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; 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 admitted she destroyed their records at the Cardiac Support Center and that she was the one 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 known that he hadn’t called his son. 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. “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.”
LaTour continued, “Quite a plan. Slipping the patients the 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 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 — 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+.
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 four 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 terminal. Tal was shocked to find that he was familiar with one of the earlier victims: Mary Stemple, 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.