You Have the Right to Remain Silent by Barbara Paul Read Free Book Online

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?”
    â€œMy 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—”
    â€œAnd robbing the victims.”
    â€œSurprise. 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 bodies, the fat man, was still warm.
    â€œMy 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.
    â€œThe fat one was last?” The warm one.
    â€œCan’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?”
    â€œSure looks like it. But that’s your