Moral Hazard (Southern Fraud Thriller)

by J W Becton

He’d be back to the basement to pay Bonnie a visit on Friday, and he wouldn’t be quite as harmless.

  Thirteen

  Dashing into the DOI a half hour late, I ran smack into Ted Insley, nearly spilling his coffee.

  Crap. Ted was the last person I wanted to see right then. Tempted to sidestep him altogether, I greeted him with a too cheery “good morning.” In response, Ted shifted his steaming mug to his right hand and consulted the enormous silver timepiece weighing down his left wrist.

  “Running a little late, are we, Special Agent?”

  Well, duh, I thought with utmost maturity.

  “I’ll stay late to make up the time,” I assured him. “Vincent is setting up surveillance, so we aren’t falling behind on the Blissett case.”

  He nodded, his lips drawing down in a small frown.

  “Since you’re here, join me in my office,” he said as if the words were an act of charity.

  I followed him into his chamber and watched as he enthroned himself behind his desk.

  “How is the surveillance proceeding?”

  Vincent and I had been working the Blissett case for less than twenty-four hours, and I’d just told him that Vincent was setting up that morning. And yet Ted wanted a progress report? He knew very well that setting up a fixed surveillance location took time, and that wasn’t even taking into account the additional challenges this case presented. Was he really expecting speedy progress on a case that had remained unsolved for years?

  With my emotions already so close to the surface, concealing my annoyance seemed more difficult than usual.

  “Well,” I said, drawing out the word as I collected my thoughts into a professional response. “We ran into a snag securing the surveillance location—”

  I was about to explain about our decision to sublet, but Ted interrupted.

  “I’ll be happy to do what I can,” he offered, pressing his fingertips together and studying me over them. “Always am. What trouble did you encounter?”

  “Only one building—a senior citizens’ apartment complex—offers a view into Blissett’s yard, but the manager said no space was available and refused to help us sublet from a resident.”

  His brow furrowed slightly. “There’s only one viable location? I find that difficult to believe.”

  “Blissett’s privacy fence obstructs all other options.” I thought about mentioning my helicopter idea but refrained. I didn’t want to give Ted a coronary. “And even the location we found won’t remain usable forever. A stand of trees partially obstructs the view, and soon the leaves will bud and we’ll lose it completely.”

  “Ah, and what do you need from me? I can’t slow the change of seasons.”

  I laughed politely at his joke and refrained from mentioning that I hadn’t asked him for help.

  “We found a resident who will allow us to sublet his apartment.”

  “How much will that cost?”

  I told him, and he winced.

  “The budget won’t allow that. Perhaps if I gave the manager a call, we could find a less expensive option.”

  I shook my head. “He said there were no vacancies.”

  “Maybe I can grease the wheels for you,” Ted offered magnanimously, picking up a pen. “I do have some clout in this city. I might as well use it occasionally. What’s the name of this complex?”

  “Dowell Heights. The manager is Joseph Peters,” I said. “He said you used to work together.”

  Ted’s facial expression didn’t change one iota, but his pen stopped mid-stroke.

  “Peters? Yes, I know him,” he admitted, a subtle look of concern crossing his face. “We worked together some years back in the mayor’s office.”

  He set the pen down and thought for a moment. “He’s not known for his ability to see reason. I’m afraid if he’s turned down your request, then you’ll have to abide by that decision.”

  Curious, I thought. Ted usually didn’t give up so easily.

  “What about a budget increase, then?” I pressed. “We need to use this location, and obviously, the time frame will be limited. Once spring comes, we’re out of luck.”

  Ted shifted in his seat and frowned at me. “Have you thought about interviewing previous investigators to see what they know? Perhaps they’ll be able to point you in the right direction, save us some money.”

  Interview previous investigators? Gee, why hadn’t we thought of that?

  “We’ll get on that,” I said tightly, choosing my words like a politician in front of Congress. “But it seems less than reasonable to send us after a man who’s been defrauding the state for years and then refuse to increase our budget after we’ve been barred from easy access to surveillance.”

  I clenched my hands in my lap.

  Were my emotions about the Slidell case blurring my vision of what was going on here, or was Ted being more obstinate than usual? He’d always been concerned about money and PR, but his reaction struck me as different somehow.

  “Special Agent Jackson,” Ted said to my back as I walked from the office, “I know you and the Chief are not squandering DOI resources, but after auditing our books, the Atlanta accounting office is deeply concerned by the budgetary issues at this branch. Please understand that it’s not me laying down these parameters. I’m trying to protect us all, but there’s only so much I can do.”

  I paused in his doorway, feeling petulant. “But wouldn’t putting an end to the Blissett case, which has cost this state millions of dollars, go a long way to shoring up Atlanta’s support and loosen their money belt?”

  “Well, sure it would, but that doesn’t change anything about your current money allocation. You’ll just have to do your best.”

  I nodded curtly and hurried away before I said something I’d regret.

  I trudged upstairs to my office, working off my frustration as I went. Ted claimed his support, but in the face of political pressure, he bent like a pine tree in a tornado. I wasn’t sure if he would stand with us if push came to shove.

  I couldn’t help wondering if something more was going on. Ted loved to play office politics and spent a good deal of time blowing sunshine up the butts of the bigwigs in Atlanta. So I imagined that he was lying about going to bat for us with his superiors. He was probably working the angles, hoping to make himself look good by solving the Blissett case without spending a dime.

  But why had he balked at contacting his former work colleague, Joseph Peters?

  I paused mid-stride.

  What if Ted wanted us to fail on this case?

  Bizarre as that idea seemed, it wasn’t completely out of the question. After all, Ted believed Vincent and I were at least partly responsible for his troubles with the folks at the main office. Over the past few months, our cases had required a lion’s share of the Mercer branch’s funding. We’d headlined the local newspapers and even managed to appear on national news, which Ted would have appreciated more if those high-profile cases hadn’t ended with the justifiable shootings of the fraudsters involved. Breaking big cases was one thing; having most DOI investigations end with a shooting death was quite another.

  According to Ted, the honchos at the Atlanta office pressured him to get the budget under control and to limit Mercer’s media presence to stories of our less dramatically concluded cases.

  There was every chance that Ted wanted to get rid of a potential source of trouble.

  If Vincent and I failed to conclude the Blissett case, Ted would have a legitimate reason to fire us both. Never mind that other investigators had tried and failed. That wouldn’t matter as long as Ted spun the case as simple surveillance that even a trained monkey could accomplish.

  Why not just fire us now? We had soaked up the budget and accounted for the sum total of duty-related fatalities. Surely that was reason enough to let us go.

  On the other hand, Vincent and I had the highest arrest record in the branch, and we had gotten the DOI a lot of positive press after infiltrating a fraud ring whose scope we were
only just beginning to realize.

  We were freaking heroes in the insurance fraud investigation world.

  But that could change at any moment.

  Perhaps that was Ted’s plan. Maybe he had handpicked the Blissett case for us—though it should really be handled by the workers’ comp people—because he knew it would set us up to fail.

  Or maybe I was being paranoid.

  I inhaled in an effort to tame my wild thoughts. I needed to concentrate on what I knew for certain, which admittedly was not much.

  And that meant I needed to get on with the investigation.

  While Vincent enjoyed his surveillance vacation at Sydney’s Dowell Heights apartment, I analyzed the history of Randy Blissett.

  He’d graduated from a local high school and then gone on to work for the Georgia Transportation Department. He married before his twenty-first birthday and had a son shortly thereafter. His life progressed normally for a time.

  Seven years ago, the injury occurred, and two years later, the rest of his life fell apart. His wife filed for divorce, and the court granted her full custody of their son. She left the state, and though she received both alimony and child support, she hadn’t returned to Georgia in years.

  Workers’ comp isn’t designed to last forever, and when the GDT approached Blissett about returning to work a desk job and he refused, suspicions began to mount.

  But we already knew all of this. I needed to dig deeper, find something that might explain what was really happening.

  I opened Blissett’s banking history, which stretched all the way back to the day of his accident. I began slogging through his deposits, expenditures, and purchase history. At first glance, everything appeared normal. He paid his alimony, child support, and most of his bills on time. He bought nothing out of the ordinary, no skydiving lessons or mountain-climbing vacations.

  I’d almost concluded that my day-long trek into Blissett’s life was pointless when a trend developed before my eyes. I recognized a slow shift in his shopping habits.

  As the years progressed, Blissett began to take advantage of Internet shopping. That’s not unusual. Even people with the least computer savvy adopt Internet shopping to a certain level. Nowadays, most people make frequent website purchases, but Blissett’s history showed that he had eventually begun to rely on them.

  At first, I’d written it off as a sign of the times, but as I dug deeper, I realized that Blissett’s purchases went beyond the average person’s.

  He not only streamed television shows and movies but also received supplies from all sorts of stores. He halted his in-person visits to local hardware stores and had them deliver tools and lumber, and he even purchased his staple products, everything from food to toilet paper, using a standing weekly grocery delivery service.

  Now he only left the house for doctor’s appointments, or apparently to work in his fortress of a backyard.

  I sat back, understanding the situation better now. No wonder investigators had such difficulty determining Blissett’s fitness to work. He gave them no opportunity to catch a glimpse of him, much less the option to establish a pattern of behavior that might indicate fraud.

  This explained how the man had remained hidden for so long, but it didn’t tell me why. What motivated him to withdraw so thoroughly from the outside world? Why did he rarely leave the house? Why not get out and grocery shop once in a while with the use of a motorized cart?

  I could think of two good reasons: pain and fear.

  Perhaps pain prevented him from leading a normal life, or maybe he was afraid.

  I recognized that the latter reason might hail from my own paranoia. I’d gotten used to believing that nothing was the way it appeared on the surface. There was always someone behind the curtain, pulling the strings.

  What if that were the case here?

  What if someone had figured out that Blissett was faking and begun blackmailing him?

  Fourteen

  Terrance Workman was an ass. That fact became abundantly clear moments after I entered his office at Southeastern Insurance the following day. On the drive over, I’d told Vincent what I found in Blissett’s bank records, and he agreed that we had not identified some critical factor in the investigation.

  We slogged through the driving rain in the hopes that our conversations with previous investigators might shed light on that critical factor. Whatever it was.

  The chill rain had washed away my early morning caffeine rush, and by the time we pounded up a couple of flights of stairs to Workman’s office, I had high hopes for some coffee. Unfortunately, the smell of onion greeted us instead.

  After taking a big breath of the pungent odor, I was put off by the idea of any sort of refreshment.

  Not that I was offered one. Apparently, Terrance Workman couldn’t be troubled to stand, shake hands, exchange pleasantries, or even say hello. He just sat at his desk, eating what looked like raw onion on rye bread, and eyed us silently.

  “Terrance Workman?” I asked, hoping the office assistant had pointed us to the wrong destination.

  Sprawled ungracefully before us with his feet propped on one of many stacks of papers on his desk, Workman chewed, making smacking sounds with his lips.

  Talk about charm, I thought as he took a moment to wipe his mouth with the sleeve of his checked shirt.

  “That’s what it says on the desk, ain’t it?” the man grunted, gesturing with his sandwich at the engraved nameplate that was partially obscured by a stack of folders.

  Now that I had confirmation of his identity and realized he wasn’t going to engage in idle chitchat, I didn’t bother replying or waiting for him to invite me to sit—that definitely wasn’t going to happen. I plunked down in one of the guest chairs and made eye contact with Vincent.

  He didn’t appear to be impressed with Workman either. I decided our best bet was to get finished and get going.

  “I’m Special Agent Julia Jackson with the Georgia Department of Insurance,” I said. “This is my partner Mark Vincent.”

  I paused and let Vincent flash his badge, a useless gesture. Workman didn’t bother to glance at it, and Vincent snapped it shut after a few seconds.

  Didn’t anybody look at badges anymore?

  “We’re here to discuss an insured that your company has been investigating for the past five years. Randy Blissett.” I smiled politely, turning on the charm on the off chance that it might inspire some cooperation.

  “Uh-huh,” Workman said, chewing between syllables.

  “Well, Terry—”

  “Terrance,” he interrupted, eyes narrowing.

  Blast. He didn’t go by Terry. I smiled at him anyway. Charm, charm, charm. That’s me.

  “Oh, right, Terrance,” I corrected, deepening my Southern accent. I was one step away from batting my eyelashes like a beauty pageant queen. “The DOI is investigating the complaint against Blissett, and we’re here to find out as much as we can about the situation.”

  Workman sighed as if he were put out by our presence, and I sensed a change in Vincent, who had been standing silently beside me. I glanced up to find that he had gone from relaxed to annoyed, his arms crossed and his eyes hard. He was definitely looming now.

  Looming impatiently.

  “Are you familiar with the case?” he demanded. “Or do we need to wait while you pull up his information?”

  “Of course I’m familiar with the case,” Workman returned. “I already sent everything I had to you guys. Didn’t you read the file?”

  “Yes, of course we read it,” I said, dropping the Southern coquette routine. “But we’d appreciate hearing the facts of the case from you personally.”

  Workman’s lip curled. “I wrote every word in that folder ‘personally.’ Shouldn’t have to repeat it.”

  Behind me, Vincent’s control snapped. He stepped to the front of the desk, balanced his broad hands on the piles of papers, and leaned into Workman’s space.

  Terrance took another bite of sandwich
and chewed it slowly.

  “And we’re ever so grateful that you took the time to pen that masterpiece,” Vincent said, his voice acidic, “but what we want to know is why this investigation has been pending for five years.”

  Workman swallowed his food and then gave a snort of laughter.

  “Why do you think?”

  “Sheer incompetence on your part would be my best guess,” Vincent said flatly.

  Finally, Workman’s snide facade disintegrated, and he slid his feet to the ground with a thunk. With deliberate slowness, he set his onion sandwich on the stack of papers his feet had formerly occupied.

  I winced.

  “The investigation,” Workman said, “is ongoing because Randy Blissett has not been caught.”

  I cut my eyes toward Vincent and squelched the urge to mutter, “Well, duh.”

  Vincent appeared to be squelching the urge to leap across the desk and smack Terrance Workman.

  “Can you elaborate on that?” I asked, laying a restraining hand on Vincent’s elbow.

  “Do I really need to?” Workman looked from me to Vincent and back again. “Randy Blissett has taken up a great deal of my time and this company’s resources. I—and nearly every investigator who has come through this office—have spent hours watching Blissett’s house. I’ve questioned neighbors. I’ve heard the sounds of construction in his backyard. But you can’t convict a guy of fraud on hearsay and sounds. You’ve got to have pictures, videos, some sort of concrete proof that he’s capable of working. You need to establish a pattern of behavior.”

  “And you couldn’t?” I asked.

  He responded with a dramatic eye roll.

  “If we’d been able to secure legal proof, you wouldn’t be here, would you?” he said.

  Vincent leaned a little farther over the desk and asked, “Why specify ‘legal’?”

  I raised my eyebrows. That was a good question. Workman’s use of that word seemed to indicate that he had secured illegal proof.

  And I saw that his bold gaze faltered for the first time since Vincent had gotten in his face.

  “Look, you’ve got to understand that we can’t control contractors…and Southeastern does not hire investigators who use illegal means of obtaining evidence. We certainly do not act based on inadmissible evidence.”