Offing an old friend... (Players stay away!), Hard Goodbyes. Options

[Rifleman]

Basics of it, it's time to finally put to an end the adventures of my original Character, who graduated to NPC status sometime around the beginning of Second edition. (Yes, he's that old.)

The trouble is, I owe him a good send off since he has been with me and my players for that long. Heck, he's been the free contact and fly on the wall for over a decade. So, I want to run it by people for Ideas.

Basically, I'm going to turn it into a murder mystery in a couple sessions based around something the group has done (based on his last email message sent about fourty five seconds before his death.) Unfortunately between his enemies, and their enemies, the list is quite long.

For reference his name is Jack Daniel, occasionally 'Black' Jack Daniels after a bad joke started by PC's about his taste in clothes.

Azzies: Long outstanding feud with JD (he's a Mexican, not an Azzie, if you get my drift), PC's are beginning a legal action that risks exposing an Azzie operation in Tir right before the revolutions. JD indirectly will give them the smoking gun next game.

Shiawase: PC's legal action also targets Shiawase given the nature of the op and the benefits reaped after the fact. Not so much worried about any penalties they might get, even from the corporate court, but it threatens to engulf some of their best engineers. Making the players slink back into the shadows long enough to 'hide' their talent is not outside the realm of reason.

Renraku: He stole a disk back in the day that Renraku would like to never come to light, especially given current events. Now, they don't know where it is due to the players messing with events. If they were to come asking, he couldn't give them the disk because the players took it away from him.

The Mob: Did I mention the players are trying to convince one of Rowena's underlings to stand up to her, and take power? Yeah, oh, and JD has provided them missles and machine guns not two months before they started talking this smack. Yeah...

His old teammate: They know that his former partner, a Rigger/Sniper, has put him in the hospital before over an argument about 'that damn disk' (Believed to be a record of Deus' development, but no one is sure.') Players have worked with him before, and actually gave him the disk. They also know he contracts these days directly with the corporate court.

Ares: One of the runners really bit a piece off Ares, and JD has told them twice behind the scenes where they can shove it. So far, they've respected him (After all, he's a client with a major gun running operation into L.A. and the West coast of Aztlan) but two is far more than they normally give other people.

So thoughts, ideas on how I should play this?