by Glenn Roug
approached Josh. Jane was too shocked to react. I felt a duty to speak for her. "Wait a minute. There must be some mistake. I can't stand the guy but he's no criminal."
"He most certainly is," Eileen replied as the agents read Josh his rights and put handcuffs on him. Josh did not try to resist. He only looked at Jane. "What are you doing to my fiancé?!" she managed at last.
"We're arresting him on suspicion of attempted murder," Eileen said.
"Of whom?"
She pointed at me and then at Jane. "Him, and you."
Jane tried to get out of bed but the tug of the wires and the tubes overwhelmed her and she sank back in. "Are you out of your goddamn mind?"
The agents carefully picked up the bag Josh had brought with him, and two bottles of drink he had given Jane. They put them in plastic bags and marked them. Then they escorted Josh out of the room.
"What is going on here?" I said. "Josh?"
"Joshua Banes," Eileen explained. "Of the Banes gang. I believe you have met the rest of them. His mother, Edna, was known to you as K. His bothers are Jack Banes, known to you as Peterson, Michael Banes, known to you as Terry, and Alex Banes, whom you knew only as the driver of the FBI car."
"I want a lawyer," Jane cried out. "My doctor deceived me. He said to come here for cancer tests."
"He didn't deceive you," Eileen said. "They found pre cancerous cells in you. That man we just picked up is responsible for it."
"You're lying!" Jane shrieked. "He's a good man. Is everyone out of their fucking mind? Bring him back!"
Eileen took out a piece of paper and unfolded it carefully and gave it to Jane. She sat down on the edge of the bed beside her and tried to hold her hand. Jane shook off her grip. "This is a lab analysis of a glass of wine we retrieved from your home the other day," Eileen said. "Paradichlorobenzene, formaldehyde, pesticides, and some other potent carcinogens. He's been poisoning you for months, Jane."
"I don't believe this. I know my fiancé. He would never do that." She shook the paper and tried to tear it up, then let it drop beside her on the pillow. Eileen looked at us and gestured that we should leave her alone with Jane. Doc and I left the room and began to walk down the corridor.
"Will you finally tell me what's going on?" I said.
Doc Minus Two searched his pockets for a half a cigar, then, realizing that he was in a hospital, gave up and began to talk. "The Banes Gang is a very sophisticated, very smart bunch of people. Other than holding down a job they could do anything. In fact the last one of them who had a job of any kind was the father, Laurence Banes. He was a corporate executive. He and the rest of the family did not see eye to eye. They loved the easy life; he was a workaholic and a very frugal person. He wanted to squirrel away his money, not spend it. One day he died of a heart attack. No one knows exactly why — he did not have a history of heart disease. No one could prove any wrongdoing. His wife and four sons collected his life insurance. Not a whole lot, but enough to allow them to live comfortably for a few years without having to work. And sure enough, they did not work. Not one of the four sons ever looked for a job. Instead they became mixed up in easy-money schemes like credit card fraud, horse race fixing, and so on. None of it was too successful, and so they decided to go back to the one thing that did work for them: life insurance and inheritance. The elder, Jack, whom you knew as Peterson, married a wealthy woman who mysteriously disappeared a year after the wedding. He got whatever money she had alright, but not her life insurance. The insurance company refused to pay without a body, and the will is contested till this very day."
"Amateurs."
"Back then, yes, but they learned quickly. The next boy to marry was Alex. Again a wealthy woman. Again a will and a life insurance policy. This time they were much smarter, though. The woman died of ovarian cancer two years later. Alex got the money with no questions asked."
"Pulling what they were now trying to do to Jane?"
"Most probably. The woman was only thirty five and healthy as an ox when she met Alex. The genius of what they did was that unlike a conventional poisoning, carcinogens leave no traces unless you catch the perps in the act, like we did Josh here. It is impossible to prove what had caused the cancer after the fact." He led us into an elevator. "So now they were rich. But the family of the woman must have suspected something because they mounted several court challenges. They had the money to pay for a good lawyer, too. They lost, but the Baneses were out some lawyer's fee themselves, and learned two valuable lessons: one, don't mess with a rich family who can sue you, and two, a life insurance policy on a new wife is always suspicious no matter how natural her death. This time around they were going to be extra careful and extra smart, and..."
"And take a life insurance policy not on the wife but on the ex husband."
He nodded. "Josh — the next in line from the Baneses to pull his weight for the family — had Jane take out a five million dollars life insurance policy on you. He purposely looked for a woman with a loser husband — no offence — so he could seem to intervene on her behalf and tell her she should not let the ex get away with financial irresponsibility. He got her to get your consent to the policy. Feeling guilty about your financial situation and worried about your son's welfare should you die, how could you refuse, especially when she is paying the premiums?"
Now I could remember her coming to me with that policy two years ago, along with several unrelated documents I had to sign. "That's true. I didn't think twice about that policy. My son, if not Jane, is my responsibility."
"No need to apologize. They're not here and I don't care. Now, back to the Baneses: what they did was — again — genius because if you go and die and the mother of your son collects the five million dollars, no one is going to suspect anything. Certainly they're not going to suspect Josh. He gets nothing."
"And then he would slowly give her cancer so the money would revert to him in the end as the surviving spouse. And there'll be no insurance company to investigate as they already paid her."
"Exactly." He scraped his grayish stubble noisily — he hadn't shaved since Crete — and led us into another corridor. I realized that he was bringing us to the exit. "The only problem was getting you to die a natural death, or at least a non-suspicious one. He couldn't slowly poison you the way he did her. Instead, he tried to learn everything he could about you. What were your weak points? You were a frustrated archeologist with delusions of grandeur. He went through your books and saw the map of the labyrinth somewhere. The idea of building a death trap for you there was born quickly afterwards: you, believing there was a mysterious new corridor unknown to science, would drop everything and rush to Crete to find out. Once you were buried under a rock, all that would be left to do is retrieve the trigger device and notify the local authorities. So a stupid tourist went where he should not have gone and found his death. Who cares? Good enough for the law, and good enough for the insurance company. And so they put together a mysterious looking envelope with a the map of the labyrinth on a pen drive, shoddily encrypted, and sent it — supposedly accidentally — to your son's mail box. He gave it to you knowing that you were into this kind of thing. But then, nothing happened."
"I never looked at it. The envelope slipped my mind."
"They didn't know that. From talking to Aaron Josh learned that you did get it. They assumed you looked at the map. So why didn't you go to Crete? Maybe you were not taking it seriously enough. They had to make sure you acted. Time was running out: Jane and Josh were to be married by the end of the year, and Jane would find out she was sick any day now. And so they came up with the most elaborate plan I've ever seen. The pinnacle of genius this gang has ever reached. Josh's mother and brothers impersonated FBI agents who picked you up and warned you about a plot to kill every passenger on a flight you took two years ago." Doc Minus Two had a desperate need to put a cigar substitute in his mouth now, and so he stole a wrapped straw from a food tray he saw on a medical trolley. He peeled the plastic wrap off noisily and held the str
aw between his teeth. "This was so easy to put together it boggles the mind: all they had to do was compose a list of sixty six people who happened to be murdered in the past two years, add your name to it, then claim that this was the flight manifest. I must admit it was foolish of me not to suspect it from the start, but that is the nature of genius that you don't suspect it."
"So now I thought someone's after me. They scared me half to death."
"That's right. And with 'Peterson's' little show, they sealed the deal in your mind. They even had him say that his attacker mentioned the Minotaur. Slowly — with some help from K's e-mails and your own son, who was coached by Josh — you made the connection they wanted you to make and assumed that the murderers were trying to protect the secret of the cave. After that it was hard even for me to stop you from going to Crete before we were ready."
"So what went wrong?"
"It almost didn't go wrong. Without me, you'd have been under a rock in a cave right now, your wife five million dollars richer and slowly dying, and in two or three years the Banes gang would have moved on to their next victim. They thought they fool-proofed it, even managed to scare you off going to the authorities. But they didn't count on you going to a private eye. Certainly not someone of