"Right. And all along this case felt to me like one with a financial motive."

"Your dream," she said. "Remember? Too much money.' "

"Uh-huh. And now it's turned on its head, because as a motive it strikes me as too little money. It's just not enough to kill for." She started to say something and I held up a hand to cut her off. "I know, people get killed every day for chump change. Two guys buy a bottle of Night Train and argue over the change, and one stabs the other. A mugger shoots a guy who was trying to hang on to his wallet and takes five dollars off the corpse. But that's different. The people who commit crimes like that don't have sixty thousand dollars to invest. They don't live in suburbs in the Midwest and fly to New York to kill strangers."

"That's not what I was going to say."

"Oh."

"I was going to say it's not enough to kill for if you just do it once. But if you take the proceeds and buy another policy-do you see what I mean? If you wait for nature to take its course, you get your twenty-five-percent return in somewhere between one and two years. But if you speed things up and get it in four or five months, and then buy another policy and repeat the process-"

"You're making your money grow rapidly."

"But you still can't see it."

"Not really," I said. "Anyway, aside from that one policy, Illinois Sentinel Life never heard of Mr. Havemeyer of Lakewood. So if he's done this before it's been with other companies, and I couldn't even begin to look for his traces. How many insurance companies are there in the country?"

"Too many."

"TJ would tell me it's possible to hack your way into some insurance company computer network and learn everything you could possibly want to know without leaving your desk. And maybe it is, if you've got the Kongs' expertise and a few thousand dollars' worth of computer equipment to play with, and if you don't mind committing felonies left and right. In the meantime-"

"He didn't purchase a policy issued by, what was it, Illinois Sentinel?"

"That's right. So?"

"But he may well have participated in other viatical transactions involving other insurers. Wouldn't he have gone through the same broker?"

"Oh, for God's sake," I said. "Why didn't I think of that?"

20

I called Viaticom a few minutes after nine the next morning and got a recording advising me that their office hours were from nine to five. I looked at my watch, frowned, and then remembered the time difference. It was an hour earlier in Texas. I waited an hour and called again, and the woman who answered was the same cowgirl who'd put me on hold the day before. I asked for Gary and she wanted to know my name. I gave it to her, and she put me on hold again.

I was there for a while. When she came back on the line to tell me that Gary was out, her voice was different, thick with suppressed anger. She didn't like having to lie, and she was irritated with me for putting her in such a position.

I asked when she expected him. "I'm sure I don't know," she said, angrier than ever.

I went through the motions, giving her my number although she hadn't bothered to ask for it, asking that she have Gary call me as soon as possible. I didn't think he would, and a little before noon I stopped waiting for his call.

Nancy Chang at the Chase had wondered if I'd have to go to Arlington. Or could I let my fingers do the walking? My fingers didn't seem equal to the task, but that didn't necessarily mean I had to get on an airplane.

I called Wally Donn at Reliable. We'd spoken briefly after the Whitfield-as-Will story broke, and he said now that he still couldn't get over it. "The son of a bitch," he said. "You know what he did? He hired us to protect him from himself. And we wound up looking bad when we couldn't do it. And now we look worse than ever, because we were right next to him and didn't have a clue what was going on."

"Look on the bright side," I said. "Now there's no reason in the world why you can't bill the estate."

"Which I've already done, and don't think I didn't pad it just a little to cover the aggravation factor. Now the question is will they pay it, and I'm not holding my breath."

I asked him to recommend a PI in the vicinity of Arlington, Texas, and he came up with a fellow named Guy Fordyce. He was based in Fort Worth, with an office on Hemphill.

"Wherever the hell that is," Wally said.

I reached Fordyce. He sounded gruff and competent and said he had an open slot the following morning. "I could try calling him this afternoon," he said, "but I can't see why I'd have any better luck than you did. Be more effective if I walk in unannounced."

* * *

He called the next day around noon. I was out at the time and got back to find his message on my machine. I called his office and got someone who said she'd beep him. I waited, and a few minutes later the phone rang and it was him.

"Slippery little prick," he said. "I made a couple of calls yesterday just to find out who I was dealing with, and what I learned about Gary Garrison didn't make me yearn to go bass fishing with him. The consensus is that what he's doing with this viatical shit is legitimate enough, but there's something about the whole deal that makes the average citizen want to puke."

"I know what you mean."

"And Garrison himself has a checkered past. He sold penny stocks for a while and got sued a few times and had to face criminal fraud charges on two occasions. Charges dropped both times, but that's not the same as saying he's squeaky clean."

"No."

"There's been some pressure locally to either outlaw these viaticals or regulate the shit out of them. Meanwhile, Garrison's doing a hell of a business, and his end of it's higher than a middleman's probably ought to be. That's one of the things they want to regulate."

"I figured he was making out all right for himself."

"You bet he is. So he's in a funny position, wanting publicity because it means more sales and looking to keep a low profile for fear that the regulators are going to regulate him right out of business. And even if this particular operation's honest, the man's used to being a crook, so it's second nature for him to weasel out of answering a direct question."

"One of nature's noblemen," I said.

"Oh, he's a prince. I let him start out thinking I was an investor, and then he just might have formed the impression that I was an investigator from a state agency I didn't get around to naming, and he got real cooperative. He's done business with your William Havemeyer three times in all. The transactions involved policies with three different insurance companies."

He gave me names and addresses and dates and numbers. In addition to Byron Leopold, the men in whose lifespan William Havemeyer had a vested interest included a San Franciscan named Harlan Phillips and a Eugene, Oregon, resident named John Wilbur Settle. Phillips was insured by Massachusetts Mutual, while Settle's coverage was with Integrity Life and Casualty.

"Life and casualty," I said.

"Yeah, they go hand in hand, don't they? I regret to say I don't know what's become of either of these gentlemen. Garrison can't say if they're alive or dead. He doesn't follow up. Once the policy's changed ownership and the transaction's completed, it's out of his hands."

"It won't be hard to find out the rest of it."

"Just make a few calls."

"Right."

He told me what all of this was going to cost me, and said he'd put a bill in the mail. The price seemed reasonable enough, and certainly came to a good deal less than what I would have spent flying there myself. I told him as much and thanked him for his efforts.

"Any time," he said. "Mind if I ask what you think you're looking at here? Is your boy Havemeyer setting these people up and knocking them off?"

"That's the way it feels," I said. "But it all depends on what I learn from the insurance companies."

"That's a point. If Phillips and Settle are still alive and taking nourishment, that'd weaken the theory some, wouldn't it?"

* * *

But they were both dead.

I got excited at first. I had a line on a serial murderer, I knew his name and where he lived, and nobody else in the world even suspected he existed. I got a rush right in the old ego. When I broke this one I'd have the media dogging me again, and this story would be national, not just local. Maybe, I thought, instead of slipping out the service entrance I ought to meet the onslaught head-on. Maybe I should welcome the attention and make the most of it.

Amazing what a mind can do if you give it half a chance. In less time than it takes to tell about it I had myself guesting on Letterman and doing a cameo on "Law and Order." I could see myself sitting across the table from Charlie Rose, explaining the workings of the criminal mind. I just about had myself racing around the country on a book tour before it struck me that the deaths of Harlan Phillips and John W. Settle weren't quite enough to get William Havemeyer indicted for murder.

Because they were supposed to die. They'd had AIDS, both of them, and it had been sufficiently advanced as to meet the medical criteria established by the viatical transaction brokers. Just because they were dead didn't mean Havemeyer killed them. Mother Nature could have beaten him to the punch.

So I made some more phone calls, and what I learned saved me from having to make the tough choice between "Inside Edition" and "Hard Copy." Harlan Phillips had died in a hospice in the Mission District, two years and eight months after having been diagnosed with AIDS, and just short of a year after assigning his Mass Mutual policy to William Havemeyer. John Wilbur Settle, treating himself to a trip abroad, no doubt with the windfall that blew his way when Havemeyer bought his policy, was one of eighty-four people drowned when a Norwegian passenger ferry caught fire, burned, capsized, and sank in the Baltic Sea.

I remembered the incident, though I hadn't paid a great deal of attention to it at the time. I went to the library and determined that the fire had broken out as a result of a failure of the ship's electrical system, that the ship had been carrying a load of passengers slightly in excess of its legal capacity, and that many of them were described as holiday revelers, which is often a nonjudgmental way of saying everybody was drunk. Rescue efforts were delayed as a result of a communications snafu, but were nevertheless reasonably successful, with over nine hundred passengers and crew members surviving. Of an even dozen Americans aboard, three were casualties, and the paper of record dutifully supplied their names. They were Mr. and Mrs. D. Carpenter, of Lafayette, Louisiana, and Mr. J. Settle, of Eugene, Oregon.

Somehow I couldn't see Bad Billy Havemeyer flying off to Oslo, then sneaking aboard the SS Magnar Syversen and crossing a couple of wires in the engine room. Nor could I picture him at Phillips's bedside in San Francisco, ripping out IVs, say, or pressing a pillow over a ravaged face.

* * *

I left the library and just walked for a while, not really paying much attention to where I was going. It was cold out and the wind had a nasty edge to it, but the air was fresh and clean the way it gets when there's a north wind blowing.

When I got home there was a message on the machine. Marty McGraw had called and left a number. I called him back and he said he just wanted to keep in touch. What was I working on these days?