Chapter 50

 

The insurance man’s statement hung between them, as if a bomb had gone off in the room, leaving a stunned silence. Finally, Pen spoke.

“Can we meet and discuss this?”

“I’ll discuss the case with anyone who has relevant evidence,” he said. “The faster I close this one, the sooner I get on to the rest of the pile on my desk.”

“I can be at your office in thirty minutes.”

When she arrived, Pen found a tall slim man in a white shirt and tan business suit. Sandy hair skimmed the top of a balding pate and his pale brown eyes could be golden in the right light, she guessed. She shook his hand, taking in his crowded cubicle with stacks of folders on top of the file cabinets and two empty coffee mugs pushed to the side of his desk. One folder lay in the middle of the desk and she saw it was labeled Holbrook.

“Needless to say, I was shocked when you said you didn’t believe Clint Holbrook is dead,” she said, after declining an offer of a beverage.

Muggins was watching her intently. “People try to fake their own deaths all the time. We see it more often than you would guess. Most are males, and they fall into two categories financially—those who are in debt up to their eyeballs and see dying as the only way out, except they don’t really want to die. Mr. Holbrook certainly fits the model, with multiple mortgages on the Vandergrift Towers condo and a hefty lease on the downtown office suite.”

Pen mentally filed the information. “And the other category?”

“Often they’re successful enough at what they do for a living but they’re disenchanted. Their present life isn’t good enough. Sometimes there’s a woman on the side and the guy has a picture of the two of them running off to live on some beach in paradise, especially if there’s a dowdy wife at home and he knows a divorce will cost a fortune.”

Pen thought of the hints the Ladies had found about Clint already starting to nose around other women. Although Kaycie was hardly dowdy, maybe the lust was gone. The Ladies did know for a fact he’d been moving money around—perhaps to avoid the cost of divorce, exactly as he did last time.

“Those are the ones who give up the deception and come back home the soonest,” Muggins said. “The shine wears off the new girl about as quickly as it did the old one, and he’ll decide he misses his hometown and his kids.”

Pen was fascinated. “So, let’s say a guy does sneak away and no one’s the wiser. He can’t collect the large insurance policy, can he?”

“Absolutely not. In fact, usually the wife he left back home can’t collect it either. That’s why we’re keeping an eye on Kaycie Marlow Holbrook. You’d be surprised how often the wife is in on it with him. In his mind, the ideal situation is that he vanishes and escapes all his responsibilities. The little wife waits at home, goes through the grieving widow routine and collects his life insurance. Then she tells friends and family she’s feeling like getting out more, she wants to take a big long trip. She joins up with her husband and the two have a grand old time with all that money.”

“I sense a but …”

“But she’ll tire of it soon, for all the same reasons the men do. Missing the family, the kids. Women can very seldom disappear forever. They have to stay in touch.”

“But, she’s not dead. I mean, on the record, she’s still very much alive. Can’t she come and go as she wants?”

“She can. But eventually, the plan falls apart. What kind of life is it—for either of them—seeing your spouse a few times a year, at most. Never being able to tell anyone where you’ve gone, who you’re seeing. They crack. Sooner or later they all crack.”

“The ones you know about.”

He finally smiled. “Yes, true. If they truly did get away with it, we wouldn’t know, would we?”

“What do you do about that—how long do you keep pursuing them?”

“It’s not my job to fix somebody’s messed-up life. Once I have enough evidence that the insured is pulling a scam, we simply deny the claim for benefits under the policy and move on to the next.” He waved a hand toward the stacks of folders. “Whether Clint Holbrook is dead or not, whether his wife collects the benefit or not—I’ll still have a job.”

“Do you actually believe the wife is an accomplice this time?”

“Kaycie Marlow?” He let out a long breath. “I’m not willing to say for sure, yet. I’ve talked with her and she’s certainly playing the grieving widow to the hilt. She and her home were a mess when I showed up there. She seemed distraught.”

“So …”

“I don’t take anything at face value. We’ll continue to watch her awhile. Most likely if she doesn’t press for the insurance benefit money, we’ll let it go. If we’re not out that million dollars, it’s really not our concern what the two of them do.”

Pen nodded. Besides being pertinent to someone she knew and was trying to help, this was all so intriguing.

“All right,” she said. “For the sake of argument, what are the clues you look for?”

He opened the Holbrook folder and pulled out a document with a red ribbon and gold seal on the front, extending it to Pen.

“Death certificate for an American citizen, issued in the Philippines. Or Thailand, Mexico, Nigeria, South America or the Caribbean islands.” The light brown eyes met hers. “Not that travelers don’t legitimately die in those places … but they rarely die and their body vanishes all at once.”

Pen read the details on the certificate in her hand. It certainly looked complete and genuine.

He read her mind. “There are guys in Manila who can make a document that looks more real than the real one. You know what I mean? Sometimes they’re a little too perfect.”

“But still—”

“The guy was eaten by sharks—yeah, that’s a popular one. C’mon. The sharks ate every last stitch of his clothing, his shoes, his wallet? If it really happened that way, something would have surfaced, washed ashore, showed up somewhere. I can’t tell you how rare it is for a body to disappear at sea and never leave a trace. You remember that case some years ago, where the guy kills his wife and weighs her body down with cement blocks—she still floated to the surface. Drowning’s not a smart way to do this. We always look twice at those.”

“Good to know. Although I will tell you up front that I’m not a fan of water. You won’t catch me in the ocean on a good day, much less as my final resting place.”

He took the certificate back and laid it on the folder.

“What is the other thing that alerts you, or the thing that trips up the person trying to stage a fake death?”

“They don’t understand the procedures for how a death is handled, and there are a lot of places along the way where they slip up.”

From the research for her books, Pen could think of one or two examples. Her quizzical expression made Muggins go on.

“Think about it. In a normal death, say, a guy has a heart attack in his own bed—there’s the body. EMTs are called—there’s the recovery of the body, where it’s taken into official custody for autopsy. Then a funeral home takes charge—the disposition of the body, when it’s decided whether it will be buried or cremated. We’ve got none of that with Clint Holbrook. The very fact that a death certificate shows up but there’s been not one official sighting or handling of a body—the whole thing doesn’t wash.”

Pen had never actually considered those things but it was true. Taken one thing at a time, death involved certain steps which always happened.

“So, what about that death certificate?” she asked, nodding toward the document. “It sure looks like it was issued by the government.”

He shrugged. “Could have been. Most likely not. Forgers can even get hold of the official paper stock the government uses, if a little cash changes hands. These guys are good. Only thing is, Clint and his attorney should have paid a little more and included an autopsy report signed by a doctor, and they didn’t add the crowning touch—photos of him in a coffin and a crowd of mourners at a funeral. Lots of these fake-death scenarios include those things.”

“Seriously?”

“Oh yes, ma’am. We’ve seen it all. Well, I’ve heard the tales. When the policy is a large one and even with excellent documentation and so-called proof of the death, the home office sends an investigator, or a team, to the location. They’ve been known to order exhumation of remains, only to find a coffin filled with rocks. In one case, they enlisted the help of a cremation service who burned cow bones rather than human remains. Those folks are doing prison time.”

“What about Clint Holbrook? Is he facing prison time for this?”

“Depends. Cooper Life won’t press charges. We’ll just deny the claim and we’re not out any money. It’s not a crime to disappear and pretend to be dead, as long as you don’t defraud someone in the process. What gets a lot of these guys though is that they do commit some kind of financial fraud—tax evasion, unreported income, offshore accounts. That kind of thing. In Holbrook’s case, it’s going to depend on what he really did and where he went.”

Pen stared at the beribboned death certificate. Where Clint went—that, indeed, was the question.