Nothing makes you question your life more closely than when somebody’s trying to sell you immortality.
Walking toward the main parking garage, Covey noted that the area was largely deserted. He saw only a few grungy kids on skateboards, a pretty redhead across the street, two men getting out of a white van parked near an alley.
He paid attention only to the men, because they were large, dressed in what looked like cheap suits and, with a glance up and down, started in his direction.
Covey soon forgot them, though, and concentrated again on his son. Thinking about his decision not to tell the boy about his illness. Maybe withholding things like this had been a pattern in Covey’s life. Maybe the boy had felt excluded.
He laughed to himself. Maybe he should leave a message about what he and Farley had just been talking about. Lord have mercy, what he wouldn’t give to see Randy’s reaction when he listened to that! He could—
Covey slowed, frowning.
What was this?
The two men from the van were now jogging — directly toward him. He hesitated and shied back. Suddenly the men split up. One stopped and turned his back to Covey, scanning the sidewalk, while the other sped up, springing directly toward the old man. Then simultaneously they both pulled guns from under their coats.
No!
He turned to run, thinking that sprinting would probably kill him faster than the bullets. Not that it mattered. The man approaching him was fast and before Covey had a chance to take more than a few steps he was being pulled roughly into the alleyway behind him.
“No, what are you doing? Who are—”
“Quiet!”
The man pressed Covey against the wall.
The other joined them but continued to gaze out over the street as he spoke into a walkie-talkie. “We’ve got him. No sign of hostiles. Move in, all units, move in!”
From out on the street came the rushing sound of car engines and the bleats of siren.
“Sorry, Mr. Covey. We had a little change of plans.” The man speaking was the one who’d pulled him into the alley. They both produced badges and ID cards of the Westbrook County Sheriff’s Department. “We work with Greg LaTour.”
Oh, LaTour... He was the burly officer who, along with that skinny young officer named Talbot Simms, had come to his house early this morning with a truly bizarre story. This outfit called the Lotus Research Foundation might be running some kind of scam, targeting sick people, but the police weren’t quite sure how it worked. Had he been contacted by anyone there? When Covey had told them, yes, and that he was in fact meeting with its director, Farley, that afternoon they wondered if he’d be willing to wear a wire to find out what it was all about.
Well, what it was all about was immortality... and it had been one hell of a scam.
The plan was that after he stopped at Farley’s office and dropped off the fake codicil to his will (he executed a second one at the same time, voiding the one he’d given Farley), he was going to meet LaTour and Simms at a Starbucks not far away.
But now the cops had something else in mind.
“Who’re you?” Covey now asked. “Where’re Laurel and Hardy?” Meaning Simms and LaTour.
The young officer who’d shoved him into the alley had blinked, not understanding the reference. He said, “Well, sir, what happened was we had a tap on the phone in Farley’s office. He called Sheldon to tell him about you and it seems they weren’t going to wait to try to talk you into killing yourself. Sheldon was going to kill you right away — make it look like a mugging or hit and run, we think.”
Covey muttered, “You might’ve thought about that possibility up front.”
There was a crackle in the mike/speaker of one of the officers. Covey couldn’t hear too well but the gist of it was that they’d arrested Dr. Anthony Sheldon just outside his office. They now stepped out of the alley and Covey observed a half dozen police officers escorting William Farley and three men in lab coats out of the Lotus Foundation offices in handcuffs.
Covey observed the procession coolly, feeling contempt for the depravity of the foundation’s immortality scam, though also with a grudging admiration. A businessman to his soul, Robert Covey couldn’t help be impressed by someone who’d identified an inexhaustible market demand. Even if that product he sold was completely bogus.
The itch had yet to be scratched. Tal’s office was still as sloppy as LaTour’s. The mess was driving him crazy, though Shellee seemed to think it was a step up on the evolutionary chain — for him to have digs that looked like everyone else’s.
Captain Dempsey was sitting in the office, playing with one rolled-up sleeve, then the other. Greg LaTour too, his booted feet on the floor for a change, though the reason for this propriety seemed to be that Tal’s desk was piled too high with paper to find a place to rest them.
“How’d you tip to this scam of theirs?” the captain asked. “The Lotus Foundation?”
Tal said, “Some things just didn’t add up.”
“Haw.” From LaTour.
Both the captain and Tal glanced at him.
LaTour stopped smiling. “He’s the math guy. He says something didn’t add up. I thought it was a joke.” He grumbled, “Go on.”
Tal explained that after he’d returned to the office following Mac’s arrest, he couldn’t get her out of his head.
“Women do that,” LaTour said.
“No, I mean there was something odd about the whole case,” he continued. “Issues I couldn’t reconcile. So I checked with Crime Scene — there was no Luminux in the port Mac was giving Covey. Then I went to see her in the lockup. She admitted she’d lied about not being the Bensons’ nurse. She said she destroyed their records at the Cardiac Support Center and that she was the one that the witnesses had seen the day they died. But she lied because she was afraid she’d lose her job — two of her patients killing themselves? When, to her, they seemed to be doing fine? It shook her up bad. That’s why she bought the suicide book. She bought it after I told her about it — she got the title from me. She wanted to know what to look for, to make sure nobody else died.”
“And you believed her?” the captain asked.
“Yes, I did. I asked Covey if she’d ever brought up suicide. Did he have any sense that she was trying to get him to kill himself. But he said, no. All she’d talked about at that meeting — when we arrested her — was how painful and hard it is to go through a tough illness alone. She’d figured that he hadn’t called his son, Randall, and told him, like he’d said. She gave him some port, got him relaxed and was trying to talk him into calling the boy.”
“You said something about an opera show?” Dempsey continued, examining both sleeves and making sure they were rolled up to within a quarter inch of each other. Tal promised himself never to compulsively play with his tie knot again. His boss continued, “You said she lied about the time it was on.”
“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.”