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 for 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).