You Have the Right to Remain Silent

by Barbara Paul

  “You sound very sure.”

  “I’ve seen this happen a dozen times, Sergeant. Kelly has the talent. She’ll know how to use it better once she has some live-performance experience under her belt. Now if you’ll excuse me, my cue is coming up.”

  Marian stepped back to let him concentrate.

  The Apostrophe Thief seemed to be about a widower (Cavanaugh) who was possibly undermining a generations-old family business; Kelly played his sister-in-law, who suspected him of taking kickbacks and skimming off the top. The main conflict was between those two, with Kelly trying to convince the other characters of what he was up to. Those other characters turned out to be “prizes” the two antagonists contended for as they struggled to line up allies, the duel stirring up all sorts of long-dormant feelings that had been kept suppressed for the sake of amity. It was hard to tell from just one scene, but it seemed to Marian that Cavanaugh’s alleged cupidity was just the excuse, that the battle was really about something else. In the scene then being rehearsed, Cavanaugh was working on Kelly’s younger sister—the “Xandria” who’d evoked such scorn (and fear?) in Kelly. Marian still couldn’t figure out what the title meant.

  “People mean no more to you than a watch battery,” Kelly trilled happily.

  Marian wanted to cheer.

  The tension was building nicely. The younger sister was torn between Cavanaugh’s charm and loyalty to Kelly—a loyalty that was somewhat forced, the scene revealed. Kelly kept making protective moves toward the younger woman, Cavanaugh kept seducing her with his voice … and Marian’s pager started to beep.

  Once again every eye in the place was on Marian; she’d never known the blasted thing to be so loud. She turned it off and asked a stagehand where she could find a phone.

  “Police business,” Kelly explained importantly to her fellow actors.

  Marian made her call and got the bad news. Multiple murder, sorry if it’s your day off, no one else available, don’t argue, get on it.

  The play’s director had taken advantage of the interruption to give a few added instructions to his players. When Marian tried to wave goodbye unobtrusively, Kelly made an attention-drawing dash to the side of the stage. “What is it? You’re not leaving, are you?”

  “Have to, Kel. Nobody else is available.”

  “Where are you going? Is it a new case?”

  “Brand new.”

  “Not another murder!”

  The stagehands were all listening carefully. “Afraid so,” Marian said.

  Kelly looked alarmed. “But you can’t!” she protested. “You’re not over the last one yet!”

  On that note of encouragement, Marian left.

  4

  The Ninth Precinct stretched south from Fourteenth Street for about a mile to East Houston, and east from Broadway to the river. The bulk of the precinct was made up of Alphabet City: the far East Side avenues A, B, C, D, and FDR Drive. The precinct was a disconcerting mixture of crumbling slums and rat-infested empty lots on the one hand, and on the other old buildings that had been renovated and occupied by upscale young professionals. Even the East Village was making a comeback from its notorious days as a focal point of drugs and prostitution. New commercial businesses stood side by side with longtime ethnic restaurants of every persuasion. Sidewalk peddlers still set up outside the old Cooper Union Building, hookers’ corner was still Third Avenue and Twelfth Street, Bowery bums still shambled out with dirty cloths to wipe off windshields, and St. Mark’s Place was still the drag center of the universe. But new crafts shops, accountancy firms, restaurants, interior decorators, and computer stores had moved in and were settling down for a long stay. Gentrification was progressing nicely.

  Separating this mishmash from the river was a stretch of public greenery called East River Park. Marian parked illegally and headed toward the three Radio Motor Patrol cars she’d spotted. She elbowed her way through a bunch of noisy spectators, close to a hundred of them, she estimated, most of them talking in either Cuban Spanish or black “swain” lingo. The uniformed officers had their hands full keeping them back, but keep them back they did. Foley was leaning against the front fender of the first RMP, waiting for her.

  He stared at her black eye. “Who gave you the mouse?”

  “Juanita Alvarez.” She waited for the putdown but he merely nodded and pointed toward some spot in the park.

  “In there,” he said. “I’ve been here fifteen minutes. What took you so long?”

  Marian started walking in the direction he’d indicated. “What did the first officer say?”

  “Didn’t talk to him.”

  “You’ve been here fifteen minutes and you didn’t question the first police officer on the scene?”

  “I was waiting for you.”

  Marian bit back what she wanted to say and merely instructed him to go find the first officer. The excited buzz of the onlookers faded as she moved deeper into the park. She walked up to the yellow crime scene ribbon and stopped.

  Four men lay dead on the ground. They were handcuffed together. Each had been shot through the eye.

  Jesus.

  Marian swallowed and looked more closely. Four men, four individuals. One was fat. One was young and one was old. The fourth was bald. All four were well-dressed. But as well as Marian could make out from her vantage point, none was wearing a wristwatch. Probably all four bodies had been stripped of their valuables before the police got there.

  The nearest cop guarding the crime scene was young, not more than twenty-one or twenty-two. He was muscular and well-built, a high school athlete who’d been recruited from out of town, Marian thought. She hoped he wasn’t going to be sick; his pasty face and clenched jaw made him look as if working the Ninth Precinct had left him in a perpetual state of shock. “You the first officer?”

  The young cop shook his head. “My partner.” He motioned with his head toward the left.

  Marian glanced over to see a black patrolwoman talking to Foley. “Did you call the Crime Scene Unit? And the Medical Examiner?”

  “My partner did.”

  Then where are they? She couldn’t even examine the scene until the CSU was finished, and the Medical Examiner was the only one who could remove anything from a homicide victim’s body. All Marian could do was wait.

  Four dead men handcuffed together. The handcuffs themselves didn’t mean anything; they could be picked up in any pawnshop. It was the linking-together that was important, that was the core of the message left by the killers. Had to be more than one; one man couldn’t have moved four corpses by himself. And they had to have been moved; the murders couldn’t have taken place here out in the open in East River Park. How did they get here? Any witnesses?

  Foley had the answer to that; he walked over to Marian and said, “First officer says when she got here there were people all over the place, trampling up evidence—”

  “And robbing the victims.”

  “Surprise. She had to call for back-up just to get the crowd to move away so they could put the ribbons up. The bodies were dumped out of a van, black, late-model—that’s all she had time to get. Want me to start on the witnesses?”

  Marian told him yes and turned back to stare at the four bodies again. What she was looking at was obviously an execution; there was even something ritualistic about it, with each man shot right in the eye like that. Dumped in a public place like this—was it meant as a warning? To whom? And what had these four been involved in that had led to such a grisly ending?

  She glanced around; the only one looking in her direction was the sick-looking young cop. Marian broke the rules and ducked under the yellow ribbon. A quick search of the four bodies revealed no identification on any of them; she was back outside the ribbon in less than a minute. But that minute of touching the bodies had been enough to bring home their peopleness. These four weren’t just lumps of trouble unloaded on the NYPD; they were individuals, four people who’d led autonomous lives but shared a common death. One of the bod
ies, the fat man, was still warm.

  “My god,” an appalled voice said from behind her. “‘If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.’”

  Marian turned to see a red-haired man carrying a medical bag. She flashed her badge and identified herself; the man from the Medical Examiner’s office was named Whittaker. Following his first biblical reaction to the scene, the doctor was all business. “Rigor’s started in two of them,” he said after a quick once-over.

  “The fat one was last?” The warm one.

  “Can’t tell yet. Some fat people never go through rigor mortis at all.”

  Marian hadn’t known that. “‘if thy right eye offend thee’… somebody playing God?”

  “Sure looks like it. But that’s your department, I’m happy to say. Know who they are?”

  “Not without I.D. Give a quick look, will you?”

  “Come off it, Sergeant, we both know you’ve already looked.” But he went through the motions anyway. “Nothing.”

  “Prints first?”

  “Sure,” Dr. Whittaker said obligingly. “You want to come to the morgue?”

  Marian said yes and went off to call Captain DiFalco. She used the radio in one of the RMPs, got some static from the dispatcher for not using a landline, but was finally put through to DiFalco. Police captains were not particularly fond of being disturbed late on a Saturday night, but DiFalco had already been notified of the multiple murder in East River Park. He didn’t know any of the details, though.

  “Handcuffed corpses?” he said, disbelieving. “Four of them?”

  “And all four shot through the right eye. No I.D.—I’m going with the ME to get prints. Foley’s interviewing witnesses. Captain, there’s no way the two of us can handle it alone. We’re going to need help. Are you coming in?”

  “Yeah, I’m coming. And I’ll get you some help.” He pretty much had to agree to that, because of the 24/24 rule. That was the unwritten rule that said the last twenty-four hours of a homicide victim’s life and the first twenty-four of the investigation were crucial to nailing the killer. It was hard enough with just one victim, but four would be impossible to investigate with only one two-person team working on it.

  By the time Marian got back to the murder site, the Crime Scene Unit had arrived and was busy taking pictures and scouring the ground for evidence. Dr. Whittaker had finished his preliminary examination and motioned her inside the yellow ribbon. “Extensive dental work in all but this one,” he said, pointing to the youngest of the four bodies. He lifted the bald man’s dead hand. “Expensive manicure. Wrist and finger indentations where he wore a watch and two rings. They’ve all had watches taken.”

  Marian nodded. “What about rubbed places on their wrists? I’ll need to know if they were all cuffed at the same time.”

  “I can tell you that better after I get them on the PM table. You want to look some more, or can I take them?”

  She said she wanted a longer look. Marian tried studying their faces, but the blood from the shot-out eyes made that difficult. The youngest of the four was about thirty, blond, neither handsome nor homely as far as she could tell. The oldest was gray-haired and probably had been rather courtly-looking in life; Marian put his age at mid-sixties. She could just make out laugh lines on the face of the overweight man, around his mouth and at the corner of his left eye: the stereotypical jolly fat man? The bald man reeked respectability, even in death; he was the most conservatively dressed of the four—he could have been a judge. Marian estimated his age and that of the fat man as late forties, early fifties. She examined their expensive clothes, finding a pair of eyeglasses in a coat pocket of the oldest victim. Everything else had been cleaned out.

  Marian watched as two of the CSU men carefully moved the bodies to see if anything of interest was underneath; nothing was. They told Marian the only thing they’d found so far was a part of a tire mark. Even that would probably lead only to a stolen car. There was nothing here to help her.

  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,” DiFalc
o 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?”