" This is Norbett.”
“What’s up?” Gage glanced at his watch as he pressed his cell phone to his ear. It was near midnight in the Caymans. He hoped he was about to get something useful in exchange for the ten thousand dollars he’d wired to Norbett.
“Pegasus Insurance stopped issuing policies four years ago,” Norbett said.
Gage sat leaned forward over his desk. “That can’t be right.”
“It is.”
“Maybe they just moved.”
“Nope. I checked. I spent a little of your money on calls to the places they could’ve gone: Barbados, Gibraltar, Guernsey, Isle of Man, and Luxembourg. Zip times five. If you’re going to run an insurance scam, those are the places you go to.”
“No companies named Pegasus at all?”
“Every constellation is represented in every jurisdiction, but not a single Pegasus is registered to sell insurance-hold on.”
Gage heard a door close in the background.
“Where are you?”
“Home. I don’t want my wife to overhear this part. She may misunderstand.”
“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.”