The intrusion, though, must’ve alerted the police to the possibility that the families’ deaths were suspicious. Officers had actually interviewed Sheldon, sending a scream of panic through Farley. But then a scapegoat stumbled into the picture: Mac McCaffrey, a young nurse/counselor at the Cardiac Support Center. She was seeing their latest recent prospect—Robert Covey—as she’d been seeing the Bensons and the Whitleys. This made her suspect to start with. Even better was her reluctance to admit she’d seen the Bensons; after their suicide the nurse had apparently lied about seeing them and had stolen their files from the CSC. A perfect setup. Sheldon had used his ample resources to bribe a pharmacist at the CSC to doctor the logs and give him a couple of wholesale bottles containing a few Luminux tablets, to make it look like she’d been drugging patients for some time. Farley, obsessed with death and dying, had a vast library of articles on euthanasia and suicide. He copied several dozen of these. The drugs and the articles they planted in her garage—insurance in case they needed somebody to take the fall.
Which they had. And now the McCaffrey woman had just been hauled off to jail.
A whole ’nother story, as Covey had said.
The nurse’s arrest had troubled Farley. He’d speculated out loud about telling the police that she was innocent. But Sheldon reminded him coolly what would happen if Farley did that and he relented.
Sheldon had said, “Look, we’ll do one more—this Covey—and then take a break. A year. Two years.”
“No. Let’s wait.”
“I checked him out,” Sheldon said. “He’s worth over fifty million.”
“I think it’s too risky.”
“I’ve thought about that.” With the police still looking into the Benson and Whitley suicides, Sheldon explained, it’d be better to have the old man die in a mugging or hit-and-run, rather than killing himself.
“But,” Farley had whispered, “you mean murder?”
“A suicide’ll be way too suspicious.”
“We can’t.”
But Sheldon had snapped, “Too late for morality, Doctor. You made your deal with the devil. You can’t renegotiate now.” And hung up.
Farley stewed for a while but finally realized the man was right; there was no going back. And, my, what he could do in the lab with another $25 million…
His secretary buzzed him on the intercom.
“Mr. Covey’s back, sir.”
A hesitation. Then: “Show him in.”
Covey walked into the office. They shook hands again and Covey sat. As cheerful and blinky as most patients on 75 mg of Luminux. He happily took another cup of special brew then reached into his jacket pocket and displayed a copy of the codicil to the will. “Here you go.”
Though Farley wasn’t a lawyer he knew what to look for; the document was in proper form.
They shook hands formally.
Covey finished his coffee and Farley escorted him to the lab, where he would undergo the MRI and give a blood sample, making the nervous small talk that the clients always made at this point in the process.
The geneticist shook his hand and told him he’d made the right decision. Covey thanked Farley sincerely and with a hopeful smile on his face that was, Farley knew, only partly from the drug. He returned to his office and the doctor picked up the phone, called Anthony Sheldon. “Covey’s changed the will. He’ll be leaving here in about fifteen minutes.”
“I’ll take care of him now,” Sheldon said and hung up.
Farley sighed and dropped the receiver into the cradle. He stripped off his suit jacket then pulled on a white lab coat. He left his office and fled up the hall to the research lab, where he knew he would find solace in the honest world of science, where he would be safe from all his guilt and sins, as if they were locked out by the double-sealed doors of the air lock.
+ − < = > ÷
ROBERT COVEY was walking down the street, feeling pretty giddy, odd thoughts going through his head.
Thinking of his life—the way he’d lived it. And the people who’d touched him and whom he’d touched. A foreman in the Bedford plant, who’d worked for the company for forty years…The other men in his golfing foursome…Veronica…His brother…
His son, of course.
Still no call from Randy. And for the first time it occurred to him that maybe there was a reason the boy—well, young man—had been ignoring him. He’d always assumed he’d been such a good father. But maybe not. He’d have to rethink that.
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’d have to consider this.
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 sirens.
“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 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 Farley that afternoon they wondered if he’d be willing to wear a wire to find out what it was all about—the recorder taped low on his abdomen so the MRI wouldn’t pick it up.
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 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 plans had apparently changed.
“Who’re you?” Covey now asked. “Where’re Laurel and Hardy?”
The officer who’d shoved him into the alley had blinked, not understanding. 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 we got the impression like 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 right up front.” He remembered a saying from his army days: Never volunteer.
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 processional coolly, feeling contempt for the depravity of the scam, though also a grudging admiration. A businessman to his soul, Robert Covey couldn’t help being impressed by someone who’d identified an inexhaustible market demand. Even if the 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; 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.
He was troubled by the deaths, yes, but he was even more shocked to find that the Foundation had actually completed a series of in vitro fertilization cycles, which resulted in four pregnancies using surrogate mothers. Three had already given birth. The children 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 $75,000 per placement 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 one fetus within the surrogate mother 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?”
Trouble in Mind: The Collected Stories, Volume 3 Page 49
