Bet Your Life

by Richard Dooling

  I looked back at McKnight and his warrant.

  “He unhooks the implant sometimes, when he doesn’t want to be distracted by people yacking,” McKnight explained.

  “Oh,” I said.

  Langdon grinned at me and kept staring, then used sign language to say something to McKnight, who nodded.

  “Are you alone? Is anyone else on the premises?” asked McKnight.

  “No one else is here,” I said.

  I didn’t step back to let them in, but they walked right in, cart and all, as if it didn’t matter whether I invited them in or not.

  McKnight walked me over to a space in the middle of the room.

  “Arms up and turn around,” he said.

  He patted me here and there in a cursory fashion. Inside both legs below the crotch was the closest he came to where I had the two Zip disks hidden in my underwear.

  “Take a seat on the floor, Mr. Stillmach,” said McKnight.

  I sat cross-legged and waited. While McKnight watched over me, the tall skinny guy, Mutton, locked the door.

  Langdon wheeled his cart over to Lenny’s machine and made that funny sound in the back of his throat. He signed something to McKnight.

  “Is this the only computer on the premises?” McKnight asked.

  “That’s it,” I said, and I felt Langdon watching me again with that unnerving stare.

  “You sit there, sir,” McKnight said. “We will conduct the search and remove the property and evidence specified in the warrant.”

  Mutton walked into Lenny’s bedroom, and I could hear him rummaging here and there. Langdon used a digital camera to take photos of the port connections, then unplugged the equipment and loaded it onto his cart. He took the Zip carousel and all of the disks, the Razer Boomslang mouse, the keyboard—every peripheral and connecting cord.

  Mutton came out of the bedroom and into the kitchen, where he opened all the cupboards and poked around inside.

  After Langdon finished loading his cart, Mutton came out of the kitchen and looked in the closets, the drawers of Lenny’s desk, his shelves of videotapes and books, and they all ended up back where I was sitting on the floor.

  “Is it normal to do this at two o’clock in the morning?” I asked.

  I could see Langdon had his little flesh-colored implant thingy stuck back on his head. He looked at McKnight, then reached up and flicked the disk off, so that it dangled down over his lapel again.

  He used sign language to tell McKnight something.

  “When we got here, the machine was off,” said McKnight. “Were you using your computer when we arrived?”

  Langdon leaned forward slightly and kept staring, even lifting his eyebrows slightly as if to say, “And so?”

  “No,” I said.

  Now they were both looking at me, silent, as if they were waiting for me to elaborate about how I wasn’t on the computer.

  “I was reading,” I said.

  Langdon walked a little closer and looked at me from another angle, like I was a potted plant or a piece of furniture he was thinking about buying. Then he used sign language again to McKnight. And McKnight signed back to him.

  Langdon was still staring at me, and lifted his eyebrows again: And so?

  “What?” I said, looking at Langdon but talking to McKnight. “What does he want?”

  McKnight almost apologized for Langdon’s behavior.

  “We do a lot of these routines,” he said. “This is probably the tenth computer seizure deal we’ve done with specialist Langdon here in the last two or three months, because we had all that telemarketing fraud, and after that a lot of denial-of-service attacks. Anyway, after about the second or third one, Langdon here up and tells us that deaf people can tell when hearing people are lying just by watching their faces.”

  McKnight made a high-pitched sound, like he didn’t believe it either, but—

  Langdon raised his eyebrows. And so?

  McKnight was almost embarrassed to ask, but he did anyway.

  “We’re tired of buying him steaks at Gorats every time he’s right. All we want to do is prove he’s wrong this time, and that you really are Leonard Stillmach. Would you mind showing us some ID?”

  15

  HOME MACHINE

  IT WAS LIKE A nightmare that turned back into just another harmless, weird dream. McKnight handed my driver’s license to Langdon, who smiled a big one when he read my name. We were in a cartoon together, and I could see a Gorats twelve-ounce New York strip hovering overhead in his thought balloon.

  Langdon took my driver’s license over to Lenny’s multifunction fax-printer-photocopier, powered it up, and made a copy of it. McKnight looked at the license, then handed it back to me. He told me to sit on the floor again while he called in on his cell and ran me through NCIC (National Crime Information Center).

  When he came off the call, he said, “Is this your current address, Mr. Hartnett?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Do you have a cell phone?” he asked pleasantly, as if we were two young execs just getting into the networking thing.

  I fished in the pocket of my sport coat and found him a card.

  He read my cell phone number aloud, and then he said, “If we call that number during the next two weeks, you’ll answer it, and you’ll be in Omaha, right?”

  I shrugged and said, “Okay.”

  Langdon rolled the cart out of the room. Mutton looked at me once deadpan, and they all left.

  Just like that! No questions. No accusations. No hot lights and where-were-you-on-the-night-of-the-fifteenth? And best of all, not a word about Lenny’s death, local cops, yellow crime tape. Nothing!

  I gave them a good five minutes’ head start, and then I jogged back over to Miranda’s. I waved her smart card, and the door opened with a soft click. I pushed it in a quarter inch, then gently nudged it, inch by careful inch, stopping and barely breathing whenever I heard anything like a creak in its hinges. If it took me five minutes or an hour, I was going to get those keys back in the purse without making a single sound. I was like the guy in the Edgar Allan Poe story opening the door millimeter by millimeter, stealthy step by stealthy step, for a look at the vulture eye, and about now I was thinking she probably had one.

  I left her a note about how I couldn’t sleep, had gone home to take a warm bath, and I’d see her at the funeral.

  I didn’t want to see her again or talk to her until I knew exactly what she knew, till I knew what Lenny had been up to and whether she’d been in on it. Then I was going to strap her in a chair like a POW if I had to, lay it all out, and break her down. Maybe GothicRage would even send a JPG image file of her, reaching over Lenny’s body the night he’d died.

  Would the FBI call Becker? Tell him they’d found me in there? I’d have more credibility if I went to Becker first and told him…everything? Tell him I’d copied files from both of their machines and was about to solve the case? What case? Well, solve the viatical angles first, and see if they pointed to a case? Tell him there’s a life insurance policy for three hundred thousand dollars on Lenny’s life, with Miranda Pryor the beneficiary? He’d probably arrest us both and take another long hard look at anything that was “not right.”

  It was 3 A.M. Becker was probably out looking at new dead bodies. I shouldn’t bother him. Between now and noon tomorrow, I could say that I was going to tell him everything, but that I had decided to wait for normal business hours, the first half of which would be occupied by my best friend’s funeral. If I didn’t sleep, that gave me four or five hours to go home and plow through the files I’d—okay, I’d stolen them, but it was under duress because my would-be girlfriend and my dead best friend started looking a lot like those lurid color photos of common fraudsters in the John Cooke Fraud Report.

  If it was Miranda whom GothicRage was calling Senorita Silk Fox with the big ones and the nice lipstick, it could turn out that there wasn’t enough to get her on a murder charge, especially if I never got the image from h
im. It could end up one of those civil trials for murder, same way it happened with O. J. trying to collect on Nicole’s life insurance after he’d slashed her. To convict an insurance murderer of homicide, the prosecutors needed to prove the usual “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” a standard not easy to meet if the accused has a decent lawyer and the perfect right not to take the stand. The county prosecutors could pass on charging her with murder, but then the insurance companies could refuse to pay her and pay the money into court instead. There the fight would be over money, pure and simple, so instead of the formidable burden of proof “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the lawyers had only to meet the burden of proof in a civil action, meaning they had to prove only that it was “more likely than not” that Miranda had got him to name her as a beneficiary, and then…? If she killed him, how did she do it?

  Instead of calling Becker, I went home and copied Lenny’s and Miranda’s .pst files onto my hard drive, where they’d run a lot faster than they would off the Zip. I could open them in two separate windows and compare them side by side, if it came to that.

  According to the little digital clock on the task bar it was 4 A.M., and in five hours I was going to be a pallbearer for the person whose inbox was open before me on the screen, and manic Lenny had an inbox with two thousand plus e-mails in it, probably hadn’t been cleaned out in months. He had a fat archive file, too, which I’d have to open separately.

  I had passed the tired mile marker four stops back, but I didn’t want to sleep until I knew what had happened. Like it or not, it was becoming just like a case file, a big one. If the FBI was watching Lenny, he was into something bigger than selling a couple of life policies. Tomorrow people like Norton, Addie Frenzer, and yes, Becker would be asking me questions. The only safe plan was to do what I always did with a big fraud case: make sure that I knew more about it than anyone else. If I had time left before the funeral, I’d take my forty winks; if not, I’d have to motor along on caffeine until tonight.

  I found an e-mail from Miranda to Lenny. Subject: “Here’s a Giggle!” I right-clicked on it, then selected: “Find all messages from Sender.” There were plenty, about books, music, movies; a few said, “Re: Norton Sucks.” A couple of others on wine tastings at Omaha Wine Company or the Winery.

  I clicked around and sorted them in different ways, until I had all e-mail from her to him sorted by subject and found the ones I was looking for: “Subject: Re: Heartland V.” I picked the oldest Heartland thread, from almost two years ago.

  I opened his preview pane so I could just click and scan them without opening each one:

  From: Miranda Pryor

  To: Leonard Stillmach

  Subject: Heartland V.

  It would be for Annette, my sister. She had a serious skin condition. I told you about it. She has a life policy. She’s at increased risk for melanoma, which can kill you quick. Is that the kind of thing that would qualify her?

  mp

  The next one had part of Lenny’s last e-mail message to her bracketed at the top:

  From: Miranda Pryor

  To: Leonard Stillmach

  Subject: Heartland V.

  >Your sister wouldn’t be doing anything illegal. I

  >didn’t do anything illegal—well, maybe a little,

  >but not really—all I did was sell them policies.

  >I got the policies legit. They bought them from

  >me. I told you they need all the policies they

  >can get because they’re being investigated.

  And underneath Miranda had written:

  You keep saying it’s not illegal, but my sister is not terminally ill. If Heartland buys her life insurance policy and sells it to their investors by telling them that she IS terminally ill, that’s fraud, isn’t it?

  wantonmp

  Same deal on the next one—she was replying to Lenny and had copied his in above.

  From: Miranda Pryor

  To: Leonard Stillmach

  Subject: Heartland

  >OK, pretend Annette sells me her car instead of

  >her life insurance policy. I pay her more than

  >the car is worth, and then I turn around and sell

  >it to an investor for even more than I got from

  >her. Did I do something wrong? Pretend I did,

  >does that mean Annette did anything wrong?

  >Why do I care if Heartland is taking advantage of

  >vulture investors who like to bet on when sick

  >people will die?

  And underneath Miranda had written:

  I’ll e-mail the Heartland stuff to her, and I’ll talk to her about it next time I go back to Ottumwa for a weekend visit.

  I’m sure she would sell the policy if she could. She needs money because the plastic surgeons say it will take a series of expensive surgeries.

  The social worker at the hospital said it would easily reach 6 procedures, and cost more than $100,000, which insurance won’t pay because they say it is cosmetic.

  wantonmp

  That one was dated November 2000, over a year ago. So if her sister was going to sell the policy, she probably would have done it by now.

  Two weeks later in the thread, another one, with a new subject heading.

  From: Miranda Pryor

  To: Leonard Stillmach

  Subject: Qualifying Medical

  I’ve attached two medical journal articles and a paragraph or two from Lycos Health WebMD, which should answer any questions your friend Rosa has about Annette’s medical condition.

  wantonmp

  The articles were from plastic surgery journals: “Excision of Congenital Giant Pigmented Nevus in Adult Patients” and “Risk of Melanoma in Patients with Congenital Melanocytic Nevi and Giant Pigmented Nevi.”

  The articles were attached web pages, so the digital photos and presentation graphics came with them. About 1 percent of infants are born with pigmented moles called congenital nevi. The worst is the so-called “bathing trunk” nevus (named for the surface area it often covers), described as a “disfiguring, darkly pigmented, nodular patch of skin that is present at birth and may cover large areas of the body.”

  The first full-color slide was of a three-month-old baby boy whose tiny haunch was a massive black mole. Only medical science can explain such a disfigurement, and before medical science, the horrors probably were blamed on elves leaving changelings in the cradles of tormented parents. It’s often said that everything can be explained by faith in a loving God—everything except the suffering of children, and the lesion I saw in the photo would make an infidel of Abraham.

  Another slide was of a baby, normal in every respect, except for a band of raised pigmented flesh wrapped around its waist, like some dermal monster from the depths of a nightmare.

  According to the article, plastic surgeons can’t just cut the nevi away from the skin, because the lesion usually extends all the way into the superficial muscle. The procedures called for a half dozen sessions of something called “tissue expansion,” with secondary procedures to remove the expanders, advance skin flaps of normal tissue, and allow for excision of the abnormal skin.

  Okay, so she helped her sister sell Heartland a policy. Fraud? Probably not. But she had had no qualms about lying to me. At the Rendezvous, before the wake, when I’d told her about the Omaha Beneficial policy for five hundred thousand that Addie had called about, Miranda had said: “I knew he was thinking about selling his Reliable policy. But I didn’t know he had a policy at Omaha Beneficial.” She’d implied that she knew only about one policy, his Reliable policy. But here he was freely telling her about selling policies. “All I did was sell them policies. I got the policies legit.”

  I scanned more e-mails looking for some explanation of how Miranda ended up the beneficiary on Lenny’s three-hundred-thousand-dollar policy at Guaranteed Investment Mutual.

  After reading the “Heartland” subject headings, I searched the body text of every message in his inbox for “Heartla
nd” and found a new series from Rosa Prescott under the subject heading “More Policies.”

  From: Rosa Prescott

  To: Leonard Stillmach

  Subject: More Policies

  If you have more, they will buy them. You will get more if you hold them for the two years until they are incontestable.

  The accusations of fraud you found on the net are old. Mr. Crogan’s former California associates pulled a neat trick and sold a single viaticated life insurance policy to four or five different investors, all of whom believed they were the exclusive owners. That’s not what Hector’s about. But the problems have followed him here to Omaha.

  The Postal Authorities and the FBI and insurance commission guys are sniffing around asking about Heartland’s operations and issuing subpoenas. The company took money from investors, and now it needs to convince the authorities that the money went to buy life insurance policies. Let the doctors argue about who is “terminally ill.” In the meantime, they need policies—pure and simple—almost any policies, or else the government will shut them down.

  If you bring any other viators with policies in, we can share my commission.

  P.S. Did you turn video capture on during the session we had last night? I was dripping hot, I hope you could feel it.

  Love,

  Rosa

  Wayward Lenny and his on-line sex. Dripping hot?

  That’s probably how Miss Rosa got him to go along with selling life policies on himself, because she gave him live web-cam action at 3 A.M. Norton’s words came rushing into my forebrain: “I moved that file over to you because two years ago I asked Lenny to investigate Heartland Viatical…he came back two weeks later and told me they were clean…Lenny dated, more than dated, had been involved with a Heartland Viatical sales agent.”