Death Benefits: A Novel

by Thomas Perry

  Evans stopped and looked back at Walker, but Walker dodged by him and hurried ahead. Walker stepped into Evans’s office and reached for the telephone, but as he did, he heard a ringing in the main office, and then a half-ironic cheer from the people gathered there. He dialed the number of the McClaren’s office in San Francisco. It rang twice, and then a pleasant female voice said, “You have reached the office of McClaren Life and Casualty. We’re sorry, but all—” He hung up.

  He sat at Evans’s computer terminal, typed in Joyce Hazelton’s e-mail address, and began to type.

  “URGENT, URGENT, URGENT for anyone in the McClaren’s office, from John Walker in Miami.”

  Walker moved his finger down Fred Teller’s list until he found the address, then turned to the screen again.

  To his surprise, the screen was not empty. It said, “John, this is Joyce. Go ahead.” She was there.

  His heart beat hard as he typed, “Have any payments been requested or authorized for policy number HO-6 135834, to Mr. and Mrs. Michael Cosgrove of Palm Beach?”

  He waited, aware that Evans was reading the screen over his shoulder, then conscious that Evans was staring at him, waiting for an explanation that he didn’t have the time or energy to give, because it would divert his concentration. There was motion on the screen again.

  “Yes. Claim received by fax via Tampa for limit of policy. Authorized for payment by Frederick G. Teller, appraiser. Check cut and sent.”

  Walker typed his response. “Stop payment ASAP.” He hesitated for a second, then typed, “Get Stillman.”

  21

  “Walker. Get up.”

  Walker opened his eyes and looked around him. The office was a momentary surprise, but his memory came back. It was daylight, and there were phones ringing. Standing near the open door was Stillman.

  Walker sat up on the couch and rubbed his eyes. “How did you get here so fast?”

  Stillman said, “I didn’t waste any time because I heard it was you that rubbed my lamp.”

  Walker stood. “Yeah. That was me.” He said, “Here’s what happened. I was out looking for—”

  “I know what happened.” Stillman looked at his watch. “It’s nearly four o’clock. Time to go.”

  Walker put on his coat and pulled one end of his tie to bring it back up to his neck, then sat down on the couch to tie his shoes.

  Stillman watched him impatiently for a moment. “That your suitcase?”

  “Yeah,” said Walker.

  “Bring it with you. If we can’t find a better place than this to sleep tonight, we deserve what happens to us.”

  They went out to a dark blue rental car, a big sedan like the ones Stillman always rented. Stillman snatched Walker’s suitcase, tossed it into the trunk with his own, leaned farther into the trunk, plucked out a folder that had the home office logo on it, and handed it to Walker. “Here, take this.”

  They got into the car and Stillman drove toward the area Walker had explored the night before. The traffic looked to Walker to be almost normal—or at least, what it had been before the storm. The streets were clear and dry, but there were many buildings with boarded windows, roofs with bare patches that showed torn tar paper and plywood. They passed two buildings where water was being pumped out through long hoses to the gutters. He looked at the street signs going by. “Hey, wait. You’re going the wrong way. The house is up this way.”

  Stillman shook his head. “No point in going there. The owners are still dead, and I don’t want to waste time talking to cops.”

  “They might have learned something by now.”

  Stillman shook his head. “They’re busy convincing themselves those two were killed in a robbery. They think Fred Teller may have arrived at an inopportune moment.”

  “Hard to argue with that.”

  “It wasn’t just bad luck. This was all set up because they knew somebody like Teller would be along shortly,” said Stillman. “Teller was sent out with cash, claim forms all ready to go, presigned blank checks, and a bunch of ID with his signature on it. One of the killers probably said he was Mr. Cosgrove, let Teller in the house, and grabbed him.” He drove on for a minute. “The blank checks all got filled in and cashed yesterday.”

  “How? The power was off.”

  “Here it was. Not in Tampa, Tallahassee, or Mobile. There’s no bank in the world that won’t cash a check from McClaren Life and Casualty. These were like cashier’s checks. Evans had them issued before the hurricane against verified accounts.”

  “Do you think they’re the same people—the ones who killed Ellen Snyder?”

  “Yeah, and so do you,” said Stillman. “It’s just a small variation on what they did to her: they send in a fraudulent claim approved by a real McClaren’s employee, then make the employee disappear. If anybody suspects fraud, the employee is the suspect—at least long enough for the checks to clear. The only difference is that they heard there was going to be a hurricane, and came in ahead of it. They knew that the phones would go out, the power would be off, and the police would be busy pulling people out from under tree trunks. They also knew that the minute it stopped raining, there would be insurance claims adjusters brought in from everywhere swarming all over the place.”

  Walker was silent for a moment. “It’s the same trick, but it seems too small. When they did this to Ellen, they got twelve million. The checks we were all carrying had a ten-thousand-dollar limit on them. Even if Teller had twenty-five like I did, and all of them cleared, it’s still not enough.”

  “Who said that was all?”

  “It’s not?”

  “It wasn’t intended to be, anyway. You know the San Francisco office sent a check for the Cosgrove house. That was two point three million. Well, there are other claims with Fred Teller’s name on them faxed in and processed at San Francisco. Pretty soon we’re going to be getting into some real money.”

  “Hasn’t the company stopped payment?”

  “Sure,” said Stillman. “I don’t know whether it’s in time, and more to the point, Fred Teller still hasn’t turned up.”

  “If you’re not driving to the Cosgrove house, where are you going?”

  “We’re going to take a look at the rest of the houses on Teller’s route.” He glanced at his road map, then handed it roughly to Walker. “Here. Find me the Dillard house. The address is 3124 Shaw Creek Road.”

  They drove from one huge house to the next. Some of the people who lived in them were at home. Two had even seen Fred Teller and signed claim forms that he had promised to submit.

  It was night when they reached the ninth house. It lay on a cul-de-sac at the end of a new road that led out onto a filled-in artificial plateau in what must recently have been wetlands. In the distance they could see tall mangroves hung with Spanish moss, and the gleam of water between the weeds.

  As they parked in front of the house, Stillman said, “Interesting.”

  “What is?”

  “Well, the power is on around here, but this place is dark. It doesn’t look as though there was much damage.”

  “Yeah,” said Walker. “It does seem a little odd. Maybe when they heard the weather reports they turned everything off and hit the road. In town, when the power came on, whatever had been left on lit up.”

  Stillman said, “Who lives here?”

  Walker looked inside the folder and read it by the map light. “Mr. Jeffrey Kopcinsky.” He looked at the other sheets attached to the policy. “He’s also got life insurance, with his brother in New York as beneficiary, and auto on a new BMW. One driver. I guess he lives alone out here.”

  Stillman shrugged. “I suppose I wouldn’t have stayed alone in the middle of a damned swamp with a hurricane coming either. Let’s go see if he just goes to bed early.”

  They walked up the driveway. Walker pushed the button for the doorbell and heard a faint chime somewhere in the house. “Power is on,” he said quietly. He reached up to knock. Just as his knuckles hit the door for the first
time, a small light went on above their heads. “And it looks like he’s home.”

  Stillman pointed up at the fixture. “It’s a security light. Noise turns it on.” He pushed the doorbell again.

  They waited for a minute, then another, but there were no sounds of footsteps. Just as Walker was preparing to ring again, the light above their heads went off. Walker said, “I want to take a look in the garage.”

  Stillman stared at him with interest, but said nothing. They moved toward the wide, three-car garage, then around it to the side. Walker put his hands beside his eyes and leaned close to the glass. “There are two cars in there.”

  “There’s room for three, and a man can only flee for his life in one,” said Stillman. He took a step toward the street, but Walker stopped him.

  “He has an insurance policy on a BMW. That’s in there. If he has two cars, or three, why wouldn’t they all be on the same policy? It’s a hell of a lot cheaper.”

  Stillman stood motionless for a moment. “Let’s look around.”

  They walked past the garage to a small terrace made of flat slabs of stone, with four chairs and a table. An umbrella was folded and lying on the stone. Walker stopped. “Look,” he whispered. “The furniture.”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s here. There were winds over a hundred and fifty miles an hour. The furniture should have blown into the swamp. It must have been stowed in the garage and brought out after. If he left before the storm, who did it?”

  They kept walking across the terrace, then into a garden. Walker could see in the moonlight that the low plants had been severely undermined by the rain, pushed to one side and uprooted by the wind. There were four small trees in big wooden planters that had been knocked over.

  Stillman walked slowly through the garden toward the lawn beyond. Walker stepped backward and studied the house as more of it became visible. The roof looked intact. There were more security lights under the eaves, then tall, narrow windows set deep into the stucco exterior in a vague evocation of the windows in a castle. None of them was boarded, but none seemed to be broken, either. He supposed the fake medieval architecture had saved them. At the corner of his eye he thought he caught movement in one of the narrow windows near the end of the house. He froze and stared at the window for a few seconds, but he couldn’t induce his eyes to see it again.

  He decided the movement must have been his own. He had been walking, and maybe as his angle had changed, it had simply brought some piece of furniture across his line of sight, or caught a bit of moonlight on the glass. He didn’t blame himself for the alarm he had felt, but he had to control it. Just because he had found the scene of a murder, it didn’t mean that every house in Florida was harboring something he had to be afraid of.

  He turned and stepped more quickly to catch up with Stillman, who was walking along the edge of the lawn, staring out at the dim, ghostly trees in the swamp.

  As he came up behind Stillman, he heard him mutter, “Shit.” Stillman bent over and looked down. “Another one.”

  Beside the exposed, gnarled roots of a mangrove tree was the half-submerged body of a man. The face was under the murky water, but Walker could see an ear, the rim just breaking the surface, and the glint of a watchband on the left wrist.

  Stillman straightened. “I would guess that’s probably Mr. Kopcinsky, wouldn’t you?”

  “Or Fred Teller.”

  Stillman had his cell phone in his hand. He punched on the power button, studied the display, held the phone to his ear, looked again, then turned it off. “The relay stations still aren’t up and running. We’ll have to go bust a window to call the cops.”

  Walker stared back at the house. “I know this is stupid, but I thought I saw something behind a window up there before. Then I figured it was nothing. But now . . . ”

  Stillman looked at the house too as he considered. “If there is somebody in there, this wouldn’t be a good place to get cornered. It seems to me we ought to walk back the way we came, as though we didn’t notice anything. As soon as we get near the patio, make a turn and put the garage between us and the house.”

  They began to walk toward the garden. Walker kept scanning the tall, narrow windows.

  “Slow down,” Stillman whispered. “The only reason to hurry would be if we found the body.”

  Walker brought his pace down to match Stillman’s. He said quietly, “It was probably my imagination.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Stillman whispered. “Run!”

  Walker took two quick steps, trying to push off hard. He flicked his eyes at the dark house to make out what Stillman had seen, but before he could, everything changed.

  A shot clapped Walker’s ears as he saw the muzzle flash in the corner of his eye, but the shot seemed not to end, because instantly the flash expanded into a brightness like daylight. The noise had triggered the security lights along the eaves of the house and the garage.

  In place of the muzzle flash was a man crouching along the wall of the house holding a pistol in his right hand, caught in the unexpected glare, shocked and half-blinded. He raised his left hand to shade his eyes just as Stillman’s body hit him at chest level and hurled him backward into one of the tall windows. There was a crack, then a crash and tinkle of glass.

  The man’s pistol had left his hand. It was still in the air, spinning to the right side, when Walker’s left foot pushed off, changing the course of his sprint to intersect with its trajectory. It hit in the center of a big sandstone slab, bounced once, and slid as Walker bent to reach for it.

  A second shot came from somewhere to Walker’s left, and pieces of stucco exploded off the house into the air above his head. He lunged at the gun, got his right hand around it, and dipped his shoulder to let the lunge’s momentum turn it into a roll. As his roll brought him to his belly, he saw the second man in silhouette beyond the lights.

  He dimly understood that this man had been waiting for him beside the garage when the first man had seen Walker break into a run and fired. Walker’s right arm was in front of him, holding the pistol on the man. He saw the man’s right shoulder rise slightly as he lowered his arm to bring his aim down toward Walker. Walker’s fingers jerked tight, and the noise of the gun in his hand startled him. The recoil kicked his forearm upward, but he forced it down, found the man’s shape crouching lower, and pulled the trigger again, then again. The man fell and lay still.

  Walker rolled onto his back and did a quick sit-up to find the man with Stillman, but the man was in the narrow alcove, the upper part of his body crammed through the broken window into the house and his legs sprawled on the terrace. Stillman was just stepping away from the window. He had his jacket sleeve pulled down over his right hand, and clutched there was a long, jagged shard of glass.

  He slowly lifted the piece of glass above the height of his shoulder. Walker could see blood running along it in two long streaks. Stillman brought the hand down and the long shard flew against the remaining sheet of glass in the upper part of the window, breaking it and bringing it down on the body in dozens of indistinguishable fragments.

  Walker gaped as Stillman stood there, examining his sleeves carefully in a way that could only be to see whether he had gotten the man’s blood on him. After a moment he met Walker’s gaze evenly. “If there were others, they’d already be here.”

  Walker’s heart was beating hard. There was a roaring in his ears that had something to do with the noise of the guns, but now in the silence, he could still hear it. His eyes were drawn to the man Stillman had pushed into the window. His legs seemed to be limp like a doll’s legs, feet pointed unnaturally to the sides, knee joints bent inward in a way that must only be possible when all of the muscles had gone limp. He felt his stomach tighten in a retch, but fought it down.

  Stillman was on the lawn squatting beside the other man now. “They’re both dead?” said Walker.

  “Yep.”

  Walker sat perfectly still, not thinking, just enduring the thoug
hts that swept through his mind. Walker knew that his life had been irrevocably altered, not just because this would change the future, but because it had already changed the past, going all the way back. He had not wanted ever to be the kind of person who did this. Everything he had thought and done while he was growing up in Ohio had been predicated on the empty faith that if he did what he had been taught—controlled his temper and appetites, struggled against the subtle diminishing effects of resentment and spite, spent his time working and learning things—he could expect something better than this.

  The enormity of what he had done frightened him. He searched through his impressions, grasping for excuses: he had not intended to kill anyone; not made a decision; not been given a chance. But his mind could not hold on to the arguments. In the second when he had thrust his arm forward with the gun clutched in his hand, he had not felt anything but the urgent need to hold it steady on the man’s chest and fire first.

  Stillman’s legs crossed Walker’s line of vision, and he let his eyes follow them. Stillman stepped close to the man in the window, reached in, and turned the man’s face. “Have you ever seen this guy before?”

  Walker grimaced and shook his head. “No.” He involuntarily turned to look at the man he had shot. “The other one either.”

  Stillman looked down at the man in the window. “We saw two guys in that alley in Pasadena, and three more out by Gochay’s house. Now these two. It’s starting to feel like a lot of people.” He bent over to search the dead man’s pockets. He found a wallet and looked inside. “Nothing but a license and one credit card, which means they’re both fake,” he muttered, and put it back.

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” asked Walker.

  After a beat, Stillman seemed to notice him. “What?”

  “They’re . . . dead. We just killed two men.”

  Stillman took a deep breath, then let it out, and said in a voice that was tired but patient, “I’m not much troubled by ethical considerations, no. I made all my decisions on the subject a long, long time ago. If somebody tries to kill me, he’d better do it on the first try, because only one of us is going home.” Walker was silent. After a moment, Stillman said, “I know what you’re feeling. It’s not going to do anybody any good. You don’t get to go through life with clean hands. I’m sorry.”