“Misunderstand what?”
“I intercepted Quinton’s secretary when she was leaving work yesterday. We had a little fling years ago when I was doing the accounting for the companies Quinton’s firm set up.” Norbett laughed. “It was a hell of a lot more than a fling. I was head over heels for that gal. She broke it off because of her kids. She felt a little guilty. I knew I’d have to break up with her anyway. She likes her martinis too much.”
“Even more than you?”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it? Especially the ones at Copper Falls Steakhouse, and they got her talking. She confirmed what I was thinking. The insurance premiums were wired to Pegasus in Grand Cayman, then bundled up and sent on to the Bermuda company, Pegasus Reinsurance.”
“Was it actually wired forward or was it just transferred within Cayman Exchange Bank?”
“Just within the bank, so there’d be no wire transfer trail.”
“How much money are we talking about?”
“That’s the interesting thing. She thinks between two and four hundred million went that route.”
“That’s a lot of-”
“Not really. It was only twenty-five or fifty million a year over eight years. Annually, that’s only a half a million or a million dollars for each company.”
“Hold on a second.” Gage retrieved Palmer’s spreadsheet from the safe. “Go ahead.”
“What I was saying was that Pegasus wasn’t all that big by Bermuda standards. You ever hear about Patrick Memorial Hospital in Houston?”
“Vaguely.”
“Quinton set that up, too. They had a hundred and fifty million dollars in a bank account offshore for self- insurance. Just one hospital. In a hundred years they wouldn’t pay out that much in claims. It was just a huge tax dodge.” Norbett laughed. “You Americans think you’ve reformed your health care system, but you haven’t even come close.”
“Did all the Pegasus money travel the same Cayman to Bermuda route?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you can find out.”
“Absolutely. Copper Falls has seven kinds of martinis and you’ve only bought me four so far.”
“Are you sure she won’t go running back to Quinton?”
“You’ve met him. He’s a little much, even for a British solicitor. He treats her like a colonial subject because she’s Jamaican. She’s got twenty years of resentment built up. She’ll come through.”
“Then see if she knows whether Quinton ever had a client named Brandon Meyer. I need confirmation.”
“Brandon Meyer… Brandon Meyer. That name is familiar.”
“How’s that?”
“I don’t know. It’ll come to me. It was some kind of shell game. Started years and years ago.” Norbett fell silent. “Give me a day or so. It’ll come to me.”
Chapter 74
Something changed four years ago.” Gage’s glove thudded against the heavy bag in the corner of Stymie’s Gym in West Oakland. Two left jabs, then a right cross. Two left jabs, then a right cross. Two left jabs, then a right cross.
Skeeter Hall sat on the floor propped against a wall, sipping from his water bottle. He wiped away the sweat dripping from his forehead with a towel.
“We’ve been doing some research,” Skeeter said. “But it feels like we’ve just been flailing around.”
Gage lowered his gloves and turned toward the lawyer.
“What Pegasus did was so novel there’s nothing in the law addressing it,” Skeeter said. “It’s not hard money and it’s not soft money, in fact, it’s not really money.”
“You’re right,” Gage said. “It’s not money. It’s debt. I told that to Landon, but he shrugged it off. He said the senatorial campaign attorneys researched how loans should be handled and claimed they’re clean.”
Skeeter looked down as though studying his shoelaces, then back up. “If this all started with TIMCO, maybe-”
Gage shook his head. “I’m starting to think I’m wrong about that. I think the tax scam was in place first and Anston just used it for TIMCO.”
“You mean for a bunch of TIMCOs.”
“We just don’t have records going back to the start of the insurance scam because Palmer didn’t get involved until witnesses needed to be paid off.”
Gage turned back toward the bag, set his feet, and then popped the rectangular Everlast label with a straight right, jolting the hundred-and-thirty-pound bag.
Skeeter grinned. “Anston’s lucky that wasn’t his head. You would’ve separated it from his body.”
Gage glanced over his shoulder. “I wish it was that simple.” He lowered his gloves and turned toward Skeeter. “You know what Landon told me? He said I was the most political person he ever met-no, he accused me of it.”
“You?” Skeeter chuckled. “Politics in this country is treating opinions as if they were hard facts and unwelcome facts as if they were just opinions.”
“Kind of like criminal defense work?”
“That’s why I don’t do it. Even so, a wrongheaded jury verdict isn’t a declaration of war.” Skeeter nodded at Gage. “Seems to me you’re completely antipolitical. Nothing seems to outrage you more than pretense.” He grinned. “Maybe that’s why you’re an investigator instead of a lawyer.”
“Not a good one at the moment. I feel like I’ve been walking down the wrong trail for days.”
“Maybe you need to backtrack a little.”
“We’ve done some. We reviewed IRS listings of illegal tax shelters and all of the private letter opinions and didn’t find Pegasus mentioned by name in any of them. So it wasn’t like the IRS came knocking on somebody’s door asking about them.”
Gage spun and punched the bag one final time. Then turned back toward Skeeter.
“Wait a second… wait a second…” Gage smiled. “Maybe they knocked, but nobody was there to answer.”
T hirty-four years old, a lifetime’s worth of money, and no chance of ever getting laid.
Kelvin Kim answered the door in flip-flops, shorts, an X-Men T-shirt, and wire-rimmed glasses. He tried to flatten his hair as he looked up at Gage standing on the landing of his creekside Tudor mansion near Palo Alto.
“Sorry to bother you at home on a Sunday morning,” Gage said, handing Kim his business card, “but I didn’t want people at your company wondering why I wanted to talk to you.”
Kim peered up at Gage. “ I’m sort of wondering.”
“I need to talk to you about some insurance RaveTron Electronics bought a few years ago.”
A call to Norbett after Gage left Skeeter at the gym had gotten him the names of some of Pegasus’s Silicon Valley clients. His own research suggested RaveTron was the best place to start, and Kim was the CEO.
“I’m not sure I-”
“I’ve seen the records.”
“I’m still not-”
“Bloomberg says you guys are planning an IPO in a few months. For you alone, probably a half a billion dollars is at stake. A little bad press about a tax fraud investigation might snuff it out.”
“Our lawyer said it was legal-”
“How do you know what insurance I want to talk to you about?”
Kim pulled back as though Gage had drawn back his fist.
“Because it’s the only one that ever worried you?”
“How do I know you’re not the one who’ll go running to the press?”
“Because I could do it now, and haven’t. And because I’m less interested in why you started buying it than
