he’s stolen it. Hischimneypot hat, his walking stick: those he sets down in alleys without thinking twice. But Sherlock has seen him cleaning his coat and tails in a rain barrel when he thinks others aren’t looking, has watched him caress it and smooth it as he talks. Long ago, that coat belonged to someone of some social status. There are secrets within its folds.
    Malefactor indeed has been blessed with more brainpower than the others. Nothing in London escapes his notice. He knows
something
about the Whitechapel murder.
    But what? What else
is
there to know?
    Sherlock casts his mind back to the scene from last night, his vivid imagination reproducing it almost perfectly. And as he does, he realizes something. The crows … they
weren’t
staying on the blood stain! They were moving around, as if they were
looking
for something, as if …
    “Sherlock.”
    Someone has spotted him, even though his head was down. It’s a warm woman’s voice, un recognizable for an instant, as he suddenly awakes from his thoughts and leaps