Move to Strike

by Sydney Bauer

  We are happy to advise you that your existing policy shall be amended and entered into our system by early next week. The new policy, titled Premium Life Plus (PLP), shall be backdated to be effective as per the date of your original email being Friday 4 May.

  As soon as the paperwork is completed our accounts department, which received your initial transfer relating to the increased premium, will send you a follow-up letter to confirm the new premium (direct debit) amount with an accompanying booklet on all policy details.

  I would like to thank you for continuing to choose APS as your preferred life insurance provider. Please feel free to contact me if there is anything else you need.

  Kindest regards,

  Shane O’Rourke

  Client Services Manager

  APS Security

  Amanda’s head was down, those petite designer glasses now concealing her expression. She had finished reading, Tony was sure of it, but he sensed she was allowing herself a few seconds of adulation, perhaps even swallowing a smile before she looked up at the other two men sitting on the couch on the other side of the antique walnut coffee table – a still nervous-looking Harry Harrison and a smug-faced Shane O’Rourke who, Tony noticed, had not taken his eyes off Amanda’s sheer-stockinged legs since she had entered the room.

  ‘Mr O’Rourke,’ said Amanda, breaking the silence. ‘Did you have any verbal correspondence with Ms Tyler before or following the sending of these emails?’

  ‘No,’ said O’Rourke, now uncrossing his own legs and resetting his expression to read: ‘I am a man of great intelligence who will patiently explain to you how I go about my daily business as insurance expert extraordinaire.’

  ‘Eighty per cent of our correspondence is now done by email – largely at our policyholder’s request. The email came from Ms Tyler’s home address, the money came from her account. We had done an extensive search on her assets and so forth when Ms Tyler set up her policy a number of years ago and so did not feel it necessary to do so again.’

  Amanda nodded. ‘And this original brochure she mentioned receiving in her email, how did she request it and how was it sent to her?’

  ‘Both via email. Ms Tyler wrote requesting the information from the same home email address on Monday, the thirtieth of April and I emailed her the brochure forthwith. I have a copy of her original request here also – a simple two-sentence request for the information.’

  O’Rourke leaned across the coffee table to hand Amanda the email and Tony noticed his fingers extending slightly so that they might brush against hers. ‘The brochure was sent by attachment, which she would have downloaded and read.’

  ‘So no paper trail,’ said Amanda.

  ‘None,’ said O’Rourke. ‘Which, I might add, goes hand in hand with our company’s Reduce Waste with Haste program. We are extremely sensitive to the current environmental issues facing our planet, Ms Carmichael. We want our trees – and our policyholders – to live as long and as healthily as possible.’

  Of course you do, you pompous twit, thought Tony. The longer they live, the more premiums you pocket and the less you have to pay out. Smart-ass son-of-a-bitch.

  ‘Did you get any further emails from Ms Tyler following the correspondence you have provided here?’ Amanda asked, interrupting Tony’s thoughts.

  ‘No, that was it,’ said O’Rourke. ‘But as you can see, we dealt with her request swiftly and efficiently so no further correspondence was necessary.’

  ‘And so tell me, Mr O’Rourke,’ said Amanda, her face all stony seriousness, ‘why don’t the police have this new information? I am sure the homicide detectives on the case would have requested information on Ms Tyler’s life insurance status. It is part of procedure in any homicide investigation.’

  ‘Yes,’ said O’Rourke, obviously worried he was going to have his knuckles rapped. ‘The problem lay in the timing. As I mentioned in my email to Ms Tyler, while the new policy became effective immediately, the paperwork took some time.’

  ‘Paperwork?’ interrupted Tony, unable to stop himself. ‘I thought you guys didn’t use any . . .’

  ‘No . . . I mean, that’s right,’ said a now flustered O’Rourke. ‘No paper, that is just a general term referring to the computer input. That will be completed today.’

  ‘So the police got the original policy details, the ones in place prior to Ms Tyler’s recent request for adjustments.’

  ‘Yes.’ O’Rourke was shaking his head. ‘The policy control officer the detectives spoke to was not yet aware of the changes as they had not been put onto the system. He would have printed out the original information and given it to the police.’

  ‘And you didn’t think to holler when you heard of Ms Tyler’s death?’ asked Amanda, tilting her head to the left in a gesture that said ‘please explain’.

  ‘I . . . ah . . .’ And that was when Tony realised exactly what had gone down after Stephanie had died, and he could see the look on Amanda’s face, that she had got it too.

  ‘I was not across that transferral of information,’ said O’Rourke.

  ‘And there would be no way that you would have deliberately failed to make information of this new policy available, Mr O’Rourke?’ asked Amanda, removing her glasses to stare the reclining O’Rourke squarely in the eye. ‘I mean, in your email you said the paperwork would be completed in a week, not . . .’ Amanda looked at her watch, ‘. . . twelve days after Ms Tyler’s request, which is exactly what today is.

  ‘You seem like a man dedicated to helping your policyholders, Mr O’Rourke, so I am sure you would not bury a new policy so that the company might not have to pay out what would now be an extremely substantial benefit. A benefit worth . . . what?’ Amanda lifted her eyes upwards as if calculating the amount. ‘Well over fifty million dollars?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said O’Rourke, now squirming in his seat and looking suitably offended by the suggestion. ‘As soon as Mr Harrison here called and requested the policy information I forwarded it immediately.’

  ‘And the fact that Mr Harrison was an attorney who asked specifically if there had been any recent changes to the policy didn’t sway your decision at all?’ asked Tony.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said O’Rourke. ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you are.’ Amanda smiled at last, before turning to Harrison. ‘It was very astute of you to call Mr O’Rourke and investigate the matter, Mr Harrison,’ she said, and Tony could have sworn Harrison blushed.

  ‘My experience tells me that people often change their wills and life insurance policies at the same time,’ piped up Harrison. ‘It’s a matter of “cleaning out the cupboards”. Nine times out of ten, people make these decisions and take action across the board – wills, life insurance, health checks and so forth.’

  For some reason Tony found himself making a mental note on the health check thing.

  ‘Well, thank you, Mr Harrison,’ said Amanda, rising to her feet. ‘I will get back to you if there is anything else we need.’

  Harrison rose to shake her hand.

  ‘Mr O’Rourke,’ she said, extending her hand but then withdrawing it as if needing to stifle a cough, leaving an open-palmed O’Rourke with nowhere left to go. ‘Thank you for your time,’ she said, walking the two men towards the door. ‘We’ll be in touch.’

  And then, she and Tony were alone.

  She turned to look at him, and he looked back, neither of them moving as if there was so much to talk about and nothing left to say.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ he said at last.

  ‘What do you think I am going to do?’ she said, as if ready for his disapproval. ‘I am going to do my job.’

  ‘Your job involves an obligation to provide the defence with all information relevant to the outcome of the impending trial – and includes voice recordings, relevant documentation. You have a responsibility to disclose.’

  ‘Tony, you’re jumping the gun. The case against your friend’s client may not even go to tria
l. I have only just received the forensics reports. I am not before the grand jury until later today and . . .’

  ‘Then you have to provide this new information to the grand jury.’

  ‘I have to do no such thing,’ she argued. ‘This information remains in this room until I confirm the voice on that message belonged to Stephanie Tyler – until I confirm who sent those insurance emails from the Logans’ home email address.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Tony. ‘The increased insurance request originating from the Logan home computer, the request to have the husband cut from the will? You’re taking another shot at the father and you know it.’

  ‘He didn’t shoot her.’

  ‘Maybe not physically but . . .’ And then he saw it, that familiar look in her eye, that glint that told him she was already focusing on the bigger picture – a rare opportunity she intended to milk for all it was worth.

  ‘You want them both,’ he said at last. ‘You lost the father and so you went after the son, and now you want them both.’ He shook his head. ‘Amanda, if what we learned this morning pans out the way I think it will, you can nail the doctor to the wall. The kid could well be another innocent victim in all of this.’

  ‘He shot her.’

  ‘He’s thirteen.’

  ‘Fourteen.’

  ‘Jesus, Amanda. You need to talk to David.’

  ‘I need to leave. I have a date with the grand jury at four,’ Amanda said, moving swiftly past him towards his desk so that she might retrieve her handbag. But as she turned again to head towards the door, Tony grabbed her by her upper arm, hard, forcing her to turn and meet his eye.

  ‘You cannot hold onto this information,’ he said, his voice close and low. ‘You cannot fail to report what you know so that you can star in your own media circus extraordinaire.’

  ‘You’re not my boss, Tony. I can do whatever I damn well please.’

  ‘But it’s unethical.’ Tony took a breath. The truth was he liked this woman, hell, he believed he was even falling in love with her. But he couldn’t sit back and let her bulldoze his best friend – he couldn’t turn a blind eye to her manipulating the system of justice they had all sworn an oath to uphold, just because her ego was greater than her sense of professional responsibility, just because he had feelings for her and did not want whatever they had to end.

  ‘I swear, Amanda,’ he went on. ‘You do this. You fail to share the information I helped you discover, and you and I are . . .’

  ‘What? Over?’ she said, shaking her head. ‘For God’s sake Tony, you were never that Goddamned special to begin with. There is a difference, you know,’ she added, moving even closer to him so that they were now standing eye to eye, ‘. . . between fucking me and fucking me over. You breathe a word of this to your moralistic friend and I’ll have you arrested for interfering with an ongoing criminal investigation. I will end your career in a heartbeat, Bishop, and take great pleasure in doing it.’

  She shrugged free of his grip, turning her back on him sharply so that she might stride towards the door.

  ‘You’re going to regret this, Amanda,’ said Tony at last, not knowing if the pain in his chest was a result of the anger or the disappointment. ‘You don’t know David like I do. He won’t stop until he . . .’

  ‘Until he what, Tony?’ she interrupted him, turning one last time as she reached the corner office door. ‘Brings me down?’

  ‘No, I was going to say until he sees that justice is done. But if he brings you down in the process, then you have only yourself to blame.’

  ‘Oh please,’ she said as she reached for the handle and opened the door to leave. ‘Cavanaugh doesn’t scare me. I eat men like him for breakfast – or in your case, lunch and dinner and dessert.

  ‘So thanks for the tip, Mr Bishop.’ She smiled as she moved out of his office and into the reception area, nodding at Tony’s assistant as she strode confidently past her desk. ‘Your boss is a credit to his profession,’ she smiled. ‘And the District Attorney’s Office shall be forever in his debt.’

  37

  The Chief Medical Examiner’s Office was located in Albany Street, south of Copley, west of Roxbury and across the road from the Boston Medical Center’s Harrison Campus. It was a short, squat building with a somewhat sad-looking exterior which, David had always felt, had a fitting relationship with the equally as depressing goings-on inside – matters of grief and loss and tragedy, of injury and illness and death. And today, despite his friendship with Chief ME Gus Svenson, and the fact that he knew he could count on Svenson’s unfailing professionalism, he felt an uneasy edge to the air of melancholy that seemed to be flowing through the corridors of the examiner’s rooms – perhaps because he had rushed down to meet with Svenson in what the ME had described as his ‘only window of opportunity’, while he was worried about Sara and her lunch with Jeffrey Logan.

  ‘You look like shit,’ said David, as he collapsed into the red-covered visitor’s chair across from Svenson’s desk. The tall, Swedish-born physician looked even paler than usual, his face dissected by the two dark circles that hung like shadows under his pale blue eyes.

  ‘Should I take your honesty to be a sign of your concern, or a general observation as to my . . .’ Gus was obviously looking for the word, ‘. . . shittiness?’

  ‘Both,’ said David, managing a smile.

  Svenson shrugged. ‘I am tired,’ he said. ‘Two of my ten medical staff are at home sick, my chief administrative officer has just resigned, my technicians are overworked and underpaid and the governor is calling for my head following our inability to get on top of our backlog.’

  David nodded in sympathy. It was no secret that the dedicated bunch who worked at the Boston ME’s headquarters were seriously outnumbered by the turnover of cases that came their way – now somewhere north of 30000 a year.

  ‘That sucks,’ said David.

  ‘It is what it is,’ returned Svenson.

  David nodded again. ‘So what can you tell me?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Nothing you would not expect,’ said Svenson, reaching across his busy desk to find a clear plastic file labelled with the name of Stephanie Tyler. In that moment David felt a deep and hollow sadness at the sight of his old friend’s name on the cover of a freshly typed autopsy report.

  ‘Cause of death was a single, high-velocity gunshot wound to the chest. The bullet entered at the sternum and fractured the third, fourth and fifth ribs before tracking through the heart.

  ‘Damage to the heart was extensive and thus difficult to define. But the vascular injuries most likely include damage to structures including right atrium and aorta, main pulmonary artery, aortic arch and right pulmonary vein.

  ‘The bullet also tracked through the right lung, with a linear path of gas containing small metallic and bone fragments from the ribs. The exit wound was large with the directionality and bevelling of bone, along with the gunshot residue on the subject’s skin and clothes, telling us she was shot at roughly a thirty-degree downward angle, at point-blank range.’

  Gus sat back in his seat and threw up his hands as if to say, ‘that’s the basis of it – with further detail enclosed to give further macabre descriptions of the harsh finality of death’.

  ‘What about the rest of your findings, the bloods, toxicology . . . ?’

  ‘The basic tests show results all within normal range for a woman her age, but given a number of her organs had been removed I . . .’

  ‘What?’ said David, unsure he had heard the ME correctly.

  ‘Her organs. Ms Tyler’s driver’s licence showed she had volunteered herself as an organ donor. And you know the good people from the New England Organ Bank are notoriously quick off the mark.’

  ‘But Stephanie had been dead too long for the NEOB to recover any living organs. Her blood supply was drained, her body deprived of oxygen.’ David well knew that in order for an organ to be viable for transplant, either the body must be kept on a ventilator to keep the organs of
a brain-dead patient ‘alive’, or the organs removed and transplanted (often ‘on ice’) to reduce what doctors referred to the organ’s ‘anoxic’ time – the lapse between the death of the donor and the transplant to the recipient.

  ‘This is true,’ said Gus. ‘But Ms Tyler was very specific in her request. Tissue – like bone, skin, corneas and so forth – can be used in transplants up to twenty-four hours after death. And in regard to her other major undamaged organs – her liver, kidneys, pancreas, brain . . . they were removed for the purpose of research.

  ‘David,’ said Gus, perhaps reading the look of disappointment on his attorney friend’s face. ‘You know how these things work. The NEOB are zealous in their recovery of usable organs and tissue. If time had been shorter and less damage procured, I am sure they would have taken every viable organ in her body.’

  Gus stopped there. Everyone knew the donation recovery people had an important job to do, but David knew that Gus and his fellow workers at the ME’s Office were sometimes irked by the bank’s workers’ efforts to cajole the relatives of recently deceased loved ones into signing away their beloved’s body parts mere hours after their death.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said David.

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Gus. ‘But in the end it mattered not.’ And David knew that Gus was trying to tell him that despite the organ donations, there was no argument as to what had caused Stephanie Tyler’s death.

  ‘Mannix tells me she was your friend, yes?’ offered Gus.

  ‘We went to college together,’ David replied.

  Gus nodded.

  ‘Have you given the report to Carmichael?’ asked David after a pause.

  ‘Of course,’ replied the ME. ‘She called me early this morning, asked me to dispatch a messenger as soon as the report was ready. I believe she . . .’ Svenson hesitated.

  ‘It’s okay, Gus, we checked with the courthouse. We know that she has an appointment with the grand jury at four.’

  Gus lifted up his hands as if to again say: ‘It is what it is’. ‘I am sorry you did not know,’ he said. ‘About the organs I mean.’