Library of the Dead

JUNE 28, 2009. LAS VEGAS

The call from Peter Benedict rattled Elder. It was deeply unsettling to receive an offer to help Desert Life from a man he had met once in a casino. And he was almost certain he hadn’t given out his mobile number. Add to that the FBI’s sudden interest in him and his company, and this was shaping up to be a worrisome weekend. During times of trouble he preferred to be in his headquarters with his people surrounding him, a general among his troops. He thought nothing of pulling in his executive team during a crisis to work on Saturdays and Sundays but needed to deal with this situation alone. Even Bert Myers, his confidant and consigliore, would have to be blacked-out until he knew what he was dealing with.

Only he and Myers knew the extent of Desert Life’s problems because the two of them were the sole architects of a scheme to get the company out of its financial hole. Undoubtedly, the correct adjective to describe the scheme was “fraudulent,” but Elder preferred to think of it as “aggressive.” The plan was in its early stages, but unfortunately it wasn’t working yet. In fact, it was backfiring and the hole was getting deeper. In desperation, they had decided to shift some cash from their reserves to artificially boost profits for the last quarter and shore up the stock price.

Dangerous ground, the path to Hell, or at least prison.

They knew it, but in for a penny, in for a pound. And God willing, Elder thought, things would turn around in the next quarter. It had to. He had built this company with his own two hands. It was his life’s work and his one true love. It meant more to him than his arid country club wife or his dissolute offspring and it had to be saved, so if this Peter Benedict character had a viable idea, then he was obligated to hear it.

The backbone of Desert Life’s business was life insurance. The company was the largest underwriter of life insurance policies west of the Mississippi. Elder had cut his teeth in the business as a life insurance man. The steady actuarial predictability of forecasting death rates had always attracted him. If you tried to predict an individual’s time of death and put money on it, you’d be wrong too often to make a consistent profit. To get around trying to figure out an individual’s risk, insurers relied instead on the “law of large numbers” and employed armies of actuaries and statisticians to conduct analyses on past performance to help predict the future. While no one could calculate what premium you’d have to charge one individual to make money, you could predict with confidence the economics of insuring, say, thirty-five-year-old male nonsmokers with negative drug screens and a family history of heart disease.

Still, profit margins were tight. For every dollar Desert Life took in as premiums, thirty cents went to expenses, most went to cover losses, and the little left over was profit. Profits in the insurance game came two ways: underwriting profits and investment income.

Insurance companies were huge investors, putting billions of dollars into play every day. The returns from those investments were the cornerstone of their business. Some companies even underwrote to a loss-taking a dollar of premium and expecting to pay more than a dollar in losses and expenses but hoping to make it up in investment income. Elder disdained that strategy but his appetite for investment returns was large.

Desert Life’s problems were growth-related. Over the years, as he’d enlarged the business and expanded his empire through acquisitions, he diversified away from dependence on life insurance. He branched out into homeowners and auto insurance for individuals and property, casualty and liability insurance for businesses.

For years business boomed, but then the worm turned.

“Hurricanes, goddamn hurricanes,” he’d grumble out loud, even when he was alone. One after another, they slammed into Florida and the Gulf coast and beat the stuffing out of his profits. His surplus reserves-the funds available to pay out future claims-were falling to red-flag levels. State and federal insurance regulators were taking notice and so was Wall Street. His stock was nose-diving and that was turning his life into something out of Dante’s Inferno.

Bert Myers, financial genius, to the rescue.

Myers wasn’t an insurance guy; he had a background in investment banking. Elder had brought him in a few years earlier to help with their acquisition strategy. As far as corporate finance types went, he was a very sharp knife in a very large drawer, one of the smartest guys on the Street.

Faced with dwindling profits, Myers hatched a plan. He couldn’t control Mother Nature and all those damage claims against the company but he could boost their investment returns by “wandering over the line,” as he put it. Government regulators, not to mention their own internal charter, imposed strict restrictions on the kinds of investments they could make, mostly low-return, nonrisky forays in the bond market and conservative investments in mortgages, consumer loans, and real estate.

They couldn’t take their precious reserves and bet them up the road on the roulette tables. But Myers had his eye on a hedge fund run by some math whizzes in Connecticut who had reaped enormous returns by correctly betting on international currency fluctuations. The fund, International Advisory Partners, was off-the-chart from a risk perspective, and investing in it was not an option for a company like Desert Life. But once Elder signed off on the scheme, Myers set up a dummy real estate partnership, ostensibly meeting the Desert Life risk profile, and passed a billion plus in reserves into IAP, hoping for outsized returns to repair their profit statements.

Myer’s timing was not good. IAP used Desert Life’s cash infusion to bet that the yen would fall relative to the dollar-and didn’t the Japanese finance minister have to mess things up by making an adverse statement about Japanese monetary policy?

Their first quarter: down fourteen percent on their investment. The IAP guys were insisting that this was an anomaly and their strategy was sound. Myers just needed to hang on and everything would come out roses. So, in the full desert heat, their palms were sweating but they were holding on as tightly as they could.

Elder decided to meet Peter Benedict on a Sunday morning to keep it low-key and far away from his office. A down-market waffle house in North Las Vegas seemed like a venue his employees or friends were unlikely to frequent, and with the smell of maple syrup in his nostrils he sat and waited in an interior booth, dressed in white poplin golf trousers and a thin orange cashmere sweater. He wasn’t sure he remembered what the man looked like and he scanned each patron.

Mark arrived a few minutes late, an unassuming presence in jeans and his ubiquitous Lakers cap, carrying a manila envelope. He spotted Elder first, steeled himself, and made his way to the booth. Elder rose and extended his hand, “Hello, Peter, nice to see you again.”

Mark was shy, uncomfortable. Elder’s culture demanded some small talk but it was painful for Mark. Blackjack was their only known common ground so Elder chatted about cards for a few minutes before insisting they order some breakfast. Mark became distracted by the fluttering in his chest, which he worried might be turning into something pathological. He sipped ice water and tried to control his breathing but his heart raced. Should he get up and leave?

It was too late for that.

The statutory small talk ended and Elder got down to it. The pleasantries done, his tone was flinty: “So, Peter, tell me why you think my company is in trouble?”

Mark had no formal finance background but he had taught himself how to read financial statements in Silicon Valley. He’d begun by dissecting his own data security company’s SEC filings then moved on to other high-tech companies, looking for good investments. When he came across an accounting concept he didn’t understand, he read about it until he had amassed a body of knowledge a CPA would envy. His mind had so much horsepower, he found the logic and the mathematics underpinning accountancy trivial.

Now, in a constricted voice, he began rattling mechanically through all the subtle anomalies in Desert Life’s last 10-Q: the quarterly financial report filed with the government. He had detected faint footprints of fraud that no one on Wall Street had noticed. He even guessed correctly that the company might be trawling in prohibited waters for high-yield returns.

Elder listened with a queasy fascination.

When Mark was done, Elder cut into a waffle, took a small bite and quietly chewed. When he swallowed, he said, “I’m not commenting whether you’re right or wrong. Suppose you just tell me how you think you can help Desert Life.”

Peter took the manila envelope he’d been keeping on his lap and handed it across the table. He said nothing but it was clear to the older man that the envelope was to be opened. Inside were a bunch of newspaper clippings.

All of them were about the Doomsday Killer.

“What the hell is this?” Elder asked.

“It’s the way to save your company,” Mark almost whispered. The moment was upon him and he felt woozy.

Then the moment seemed to slip away.

Elder reacted viscerally and started to get up. “What are you, some kind of a sicko? For your information, I know one of the victims!”

“Which one?” Mark croaked.

“David Swisher.” He reached for his wallet.

Mark mustered his courage and said, “You should sit down. He wasn’t a victim.”

“What do you mean?”

“Please sit down and listen to me.”

Elder complied. “I’ve got to tell you, I don’t like where this conversation is going. You’ve got a minute to explain yourself or I’m out of here, understand?”

“Well, he was a victim, I guess. He just wasn’t a victim of the Doomsday Killer.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because there is no Doomsday Killer.”