Bull's Eye: Confessions of a Fake Psychic Detective #3

Chapter 12

Zeena's red face contorts upon seeing Vince and Jo hover over her. She tries to spit, but Vince gags her mouth with a red handkerchief.

How long has Zeena been in here?

"Her blood pressure is high. I can see it in her eyes," Jo says with the flat gusto of a doctor one day before retirement. "She'll need her medicine soon or she'll have problems. Big problems."

"Then we wouldn't want to do anything to make her heart race, would we?" Vince says with a grin. He unfolds a card table leaning against the wall and drags it over to the cot. An electric hot plate is placed on top and plugged into a nearby outlet while Jo fetches a jug of vegetable oil.

Zandra doesn't need to be a psychic to see what's happening.

I liked Vince a lot better back at jail.

"The stakes are too high, Zandra, too high," Vince says while the oil heats. "Zeena originally came to us wanting to help connect the dots between Gene and anyone who might have, oh, let's say, compromising information about his activities in the insurance business. He's been busy whacking anyone who could possibly blackmail him during his run for governor."

As expected. So why am I still alive? Why didn't he kill me already? Haven't been able to answer that one yet.

"And now you think Zeena is a double agent," Zandra says.

"She's going to tell us all about it after this oil gets hot enough," Jo says. She wipes a bead of sweat from her forehead and flicks it into the oil. It dances, but it doesn't pop. Needs more time.

"Gene sent her," Zandra says through a hack into her sleeve.

"We think so. That means he knows what we're up to, and will probably try to kill us before we can string together enough evidence to link him to a dozen or so murders we're 99 percent sure he ordered. Sending Zeena to throw us off the scent was Gene's attempt at acting merciful. When he finds out his mole is compromised, he'll want us dead like anyone else," Vince says. "The political heads bankrolling our little operation won't bail us out, either. It's all part of plausible deniability. They wrote a check for us to dig up dirt on Gene, then they walked away on the promise of more money after we produced the goods."

Shit.

"Who are these people Gene murdered?" Zandra says.

Zeena struggles against her restraints and tries to say something through the handkerchief. She's quieted with a slap across the temple from Jo. Vince gets one in for good measure, too.

The violence relaxes them. Zandra can see it in the way their shoulders and neck loosen up. They repeat the slapping until they're giddy with excitement, smiling from ear to ear. The eye contact between the two suggests they'd be partaking in more than that were Zandra not standing a few feet away.

"What was that you were saying?" Vince says after he regains his bearings from beneath all that grinning in Jo's direction.

"Who did Gene murder?" Zandra says.

"Yeah, yeah, OK. First, you've got to understand how Gene really operates. You probably know already that he takes kickbacks for manipulating insurance claims. But what you might not know is how deep the fraud runs," Vince says while Jo turns the heat up on the hot plate. The bunker starts to smell like a fast food joint. "He's manipulating rates across the board to ice out his buddies' competitors."

David was on to something even bigger than I thought.

"What do you mean?" Zandra says.

Vince says, "He'd raise or lower insurance rates depending on who could pay him the most under the table. If a business in Madison didn't want a competitor opening up across the street, they'd go to Gene. He'd up the insurance rates for that competitor so the business would be incentivized to move somewhere else or flat out not open. It'd be the same for any kind of insurance product a business or person would want. Take health insurance. He could kill or bankrupt someone by jacking up the rates for a specific person, then take payment from whoever wanted that person out of the picture. He's like a hit man. 

"Because Gene's insurance company controls most of the market in Wisconsin, he could get away with it. It also guaranteed lifetime customers, because no one wanted Gene to out them for engaging in something as unethical as this little scheme.

"Spread that out over the course of more than 30 years, and Gene's got every major business in Wisconsin in his pocket. He basically runs the state's economy by manipulating insurance rates. Nothing happens without him saying so. Not even the regulators can touch him. They've all been paid off. Now that he wants to be governor, the bodies are hitting the floor."

Holy shit.

"Taking down Gene means taking down the entire state of Wisconsin," Zandra says.

"Everything, and I mean everything, would collapse if Gene was exposed," Vince says. "But Jo and I weren't hired to figure that out. If we can tie even one murder to Gene, we'll have enough to retire three times over."

"And you want me to replace Zeena as the token psychic?" Zandra says.

"Exactly. You'd get a piece of the haul, and it'll be more than enough to hire the best lawyer on the planet to keep your supernatural ass out of prison. Justice is blind, but it can still smell money," Vince says.

Jo tests the oil again. A pop sends a speck of oil into the ceiling. It's ready.

"If you're out, you better tell us now," Jo says.

Zandra's eyes shift from the oil to Zeena and back again.

A chance to bring down not just Gene, not just Stevens Point, but all 5 million shitheads in Wisconsin?

"Count me in," Zandra says. "Now what do you need me to do with that oil?"