“She was with him at the casino when he lost the hand,” I said. “She must have stopped by after we dropped him off.”
“And thanks to you he was already normal fucked up,” said Becker. “All Juanita’s gotta do is help him take it to the next level of totally fucked up. After he goes out, she slips him a needle between the toes. He maybe murmurs wha-the-fuck-ya-doin’-down-there-Rosa and drops under the cold waves in the Dead Sea.
“Then she props him up at the keyboard, turns his web cam on, and it looks like he passed out at the controls.”
“Then you were thinking it’s somebody with some medical background, because they’d know about potassium chloride, and how to deliver it, right?”
Becker nodded, as if he’d always expected more of me, and was glad to see me coming along after all.
“And one of those policies had Dr. Guttman’s name on it,” I said, “before he transferred it to Heartland. Guttman’s a doctor. And my friend Addie said Rosa, or Juanita, I guess; Addie said she was an ex–hospice nurse turned viatical broker.”
“Yeah,” said Becker, “she was a good nurse, and when you get another look at her you’ll see why Lenny was anxious to try some viagra-tickles and veggie-tales out on her. But so what? You see the problem? Just because I know how Lenny died doesn’t mean shit. We got nothing but a hole in a foot and some potassium chloride. Even if you got a picture of Rosa Juanita on the Internet camera. She’s gonna say she stopped by Lenny’s neck of the woods on a snowy evening for a drink on the way home and then left. So what?”
“Fingerprints?” I asked.
“Only a total amateur,” he said. “Anybody medical is going to be wearing latex gloves at the scene.”
“So you gotta find the syringe?”
“Literally a needle-in-a-haystack deal,” said Becker. “We got a search warrant for the medical waste at the Heartland Clinic. We gotta hope she takes it back to the clinic and properly disposes of it in one of those red needle chop boxes that has ‘biohazard’ written all over it.”
“If she pulled back on the syringe,” I said, “then it’s got potassium chloride and Lenny’s blood.”
“Even if she don’t pull back, it’s in and on the needle barrel. Blood, Lenny’s DNA, and potassium chloride.”
“She can’t be dumb enough to keep it.”
“She’s not dumb,” said Becker. “She’s smart, so smart she knows not to trust Hector and his brother-in-law. Juanita goes way back with Hector and Dr. Ray. She was with them at the old veggie-tale company out in L.A. She saw them turn on the other half of the outfit once before. Those California guys all went to jail, and Hector and Ray got off with wrist slaps from the licensing boards. Murder’s too fast for her, but they find her price and talk her into it. They keep telling her that the chances are we’re not even going to find the hole, and even if we do, our first thought is going to be that crazy Lenny had moved on to needle drugs and was trying to hide his tracks.
“Still, she’s smart enough to realize that if we do figure it out, Hector would toss her overboard at the first sign of trouble. So she’s got to protect herself. Guttman prepares the big syringe for her, loads it with potassium chloride so it’s all ready to go. Caps the needle. Gives her a couple pairs of latex gloves and cotton balls. Puts it all in a Ziploc bag for her. All she’s gotta do is make sure that the bleeding stops after the injection, and take the syringe with her when she leaves. She might be dumb enough to throw the stuff in the closest Dumpster, but that’s the first place we look when we walk out of a crime scene. No luck. All she had to do was throw that needle away in any trash can on any street corner in town.”
“But she not only took it, she kept it?”
“It’s got Guttman’s prints on it,” said Becker, “not hers. He’s got no reason to wear gloves drawing up a syringe full of potassium chloride. No. She wears gloves while she’s working on poor Lenny, and you know she’s gonna take the syringe and the needle with her when she goes. But instead of throwing it away, she keeps it, because if Hector or Guttman turn on her, she’s gonna say, ‘I didn’t do it. Dr. Ray did, and I can prove it. I got the syringe with his prints on it.’”
“You grabbed her,” I said, “and threatened her downstairs?”
Becker raised a single eyebrow. “I talked to her in a special way. I didn’t threaten her. If criminals trusted each other,” he said, “we’d never catch them. But there’s no honor among snakes, and no law that wasn’t made to be broken, even the one that says Never turn on your own. When the cops hand you a few affidavits from cooperating witnesses and confidential informants who all say things only your best crooked buddies know about—”
“She turned on them,” I said.
He nodded. “I got ’em all downstairs,” Becker said. “Guttman says she did it. She says Guttman did it, and they both blame it all on Hector.”
“And Hector?” I asked.
“Hector won’t say shit until it hits the fan. He’s a lawyer. Those guys are always careful, but in the end they do whatever it takes to stay off of Old Sparky.”
“But you wouldn’t have Rosa without the image file,” I said.
Becker shrugged. “True. You got her picture. I owe you there.”
29
TURN OUT THE LIGHTS
AFTER A WEEK OR so of big news stories on Lenny’s murder and coverage on the ensuing pretrial skirmishes, the paper was saying that the government was going to get guilty pleas and big prison terms on most if not all of the Heartland defendants, and any holdouts would be tried for capital murder. The corporate officers of Heartland Viatical, including Rosa/Juanita and my spiritual mentor, Don Gandhi, had all been moved from Becker’s basement to the Douglas County Jail, where they were awaiting trial and turning on each other by the day. I only wished I’d been able to set up Attila-at-Home web cams on the walls of Becker’s holding tanks, so I could watch playbacks of his technique. I could eat popcorn as he serially interrogated them, constantly reminded them of their inhumanity and duplicity, administered one deniable insinuation after another, confronted them with mismatched stories.
Meanwhile, I had the good fortune to work on another case with Becker. He had a house fire and a charred corpse, which always makes the cops suspicious, because murderers love to clean up a crime scene by starting a body-of-evidence bonfire on their way out the door. This one was a gas fire in the garage of Sally and Howard Turnbull, a childless, thirty-something couple living in deep South Omaha. Howie had his tool bench in the attached garage, with shelves above it for paint cans, paint remover, motor oil, propane tanks for the grill, and, yes, a gas can for the mower. He’d taken his wife, Sally, out to dinner, because she was leaving town for the weekend and going to her Class of ’81 Wyandotte High School reunion down in Kansas City.
Howie dropped Sally at the airport and came home to a raging house fire. The garage had burned to the ground and most of the house, too. Inside the garage, the arson boys found the charred remains of a body.
For weeks, Becker and his men operated under the assumption that it was breaking and entering gone tragically awry when the burglar must have set off a spark while stealing Howie’s tools. That was too far-fetched for Becker, who thought that maybe Howie had hired somebody to torch the house for him so he could collect on the insurance money, and maybe whatever his buddy had used to start the fire got out of hand too soon.
That’s when Becker called me.
I checked the property-insurance angles for him, and when I did I also found some recent life insurance activity on the Turnbulls, namely, three different policies at three different companies for a grand total of almost a million on Howard Turnbull, with Sally Turnbull the beneficiary on all three. When Becker asked the Turnbulls about those, husband and wife said that they were trying to get pregnant and Sally had been having nightmares about having a child and no husband if something went wrong down at the salvage yard where Howie ran a backhoe for a living.
Meanwhile, Becker put a missi
ng person’s report together with the charred body and found out the dead guy’s name was Sonny Lisko, the line supervisor out at the packing plant where Howie’s wife, Sally, worked. What was Sonny doing at the Turnbulls’ house? Sally said she didn’t know, and Howie said he’d heard his wife mention Lisko’s name once or twice in connection with work but had never met the guy.
When I told Becker about the life insurance policies, he went out to the packing plant to ask around about Lisko and found out that he was a supervisor who had been counseled about having a workplace relationship with Sally Turnbull: sex in the parking lot, drinking after work together, carrying on in public.
Uh-oh. I almost told Becker to stay on the line while I patched Miranda in.
Becker and his men took another look at the evidence gathered at the scene, and I recommended an arson investigator I’d met through Old Man Norton. On the second pass, they found a single fragment of a lightbulb out in the driveway with a frayed shred of duct tape stuck to it and some residues that later proved to be paraffin, epoxy, and gasoline.
I was sitting at my desk when Becker called and told me about the lightbulb fragment and the residues. He thanked me for finding out about the life policies, then he asked me what I thought had happened.
“I don’t know,” I said, “let me mull it over.”
“Well, I do,” he said, “because the fire boys told me. And I’ll buy you drinks at the Holiday and dinner at Jams if you get it right. I think you pretty much have to be an arson man to figure this one.”
I had my machine up and running with the Google search engine sitting right there blank, so I typed in “paraffin lightbulb gasoline epoxy duct tape” and clicked on the Google Search button.
There it was, on top and first in line: “How to make a lightbulb bomb.” First you heat the metal base of a lightbulb with a butane torch until the bulb separates. Then, after it cools, you fill the bulb with gasoline, glue it back onto the base with epoxy, seal it with paraffin, and wrap some duct tape around it for good measure, and then screw it back in the socket. The lights go out, not on, for the next person who flips the switch, especially if you got a can of gasoline and two propane tanks on the shelf underneath the bulb.
“It sounds like a lightbulb bomb to me,” I said in a bored tone of voice, like I’d already seen ten or twenty lightbulb bombs in my day, and what else did he have for me.
“You circus-freak fuck!” cried Becker. “How’d you do that?”
I could hear him pounding the table and stamping his foot on the other end, like he was Rumplestiltskin and I’d just guessed his name.
Lisko must have made his lightbulb bomb, and then won himself a Darwin Award by forgetting to make sure the switch was off before he screwed in the bulb. Becker liked that part, too, because I told him just how it could have happened. What if when Lisko arrived at the Turnbull house the light switch was on, but the bulb was burned out? Lisko would think the switch was off, would then remove the dead bulb and screw the lightbulb bomb into a live socket. Kabloom!
Later, over dinner and drinks on Becker’s nickel, I put him out of his misery and told him how I’d done it. He was intrigued, maybe for the first time, about what could be done with a computer. He was also going to retire soon with a nice pension and was thinking about going private and starting his own investigation business.
If he did, would I like to join him, and run a computer for him?
30
DAGMAR SLEPT WITH HITLER
I WAS USED TO it now. Every time I managed to escape the malign and deadly forces of the universe and struggle back to my cube to do a little work, I’d find a note from Comrade Dagmar on my keyboard advising me to “See Mr. Norton. Urgent.” She didn’t trust the electronic versions of pink slips checked URGENT, she had to take the precaution of adding a real pink slip when it was really important.
Maybe Becker and I had the real world under control, but the Special Investigations Unit was a bleeding beast, mortally wounded by the antics of Leonard Stillmach. I had e-mail and phone calls looking for dirt on Lenny the viatical scammer, and more e-mails and phone calls from HR looking for evidence against Lenny the national-origin discriminator, along with some sidling, personal e-mail inquiries saying, in effect, “Such a tragedy, he was so young, you must be devastated…but what the fuck happened?”
All of which landed me back in Norton’s environment, this time in our customary positions: He was behind the desk tapping on his “book rest”; I was out front under my own cone of light.
“Nobody knows paper the way we do,” said Norton. “That’s why taking good care of files is so important.”
“True,” I said.
I figured he was headed off on another rant against management. How they hated the expense and space required to store paper, even if having real paper files helped us deny bogus claims, claims that would otherwise cost the company millions. How brave, old-schooler Norton was going to have to fight them again and make sure that the company kept saving paper files and original documents and kept one or two real investigators around who knew how to review a Special Claims file.
I started feeling sorry for him again and knew I’d have to pick a time soon to tell him that Miranda and I were going to work for Charlie Becker when he retired in March.
“On the other hand,” said Norton, “if you have a problem file, one with a stinky claim in it that got paid anyway, or paid to the wrong person…”
He wasn’t saying what was on his mind, which had me worried.
“If the file winds up missing,” said Norton, “myriad sins just vanish.”
I knew what he was talking about. It was practically a cliché in the business. A Special Claims investigator enters an order to pay a claim in the main system, and it gets paid. Later, a question arises about the claim, usually because of an inquiry from some external entity—the Nebraska Insurance Commission, the state attorney general, the postal authorities, litigants in some ancillary civil litigation. When a request for information on the claim comes in, somebody at Reliable goes looking for the file. And guess what? Poof! No file. No supporting documents to explain how or why the claim got paid; it just did. The only record is a draft or a check issued, along with the auditor number of the person who ordered payment. Nobody expects an investigator to remember why he paid claim number 7684763-01 without the supporting documents. Everything must have been in order, or he wouldn’t have entered an order to pay on the claim.
“It’s curious that the file on Lenny should suddenly be missing,” he said. “More than curious, since the fraud investigation is now a murder investigation.”
If Lenny’s file was missing, who would bury it? Miranda? What for? I knew just about all there was to know about her, including the exact size of her left ring finger. The policy had been viaticated to Heartland. What possible reason could she or any other investigator have for making it disappear? Why would anybody bury it? It was going to get paid, if it hadn’t been paid already.
“We don’t have a file on Lenny’s policy anymore,” said Norton. “Troubling enough, but even more troubling is what we do have.”
“Was it paid?”
“It was paid,” Norton said.
Maybe the file was missing, but if the claim got paid, they shouldn’t have any trouble figuring out who ordered payment. You can’t get a check or a draft issued without putting in your auditor number.
“Whose auditor number?” I asked.
“The death benefit was for one hundred thousand,” said Norton, “so the file was supposed to come back to Dagmar Helveg for quality control,” said Norton. “Dagmar didn’t get a file, all she got was a record of the request for payment and a copy of the check from processing. The file is nowhere to be found. You had it last, right? I gave it to you.”
“So somebody paid Heartland on Lenny’s life claim,” I said. “So what? It was incontestable. It was going to get paid no matter what.”
“True,” said Norton. “I paid Heartland
three days ago. But that’s what’s puzzling, because two days ago, a second check was issued on the same claim. Are you related to a Tarlon Ashwater by blood or marriage? Is he a friend of yours?”
Hot flash, and of course he had the thermal cameras going and the Truster software.
“Ashwater got a check?” I asked. “Who met with him? You? Dagmar? Who paid him?”
Norton didn’t answer, just watched his book rest.
“I talked to him out front one night,” I said, “and told him to go see Heartland, or go find a lawyer. Who’d he get to pay him on Lenny’s policy when he’s not the beneficiary? Heartland was the beneficiary.”
“Well, Heartland has been paid,” said Norton, “and so has Mr. Ashwater. Just who is he?”
Norton’s tone of voice suggested that Tarlon Ashwater was about as real as a wood nymph or a leprechaun.
“He’s a destitute rancher who was dumb enough to invest a hundred grand in life insurance policies held by Heartland Viatical. That’s all I know about him. Who paid him?”
Norton just kept looking at me, waiting for me to figure things out for myself. He shook his head.
“Unlike Lenny, you are an excellent actor,” said Norton. “Where’s the file?”
“I didn’t bury the file,” I said. “What possible reason—”
Norton’s eyes flashed like sharp knives in the sun.
“It’s your auditor number on the order to pay the claim,” he said. “And then conveniently the file winds up missing. I’m just not understanding why. Why issue a one-hundred-thousand-dollar check to a Sandhills rancher you supposedly don’t know? Is he a dummy ID? Do you have a bank with an account in the name of Tarlon Ashwater and a phony driver’s license to go with it? Some obscure little Sandhills bank where you could cash that check? Tell me how it works, Carver.”
The son of a bitch was filthy dirty. I’d ravaged my heart and almost got myself killed suspecting the woman I loved. Now it was as if Norton had passed me a note in the back of the classroom.
Bet Your Life Page 28