Murder at McDonald's Read Online Free PDF Page A

young women like Donna and Arlene.
    As the two friends were getting ready to go home, Derek Wood was still at McDonald’s, making a call to the pay phone in front of the Tim Hortons in the shopping plaza across the street, the same plaza where his dad worked during the day. But nobody was answering. He knew his friends Darren Muise and Freeman MacNeil would be there, waiting in front of the phone booth, so he figured the problem had to be with the phone itself. Wood decided to head down to Tim Hortons to see what was going on.

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    Nothing about Darren Muise or Freeman MacNeil suggested to their friends or family that they were capable of extreme violence. At eighteen, Muise had just dropped out of high school, in February. His thick, curly black hair, good looks, and athletic prowess made him popular with the young people he knew in Sydney. The problem was, he either didn’t know he was well liked, or didn’t feel it was enough. He craved attention and went out of his way to get it. The youngest of four boys, Muise always seemed to be trying to prove that he was as good as everyone else. He felt he came from a tough background, but while there was not a lot of money to go around at home, he had had a very fortunate upbringing; he was loved and supported by his parents and other relatives, who hoped he might return to school someday, or perhaps go into business with his dad, who had wanted for some time to work for himself and possibly with his sons.
    Like Muise, and like many young adults with no special skills or education, MacNeil was still hanging around Sydney with no real direction in his life. It hadn’t always been that way. MacNeil had finished high school, and even spent a year at the Nova Scotia Teachers College; he worked briefly at Malcolm Munroe Junior High as a student teacher, and the students and faculty liked him a great deal. But MacNeil had given up on that ambition, and worked for a while as a private security officer in Halifax and Sydney. The work was not steady enough to keep him from drifting into a new, dangerous friendship—with Muise and with Derek Wood. The youngest in his family, Freeman had been raised by his mother and sisters after his father committed suicide while Freeman was a child. Now, at twenty-three, instead of spending his time making the kinds of decisions that could guide him towards a secure future, he was living an aimless existence, hanging out late at night in coffee shops, talking with other young adults who, like him, were unsure of what they were going to do with their lives. Darren Muise was one of these young people; he and MacNeil had acquaintances in common, and they soon met. As for Derek Wood, he and Muise had known each other ever since Wood moved away from the Pier and ended up attending the same school as Muise, in the Hardwood Hill area of Sydney. Restless energy and late-night conversation brought the three together.
    In part perhaps out of a sense that there was nothing to lose, and in part perhaps out of the gnawing knowledge that they were headed nowhere at a time in their lives when they should have been embarking on careers or at least working towards something, the three decided to shun convention and take what they could get without earning it. If the economy of Cape Breton stood in the way of getting what they wanted, then a life of crime might deliver it.
    The idea of robbing the McDonald’s restaurant had evolved over the winter and early spring. In early March, shortly after he started his job at McDonald’s, Derek Wood was working the day shift when he made a discovery that would form an integral part of the plan to rob the restaurant. Deliveries to the restaurant are usually made at the employees’ entrance, at the back of the building; the trucks are unloaded and cartons carried to a conveyor belt that runs from the kitchen to the basement, where the stock is stored until needed. One day, the conveyor system broke down,