Mom repeated the latest on the pneumonia and treatment.
Pace leaned on his walking stick. “Connie, your brother’s the strongest man I know. To stop Toby McKay with no regard for his own safety shows heart and courage. Those two things, plus the medical team, and God’s power will serve him well. So, you have to have faith that whatever happens will be for the best.”
The old preacher eased by us and went to the bedside. He laid his hand on Uncle Wayne’s arm just above the IV and bowed his head in prayer. Mom and I stood in silence. I believed if anyone had a direct line to the Almighty, it was Lester Pace.
I heard footsteps behind us. Susan entered, and then stopped just inside the doorway. She held a bag from Lenny’s Sub Shop. Supper. I’d insist Reverend Pace join us. If Jesus could feed five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, we could stretch three sandwiches to feed the four of us.
It was during Pace’s blessing of the subs that I thought about the people he served. These were the victims of opioid abuse, the proud but poor who needed Medicaid and food stamps to survive. These were the people who would turn to the Rufus Taylors of the region for credit. They were the ones susceptible to schemes for turning a food benefit into cash. Pace knew these people and would keep their confidence. But he also might offer guidance as to who could be behind what appeared to be a criminal enterprise. He would protect his flock from the wolves. Now was neither the time nor the place to broach the subject, but I decided a conversation with the good pastor could be valuable.
We left the hospital at eight-thirty. Uncle Wayne had awakened for a few minutes and seen all of us. He managed to croak out two sentences: “I ain’t dyin’. Go on about your business.” Those few words seemed to sap his strength and he went back to sleep.
Susan and I left when a medical team came in for the breathing treatment. Reverend Pace said he would take Mom to her friend Hilda’s as soon as they were finished and Mom had told her brother good night.
Susan and I had driven separate cars, and I rode home accompanied only by my thoughts. The case retreated to the back of my brain as the impact of Mom’s proposal to leave the funeral home launched a barrage of questions I should have been preparing for. How much would Mom and Uncle Wayne need to buy into a place like Alderway? What was the monthly fee? How could she access her equity in the property of the funeral home without hurting the resources and cash flow of our business? What would Uncle Wayne’s share be and how much could he contribute? That question brought me to the sobering corollary—would Uncle Wayne even be here?
The case, Uncle Wayne’s illness, and Mom’s future were all swept from my mind when I drove up the driveway to our house and saw Archie Donovan’s Lexus parked by the front porch. Susan pulled in behind me and I knew she was asking the same question: what was Archie doing here at nine o’clock at night?
The interior courtesy lights of the Lexus came on as Archie opened the door. Susan had turned on the porch lights when she’d swung by to feed Democrat, and Archie stepped up into their glow and waved like we were visiting him.
“Hi, Susan,” he said with a nervous smile. “Barry, I left you a voice message but you must not have checked it.”
“We’ve been at the hospital.”
“Oh, of course.” He stepped back to clear a path to the front door. “How’s Wayne doing?”
“Not so well. He’s contracted pneumonia.”
“Gosh. I’m really sorry to hear that. Can I do something? Take care of the dog?”
“We’re all right. What do you need?”
He glanced at Susan as if she might be a foreign spy.
“Would you like a glass of wine?” she asked him. “Or I could put on a fresh pot of coffee.”
“No, thanks. I just need to talk to Barry a few minutes.”
“Very well. But if you change your mind, I’ll be up a little while longer.” She unlocked the door and left it open behind her.
I appreciated her subtle reminder that it was late.
“You want to come in?” I asked Archie.
He walked to the front door and closed it. “Barry,” he whispered, his voice quivering. “I heard about Sonny. Shot dead, right in his own bed.”
“Yes. I meant to call you.”
Archie’s eyes were wide, reflecting the yellow cast of the porch lights. “If someone silenced Sonny, do you think they could be coming after me?”
“I don’t see how. Sonny hadn’t told you anything yet. No one knew you were planning to talk to him.”
Archie looked away. His silence spoke a message that made my stomach turn.
“Archie. No one knew, right?”
“I didn’t tell anyone about the food stamp scam.”
“Who did you tell what?”
“I swore to keep it a secret.”
“Then why the hell are you on my doorstep?”
Archie took in a staggered breath. “Because I’m afraid. I’m caught between professional standards of client confidentiality and what is probably coincidence.”
“And you don’t want to bet your life on a coincidence.”
He nodded.
“Let’s start with what you said.”
“Well, this client had read my Letters from a Gainesboro Jail blog and asked me if I’d seen the man whose father attacked Commissioner James. Like you suggested, I said that Sonny wasn’t in the next cell. Just that our paths had crossed.”
“And?”
“I said I’d told him I was a robber because I didn’t want someone like him knowing my identity. I said Sonny had been impressed and wanted to talk to me after his release. He had information that he wouldn’t tell anyone else.”
I could hear Archie telling his client those words, making himself seem important, the James Bond of Gainesboro.
“This was last night,” I said. “When I called you and you couldn’t talk.”
“Yes.” Archie paced back and forth on the porch. “But these people wouldn’t have known Sonny or Toby. They were just curious.”
“So, you tell them you’re going to have a secret conversation with Sonny, and then during the night, Sonny’s murdered. Did you say you were doing this on your own?”
He grimaced. “I said it was undercover work.”
“For who?”
“I just said for the big boys.”
“Jesus, Archie. The FBI? Why would you fabricate such an outrageous claim?”
“I never said FBI.”
“Well, I don’t think ‘big boys’ conjures up the image of the Laurel County Sheriff’s Department. What guarantee do you have that your client didn’t tell someone else?”
“Because I learned a secret from them.”
“Them?”
“Yes. And their secret is more important than what I told them. That’s why they wouldn’t tell. At least I thought they wouldn’t tell.”
“Until you learned about Sonny.”
“Like I said, I’m caught between client confidentiality and what’s probably a coincidence.”
“No. You’re caught between client confidentiality and an obstruction of justice charge.”
“Barry, I promised them. They asked me if our meeting was a privileged conversation like with a lawyer or a priest.”
“You’d better find a lawyer and a priest,” I snapped. Then the phrase triggered a memory—Janet Sinclair asking me the same question in our funeral home six weeks before.
I got up in Archie’s face. “The Sinclairs. Your clients are the Sinclairs.”
He jumped back like I’d jabbed him with a cattle prod. “How did you know?”
“Never mind that. Tell me this secret or I’m arresting you right now.”
He looked over his shoulder at the front door as if Susan might be eavesdropping behind it. “Their identities,” he whispered. “They’re not who they say t
hey are. They’re in the Witness Protection Program.”
Chapter Twelve
As soon as Archie told me the Witness Protection story, I called Tommy Lee. He insisted we meet immediately, and so at ten that night, Archie, Tommy Lee, and I sat in the great room of my log home and analyzed the veracity and implications of this unexpected development. Susan had retired to our bedroom, understanding the confidentiality of our conversation and knowing I would have done the same if one of her patients had dropped by for an urgent medical consultation.
I brewed a pot of coffee and set out a bowl of pretzels, giving Democrat a warning glare not to touch them. The dog whined and retreated to his cushion in front of the hearth.
Tommy Lee got right to the point. “Tell me how your stint in jail even came up with the Sinclairs?”
Archie rubbed his sweaty palms on his thighs. “The charity fundraiser. The Sinclairs made the ten thousand-dollar donation.”
“You said you were going to get a certified bank check today. Why did they need to see you last night?”
“Mr. Sinclair called me yesterday afternoon and asked to meet. He apologized for calling on Labor Day, but said his wife had made the donation without considering their cash flow needs. They had every intention of honoring the commitment to the kids and that perhaps I could help.”
“How?”
“He wouldn’t say over the phone. He said it would be better if we could meet in my office.”
“Were they a long-standing client?” Tommy Lee asked.
“No. I’d never met them before. Mrs. Sinclair had called for an appointment a month or so ago. It didn’t get on my schedule and so I missed it. I apologized, but she never rescheduled.”
“The Monday after the Fourth of July,” I interjected. “The morning you met me about the float idea.”
Both Tommy Lee and Archie looked at me with surprise.
“How come you remember that?” Tommy Lee asked.
“Because Janet Sinclair came to the funeral home to inquire about pre-planning for her and her husband. She showed up early claiming her insurance agent didn’t keep a meeting.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” Archie said defensively. “She requested the meeting the night before by leaving a message on our answering machine. I didn’t get it till after you and I met, Barry.”
“When did she make the funeral home appointment?” Tommy Lee asked me.
“That morning,” I said. “My mother took the call before I arrived. I really didn’t know anything before sitting down with her.” I explained her strange request not to involve a New Jersey funeral home and to deal directly with the cemetery. I also said the cemetery had no record of plots owned by a Sinclair family.
Tommy Lee leaned forward in his chair and snagged a pretzel. “That’s consistent with WITSEC.” He used the short word commonly used for the program. “A new name severs all ties and they’ll probably have to offer the cemetery some proof of their former identities.”
“She said the surviving spouse would give instructions, or an attorney would provide the information in the case of simultaneous deaths.”
Tommy Lee chewed the pretzel and chased it with a sip of black coffee. “If they were in WITSEC, the burial instructions probably give their real names, and your contact with the cemetery would create a lower profile than your dealing with a local funeral home. That would protect the surviving spouse.” He turned to Archie. “But I don’t understand why they confided in you.”
“Like you said, new identities shut the door on the old. They told me the U.S. Marshals helped them get some assets moved into the new names, specifically bank accounts. Mr. Sinclair stressed they weren’t criminals, but that he was an innocent accountant who discovered anomalies in a client’s books who turned out to be laundering money for the mob. His testimony put some chieftains away but at the cost of being on a hit list.”
“Okay,” Tommy Lee said, “but what does that have to do with you?”
“Some assets didn’t get transferred. Specifically, three insurance policies. A policy on the husband, another on the wife, and a second-to-die policy on both of them.”
“Better explain that last one.”
“It insures two lives but doesn’t pay out till the second person dies. You get more insurance for less money because odds are one spouse might significantly outlive the other, and it mitigates what could be some health concerns if one of the two is a higher risk. They told me the beneficiary of that policy was the ASPCA. They’re very charity-minded.”
“Why don’t they just apply for new policies under their new names?”
Archie looked at us like we couldn’t understand that two plus two equals four. “Money. There’s a lot of cash trapped in those policies. Each was a single premium and they dumped three hundred thousand in each. That means they paid enough so that no additional premiums are needed. The cash in the policy will grow tax-sheltered and unreported. The death benefit will be paid tax-free, and I don’t know the face values but they might be two or three times the premium. But now they have no control over them. How do you make a claim when a strange name is on the death certificate? How do you borrow against the value or surrender the policy if your name no longer matches that of the owner?”
“Have you seen these policies?”
“No. They described them exactly the way I described them to you.”
“So, you don’t know the Sinclairs’ original names?”
“No.”
Tommy Lee looked at me and shook his head. “Somehow that just doesn’t sound right.”
“Well, it is,” Archie exclaimed. “It’s a great financial planning tool, if you remember not to piss off the mob.”
I didn’t doubt Archie’s assessment. It sounded better than mechanic Harold Carson’s advice to invest your money in a pickup truck. But I was getting the same vibes as Tommy Lee. “That seems like a lot of money for an accountant to earn.”
“Evidently, his wife had a sizable inheritance,” Archie said.
“What’s his job now?” Tommy Lee asked.
“He’s a manufacturer’s rep for a line of sportswear. He said the marshals helped him get the job and he covers North and South Carolina and Georgia. Mrs. Sinclair helps him with his paperwork. The new life’s going fine, but they’d like the financial security of owning those policies again. That’s where they’ll pull the ten thousand for the Girls and Boys Clubs.”
“What could you do to help them?” Tommy Lee asked.
Archie grinned. “I came up with an option. I mean the policies are theirs. They should be able to get them back.”
“You care to explain?”
His smile faltered. “I mean I outlined a possibility. I didn’t tell them they should do it.”
Tommy Lee grunted. “Sounds like this option has legality issues.”
Archie shook his head. “No. Not since all the names are the same people. Look, you can’t transfer ownership to another person without triggering a tax event. The insurance companies would report it. It needs to be an exchange involving the same individuals, like rolling over an IRA. But the Sinclairs can’t do that because of their name change. So, I said they could form a corporation and list the owners or officers as themselves—and their old identities—four people. You can transfer a policy into a corporation as long as the original owners are corporate officers.”
Archie stared at us like we should now see the obvious. Tommy Lee and I just stared back.
“So,” Archie continued, “the Sinclairs set up a corporation. They can do that easily through an online service that will even file it with the North Carolina Secretary of State. They add their old identities as two officers and then file an ownership transfer to the corporation. The names match, the insurance company is satisfied it was a permitted transfer, and the Sinclairs are one step closer. Then they document that the old identities le
ave the corporation, but ownership stays with the corporation owned solely by the Sinclairs. They now have control in their new names.” Archie raised his hands, palms up. “Problem solved.”
I looked at Tommy Lee. I didn’t know insurance regulations, but it sounded plausible.
Tommy Lee let out a long breath. “Impressive. But, Archie, you know what you’ve done?”
“Sure. Freed up ten thousand dollars for our kids.”
“Maybe. You also explained how to launder hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Archie paled. “No. It was their money.”
“But you don’t know the source. You’re trusting their word. These are the people you told you’d be talking to Sonny. If they murdered him, do you think they’d hesitate to lie about their finances?”
Archie ran the tip of his tongue over his dry lips. “Well, check with the marshals. They can tell you if they’re innocent people.”
“I’ll tell you what the marshals will say. ‘We can neither confirm nor deny.’ Marshals have one responsibility—to protect their witnesses. They won’t tell you who’s in the program and they won’t even tell you if someone left the program. WITSEC participants sever all ties with their old world. To do otherwise voids their protection. Just by telling you, the Sinclairs violated the agreement. If I check with the marshals, they’ll stonewall me. And I’m a fellow officer of the law. Then they’ll go straight to the Sinclairs. Who do you think that loops back to?”
Archie swallowed. “Me.”
“That’s the way I see it.”
Archie’s gaze shot back and forth between Tommy Lee and me like he was watching a high-speed tennis match. “Well, what are you going to do about it?”
Tommy Lee shrugged. “Not my problem. You’re the one who couldn’t keep a secret. You’re the one who bragged you were going to talk to Sonny. What are you going to do about it?”
“Send Gloria and the girls to her mother’s in Weaverville. Demand round-the-clock police protection for me till you arrest these people.”
“On what charge? Talking to an insurance agent?”
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