You Have the Right to Remain Silent (23 page)

It was Page's turn to speak. He signaled for quiet and when he got it, said, “The laser handgun has been no threat until now because no one had ever figured out how to make a power pack small enough to fit into the butt of a hand-held weapon. But Universal Laser has come quite close to solving the problem, and Edgar Quinn fully intended to capitalize on it. Quinn entered into partnership with an arms distributor named Evan Christopher, and the two of them together killed Webb, Bigelow, Vickers, and O'Neill when it looked as if one or more of them was leaking the secret.”

“What's that name again?” one of the reporters yelled.

“Evan Christopher,” Page repeated slowly. “Christopher died last Sunday in a freak accident at his home in Baltimore. We have no evidence that any third party was involved in the East River Park killings.”

The reporters started shouting questions. Marian leaned against the wall behind the file cabinet and tried to think. The scenario had changed. Evan Christopher was no longer the big bad arms dealer who'd bribed Jason O'Neill to spill company secrets. Now he was the big bad arms dealer who'd helped Edgar Quinn kill four men. Page must be running scared to pull so drastic a switch. He had to have seen he wasn't going to be able to keep Quinn out of it; his original plan of putting the blame on Jason O'Neill and the near-anonymous Evan Christopher was scrapped and a new one fingering
Quinn
and Christopher substituted instead. Page couldn't have had much time to make up his mind, but what he'd decided was that Quinn would take the heat for both of them. All this time Page had evidently been cultivating Marian and DiFalco both; and sometime since she'd last seen him, he'd concluded he had a better chance with DiFalco. What if she'd let him stay last night? Would there have been any press announcement this morning?

The shouting had died down but the reporters' questions continued. Marian barely heard them; she had questions of her own. How had Page managed to convince DiFalco that Evan Christopher was Quinn's partner? And how was he going to explain away the money trail he'd left for Holland to find?

Holland
.

If Page somehow knew that Holland had found what he was meant to find … that could become an embarrassment, now that Page was following a new script. Marian had left Holland in her apartment phoning the FBI in Washington. She moved to the nearest telephone and punched out her own number. Busy.

The press conference was over. Captain DiFalco was making his way out the front door, followed by a couple of reporters not quite ready to give up. She ran after them.

“Marian!” she heard Trevor Page call.

She pushed on. She caught up with DiFalco in the parking lot across the street and waited impatiently until he got rid of the reporters. He started to get into his car without acknowledging her.

“Captain!
Captain DiFalco
.” He turned, but before he could speak whatever excuse he had planned, she said, “Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't you put
me
in charge of this investigation?”

“Of course you're in charge. There's no question—”

“Then what the hell are you doing deciding the case is closed without even telling me?”

His face turned dark. “Hold it. Who do you think you're talking to?”

“I think I'm talking to a police captain who knows better than to ride roughshod over his own investigators but who did it anyhow. I want to know
why
.”

“What's your problem, Larch? Did you change your mind about Quinn's being one of the murderers?”

“No, but—”

“Then what are you bitching about? We'll pick him up.”

“I'm
bitching
about the way you've taken it on yourself to decide Evan Christopher was Quinn's partner. What's your evidence?”

He actually moved toward her as if he wanted to hit her. “You'd better get something straight. I don't account for myself to you,
you
account to
me
. You have to be reminded of that?” They stood glaring angrily at each other in the parking lot, the bright midmorning sun making them both squint. Then DiFalco forced himself to relax and went so far as to make a peace offering. “There wasn't time to bring you in on it—this all came up in a hurry. And there
is
evidence. The FBI found a money link between Evan Christopher and Quinn.”

So that's how Page did it, the son of a gun. “It's evidence Trevor Page manufactured,” Marian said. “He also made up a money link connecting Christopher to Jason O'Neill.”

“What?”

“That's what I was trying to tell you when you left for the press conference. Evan Christopher didn't have any illicit connection with Edgar Quinn or Jason O'Neill or anybody else at Universal Laser. He was just a small-time arms dealer who died at the right moment and made a convenient patsy.”

“You're telling me Page fabricated evidence just to close the case? You're wrong, Larch, dead wrong. Better forget it before you make yourself look foolish.”

“But Captain—”

“I said forget it. This case is
closed
.”

Then she understood. “You don't care if you got it right or not. All you want is the arrest. That business in your office before the press conference—what was that all about? Having me go over the murders step by step … to make sure there weren't any gaping holes to embarrass you? You don't give a damn who Quinn's partner really is.”

He'd grown angry all over again. He moved in close, his face only inches from Marian's. “Larch, you're the best detective I got, but you ain't going
nowhere
until you get down off that goddamned high horse of yours. If you ever,
ever
speak to me like that again, I'll see to it you get every dirty, nasty little job that comes along. You'll spend your days in the Records Department, waiting for your pension. You'll work traffic detail. You'll sweep the floors and empty the wastebaskets and kiss Foley's ass before you ever get a decent case again.
Do I make myself clear?
”

Marian's breath was coming in shallow gasps. “Perfectly clear.”

“Good.” He got into his car, slammed the door, and drove away.

Marian lumbered over to her own car, still trying to catch her breath. She got in and rolled down the window; early September heat was no different from late August. She could request a transfer to a different precinct, but DiFalco would block it. Play ball, keep your mouth shut, be a good little detective. She started the car and pulled out of the lot.

As she drove she felt the familiar heavy weight of depression. What had happened to make Page change his mind? Last night he'd seemed so relaxed, as if he didn't have a thing to worry about. But then overnight he'd switched from his plan to incriminate Jason O'Neill and was now throwing Edgar Quinn to the wolves. For Page to pull such an about-face, something had to have happened.

Holland. Holland happened.

If there was a way for Page to know that Holland had found the money trail between Christopher and O'Neill but
had not reported it
… oh Jesus. He'd know that Holland had figured it out. Whatever Page and Quinn had once planned for the laser handgun was lost and all of Page's efforts would now be directed toward saving himself. Quinn was missing, maybe dead. And Holland? Holland's life wasn't worth the proverbial plugged nickel.

Praying that he hadn't left her apartment and gone where Page could find him—home, wherever home was, or the FBI building at Federal Plaza, Marian honked her horn anxiously at the car in front of her. When that didn't help, she reached the police light up to the roof of her car, getting her arm tangled in the connecting wire in her haste, and turned on the siren. The traffic ahead of her grudgingly edged over to the right.

No parking space in her block, of course; she pulled up next to a fire hydrant. The elevator took forever. Just as the doors opened at her floor, Marian looked down the hallway and saw Holland coming out of her apartment. “Stop!” she called. She ran down the hall, pushed Holland back inside, and shot all four bolts on the door.

He raised one eyebrow. “If you really want me to stay that badly—”

“Shut up and listen. When you went hunting for the money connection between Evan Christopher and Jason O'Neill, did you leave any kind of computer trail someone else could follow?”

“I left tracks, yes. It takes a lot of time to cover them up, and there was no need.”

“Does Page know enough about computers to follow those tracks?”

Holland's eyes narrowed. “Yes, he does. It's not too difficult.”

“He knows. He knows you found the trail he left, and you didn't say anything to him about finding it.”

“Then he knows I'm on to him. Damnation! We've lost the advantage of surprise.”

“It gets worse.” She told him about Page and DiFalco's joint press conference, about how Page was sacrificing Quinn to save his own neck, and how the new scenario called for Quinn and Evan Christopher to be partners in whatever scheme Quinn and Page had had going.

Holland listened carefully, absorbing it all quickly. “And DiFalco wouldn't listen when you told him? I'm not surprised. He's cast his lot with Page now—he'd lose face if he backed out. I've got to keep out of sight. It didn't look as if you were coming back so I was going home to get some sleep, but now I don't dare.”

“No, you'll have to stay here. It should be safe—Page wouldn't think of looking for you at my place. There's something else. The hush-hush project that Universal's been working on?”

“The laser handgun, yes.”

Marian clamped her lips together so her mouth wouldn't drop open. “How'd you know?”

“It seems a number of people in Washington know about that. Let me tell you what I found out. Could we sit down? Not the sofa—I'd fall asleep.”

They went back to the kitchen and sat at the table again; Marian tossed her raincoat over the chair back. Holland looked desperately tired, his face gray and bleak. One of the members of Universal Laser's liaison team, he said, had had a conscience. One of them, Webb or O'Neill or Vickers or Bigelow, was disturbed by this new weapon that could kill without leaving any trace except for a hole burned in some hapless victim's body—disturbed to the point where he was trying to do something about it. He'd informed three congressmen and two senators of what Universal Laser was working on and pointed out the need for legislation to suppress the futuristic weapon
before
it was ready for manufacture.

“But he informed them all anonymously,” Holland said, “in statements written out on Universal Laser letterhead stationery. He'd managed to leave the letters where the lawmakers themselves were bound to find them, instead of some member of their staffs. And all five lawmakers were on the liaison team's itinerary during their penultimate trip to Washington. That's how Quinn knew the leak came from one of the four men who made up the liaison group.”

“Uh, how?” Marian asked. “How'd we get from Senator Whosit to Edgar Quinn?”

Holland rubbed his eyes. “Sorry, I'm not thinking in sequence. Senators Wagner and Newbury as well as Congressmen Rock and Kincaid all had their staffs check out the story with Universal Laser. Congressman Torelli called Edgar Quinn direct. Denials all around, of course. But the informant had thoughtfully supplied each of the lawmakers with the names of the other four he'd notified, so the five of them got together and decided they were on to something. They called in the FBI.”

“I was wondering how they got involved,” Marian said. “Page wouldn't have notified them.”

By now too many people knew the secret for it to remain a secret much longer; even the Universal Laser employees who weren't working on the laser handgun had an inkling of what was going on, thus propelling Quinn and Page into a monstrous act in a desperate but doomed attempt to plug up the holes. Holland said he thought Quinn must have called in the four members of the liaison team and accused them as a group. That in turn led to their Saturday afternoon meeting at Jason O'Neill's place.

Holland put his hands on his hips and stretched his back without getting up. “It's entirely possible that they did figure out which of them ‘betrayed' the company. Then the other three would have called Edgar Quinn and arranged a meeting at Universal Laser. Quinn would have put them off for a few hours, until he had time to contact Page and they could decide what they wanted to do. So at six o'clock three of the team forced the informant to accompany them to meet Quinn … and found Trevor Page with him, armed with handcuffs and a thirty-eight.”

“And the other three were shot gratuitously, as an object lesson?” Marian shook her head. “I don't think so. Edgar Quinn was genuinely fond of Conrad Webb. He wouldn't have taken part in Webb's murder unless he was convinced it was essential to his own survival. No, it's more likely the liaison team did
not
discover who'd leaked the secret, and they just wanted to meet again with Quinn in one last attempt to clear themselves. The informant would have no choice but to go along. Then when Page and Quinn couldn't identify him, they killed them all. I wonder …” she trailed off.

“What?”

“When the four men were handcuffed together and the first man had been shot through the eye—I wonder if the informant spoke up then and identified himself. He knew he was going to die, but he wouldn't want the others to die because of him.”

“Unless the informant was the first one shot.”

“Ah.” Marian was silent a moment, feeling dejected. “Which one do you suppose it was?”

“Which one do you think?”

“Well, it wasn't Conrad Webb. Webb would cut out his tongue before he'd do anything to harm Universal Laser. Jason O'Neill was too dedicated to climbing the corporate ladder to knock it out from under himself. And I can't see Herb Vickers getting his act together enough to develop a social conscience overnight. That leaves Sherman Bigelow. He was a pretty stand-up type anyway—just the sort to be bothered by the development of an untraceable weapon.”