Too Many Murders Read Online Free PDF

thank you! You’ll never regret it! Neither will our son. He can carry any name.”
    “I’ve just realized that,” he said.

Commissioner John Silvestri’s office was large, though seldom called upon to accommodate as many men as gathered there at nine the next morning, April fourth.
    Holloman, a city of 150,000 people, wasn’t big enough to have a homicide division, but it did have three squads of detectives to investigate the full gamut of serious crime. Captain Carmine Delmonico headed the entire division, with two lieutenants who were nominally under him but who usually followed their own lines of enquiry. Lieutenant Mickey McCosker and his team weren’t present; he was embroiled in a drug investigation the FBI was running, and couldn’t be spared for other work, a point that rankled with Silvestri and the Staties, bypassed. So Carmine and his two sergeants, Abe Goldberg and Corey Marshall, were joined by Lieutenant Larry Pisano and
his
two sergeants, Morty Jones and Liam Connor. Also present was the Deputy Commissioner, Danny Marciano, due to retire at the end of 1968. Despite his impeccably Italian name, Marciano, of northern blood, was freckled, fair, and blue-eyed. Larry Pisano was due to retire at the end of this year, 1967, which had led to some difficulties for Carmine, both of whose sergeants had seniority over Pisano’s men and were in line for the next lieutenancy. Since that meant a hefty raise in pay as well as greater autonomy, he couldn’t blame Abe or Corey for wanting to move up.
    Silvestri himself, a desk cop who had never fired his sidearm in the course of duty, much less a shotgun or a rifle, was never dismissedas a pantywaist; during World War II he had earned many decorations, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. But reinstalled in the Holloman Police Department, he had recognized his talents as administrative, and was one of the city’s finest-ever police commissioners. He was a dark, smoothly handsome man who could still pull the women, reminded people of a big cat, and was intensely loyal to his department, for which he would go to bat with anyone from the Feds to Hartford. So good a politician that he was generally held to be politically inept, Silvestri had a brilliant media persona and only two weaknesses. The first was his protégé Carmine Delmonico. The second was his addiction to sucking and chewing on unlit cigars, whose slimy butts littered his wake like corks after a pleasure boat. Owning a streak of the diabolical, he had long ago realized that Danny Marciano loathed these cigars, and he always contrived to put the current one as close to Marciano as he could.
    Under ordinary circumstances his striking face was rather expressionless during a conference, but this morning it was distinctly grim. As soon as Patrick O’Donnell came through the door and took the last vacant chair, Silvestri got straight down to business.
    “Carmine, fill me in,” he commanded, champing on a cigar.
    “Yes, sir.” Without referring to the sheaf of papers and folders on his lap, Carmine commenced. “The first call came at six a.m. yesterday, from the Chubb Rowing Club. Their premier eight had gone out for practice as soon as it was light enough—apparently conditions on the stretch of the Pequot River they use were perfect, so the coach dragged them all out of bed and put them on the river. They’d worked hard and were about to come in when two of the port oars struck an object just under the surface—the body of a small child. Patsy?”
    Patrick took over almost in the same breath. “A toddler, about eighteen months old, dressed in top quality Dr. Denton’s and a super-thick diaper of the kind certain institutions sell to families with handicapped kids. The body showed the stigmata of Down’s syndrome. Cause of death—I prioritized the child—wasn’t drowning,but asphyxiation due to smothering with a pillow. There were contusions indicating that the child had resisted. Death