Free Endangered Species: PART 1 by John Wayne Falbey

head and smiled at her
brother’s naiveté. “No, Paddy, the theatre schedules those
performances between May and September. From October to April, they
host a wide variety of programs, including touring productions of
musicals and dramas.”
    “ How would Miss Tankersley
travel to Tralee?” Tom said.
    “ By car,” Caitlin said.
“It’s the blue and white Mini Cooper parked out front.
Why?”
    “ An automobile accident.
Perhaps at Connor Hill on R560,” Whelan said.
    “ Exactly,” Tom said.
“That’s a nasty bit o’ road, especially in the dark. Worse yet if
you’re not a local.”
    Padraig said, “A car tumblin’ down that
cliff would surely catch on fire and burn up before anyone could
get to it.”
    “ And burn up whatever was
in it,” Tom said.
    Paddy nodded and said, “Burn it beyond a
coroner’s ability to determine that the cause of death was other
than the plunge down the hillside and the fire that followed.”
    “ Or,” Whelan said, “that
the death may have occurred a few hours earlier than the
fire.”
    Caitlin had been listening to the
conversation. “The poor dear and I once had a conversation over tea
about the afterlife. She was clear that she wanted to be cremated
when she passed.”
    * * *
    By late the next morning, Tom’s brother and
two of his sons, commercial fisherman from Dingle, had disposed of
the remains of the Ukrainian would-be assassins. The fifth man also
had died of his wounds. The fishermen sailed around Slea Head, the
closest point in Europe to America, and through the Blasket Islands
into the North Atlantic. The corpses had stiffened and being buried
under a load of ice hadn’t helped. The fishermen sawed them into
smaller pieces and packed them in thick burlap sacks along with
heavy stones. The grisly parcels plunged swiftly through the icy
waters to the barren mud far below.
    Tom and Paddy personally
handled Miss Tankersley’s final arrangements on Connor Hill, the
highest mountain pass in Ireland. They picked a place where the
R560 made a sharp, blind turn to the left in a series of s-curves
along a steep escarpment. As the Sergeant in Charge of the An Garda Síochána station in Dingle, Paddy had primary
responsibility for the routine investigation of the accident. He
reported in turn to the District Superintendent for County Kerry in
Ardfert, about 9 kilometers west of Tralee. Tom was the District
Superintendent.
    Tom and Paddy hadn’t left
the Fianna House the previous evening until several armed members
of their extended family had been posted as sentries. The Irish are
close. Family ranks as the top priority along with religion. The
residents of the Dingle Peninsula are particularly tightknit and
hardy. During the Dark Ages, when literacy was extinguished in
Europe, Irish monks living in beehive-shaped stone huts
called Clocháns near the tip of the Dingle Peninsula kept it alive. Later,
when the English occupied the Island, they banned the use of Gaeilge , the Irish form
of Gaelic. It survived on the Dingle Peninsula.
    The Whelans spent the remainder of the night
scrubbing away the gruesome evidence of the evening’s activities.
By dawn, the only thing that differed from the night before was a
patch of carpeting at the foot of the stairs where one of the
intruders had bled out. They cleaned it as best they could, but
traces of the bloodstain remained. Caitlin solved the problem. She
poured bleach on the spot. At eight o’clock in the morning, she
called a friend who was in the carpet business and explained that
there had been a cleaning mishap. He promised to send out a crew
that same day to replace the carpeting.
    At mid-morning, Tom and
Paddy returned to the Fianna House, and for the sake of
appearances, delivered the official announcement that it’s sole
current guest, Miss Elenora Tankersley, had
perished the previous evening in an unfortunate one-car accident.
The Whelans confirmed that she had told them she was going to
Tralee to enjoy a touring