Jonathon King - Midnight Guardians

“This is nice, eh?”

“Yeah,” she said, relaxing against me, moving with the motion of the sea. “And I’m sorry about last night, Max.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

On Friday, I ended up at Billy’s, doing the kind of investigative research he always likes to foist on me.

“They say the criminal element will always be one step ahead of law enforcement, Max. But that’s only because law enforcement spends so much time reacting instead of being proactive.

“By the time the DEA figured out that smugglers were sending cocaine inside hollowed-out railroad ties, they’d already moved on to molding the coke to look like plaster columns and sending it in as construction material.

“By the time the feds were warning people about identity fraud and keeping their social security numbers safe in their pockets, the hackers were already infiltrating the big data storage companies and pulling out millions of numbers for their own use.”

I nodded, and let Billy go on in the kitchen while I sat out on the patio reading a sheaf of U.S. attorney and media reports he’d given me.

“… the crime began when an employee at the Cleveland Clinic stole fifteen hundred Medicare patients’ numbers and sold them to companies that billed the government about eight million in bogus health care claims…”

And another.

“‘… while we know these numbers are being used by criminals… the criminals can use them again and again,’” said the U.S. attorney. “‘That is a fundamental problem…’”

A newspaper clipping:

“…six Miami-Dade medical equipment suppliers are charged with submitting eight million in bogus Medicare bills to insurance companies for services and equipment that were never provided to the patients. In turn, the Medicare system paid them about two and a half million…”

And yet another:

“… in sworn testimony before the Senate Committee on Finance, a witness explained how she was able to set up a sham company with three thousand dollars and obtain a Medicare billing number, even though she had no prior experience, expertise, or discernable resources for providing durable medical equipment items or services. In the year her company operated, she was able to bill Medicare more than a million dollars…”

I had already closed the file by the time Billy came out onto the patio with a tall glass of vegetable juice in his hand and a smug look on his face, the kind you got from instructors or your parents when they were proud of teaching you something you didn’t know.

“So, M-Max-what do you th-think? Motive?”

“A million bucks for shifting around a bunch of numbers?” I said. “Sure-goes on every day at the casinos, down at the track, and on Wall Street.”

Billy looked askance, lifting his eyebrow. I knew he was a big-time investor, played the stock market on a daily basis. It was one of the things we differed on: He would argue that those who got in the financial game knew the rules and the nature of the beast, and thus took personal responsibility for their losses and gains. I would counter that the financial guys also knew the ways around those rules, not unlike the criminals who can crack safes and avoid surveillance cameras to get what they wanted. It was a subject we stayed away from.

“I m-meant do you think it would be m-motive enough to put Luz Carmen in physical danger, if she were tr-trying to expose such a scam and they f-found out?”

Now it was my turn to raise the eyebrow.

“Greed, Billy?”

We didn’t need another symposium on how greed, sex, and power form the motivations for almost all the nasty thing humans do to one another.

“OK,” he said. “Then I w-would suggest you go ahead with the surveillance of Ms. Carmen’s br-brother, while I tr-try to track down some p-people I know with the FBI’s white-collar crime pr-program in Miami.”

“All right, boys,” a woman’s lilting voice came from inside. “I heard the phrase FBI, which means you’re talking shop. I have not yet left for work-beware.”

“Good morning, Judge,” I said as Billy’s wife, Diane, rattled around in the kitchen. “I didn’t know you were still here.”

She came out onto the porch dressed in a suit cut in the most conservative style, but the quality of the fabric and the way it was tailor-made to her petite frame was obvious even to a fashion slug like me. In her left hand, she held a china cup of steaming coffee.

“That fact does slip by a few of Billy’s visitors,” she said, hooking her right hand around Billy’s upper arm and leaning her face into his shoulder. Billy looked down into her eyes with a grin only a loving husband can make seem natural.

“And you’re complaining, madam?”

“Not a bit, baby,” she said, and then with a knowing smile of her own, “but the less I know about what you two are up to, the better.”

Both of our faces immediately broadcast innocence.

“Yeah, I thought so,” she said. Then she gave Billy a kiss good-bye, and me a lesser one on the cheek.

“Lovely to see you, Max.”

When the clicking sound of her heels on the tile to the front door diminished, I turned to Billy. “You’re a lucky man, my friend.”

“I am indeed.”

Their marriage had not been an easy union. As a black kid from the projects who made it to the penthouse, Billy had a tendency in his law practice to snatch up cases of injustice. Diane McIntyre was a white woman of social standing who broke all her ensconced family’s conservative social rules by becoming the first female judge in Palm Beach, where money, business, and brokered deals in smoke-filled back rooms have been a sitting foundation for more than a hundred years.

As an unemotional counselor, Billy had always answered my simple questions about how he and his wife are able to make it work with a smile and a statement: “Love, my friend M-Max, the kind no man can put asunder.” A few hours later, I had a need to put something asunder, and love wasn’t going to help me as much as a fifteen-shot 9 mm would have.

By 5:00 P.M., I was back in the parking lot of the West Boca Medical Complex, waiting to see if Andres Carmen would come out. This time I was off to the side in the minor shade of a recently planted dogwood. I still don’t know why they plant those skinny-trunk trees in the grass separators of parking lots. Aesthetics? Had to be; I’ve yet to see a Florida parking lot with big canopied trees providing acres of shade for customers.

At about 5:05 P.M., the end-of-the-day troop of employees began. Out the front doors came a bustling group that included several women dressed in those plain-cut pink scrubs that had made the transition from hospital surgery theaters and patient floors to the medical spin-off industries and learning campuses. Some of the men were similarly outfitted in blue. But I was looking for a slightly built young man with dark hair and a bit of a chin beard who’d be wearing a green version of this medical getup, the description Luz Carmen had given me of her brother.

At 5:10 P.M., I recognized Luz. She exited the building with that same careful look she had two days ago, her head on a swivel, scanning the parking lot, searching for someone who might be searching for her. But this time, she was obviously with another woman, about her size, both of them dressed similarly in knee-length summer dresses and conservative short heels. They walked to a dark red Toyota Camry, and Luz got into the passenger side. I was relieved to see that she’d taken my advice and was getting a ride home with a co-worker. Maybe she was even staying with the other woman over the weekend, a suggestion Billy had made to her after I’d described the encounter in the park. If she noticed my pickup truck under the meager shade tree, she didn’t show it. The friend pulled out, and they exited from the opposite side of the lot.