The search warrant for our house came through the same day. In Leo’s garage workshop, behind a shelf of paint cans and old bowling trophies, officers found a half-empty container of industrial-grade methylene chloride. Leo’s employer confirmed he had been signing out this compound for six months, consistently more than his inventory role required. His supervisor had never questioned it because Leo had worked there for eight years and was considered reliable. That is the thing about a cultivated reputation for reliability. It is the perfect hiding place.
The financial forensics followed.
The seven-thousand-four-hundred-dollar credit card I had found charged two things: monthly premiums on a three-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy taken out on me seven months earlier, simplified issue, no medical exam required, which was precisely why Leo had chosen that type of policy, and rent on a studio apartment in Florence, Kentucky, three hundred and forty square feet with a view of a Jiffy Lube parking lot, signed five months ago under Leo’s name. The ATM withdrawals I had noticed from my hospital bed were all within two blocks of that apartment. Leo was not only trying to collect insurance money. He was constructing a separate life to step into once I was no longer in his way. His grand exit strategy was a studio apartment with laminate floors in a strip of Kentucky he had never mentioned to me. The man genuinely lacked imagination.
