by Ed McBain
“Oh. Right. Oops.”
“Oops?”
“The Whitleys died on Sunday. The show’s on at four then. But it’s on at seven during the week, just after the business report. I checked the NPR program guide.”
The captain asked, “And the articles about euthanasia? The ones they found in her house?”
“Planted. Her fingerprints weren’t on them. Only glove-print smudges. The stolen Luminux bottle too. No prints. And, according to the inventory, those drugs disappeared from the clinic when Mac was out of town. Naw, she didn’t have anything to do with the scam. It was Farley and Sheldon.”
LaTour continued, “Quite a plan. Slipping the patients drugs, getting them to change their wills, then kill themselves and clean up afterwards.
“They did it all themselves? Farley and Sheldon?”
LaTour shook his head. “They must’ve hired muscle or used somebody in the foundation for the dirty work. We got four of ’em in custody. But they clammed up. Nobody’s saying anything.” LaTour sighed. “And they got the best lawyers in town. Big surprise, with all the fucking money they’ve got.”
Tal said, “So, anyway, I knew Mac was being set up. But we still couldn’t figure what was going on. You know, in solving an algebra problem you look for common denominators and—”
“Again with the fucking math,” LaTour grumbled.
“Well, what was the denominator? We had two couples committing suicide and leaving huge sums of money to charities—more than half their estates. I looked up the statistics from the NAEPP.”
“The—”
“The National Association of Estate Planning Professionals. When people have children, only two percent leave that much of their estate to charities. And even when they’re childless, only twelve percent leave significant estates—that’s over ten million dollars—to charities. So that made me wonder what was up with these nonprofits. I called the guy at the SEC I’ve been working with and he put me in touch with the people in charge of registering charities in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Delaware. I followed the trail of the nonprofits and found they were all owned ultimately by the Lotus Research Foundation. It’s controlled by Farley and Sheldon. I checked them out. Sheldon was a rich cardiologist who’d been sued for malpractice a couple of times and been investigated for some securities fraud and insider trading. Farley? . . . Okay, now he was interesting. A crackpot. Trying to get funding for some weird cloning theory. I’d found his name on a card for the Lotus Foundation at the Whitleys’. It had something to do with alternative medical treatment but it didn’t say what specifically.”
LaTour explained about checking with Mac and the other Cardiac Support Center patients to see if they’d heard from the foundation. That led them to Covey.
“Immortality,” Dempsey said slowly. “And people fell for it.”
Together forever. . . .
“Well, they were pretty doped up on Luminux, remember,” Tal said.
But LaTour offered what was perhaps the more insightful answer. “People always fall for shit they wanta fall for.”
“That McCaffrey woman been released yet?” Dempsey asked uneasily. Arresting the wrong person was probably as embarrassing as declaring a bum 2124 (and as expensive; Sandra Whitley’s lawyer—a guy as harsh as she was—had already contacted the Sheriff’s Department, threatening suit).
“Oh, yeah. Dropped all charges,” Tal said. Then he looked over his desk. “I’m going to finish up the paperwork and ship it off to the prosecutor. Then I’ve got some spreadsheets to get back to.”
He glanced up to see a cryptic look pass between LaTour and the captain. He wondered what it meant.
Naiveté.
The tacit exchange in Tal’s office between the two older cops was a comment on Tal’s naiveté. The paperwork didn’t get “finished up” at all. Over the next few days it just grew and grew and grew.
As did his hours. His working day expanded from an average 8.3 hours to 12 plus.
LaTour happily pointed out, “You call a twenty-one-twenty-four, you’re the case officer. You stay with it all the way till the end. Ain’t life sweet?”
And the end was nowhere in sight. Analyzing the evidence—the hundreds of cartons removed from the Lotus Foundation and from Sheldon’s office—Tal learned that the Bensons hadn’t been the first victims. Farley and Sheldon had engineered other suicides, going back several years, and had stolen tens of millions of dollars. The prior suicides were like the Bensons and the Whitleys—upper class and quite ill, though not necessarily terminally. Tal was shocked to find that he was familiar with one of the earlier victims: Mary Stempie, a physicist who’d taught at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, the famed think-tank where Einstein had worked. Tal had read some of her papers. A trained mathematician, she’d done most of her work in physics and astronomy and made important discoveries about the size and nature of the universe. It was a true shame that she’d been tricked into taking her life; she might have had years of important discoveries ahead of her.
He was troubled by the deaths, yes, but he was even more shocked to find that the foundation had actually supervised the in vitro fertilization of six eggs, which had been implanted in surrogate mothers, three of whom had already given birth to children. They were ultimately placed with parents who could not otherwise conceive.
This had been done, Tal, LaTour, and the district attorney concluded, so that Farley and Sheldon could prove to potential clients that they were actually doing the cloning (though another reason, it appeared, was to make an additional fee from childless couples).
The main concern was for the health of the children and the county hired several legitimate genetics doctors and pediatricians to see if the three children who’d been born and the three fetuses within the surrogate mothers were healthy. They were examined and found to be fine and, despite the immortality scam, the surrogate births and the adoption placements were completely legal, the attorney general concluded.
One of the geneticists Tal and LaTour had consulted said, “So Bill Farley was behind this?” The man had shaken his head. “We’ve been hearing about his crazy ideas for years. A wacko.”
“There any chance,” Tal wondered, “that someday somebody’ll actually be able to do what he was talking about?”
“Cloning consciousness?” The doctor laughed. “You said you’re a statistician, right?”
“That’s right.”
“You know what the odds are of being able to perfectly duplicate the structure of any given human brain?”
“Small as a germ’s ass?” LaTour suggested.
The doctor considered this and said, “That sums it up pretty well.”
The day was too nice to be inside so Mac McCaffrey and Robert Covey were in the park. Tal spotted them on a bench overlooking a duck pond. He waved and veered toward them.
She appeared to be totally immersed in the sunlight and the soft breeze; Tal remembered how much this member of the Four Percent Club loved the out-of-doors.
Covey, Mac had confided to Tal, was doing pretty well. His blood pressure was down and he was in good spirits as he approached his surgery. She was breaching confidentiality rules by telling Tal this but she justified it on the grounds that Tal was a police officer investigating a case involving her patient. Another reason was simply that Tal liked the old guy and was concerned about him.
Mac also told him that Covey had finally called his son and left a message about his condition and the impending surgery. There’d been no reply, though Covey’d gotten a hang-up on his voice mail, the caller ID on the phone indicating “Out of Area.” Mac took the optimistic position that it had indeed been his son on the other end of the line and the man hadn’t left a message because he preferred to talk to his father in person. Time would tell.
In his office an hour ago, on the phone, Tal had been distracted as he listened to Mac’s breathy, enthusiastic report about her patient. He’d listened attentively but was mostly waiting f
or an appropriate lull in the conversation to leap in with a dinner invitation. None had presented itself, though, before she explained she had to get to a meeting. He’d hurriedly made plans to meet here.
Tal now joined them and she looked up with that charming crooked smile that he really liked (and was more than just a little sexy).
“Hey,” he said.
“Officer,” Robert Covey said. They warmly shook hands. Tal hesitated for a moment in greeting Mac but then thought, hell with it, bent down and kissed her on the cheek. This seemed unprofessional on several levels—his as well as hers—but she didn’t seem to care; he knew he certainly didn’t have a problem with the lapse.
Tal proceeded to explain to Covey that since he was the only victim who’d survived the Lotus Foundation scam the police needed a signed and notarized copy of his statement.
“In case I croak when I’m under the knife you’ll still have the evidence to put the pricks away.”
That was it exactly. Tal shrugged. “Well. . .”
“Don’tcha worry,” the old man said. “I’m happy to.”
Tal handed him the statement. “Look it over, make any changes you want. I’ll print out a final version and we’ll get it notarized.”
“Will do.” Covey skimmed it and then looked up. “How ‘bout something to drink? There’s a bar—”
“Coffee, tea or soda,” Mac said ominously. “It’s not even noon yet.”
“She claims she negotiates,” Covey muttered to Tal. “But she don’t.”
The old man pointed toward the park’s concession stand at the top of a hill some distance away. “Coffee’s not bad there—for an outfit that’s not named for a whaler.”
“I’ll get it.”
“I’ll have a large with cream.”
“He’ll have a medium, skim milk,” Mac said. “Tea for me, please. Sugar.” She fired a crooked smile Tal’s way.
About a hundred yards from the bench where the old man sat chatting away with his friend, a young woman walked along the park path. The redhead was short, busty, attractive, wearing a beautiful tennis bracelet and a diamond/emerald ring, off which the sunlight glinted fiercely.
She kept her eyes down as she walked, so nobody could see her abundant tears.
Margaret Ludlum had been crying on and off for several days. Ever since her boss and lover, Dr. Anthony Sheldon, had been arrested.
Margaret had greeted the news of his arrest—and Farley’s too—with horror, knowing that she’d probably be the next to be picked up. After all, she’d been the one that Sheldon and Farley had sent as a representative of the Lotus Research Foundation to the couples who were planning to kill themselves. It was she who’d slipped them plenty of Luminux during their last few weeks on earth, then suggested they buy the blueprint for their deaths—the suicide books—and coerced them into killing themselves and afterwards cleaned up any evidence linking them to the Foundation or its two principals.
But the police had taken her statement—denying everything, of course—and let her go. It was clear they suspected Sheldon and Farley had an accomplice but seemed to think that it was one of Farley’s research assistants. Maybe they thought that only a man was capable of killing defenseless people.
Wrong. Margaret had been completely comfortable with assisted suicide. And more: She’d been only a minute away from murdering Robert Covey the other day as he walked down the street after leaving the Lotus Research Foundation. But just as she started toward him a van stopped nearby and two men jumped out, pulling him to safety. Other officers had raided the foundation. She’d veered down a side street and called Sheldon to warn him. But it was too late. They got him outside his office at the hospital as he’d tried to flee.
Oh, yes, she’d been perfectly willing to kill Covey then.
And was perfectly willing to kill him now.
She watched that detective who’d initially come to interview Tony Sheldon walk away from the bench and up the path toward the refreshment stand. It didn’t matter that he was leaving; he wasn’t her target.
Only Covey. With the old man gone it would be much harder to get a conviction, Sheldon explained. He might get off altogether or serve only a few years—that’s what they doled out in most cases of assisted suicides. The cardiologist promised he’d finally get divorced and he and Margaret would move to Europe. . . . They’d taken some great trips to the south of France and the weeks there had been wonderful. Oh, how she missed him.
Missed the money too, of course. That was the other reason she had to get Tony out of jail, of course. The doctor had been meaning to set up an account for her but hadn’t gotten around to it. She’d let it slide for too long and the paperwork never materialized.
In her purse, banging against her hip, she felt the heavy pistol, the one she’d been planning to use on Covey several days ago. She was familiar with guns—she’d helped several of the other foundation clients “transition” by shooting themselves. And though she’d never actually pulled the trigger and murdered someone, she knew she could do it.
The tears were gone now. She was thinking of how best to handle the shooting. Studying the old man and that woman—who’d have to die too, of course; she’d be a witness against Margaret herself for the murder today. Anyway, the double murder would make the scenario more realistic. It would look like a mugging. Margaret would demand the wallet and the woman’s purse and when they handed the items over, she’d shoot them both in the head.
Pausing now, next to a tree, Margaret looked over the park. A few passersby, but no one was near Covey and the woman. The detective—Simms, she recalled—was still hiking up the hill to the concession stand. He was two hundred yards from the bench; she could kill them both and be in her car speeding away before he could sprint back to the bench.
She waited until he disappeared into a stand of trees then reached into her purse, cocking the pistol. Margaret stepped out from behind the tree and moved quickly down the path that led to the bench. A glance around her. Nobody was present.
Closer now, closer. Along the asphalt path, damp from an earlier rain and the humid spring air.
She was twenty feet away . . . ten . . .
She stepped quickly up behind them. They looked up. The woman gave a faint smile in greeting—a smile that faded as she noted Margaret’s cold eyes.
“Who are you?” the woman asked, alarm in her voice.
Margaret Ludlum said nothing. She pulled the gun from her purse.
∞
“Wallet!” Pointing the pistol directly at the old man’s face.
“What?”
“Give me your wallet!” Then turning to the woman, “And the purse! Now!”
“You want—?”
They were confused, being mugged by someone outfitted by Neiman Marcus.
“Now!” Margaret screamed.
The woman thrust the purse forward and stood, holding her hands out. “Look, just calm down.”
The old man was frantically pulling his wallet from his pocket and holding it out unsteadily.
Margaret grabbed the items and shoved them into her shoulder bag. Then she looked at the man’s eyes and—rather than feel any sympathy, she felt that stillness she always did when slipping someone drugs or showing them how to grip the gun or seal the garage with duct tape to make the most efficient use of the carbon monoxide.
The woman was saying, “Please, don’t do anything stupid. Just take everything and leave!”
Then Robert Covey squinted. He was looking at Margaret with certain understanding. He knew what this was about. “Leave her alone,” he said. “Me, it’s okay. It’s all right. Just let her go.”
But she thrust the gun forward at Covey as the woman with him screamed and dropped to the ground. Margaret began to pull the trigger, whispering the phrase she always did when helping transition the foundation’s clients, offering a prayer for a safe journey. “God be with—”
A flash of muddy light filled her vision as she felt, for a tiny frag
ment of a second, a fist or rock slam into her chest.
“But. . . what. . .”
Then nothing but numb silence.
A thousand yards away, it seemed.
If not miles.
Talbot Simms squinted toward the bench, where he could see the forms of Robert Covey and Mac on their feet, backing away from the body of the woman he’d just shot. Mac was pulling out her cell phone, dropping it, picking it up again, looking around in panic.
Tal lowered the gun and stared.
A moment before, Tal had paid the vendor and was turning from the concession stand, holding the tray of drinks. Frowning, he saw a woman standing beside the bench, pointing something toward Mac and Covey, Mac rearing away then handing her purse over, the old man giving her something, his wallet, it seemed.
And then Tal had noticed that what she held was a gun.
He knew that she was in some way connected to Sheldon or Farley and the Lotus Foundation. The red hair . . . Yes! Sheldon’s secretary, unsmiling Celtic Margaret. He’d known too that she’d come here to shoot the only living eyewitness to the scam—and probably Mac too.
Dropping the tray of tea and coffee, he’d drawn his revolver. He’d intended to sprint back toward them, calling for her to stop, threatening her. But when he saw Mac fall to the ground, futilely covering her face, and Margaret shoving the pistol forward, he’d known she was going to shoot.
Tal had cocked his own revolver to single-action and stepped into a combat firing stance, left hand curled under and around his right, weight evenly distributed on both feet, aiming high and slightly to the left, compensating for gravity and a faint breeze.
He’d fired, felt the kick of the recoil and heard the sharp report, followed by screams behind him of bystanders diving for cover.
Remaining motionless, he’d cocked the gun again and prepared to fire a second time in case he’d missed.
But he saw immediately that another shot wouldn’t be necessary.