Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

  He smoothly stretched his stride to meet me. “It’s a small town. Everything is within walking distance. Where are the rest of us going, if I may ask?”

  “We follow the Uber. Billings!” I called.

  He and the twins stopped walking and turned toward me. “Yes?” he asked. Agnes gave me her attention, but Avis was looking up at Billings, proud of how important her man was. I hoped I hadn’t been that obvious when I dated Butte, but I was probably worse. I remembered some overly dramatic swoons, particularly after one of his serenades. I remembered it fondly, and was devastatingly embarrassed at the same time, even though no one else could possibly know what had just gone through my head. They started walking again after I caught up.

  “What kind of car did Tevaughn get into?”

  “Why?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  “A navy blue Lexus hybrid. A bit muddy, but then everything around here is.” His point was proven when a tan sedan rolled by, dipping a front tire into a muddy pothole. He pushed me back with his free arm in time to avoid my getting splattered with it. He stopped suddenly, as did the twins a step later. The rest of us tumbled together behind him. “Follow the money,” he said.

  “Lightbulb, Billings?”

  “Did you say Lexus?” asked Sir Haughty, his voice muffled by the back of Sylvia’s jacket.

  We formed a semi-circle right there on the sidewalk, half-way back to Banshee’s Breath. “That’s a very expensive car,” said Billings. “And he was willing to lose two horses and a wagon. Where is he getting that kind of money?”

  “And if he has that kind of money,” I added, “then the motive for the fire isn’t jealousy over O’Shea’s commission to make the Big Block of Cheese. In fact, the fire, and possibly the murders, may not be Tevaughn at all.” My shoulders drooped in disappointment. I’d been hoping for all of this to be wrapped up with a neat little bow, but now it seemed likely that the double murders and arson were probably someone else. Maybe another member of this Cheese Club? It bothered me. Had the O’Sheas been involved in the club? Older, childless couple. Didn’t really seem the type to take those kind of risks to me. Our job was to follow the Uber and that looked like it was going to lead handily to Tevaughn. But the Dunleavy farm was not that big. There was no way it was pulling in enough to get him a late model Lexus, let alone a hybrid. Maybe Tevaughn didn’t even live at the farm. Maybe he had his own place. But he had no motive I could see for shooting his neighbor in the head and hiding him in the Big Block of Cheese, and then shooting his wife and burning down the farm. If he had enough to own a Lexus, then he had enough to buy all the animals he wanted, even alpacas. “We’re going back to the Dunleavy farm,” I said. “Even if Tevaughn isn’t there, we have to talk to them. We’re going to need wheels.” I spun my head around, trying to identify a source for transportation.

  That was when I felt something buzz passed my ear, flip some of my hair, and smack into the wall near me, sending out shards of wood. I hadn’t heard the gunshot, but I had time to see the small hole drilled into the side of a shoe store, right next to the display window. “Get cover and open your channel!” I yelled unnecessarily, as I ran for the nearest alleyway, tapping my phone in its holster and opening the team comm channel. Both of those actions were ingrained in us during training, but it was also ingrained in me to yell the order regardless. I grabbed my Glock and pulled the safety, pointing it at the sky as I waited to determine a target. Two more shots were fired as the others ran in different directions, ducking behind dumpsters and sandwich signs, whatever obstacles they could find. I lost sight of all of them, which is exactly what I wanted. If I couldn’t see everyone odds were good the shooter couldn’t see all of us, either. A couple proprietors or customers ducked out of nearby shops to look around and I heard Badger yell something in Irish. They ran back in.

  “Mom, are you all right?” Billings called over my open phone line.

  “Yes, Billings. I’m fine. Anyone else hurt?” As I huddled low behind a stack of wooden crates, I listened to the negatives come through. I heard two more shots, but they weren’t very loud. Either they were long distance or the shooter had an illegal silencer. The shots came out sporadically, nothing rapid fire like a semi-automatic. He probably had a revolver of some kind, maybe more than one, was picking his shots conservatively.

  My heart was pounding. Training or no training, no matter how many firefights you get into, it still makes your heart pound. I looked back along the trajectory of the first bullet as much as I could from this angle. There was a two story dress shop across the street, but beyond that, there were taller buildings, making a clear shot from as much as two blocks away. “Anyone got eyes on him?” Again, a string of negative replies. I thought Sylvia might have spotted something. It was really unusual for her to come up empty.

  There was an eerie silence while we each listened to our own breathing. Then a string of five shots in a row. I watched for where they were hitting. Small puffs of smoke and the appearance of tiny craters told me two of them hit the sidewalk.

  “I think there’s more than one,” said Sylvia, sounding unusually calm. But that’s how Sylvia usually was. I imagined that inside she was at least cringing a little, but I was probably wrong. “Unless he can teleport, there has to be at least two.” None of us were shooting back. We didn’t have a clue where to shoot. Four shots, a brief pause, then three more. They were shooting wild, hitting high and ricocheting off a gutter and simultaneously shattering a window two buildings away. My estimate of a conservative shooter fell away as they continued wasting bullets on no visible target.

  I saw an impact puff hit the wall I was staring at as I huddled in the alley. I looked up in time to see an arm swing out of view on the roof above me. “There’s one above me. Can anyone see him?” I saw no quick way up to the roof from the outside or I might have given chase. If he’d been any kind of marksman at all, he should have been able to hit me from there. They weren’t trying to kill us.

  I pulled back as a string of shots so long I lost count riddled a maroon Dodge Durango parked in front of the dress shop. The car jumped and bounced on its axles as if reacting to the assault like a human body might. It still clearly wasn’t an automated weapon, though. Just a large magazine on a regular handgun. When the strafing run ended, the side of the Durango had more holes than my mother’s colander back home. I wondered if the shooter had been trying to make it explode. Things don’t explode nearly as easily in real life as they do on TV or in movies. But in this case, it worked anyway. Eventually. Just when I thought the car was okay, the fuel tank erupted in flames in a visible stream that ignited the upholstery inside, engulfing the entire vehicle in short order. The flames crackled and I could feel the heat. “Please tell me no one was hiding behind that car!” I shouted over the noise.

  “Nope, we’re good,” Sylvia responded. “I’ve got eyes on everyone but you.”

  “You mean eye, don’t you?” kidded Nitro, probably the only one who could get away with it.

  “How much do you like your spleen?” On second thought, maybe he couldn’t.

  After the car exploded, the shots ended. Sirens could be heard approaching. The shooter and his or her partners disappeared to avoid detection and arrest. A fire truck pulled up, and its five-man crew, dressed in heavy black gear with reflective piping and yellow helmets, went into action, hooking up a hose and squirting the car and the nearby buildings until the flames were gone, leaving a wet, black, smoking ruin. Fellow firefighters came behind them and began shooting chemical foam from extinguishers to make sure that any oils did not reignite. Slowly we came out onto the street as police cars joined the parade.

  Officers of the Garda Síochána emerged from their vehicles and approached us where we stood watching the proceedings on the sidewalk across the way. They wore hip length bright jackets with widely spaced reflective horizontal stripes, and black caps with polished black visors. They recognized our jackets, but we showed our IDs and introduced ou
rselves, explaining that we hadn’t fired. A quick inspection of each of our weapons bore us out. We took turns telling our various viewpoints of the incident and the police, literally Guardians of the Peace, wrote in their notebooks. “Any idea why anyone would want to kill you?” the officer asked me.

  Several, I thought. At least ten people didn’t want me revealing their secret club. Instead of detailing my investigation, I replied, “I don’t think they were trying to kill us. I think they were trying to scare us.” The eight of us had been standing close together in an open street with very little foot traffic and just as sparse street traffic. If the objective had been to kill someone, they could have done it on the first shot. It didn’t take much practice to hit a target as big as eight people even from that distance. As I thought about it, it kind of made sense. We’d been warned away, rather dramatically, but still invited to find the secret lunch. They were protecting themselves, but a bit shy of causing serious harm. There was no guarantee it would stay that way. At least one of them might be having second thoughts about the whole thing. We needed to find that person.

  “I see,” the officer said with no inflection whatsoever.

  In contrast, Tevaughn’s actions had definitely been intended to cause serious harm. He could be an outlier in the group, the one willing to go to extremes, while the others were more cautious. I wanted to get back to that farm. I hadn’t met the family and I wanted to put my people sense to work. As soon as the officers gave us leave to go, we went in search of transportation to the Dunleavy farm. I texted Roxy about our plans and told her to wait for us at the Banshee’s Breath. We walked further into town, past the Smoky Flue until we found a Europcar outlet.

  Billings tried to rent a van for us. He had the highest rating in defensive driving so he was kind of our default guy, just in case something happened when we were out and about. But it turned out that Europcar only allowed drivers over age 28 and Billings is only 21. So Sir Haughty arranged the rental of a mid-size van for an open ended time period. We’d been on our feet quite a bit walking around Ballincollig and it felt good to climb in the van and not worry about runaway horses or someone being pushed off in the middle of the road. Both sides of the van were clearly marked with the rental company’s information and the interior had two bench seats behind the driver. The upholstery was standard black leather. Sir Haughty slid confidently behind the wheel, checking all the controls and making adjustments as the rest of us found spots. Badger sat in the front with Sir Haughty to provide navigation, Billings and the twins took the center seat, and Sylvia, Nitro and I got in the back.

  As we buckled in, Badger had his phone in hand. I’m not sure I’d recognize him without a phone in his hand, actually. In any case, he called back to me, “Helena, do you have a missed call from Roger?”

  I checked. “Yes.”

  “See if you can find out what he wants. I have to retrace the route to the Dunleavy farm from our STD tracking system. It’s too remote for GPS.” Sir Haughty already had the engine going and was just waiting for a direction. After consulting his phone, Badger pointed and Sir Haughty edged the van into traffic.

  I did some quick calculations and determined that it would be early evening back in D.C. He might not be at the lab, but he should be awake. The line rang twice and he picked up. “Ms. Montana, it’s good to hear from you. Is Jerry okay? He’s not answering.”

  “He’s fine. We’ve been . . . busy,” I said finally, not wanting to tell him we were being shot at when he called. “And it’s Helena, please. Do you have information for us?”

  “Yes. The skeletal remains have been examined and they show considerable defensive wounds.”

  “Patrick O’Shea was in a fight?” So, not the straight execution we had speculated about.

  “Correct. A bad one, by the looks of it. There would have been a lot of bruising, which we didn’t recognize when we looked at the soft tissue because decay and chemical reactions from the cheese discolored the skin. We found small fractures in the left scapula, and right femur, micro fractures in the T10 to T12 and L1 to L3 vertebrae, and the T12 was dislocated from the L1.”

  “A broken back? Would he have been paralyzed?”

  “From the waist down. Yes. I would guess he was pushed backwards over an obstacle with a lot of force. None of the fractures showed any remodeling so they had to be perimortem.”

  “He was beaten, paralyzed and THEN shot in the head?” Nitro cringed. If you can make Nitro cringe, that’s bad. I’ve seen him retrieve an arm from a lake while eating a fish sandwich. Might have made a difference that the arm belonged to Oscar “the Mangler” Mangladovich, a Russian Uber kingpin that we took down near the Caspian Sea on Nitro’s second mission with us. Oscar and his arm were separated by an IED left over from the latest war in the Persian Gulf fighting Ima Badassi, also known as Public Enemy Number One, but thanks to Nitro’s quick action he and local surgeons were able to reattach the arm and Oscar was able to use it to eat his last meal several months later.

  “Can you tell anything about his assailant?” I asked. Would they be able to rule out Tevaughn, I wondered.

  Roger’s voice came back, “Our original findings that the attacker was three to four inches taller than Patrick were confirmed. Remember, O’Shea was five feet seven, so you’d be looking for someone five ten or eleven, and pretty muscular to have inflicted this kind of damage. The injuries are consisted with being struck by a large, flat metal object, like the blade of a shovel. And the dislocation was probably caused by pressure against something about thirty inches in height and maybe an inch wide.”

  “Thank you, Roger.” I disconnected. My height estimates were sometimes off by an inch or more, but Tevaughn was too short to have killed Patrick. Muscular enough, yes. If the obstacle that Patrick had been bent backwards over was the edge of the cheese press, which seemed likely, then there was no platform to account for the extra height, either. With the boards broken and burned, it was hard to say how high the edges of the press had been, but it still struck me as the most likely scenario. So Tevaughn was not the killer. He might know who was, though.

  This time we got to the Dunleavy farm around 5 p.m. with daylight only beginning to wane. Yellow lights glowed from the house windows, where white, lacey curtains could be seen. Once again, Orson came out, rifle in hand, to greet us. One of his sisters ran behind him. It looked like she was worried about what he would do and was prepared to try to stop him, but not sure if she could. “Who are you and why are you here?” Orson asked, leveling the rifle at us.

  “Orson!” scolded his sister. “Put that gun down. You know better. Honestly, when did you boys get to be so rude?” She stepped in front of him, wrapped up in a long, brown woolen coat. A large single brass button held it closed over her left shoulder. Thick, long brunette hair hung down her back. “I’m sorry. This isn’t really a good time for us. Can we help you?” All of us emerged from the van. In our CURDS vests and wearing weapons of our own, we must have been quite alarming. She took a step back, probably remembering the raid from this morning. “Oh dear.” Behind her, the curtains moved as small, inquisitive faces peered out at us.

  Coming from the rear of the van, I hurried to the front and stood next to Sir Haughty as car doors clicked shut behind me. “We’re here representing CURDS. We have some questions to ask you. May we come in?”

  “I’m sorry. Our parents aren’t home right now.” She was still backing slowly away and I was afraid she was going to make a run for it. While Orson clearly favored the fight reflex, she seemed to favor flight.

  “I know,” I said, trying to sound comforting. “They’ll be okay. The police just have some questions for them. I’m sure they’ll be back home tomorrow. Can you tell me, is Tevaughn here?”

  Now she started looking to Orson. “Back to the house, Siobhan. I’ll take care of this.” After a moment, he repeated the request, not unkindly. “Go on. This won’t take long.” He turned back to us, not even watching Siobhan retreat into th
e house. At the door, she turned one more time and looked out at us, then disappeared. “You’re keeping me from my dinner.”

  Nitro stepped up next me. “Tevaughn might be in trouble.”

  “Tevaughn is always in trouble.”

  With real concern on his face, Nitro countered, “I don’t mean trouble with the law. He might be seriously ill. I’d very much like to find him and test him for exposure to Uber. If we get him into a hospital soon it could save his life.”

  “That’s his business. He doesn’t live here. I have no idea where he is. You need to get off our property.” He raised the rifle straight up into the air and fired a warning shot, quickly pulling the bolt to expend the shell and pointing it at us again. It wasn’t aimed at any one of us specifically, however, just in our general direction. If he fired, he’d probably hit the van.

  We stood our ground for another few moments. “You care about your brother so little?” Nitro was very persistent when someone’s health was at stake. “Uber was detected in the room where Tevaughn ate lunch today. As many as three of the people there were likely exposed to Uber. Tevaughn may have been one of them. And he could help us find the others, so they can be tested and treated as well. This is a matter of life and death, sir.”

  He couldn’t shoot all of us, and the rest would be eyewitnesses for cold-blooded murder, but rushing him or forcing our hand didn’t seem a wise choice either. I set my jaw. “What about the fire at Begorah Farms? You had their animals. You must have known about it. Did you know Mrs. O’Shea was in the house?”

  His jaw was set as firm as mine. His eyes were cold. “I said, get off our property.”

  I heard my team retreating into the van as I continued to stare him down. My phone vibrated and buzzed, but for the time being, I ignored it. Frustrated, I got into the back where I’d come from and closed the door, checking the phone. It was Roxy, so I returned her call. She told me she was waiting for us at the Bed and Breakfast with the warrant. I told her to wait in the pub and we’d go back to the Smoky Flue tonight to get the name of whoever booked the private room. Someone had invited us. That someone was likely to tell us more if we could find them. “Back to the Banshee’s Breath,” I told Sir Haughty. “Maybe Roxy’s warrant will get us more information.”