The Brooklyn North Murders by Erica Obey

Author:Erica Obey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amphorae Publishing Group, LLC
Published: 2023-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

An Eyewitness Account

I was only halfway back to my office when my phone began to buzz with an alert. “Stop the presses!” my screen blared the same words as those that had interrupted the A/V feed. “Breaking news!”

I swiped the screen closed in horror. “Christ, Doyle! Please don’t tell me they have pictures!”

I tried to calm myself down. Pictures of what? Me wearing a VR headset in the internet café? The camera on the A/V feed couldn’t have been real, no matter how blinding its flash. Beyond that, what happened in cyberspace stayed in cyberspace, right?

Yeah, along with the sex videos of half a dozen starlets and promising politicians.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you whether or not Miss Mountweazel has exercised her well-known gift for photography to accompany her article, given that the upload is still in progress.”

I stopped short. “What do you mean, upload?”

“Just as the message said. It’s breaking news, so it’s still coming in. Hold on. Here’s a headline now.… No, no pictures yet. Just A Combustible Case: Was it Murder? And a byline. Lillian Virginia Mountweazel.”

I shut my eyes. It didn’t help. “Okay, so we’re back to the intrepid Miss Mountweazel?”

I supposed that was a good development—at least in comparison to sex videos. Especially sex videos that might feature me. On the other hand, it did raise another issue. “Miss Mountweazel, who, if I understand your headline correctly, is now writing an exclusive about how she was murdered? How? From beyond the grave?”

“Instead of quibbling about metaphysics, let us simply rehearse the facts of the case as Miss Mountweazel herself has laid them out—beginning with the well-documented fact that Lillian Virginia Mountweazel died in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles Magazine.”

“I think ‘fact’ is stretching a point. But leaving that aside for the moment, how do we get from there to murder?”

“It’s the twenty-first century, my dear Watson. Surely no-one believes in spontaneous combustion any longer.” Not waiting for my spluttered response, Doyle went on, “Surely, you find it more than a little suggestive that Miss Mountweazel was born in the quiet little hamlet of Bangs, Ohio?”

“Is there truly a Bangs, Ohio?”

“Oh, yes. It’s an unincorporated community in Knox County, that began life in 1874 as a post office to serve the Cleveland, Mt. Vernon, and Columbus Railroad, and was named for George H. Bangs, a postal official. It was also once home to what once was the largest building in the state of Ohio: the Knox County Poorhouse.”

A passerby shot me an anxious glance, and I couldn’t blame them. Nothing says crazy cat lady more than arguing out loud with your cell phone about fictitious reporters while walking down Main Street all by yourself. “Enough already! Let’s leave Miss Mountweazel out of it for now. The point remains that I am the only one who can upload files to your databases and I’m not uploading anything right now. Unless…”

“Unless Miss Lillian Virginia Moutweazel is also our mystery hacker,” Doyle completed the thought for me, “who piggybacked on our accounts to find the Dragon’s Den and Devlin.

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