You Have the Right to Remain Silent by Barbara Paul Page A

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.
    â€œWhat 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.”
    â€œSomething there?” Marian asked.
    â€œFind 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.
    â€œYeah, 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.
    â€œHe 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?”
    â€œYes—I’m