But the day came when, pulling off his socks, he saw a raised, purple squiggle on the sole of his right foot. He knew immediately it wasn’t a callous or a bruise. Gingerly, he ran his finger across it. There was no discomfort or pain. There was nothing, just the lesion, dark against the soft, pale flesh of his foot, mocking him. For a wild moment he considered grabbing a razor blade and cutting it off but that would accomplish nothing, solve nothing, end nothing. Others would follow, disfiguring his body and perhaps, as they had with Waldo, scabbing his internal organs until he wasted away. He raised his head, looked around the pleasantly furnished room, heard Nick singing to himself in the kitchen where he was frying hamburgers for dinner, watched the dusk settle in the sky beyond the dust-streaked windows. The thin black sock was still in his hand. He had not yet removed his tie. Everything seemed the same as it had been the moment before he had noticed the lesion, but it was all changed, for he had crossed from the world of the living to the world of the dying. He closed his eyes, thought about Nick whom he was now certain he had infected, remembered Waldo’s last, gruesome moments of life, and began to make a plan.

17.

17.

Plastered across the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle was the headline: Confederation CEO Arrested in Insurance Scam accompanied by a photograph of a tall, middle-aged man in a beautifully cut suit being led away from an office building in handcuffs by two plainclothes police officers. I had been expecting something like this since that afternoon, six months earlier, when I had presented Ruth Fleming with indisputable evidence that Brendan Scott had forged most of the thirty insurance policies he had sold to Western States that she had given me to investigate. Still, the scale of the fraud was breathtaking, going far beyond one corrupt agent. According to the newspaper story, the scam had been devised by Confederation’s top officers who had sent out secret (but not secret enough) memos to key agents across the country that had generated thousands and thousands of fake policies that were then resold to a half dozen of the biggest insurance companies.