You Have the Right to Remain Silent

You Have the Right to Remain Silent by Barbara Paul

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Authors: Barbara Paul
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that managed to get to the crime scene before he did. “Needlessly conspicuous way of disposing of the bodies, all right. Show-offy.”
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œUnless that’s what we’re supposed to think,” Foley said with a smirk.
    â€œBut a warning to whom?” Marian asked, ignoring him.
    â€œYah,” 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.
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œMaybe 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?”
    â€œLet’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.
    â€œ 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

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