Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

  “You’re telling me,” I said. Secretly, I was both enjoying her dilemma and sympathetic about it. I’m a very complex person. Not only was she in trouble trying to create two more ‘glarfs,’ but I’d caught her crocheting on duty. Of course, I didn’t have authority right now. I kept that in mind. On the other hand, with our jobs being sort of 24/7 it was unreasonable to begrudge a short break now and then.

  “Yeah, I’ve got to get the patent paperwork going right now and I don’t have my tablet. It’s back on the darn plane,” she complained.

  “Patent? You’re afraid of someone stealing your idea?” I asked. “Roxy, I think you’re safe,” I told her with a pat to her shoulder.

  She looked at me in shock. “Are you kidding? Do you know how many great inventions happened by accident and don’t get to market because of patent issues? Hundreds of them every year! There was the Bungee Saw, and the Purse Cookie, and the Mattressampoline –“

  “Roxy, I haven’t heard of any of those things,” I interrupted her.

  “You know why? Because the patents were late! All three of those things got patented in Croatia and never got marketed here.” In the middle of her panic, she suddenly noticed Butte standing behind me with a look of utter amusement. “What’s he doing here?” she asked.

  Not far away, I heard a familiar voice say, “No, don’t touch the SQUISH-E.” I saw Nitro battling his curiosity as he was rebuffed once again. Clearly something about the Sub Quantum Injectable Serialized Hemoglobular Electromicroscope was too much of a temptation for him. Must be a scientific thing, the way an extremely old coin might fascinate me because of my background in history or a glimpse of a zombie attack might interest Sir Haughty because of his…well, his morbid proclivities. It looked like the lab tech standing guard on the machine was handling it just fine, however.

  “Can I read the manual?” Nitro asked.

  “No.”

  “Can I take a picture?” Nitro took out his cell phone and tried to frame a shot.

  The tech moved directly in front of the machine. “No, sir. Sorry, sir.”

  “Lab rules,” I told Nitro. “Maybe you can convince Miss Chiff to requisition you one.”

  As he tucked his phone away he muttered, “Yeah, right. I’m sure there’s ten million just laying around in the budget.”

  “Start a savings account,” I suggested.

  Most of the lab personnel and the rest of the CURDS group were still huddled around the computer and Trooper Ferguson. Butte and I approached and listened in. Billings was taking charge quite well and I noticed Miss Chiff nodding as he spoke. “We need to see if there’s any surveillance video from nearby establishments that might include that alley. Oh, hi, Mom. Dad?” Everyone turned to look at Butte, who didn’t even blush. He was looking at the computer screen which was showing a WAV representation of the ransom call. Trooper Ferguson, seeing someone new, pushed the button to pause playback and tilted the screen of his laptop down. “Mom, what is he doing here?” asked Billings.

  “Why do people keep saying that?” asked Butte.

  “Because you weren’t invited and you don’t belong here,” replied Sylvia. “I know when we last saw you there was a lot of cooperation going on, but that was a fluke, an unusual circumstance that will probably never be duplicated and certainly is not duplicated now.”

  “Guys, wait. He knows something,” I said. I nudged Butte to tell them what he’d told me.

  “They asked for a bazillion dollars,” he said.

  Trooper Ferguson and every member of CURDS except for myself and Roxy drew their weapon and aimed it at Butte. There was a stereophonic click as they all cocked their pistols at the same time. The lab personnel in their red scrubs took steps back with startled expressions on their faces. “Holster those things!” I shouted reflexively, unsure if they would listen. Technically, Billings was in charge and I couldn’t issue orders. Old habits die hard, but not all at once, however. The weapons were lowered but not holstered. Butte was rattled from what he might have felt was a near-death experience. “I’m sure he has an explanation, but when he told me that I couldn’t very well leave him outside with the press, now, could I?” I asked. Finally, the weapons disappeared.

  Billings, keeping his eye on Butte as if he was a Nazi sympathizer, said, “Sylvia, fill them in.”

  Sylvia hid her handgun at the small of her back. “In my examination of the terrace, I found deep scratches in the cement railing around the ledge. I believe the thief scaled the wall in the alley below the terrace using a grappling hook. By the depth of the scratches, I’d say he was over two hundred pounds. He then broke a window that accessed a corridor leading to the elevator and stairwell access to the habitat levels. He probably used the stairwell for expediency and lack of a passkey. I examined the stairwell but found no evidence. Trooper Ferguson tells me that his people had already dusted all the areas in question for prints, but as we saw on the video the thief wore gloves. In the habitat itself, there were a few partial footprints in the soil that seem to indicate an approximate shoe size of 11 or 12 with a standard tread used by several shoe manufacturers. He must have had a partner, who waited in a car or other vehicle in the alley, which is not covered by cameras. We saw him take Clara out in a bag, but they couldn’t hold her like that for long. I’m guessing they’ve put her in a small animal carrier by now. There may have been tread marks from the car, but that’s where the dumpster is located and the garbage truck went through there shortly after the thieves left. I think they’ve been studying the building and chose that time deliberately.”

  “Thank you, Sylvia. Okay, Dad, er, Butte. What do you have?” Billings said, like it was a challenge, sounding like he wasn’t expecting much of importance.

  Butte was impressed by Sylvia’s details, but didn’t hesitate in adding his own information. “Names. I think you’re looking for Gary and Ross Nonegan. Brothers. They used to work for WHEY. They’ve protested in Cuba, Switzerland and Slovenia, to name a few. I had to terminate them both in Singapore when they were caught stealing a tapestry from the hotel.”

  “A tapestry?” said Agnes and Avis at once.

  “Yes. As you may have guessed, they are not very bright. They think they are Stephen Freaking Hawking, but appear to have the reasoning skills of Elmo the Muppet.”

  “Is that an insult to Elmo?” asked Agnes.

  “Probably,” Butte admitted. “But just because they aren’t bright doesn’t mean they aren’t dangerous. In fact, it probably makes them even more dangerous.”

  “I agree with that,” Trooper Ferguson concurred. “Couple of years ago, I was involved in a high-speed car chase down the Interstate. Two men, father and son, in the car. Son driving. Going 100 mph north on I-94, weaving in and out of traffic. My partner and I are following, siren going, lights flashing. Suddenly, they slow down, so we get ahead and block them off. They crash into our sedan, causing my airbag and both of theirs to deploy. When I get out of the car, I hear a shot and the driver-side airbag deflates. Father shot the son in the head. ‘Told you to stop looking at the damn odometer,’ he says. I looked at said odometer, which read 99,999.9. He then turned the gun on himself. Want to know what it was all about?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but went right on talking. “You’re probably thinking it was a stolen car, or they robbed a store at gunpoint. Nope. You’d be wrong on that. Father was drunk and the son was driving him home. Son wasn’t drunk, just stupid, and without a license. All he wanted was to see the odometer roll over to 100,000. Like you said, stupid is damn dangerous.”

  It was an astounding story, and I had no doubt it was completely factual. Like Voltaire once said, common sense is not so common.

  “What I still don’t get,” I said to Butte, “is how you can connect this Gary and Ross to Clara. Look, it’s true one of them is apparently named Gary. But there have got to be hundreds of Garys in Southeastern Minnesota.”

  Butte took a breath. It seemed this morning had been a bigger rush for him than it ha
d been for us. He had appeared relatively calm outside, but he must have been chomping at the bit to get to me. “I remember their home town is Dover, Minnesota, just 20 miles from here, for one thing. Back before we got funding from the Krochedy Brothers we did all our protests here in the States. They joined in Dover, Delaware, commenting on how it was the same name as their home town. And, like some people,” he said, catching my eye, “Ross believed that the research at the Mayo Clinic was going to hurt WHEY. He wanted to stop it, but he could never see how. I think Gary figured it out and talked Ross into going along. He dotes on his idiot brother. I don’t know if he agrees with him, but he’ll climb mountains for Ross. I think he feels sorry for him.”

  Billings said, “That’s not what it sounded like on the call. Play it back, Fergie.”

  Fergie?

  Trooper Ferguson restored his laptop to its full and upright position and restarted the ransom call. We watched the vertical bar crawl across the peaks and valleys of the WAV file as Ross stumbled through his oration. When it was finished, Butte said, “God damn it. That’s Ross, all right. I don’t get Gary hitting him, but that’s Ross. I’d know that whine anywhere. I listened to him for eighteen months. And there’s the tapestry thing. When I set them loose in Singapore, Ross insisted they could have gotten a bazillion dollars for the tapestry. Remember in Rain Man, when Dustin Hoffman thought everything was worth a hundred dollars? I think Ross’s a little like that. Everything is a bazillion dollars to him.”

  “So, does Gary talk?” asked Billings.

  “When he’s got something to say. Helena, you would say he’d make Calvin Coolidge seem verbose.” Calvin Coolidge was known as a man of few words. It’s said that at a dinner party a guest told him she had made a bet that she could get him to say three words. He looked at her and responded, “you lose.” I could handle taciturn. Less likely they’ll try to psych you out that way. If it came to a confrontation, an opponent who gave you time to think was much easier to deal with.

  Sylvia edged her way forward, indicating that unlike Gary, she had something to say. “So how do we find these guys? Would they take Clara home with them to Dover?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt it. Gary would assume that would be the first place we’d look.”

  There was silence for a few minutes. After the brief gunplay, the lab techs, rather than moving in again to hear the conversation, had spread out among the work stations, but mostly sat in their wheeled chairs looking stunned. Trooper Ferguson had taken the opportunity to use his laptop to run the names Butte had provided through his databases. “I have two possible getaway vehicles. There’s a maroon PT Cruiser and a yellow Ford pickup both registered to Gary Nonegan. My money’s on the pickup, but I’d like to hunt down off-location surveillance and see if we can get any footage on that alley. If we can identify the car, we can get out an APB. If we’re lucky, maybe we can get some face shots as well.” He ran his hand through his hair and it occurred to me that he’d probably been called to the scene before dawn, and that was likely not the beginning of his day, either. But a lead after hours of nothing but speculation was almost as good as adrenaline. He perked up and looked at Billings.

  “That’s good,” said Billings.

  “They also could have stolen a vehicle,” the Trooper suggested, but he grabbed his flash drive from the laptop, and his coat and hat from the tree and left the room at double speed.

  “What about the ransom instructions?” said Billings. “I think we need to send someone to the airport. It’s probably a wild goose chase. The airport is south. It might mean they are going north, but we can’t just dismiss it.”

  Ban was wringing her hands. “We don’t have a bazillion dollars!” she cried.

  “Do you have a suitcase?” Billings asked gently. “We don’t even need to fill it with anything, really.”

  Darwin nudged Ban. “Don’t you have a suitcase in the bunkroom?”

  “Yes, but it’s full of my clothes.”

  “Go dump it.” It was obvious, but Ban was too upset to think of it. “I’ll help you.” He took her by the arm and they left through the other door we had used to go down to the habitats.

  Billings was moving on with his delegating quite nicely. “I need two or three people to go make the drop and watch to see if anyone comes to pick it up.”

  Everyone raised their hands, but Billings shook his head. “Agnes, Avis, I’m going to need people who can blend in. That lets you out, too, Sylvia. Sorry. It’s a men’s room. Sir Haughty, you look more like a traveler. Take Badger and…and Miss Chiff.”

  What? I thought.

  “What?” asked Miss Chiff.

  “Is that a problem, Miss Chiff?”

  She fumbled with her carpetbag. “Of course not, but I don’t see the reasoning.”

  “You also look like a traveler. Your carpetbag is easily a carry-on. You might have to hang around the airport for quite a while since he gave us until midnight to make the drop, and a group of people with no carry-on would look suspicious.” Billings explained his reasoning quite well, I thought. Miss Chiff still looked a bit put out, but it would have looked unseemly for her to back out. This was simply Billings making the best use of the resources he had, and whether or not Miss Chiff realized it, she was a resource. “Sir Haughty,” he added, “don’t forget to alert airport security so they don’t set off an alarm when you leave a suitcase unattended. And take a taxi. It will add to your authenticity.”

  Badger jumped up. “Authenticity. We can fake that!”

  I smiled, feeling a bit of pride. Billings was thinking of everything.

  “Come along, son,” said Sir Haughty, tagging Badger on the shoulder.

  “Son?” said Badger. “You sure you want to go with that?”

  Sir Haughty thought a moment. “Perhaps not. Younger brother?” They were probably about five years apart in age, so that scenario made a much better fit. At that point, Ban and Darwin returned with the empty suitcase. It was pink with various sized hearts all over it. Ban shrugged an apology.

  Badger took it delicately. “Do we have time to recover this?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” said Billings. “You’ll have to deal with it. Thank you, Ban. If anything happens to it, CURDS will happily replace it.”

  “I’m not worried. Not about the suitcase, anyway.”

  Miss Chiff was already waiting for them, bouncing on her heels at the doorway. “Let’s go, people. We haven’t got all day. I must get to the airport with my gay son and his partner.”

  “Now, just wait a doggone minute,” objected Sir Haughty.

  Badger, who actually is gay, was smiling broadly at Sir Haughty’s dilemma. “I don’t have a problem with that, though I really could do better,” he confided to Miss Chiff, joining her at the door. He slid it open and gallantly waved Miss Chiff through ahead of him. Sir Haughty, still perturbed, followed and slid the door shut behind them.

  “Well done, Billings,” I said. “That was fine delegating.”

  Billings was still watching the door, I guess to make sure no one came back. “Thanks, Mom. Can I talk to you about something?”

  I approached closer, wondering what it could be. “Sure.”

  He leaned in close, directing us away from the lab personnel. In one ear, I could hear Nitro negotiating for the privilege of examining the SQUISH-E microscope again. Some of the other equipment in the lab I even recognized from his own medical lab in the garage back home in D.C. But something new held a lot of appeal for him. Billings and I stepped away casually as the rest of our team and the lab personnel began to mingle.

  “I sent Miss Chiff to the airport for a reason. I wanted to get her out so I could talk to you. About her.”

  Oh dear. He’d seen her, too. But I could be wrong, so I simply said, “what about her?”

  “I think she’s drinking.”

  “You saw the flask?”

  “You, too?”

  I nodded. “And Sylvia. On the plane, and I saw her once on the
bus, too. It was just small sips.”

  He hesitated. “True, it was just a sip, but it was here. While you were in the habitats.”

  Damn. That made at least four sips inside of a couple of hours. On the plane it could have been fear of flying. On the bus it could have been nerves. Either time could have been a tickle in her throat, though the idea of a coming cold was losing credibility. She hadn’t so much as cleared her throat or wiped her nose. But drinking here, on the scene, after the nervous part of meeting Banana Harris and getting the rundown on the crime was over. That was yet another matter. It gave me a bad feeling.

  My eyes were scanning the floor, but I wasn’t seeing it. Besides, what I’d told Sylvia still held. “Noted.” I said, bringing my eyes up deliberately. “We’ll deal with it after we get Clara back.”

  When I turned back, I saw Roxy had resumed crocheting over by the door, her long legs crossed to hold up the glarf which had begun draping down the other side. Nitro had his hand on the microscope with Banana and the tech who’d been guarding it nearby. Apparently, Banana had intervened on Nitro’s behalf, preparing a slide and allowing him to look through the eyepiece. He carefully adjusted the focus. I wondered what he was looking at, but wasn’t curious enough to go find out.

  The door slid open suddenly and we turned to see who was coming. For a split second I was worried that our airport contingent had returned to present another problem, but it was Trooper Ferguson rushing in, waving his flash drive and making a beeline for the laptop. “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” He fumbled plugging in the drive as everyone began to gather to see what he was so excited about. “There’s a traffic cam that spotted what had to be them coming out of the alley.” He was breathing hard, no doubt from running all the way back to the lab. He pushed some buttons and the audio program was replaced by a video, which he quickly moved to full-screen. It showed the alley, which was totally dark, and a small circle of hazy light from a street lamp. It was hard to imagine there would be anything useful. And then we saw it, very briefly. In the flash of a couple of frames a vehicle came bouncing out of the alley and vanished down the dark street.