The shouting died and another sound filled the air—
crying. Abby stood in the living room doorway, sobbing.
She buried her face into Wiener’s body. The dog
didn’t move as her tears soaked into his coat.
Oh, shit, Josh thought.
“Well done, Josh,” Kate said bitterly.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Dexter Tyrell sat at his desk in his executive office. It was five hundred square feet of office space luxuriously decorated with the best furniture, the best carpeting, the best of everything befitting a vice president of Pinnacle Investments.
The report lay on the desk in front of him, the result of weeks of number crunching and research. But it didn’t matter how many times he juggled the numbers, he still failed to meet the return he’d promised the board. The growth in revenues would be ten percent, not fifteen, as he’d promised.
Seeing Greg Baxter’s name on the cover filled him with bile. The little shit would be loving this. Ten years his junior, Baxter was the spitting image of himself—
ruthless and hungry for success. Did that bastard think I wouldn’t find out?
Baxter had been playing politics. He didn’t want to be on the losing team and rather than fight for his successes, he wanted to jump ship. He’d been sucking up
to the other divisions.
“I’ll fix you, you little prick,” Tyrell said to Baxter’s name at the top of the report.
He’d see that Baxter’s wings were clipped before he got to scale the corporate heights. He still possessed enough clout to arrange for a crap assignment. Baxter could never be like him. The man lacked the guts and the vision to be capable of what he had done for the division.
The telephone on his desk rang. “Yes?”
“Mr. Tyrell, Mr. Edgar has asked for all VPs to be in the board room in ten minutes for the quarterly review,”
Tyrell’s personal assistant said.
“Thank you.” He put the phone down.
He wasn’t looking forward to this meeting. It was an opportunity for the big men to show their disappointment in him like parents reading their child’s lackluster report card. At forty-one, Dexter Tyrell was the youngest vice president to make it to the board. Many in the organization resented his appointment, including three members of the board. They would love to watch him fail, even at their own personal expense. They were big men playing childish games. Screw it, he thought. I make the rules. He flicked through his copy of the report for the last time.
Tyrell had been appointed to the board eight years earlier, a rising star in the corporate heavens. However, he looked older than his years, the price for being the head of a failing business venture. His mop of hair had receded to a widow’s peak with a balding spot on top.
The golden blond had withered away to leave a tangle of gray growing out like weeds in a field.
His rapid rise to success came when he’d presented the board a guaranteed surefire winner. Dexter Tyrell had seen the future and it had been viatical settlements.
A new and unique business opportunity was created and Tyrell was the man given the task of pulling it off.
Terminal illness in the early 1990s was creating a disaster area for its sufferers, especially AIDS victims.
Medical insurance policies were not designed to cover the effects of long-term illness and this left the policyholders out in the cold to fend for themselves. The patients found themselves footing the bills for expensive
treatments to maintain their quality of life. Eventually, patients unable to pay were denied access to drugs because of the cost. But if the patient had a life insurance policy there was a way out for them, through a viatical settlement.
Dexter Tyrell saw the gap in the market. His division and several other competing companies jumped to the rescue. Pinnacle Investments’s viatical division took over payment of the terminally ill’s life insurance policies.
In addition to paying the monthly dues, a generous cash payment was made to the patient. In return,
Pinnacle Investments became the beneficiary of the policy.
The cash payment could be a considerable percentage of the face value of the life policy. The percentage was based on the likelihood of the client’s death—the closer the client was to dying, the greater the payment.
And thus, an industry was born mainly thanks to the HIV virus providing so many potential customers. An industry where everyone got what they wanted. The investment companies returned a guaranteed profit. Patients
had a relatively carefree life until their death. The medical insurance companies got a monkey off their back. Everybody won.
Dexter was the toast of Pinnacle Investments for four years. People died as projected, usually within a twelve to eighteen month period, and the company collected on the insurance policies. All was plain sailing, except for some problems with dependants. The surviving
family members were often upset by the loss of their inheritance to the profit of corporate America. Dexter liked to think of it as sour grapes. It was their unsatisfied greed that was upset. He provided a public service, a good deed, and like all good deeds, someone received a reward. In this case, cash. Publicly he was the Good Samaritan, but honestly he believed he’d exploited a business opportunity to good effect.
The industry snowballed. Pinnacle Investments received the number of requests for viatical settlements in a week that it had received in a month two years before.
At the rate at which their clients died, the company was able to take as many new clients as it wanted.
But disaster hit when the medical community discovered fantastic breakthroughs in the fields of treating terminal illnesses. The major advance had been in the treatment of HIV with reverse transcriptase inhibitors and protease inhibitor drugs. The new protease inhibitors seemed to purge the blood of virus. Drugs with
names like Nofinivir, Thyrimmune, Thydex, and Xered cropped up from all quarters, with others following close behind. Dexter Tyrell’s viatical clients had the cash to pay for the new treatments with the payouts from their settlements. As a result, clients stopped dying as scheduled.
The majority of Dexter Tyrell’s clients were HIV
positive patients. How he wished for the new drugs to fail. The new discoveries meant that life expectancy could be extended as much as ten to fifteen years with a quality of life previously unseen. Patients with an extended lifeline faced the prospect that in ten to fifteen years a cure could be found. The unwelcome possibility of financial ruin now greeted Pinnacle Investments and its competitors.
Pinnacle Investments’s viatical division saw its income dry up and its costs increase over the next eighteen months. Many viatical policies’ monthly dues
needed paying. Dexter Tyrell was blamed for his short
54
sightedness. He was seen as the man who would sink the company.
To Tyrell’s credit, he’d been inventive when his back was against the wall. He’d diversified, changed his investment mix, all but stopping the intake of HIV victims
and replacing them with patients that were unlikely to survive from other illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and multiple sclerosis. Also, individuals with dangerous jobs or hereditary conditions were welcome.
Those actions and some other extreme measures
he kept from the board had averted the collapse of the viatical division. He was a hero. The board should be thanking him. But they wouldn’t.
The desk clock told Tyrell that his ten minutes were up. He picked up the copies of the quarterly report and his presentation materials and made his way to the boardroom.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Josh paced about the house on eggshells for hours. Bell had said she’d call at noon. It was twenty after. What made matters worse was Kate and Abby were still in the house. He’d hoped they would be out by now, but
