And Now She's Gone(64)
“Has to be soon. It’s not like she has a lot of money to just be gone forever.”
“Do me a favor. Lemme know either when she’s back or if you find out where she is. I’ll give you five hundred dollars for your trouble.”
“You think I trust you to pay me?”
“Look at this face.” He smiled big and wide and silver. “Would I lie?”
“Yes. That’s what we do in this business—lie.”
“C’mon, Miss Sykes. I’m with a big outfit. I don’t need to lie to you. Ask your boss if I’m a straight arrow and he’ll tell you ‘Hell yeah.’”
“Fine. I will.” She called Nick. “So, Stuart Ardizzone?”
Nick laughed. “Went to UCLA with him. I owe him twenty bucks. Why?”
She studied the investigator. That ear, that strained belt buckle, those gorgeous Gucci loafers. “He’s sitting right in front of me. Working with JCI on the Lincoln case.”
“He being a problem?”
“Just making sure he’s being honest.”
“Honest? Who do you think we are? Captain freakin’ America?”
After she ended the call, Stuart Ardizzone grinned. “I check out?”
“Yeah. So, Isabel Lincoln. You think she’s scamming you guys?”
“Can’t say.”
“Fine.” She stepped away from the Malibu. “Later, dude.”
“Okay, okay. Yeah, she’s scamming again. You tell me something and I’ll tell you something else.”
“Deal. I have a few questions first. Easy ones. She have an insurance policy?”
“Of course—that’s why I’m here.”
“What kind?”
“The whole enchilada—health, life, car.”
“Who’s the beneficiary?”
Stuart Ardizzone grabbed his iPad from the passenger seat and sent soy sauce and ketchup packets spilling to the mat. He tapped around the screen. “Tea Christopher.”
“Really?”
“Yup.”
“Isabel use medical insurance to pay for emergency room visits in the last six months?”
“So, that would be January until now? Lemme see…” He tapped on his iPad. “Nothing here except a few checkups with her general practitioner.”
“She could’ve paid cash, though. Or visited some random clinic.” Like Gray had.
“Yeah, she could’ve,” Ardizzone admitted. “I can tell you this, though: She filed a claim for a car accident last year. Says the guy who hit her didn’t have insurance. We paid that. Then there were the medical bills from her doctor—some quack who signed forms for kickbacks. He’s in jail for being a kickback king.”
“You’re gonna love this, then. That guy with no car insurance?”
“Yeah?”
Gray told him about meeting Mitch Pravin, who drove that allegedly uninsured Maserati.
Stuart Ardizzone grinned as he typed into his notes app. “This is good, real good.”
“You said ‘scamming again.’ She has a history of this?”
“Last year, she filed a worker’s comp claim. Says she slipped over at UCLA—”
“That’s true. Her boyfriend—he’s a doctor over there—he witnessed it. That’s actually how they met.”
“She says she broke her ankle on the clock that day, on her way to a meeting.”
“But?”
“There wasn’t no break in her ankle. He signed off on it, though, and said that she had broken it, even though the X-rays were suspect. Didn’t matter—she got disability payments.”
“She would’ve had to go to medical appointments to collect disability.”
“She saw him—I guess the doctor boyfriend—and he examined her.”
“But he’s a cardiologist.”
“Yep.”
Gray froze. Isabel’s text message. This is all about insurance. TRUST ME.
Ian O’Donnell’s hands were dirty. He had committed insurance fraud. That was the Big Secret. The liaison in the treatment room with Hot Nurse Pfeiffer was simply gravy.
Everything about Ian is a lie. Tea Christopher had been right about that, and yet Gray had believed his tears.
Blame the Viognier. Blame his beauty. Blame her willingness to believe a crying, beautiful man plying her with delicious wine.
Gray asked, “How long have you been investigating?”
“Started right before the holiday.”
“There’s an envelope from JCI on her breakfast bar.”
“That’s the check for the stolen car.”
“Is this the same car wrecked by the accident with the Maserati last year or is this a different car?”
He tapped around the iPad again. “We totaled a 2015 Honda Accord in the accident with the Maserati—gave her eight grand for it. Then she bought a pre-owned 2017 BMW 428 last August, and it got stolen May eleventh, just a few months ago, and we gave her Blue Book for it—thirty-three thousand. That’s the check we just sent. That’s the check on her breakfast bar.”
Gray’s belly felt loose and hot and she wanted to sit in the middle of Don Lorenzo Drive.