You Have the Right to Remain Silent (6 page)

She told Dr. Whittaker he could take the bodies and went looking for Foley. Her partner had corralled a couple of the uniformed cops into helping him interview witnesses, some of whom had slipped away, he said. “But we got a partial license number on the van—which is either a Dodge Caravan, a Plymouth Voyager, or a Ford Aerostar, depending on which witness you talk to. The only thing they agree on is that it was black.”

“How many in the van?”

“They saw only one guy pushing the bodies out the back, but there had to be a driver, right? Two men at least.”

“How much time between the dumping of the bodies and the van's starting to move? Did it take off while the guy in back was still visible or was there time for him to move up to the driver's seat?”

He stared at her. “I don't know.”

“You didn't ask,” Marian said tiredly.

“Christ, you don't think one guy did all this by himself? That's stupid.”

“No, I don't think one guy did all this by himself, but I don't like guessing. Ask them. Did you get a description of the one they did see?”

“Tall and short, bald and curly-haired, clean-shaven and bearded. Dressed in jeans and a business suit, bareheaded and wearing a ski mask.” Marian swore. “What did you expect?” Foley asked. “Real help? Look, you feel like giving me a hand here? I got a lotta people still to talk to.”

She told him one of them had to go to the morgue for the fingerprints and did he want to swap jobs? Foley walked away without answering.

So she'd be the one going to those cold-storage lockers on Thirtieth and First, just as she thought.
Down among the dead men
. Marian checked her watch, thinking of the 24/24 rule: it was getting on toward one o'clock. Twenty-two hours and counting.

5

Miracles still happened, even in the limping last decade of the twentieth century; but lately they tended to be of the technological sort. Marian Larch rarely had occasion to bless the FBI; but by four
A.M.
that meddlesome organization's Automated Fingerprint Identification System had searched through its digitized images of millions of prints and had come up with identifications for all four of the dead men found in East River Park.

“At least we don't have to bust our butts finding a connection,” Foley said, slurping coffee. “Universal Laser Technologies.” All four men had worked there, at one of the country's leading designers and manufacturers of laser equipment, heavy into government contract work. And all four men had had some level of government security clearance, automatically placing their prints on file with the FBI. “Universal Laser,” Foley repeated, “that's where the answer is.”

“Or that's what we're supposed to think,” Marian pointed out. DiFalco had put her in charge of the investigation, a job that would normally have gone to the vacationing lieutenant heading up the detective unit; multiple murders usually merited the attention of the higher ranks. “It could be four murders to hide just one,” she said. “The other three could be window dressing.”

“Yah,” Captain DiFalco said glumly, “I was thinking along those lines myself.” They were in the captain's office, getting themselves organized. Not one of them questioned the callousness behind the killing of innocents solely to throw a monkey wrench into the police investigation; they all knew the extent human indifference could reach. “Hell, that'll just make everything harder.”

Marian didn't answer right away. Then she said, “We've got to consider the possibility of three of them being cover-up killings, but I don't buy it myself. It
had
to be meant as a warning, dumping them like that. The man in the van—”

“Men,” Foley corrected testily. His eyewitnesses hadn't been able to clear up that point.

“Whichever,” Marian said. “The
men
in the van were running a terrible risk, bringing the bodies to such a public place. It would have been easier and safer to dump them in the river. No, they wanted those bodies found as quickly and as sensationally as possible.”

“Well, they got that,” DiFalco remarked dryly. He'd had to face the TV camera crews that managed to get to the crime scene before he did. “Needlessly conspicuous way of disposing of the bodies, all right. Show-offy.”

“The whole schmear of handcuffing them together and shooting them through the eye,” Marian went on, “all that had to be aimed at getting coverage on the news. There's no other reason for it. It was meant as a warning.”

“Unless that's what we're supposed to think,” Foley said with a smirk.

“But a warning to whom?” Marian asked, ignoring him.

“Yah,” the captain said, “and a warning to do what? Pay up? Keep their mouths shut? Toe the line? We've got to find out what our four dead men were up to lately.”

The families of the murder victims had been notified. They'd all been awakened in the middle of the night to find a uniformed police officer and a plainclothesman waiting at the door, their terrible news clear on their faces. All but one: the youngest victim had had no family in New York. It had been Captain DiFalco's job to call the young man's mother in Idaho and break the news.

The youngest victim's name was Jason O'Neill. He was twenty-nine years old and had been with Universal Laser Technologies for two years. Prior to that he'd been employed by a PR firm until Universal lured him away to do the same sort of work for them.

“I asked his mother if she still had Jason's last letter,” Captain DiFalco said. “Evidently he didn't write much, but he called every week. Mrs. O'Neill said he hadn't sounded worried about anything the last time she talked to him, which was Thursday. He said he'd just got back from Washington, where he'd met with a congressman from Maine, and he was going back next week for an appointment with Senator Wagner of Wisconsin. The whole conversation sounded to me like a little bragging, a little name-dropping—just the sort of thing to make a proud momma even prouder. She had no idea what he was working on.”

“Maybe the answer's in Washington,” Foley said hopefully.

So Jason O'Neill was a small-town boy making good in corporate America, meeting with the nation's lawmakers and doing Important Things. “He must have been a real hotshot,” Marian said, “if a firm like Universal Laser would send a twenty-nine-year-old to represent them in Washington all by himself. Or did they? What about the others? Were they in Washington too?”

DiFalco didn't know. “That's something we'll have to find out. I want you to contact Universal Laser as soon as you get your team organized, never mind what time it is. Do you want to split this list, or what?”

“Let's see what Universal has to say first,” Marian suggested. “What does the FBI have on the others?”

The elder statesman of the four victims had been named Conrad Webb. In sound health at sixty-seven, he'd been with the firm since its founding, always on the business end, and was in fact a principal shareholder. The FBI's list of Webb's industrial and governmental contacts read like a
Who's Who
of shapers and movers.

“
Government
contacts,” Foley stressed. “The answer's in Washington, I tell you.”

Webb's children were grown and scattered about the country; his sixtyish wife had collapsed when the officers brought her the news, Captain DiFalco said. Mrs. Webb's housekeeper had chased the police away, telling them to come back later. “Send somebody, or go yourself,” the captain told Marian.

The wife of the bald murder victim had been more stalwart; she'd excused herself when she learned her husband was dead and then returned a little later, red-eyed but relatively composed, to ask for details. The bald man's name was Sherman J. Bigelow; he was fifty years old and had been the head of Universal Laser's legal department. Mrs. Bigelow was also a lawyer, in private practice; she and her husband had met while arguing opposing sides of a civil case sixteen years earlier. Bigelow had been with Universal Laser for the last seven. The Bigelows had no children.

The last of the victims was Herbert Vickers, the fat man, forty-three years old but looking older. He was the technology man in the group; according to the FBI, his field was inertial confinement fusion.

“What the hell's that?” Foley asked blankly. The others couldn't tell him.

Vickers had been married twice; his first wife had divorced him after two years of marriage. His second marriage was less than a year old. DiFalco said, “The officers who contacted the second Mrs. Vickers say she's a centerfold blonde, at least twenty years younger than her husband. They also say she seemed more aggravated than heartbroken when she learned he was dead.”

“Something there?” Marian asked.

“Find out,” DiFalco said. “No way this can be a domestic matter, but we gotta investigate just the same.” He looked at his watch. “I'm going home—I'll check back with you later, and I want to hear some results, got that? Have a nice Sunday.” They were dismissed.

“Yeah, rub it in,” Foley muttered on the way out.

Captain DiFalco had assigned four additional detectives to the case to help with the legwork. There was much to be covered. Follow-up interviews with Mrs. Webb, Mrs. Bigelow, and Mrs. Vickers; a follow-up phone call to Jason O'Neill's mother in Idaho. Did Jason have a girlfriend? Check finances; Conrad Webb was probably worth a mint, but what of the other three? Who inherited? Try for a make on the black van, as impossible as that seemed; check on stolen vehicles reported for a start. Check with the cab companies; look through every driver's daily record for Saturday and see if anyone picked up a fare near one of the victims' home addresses. Bug Dr. Whittaker for the autopsy report. But most especially, find out if any one of the four victims had an enemy so deadly that he'd kill three other people to get to the one he wanted.

Once the other detectives were squared away, it was time for Marian and her partner to approach Universal Laser Technologies. It was almost six
A.M.
The head of the firm was a man named Edgar Quinn who lived in an apartment on Park Avenue South.

The security guard on duty in the apartment building lobby was reluctant to ring Mr. Quinn's number even when they showed him their I.D. Only Marian's repeated insistence that the matter was urgent finally persuaded him to wake up an important tenant at such an early hour. Upstairs, the door was opened by a man with hastily slicked-back hair who demanded to see their identification before he'd let them in. “Mr. Quinn will be with you shortly,” the man said and left them standing in the entranceway.

“He did say ‘Have a seat,' didn't he?” Marian asked dryly and stepped into a hallway that opened on to two rooms on either side, with a stairway straight ahead. A two-story apartment.

Her partner didn't answer; he was too busy gawking. The apartment was spacious and luxurious, of the sort Foley probably thought existed only in the movies. Eleven years in the Ninth Precinct could do that to a man.

They were still standing when a man wearing a gray velvet robe joined them. He was surprisingly young, not yet forty, with an oddly triangular face that he emphasized by brushing his dark blond hair upward from the temples. “I'm Edgar Quinn,” he said, and waited.

Marian identified herself and her partner. “I'm sorry to tell you this, Mr. Quinn, but we have bad news.” And she told him.

Quinn's mouth opened and his eyes narrowed. “All four of them are dead? Conrad's dead?”

“Yes—I'm sorry. They all died quickly, no pain.”

Quinn felt behind him for the stairway banister and shakily lowered himself to one of the steps. He sat there stunned-looking. “How? How did they die?”

“They were all four shot. Death was instantaneous.” She didn't know that was true, but why make it worse for him?

Quinn buried his face in his hands. Foley cleared his throat and said, “Uh, can we get you something? Call somebody?”

The other man gestured
no
and after a few moments pulled himself together. He stood up slowly and said, “How am I ever going to tell my wife? She loved Conrad as much as I did.”

“You were close to Mr. Webb?” Marian asked.

“He was like a second father. Sergeant Larch, Detective Foley—let's go in here and sit down. I have questions, and I'm sure you must too.”

Tons of them
. Marian noticed he'd gotten both their names right after only one hearing, something most people failed to do when faced with the unexpected appearance of the police. Once the three of them were seated, Quinn wanted to know details. Marian explained what they'd found in East River Park.

He took it hard. “That's insane! Shot through the eye and then handcuffed? Or were they handcuffed first?”

“We don't know yet,” Foley told him.

“But why? Why would anyone want them dead?”

“That's what we're trying to find out, Mr. Quinn.”

After a while Quinn couldn't think of any more questions and fell silent. Marian asked him how long he'd known Conrad Webb. “All my life,” he answered.

Universal Laser Technologies had been founded by the present owner's father. One of the first things the elder Quinn, a physicist, had done was bring in a man he could trust who had a head for business. That was Conrad Webb, who'd stuck with Universal during early hard times and ended up owning a piece of the firm. He'd been CEO for nearly twenty years, before advancing age had prompted him to opt for a less strenuous position in the company. Webb was as much identified with Universal Laser as Quinn's father had been, the younger Quinn told them.

But Webb had eased out of the actual management of the company several years ago. His real value, Quinn said, was in the contacts he'd built up during his life, both in industry and in government. “We called him The Network King,” Quinn said with a wry smile.