Greed Kills

Copyright © 2015 M.M. Bingham

Published by WMPD at Smashwords

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To Peter

The Myth of Persephone

The myth of Persephone is one of the oldest of all Greek myths. Her story is a personification of some of the most universal concepts about life and death. In her youth, Persephone represents the powerful bond between a mother and a daughter and the often-difficult transition from maidenhood to marriage. As the Goddess of Springtime and Rebirth, she is eternally connected to the cycles of the earth, which lies barren in her absence and bloom again each spring with her return. And her initiatory experience in the realm of the dead is such a powerful experience that it changes her life forever. It is after this transformation that we remember her most for her role as the Greek Goddess of the Underworld.

Interpretation of the Persephone myth by Laura Strong, PhD - her more detailed story can be found at http://www.mythicarts.com/writing/Persephone.html

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Still the Same

Chapter 2 – Craig

Chapter 3 – Reg

Chapter 4 – Persephone

Chapter 5 – Craig’s Crime

Chapter 6 – Isaac

Chapter 7 – Israel

Chapter 8 – Consultant of the Year

Chapter 9 – Retribution

Chapter 10 – Protecting Persephone

Chapter 11 – The Other Scam

Chapter 12 – Aaron

Chapter 13 – The Prentice Affair

Chapter 14 – Japan

Chapter 15 – Justice

Chapter 16 – Revenge

Chapter 17 – Getting Away with Murder

The next Persephone Stone novel

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CHAPTER ONE

Still the Same

Persephone was stiff and sore from the previous day’s 13-hour drive home from the Sunshine Coast. She dragged herself to the bathroom, stretching her cramped shoulders and legs, realising that her life had been transformed. Nothing would ever again be the same. When she looked at her face in the mirror she was surprised at how normal she appeared. Surely there should be some sort of sign that she was now a stone cold killer?

‘Nope—still looking good,’ she said to her reflection, trying out a shy smile followed by an evil grimace. ‘Still the same old bird, just another day older.’

She wandered into the kitchen and made herself a strong black espresso with her sexy new coffee machine, a recent present to herself after discovering that she now needed caffeination at all hours of the day and night and her local café wouldn’t stay open for 24 hours, even for her. This did the trick, and soon her brain started spinning up as she contemplated her new life and what had led her there.

Corporate Australia had become a consequence-free zone, she judged. Bad behaviour, ranging from bullying and harassment through to large-scale fraud was at best ignored and at worst rewarded. Even when frauds threatened to surface, boards and executives worked hard to keep the news away from outsiders, especially law enforcement agencies, scared that the publicity would hurt the company. Hidden behind this tacitly-condoned white collar crime, some perpetrators moved seamlessly into violent and even deadly action. It had become so bad that innocent whistle-blowers were routinely sacked and then publicly vilified by the PR departments of these immoral corporations in an attempt to protect executive bonuses.

If these crimes had been committed outside the corporate veil, society would demand that the criminals be vigorously pursued and prosecuted. But in today’s world, it almost never happened.

Sadly Persephone contemplated her previously successful corporate career in her adopted country of Australia. She had become totally disillusioned by the lowering of ethical and personal standards and the rise of self-serving behaviour that was now being rewarded in an increasingly greedy and heartless corporate world. She was determined to strike a blow for all victims of fraud and corporate wrong-doing. She reckoned she had already started to balance the ledger with Craig’s death; and accepted that her new career as a corporate avenger had begun.

With the reckless bravado that had marked many of the decisions which had changed the course of her life, she had leapt into action. Now here she was delivering on her promise to herself, just like Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, to make the punishment fit the crime. The trouble was that she didn’t feel as if she were a player in a comic opera. Craig, the man she had murdered, was well and truly dead and nobody was going to applaud as the final curtain came down. In fact Persephone would find out over the next few days if she had managed to carry out the perfect assassination.

But in the meantime, she had another job to do. This one was personal—but just as deadly.

‘Time for some fresh air,’ she thought, ‘and some sugar wouldn’t go astray.’

Her local café was round the corner. The owner, Vinh, was a small man whose parents had brought him to Australia in a boat with dozens of other refugees at the end of the Vietnam War. Although his outward appearance was Vietnamese, he was Aussie through and through, with the broadest of dinkum Aussie accents and mannerisms. He could, however, feign a complete lack of English whenever some patronising customer treated him as if his café were some sort of Asian marketplace and tried to get discounts for coffee and cake. Most of his clientele were local, however, and knew him and his wife Mai well. He especially liked Persephone, who not only always treated him well but spent hundreds of dollars every week in his establishment.

Mai had recently started to bake ‘authentic’ Middle Eastern pastries and to Persephone’s taste they were indistinguishable from the ones you could buy at the Lebanese patisserie a bit further down the road. She hurried in, her mouth watering in anticipation of the sweet treats waiting for her.

CHAPTER TWO

Craig

It was a typically hot and humid Sydney February day and Craig was sweating so hard he was finding it difficult to hold Brad Jones’s arm in place so that he could get the saw in the right position to cut it off at the elbow. He dropped the arm into the bath for the third time and some blood escaped from the already-severed shoulder, splashing in a crazy pattern on Craig’s T-shirt and also into his right ear. As the warm fluid ran down his neck, he lost it.

Why couldn’t your stupid bitch of a sister find your policy in winter? he whined at the necessarily silent Brad. Stupid cow, this is all her fault!

Craig fumed and muttered to himself as he completed dismembering Brad’s scrawny (but surprisingly heavy) body in the bath at Brad’s smart flat in Neutral Bay. He had paid thousands of dollars for gym membership to sculpt the lean, strong physique that looked so impressive on a surfboard at the weekends when he went to Bondi for his favourite activity, surfing. As he sawed away he thought that it was really now his second-favourite activity since he had upgraded his drug habit from dope to include cocaine and the occasional puff of heroin, just to keep him mellow. Now he was realising, however, that the exercises he did every morning to improve his appearance on a surfboard didn’t really equip him for cutting up a man’s body, bagging it up and lugging it to his car so he could get rid of the pieces. And he still had no idea how he was going to get the body parts discreetly on to his mate’s tinnie so that he could dump them somewhere out to sea.

But he would work something out. Craig was a very deliberate man who carefully and meticulously planned his exploits, both work and play. He prided himself on understanding the risks that he chose to take, and was always a patient and watchful achiever of his goals. He didn’t work in the insurance industry for nothing.

He was still smarting from the mishap that had upset the highly successful scheme he had been running at work for the past few years. He was now a middle-ranking manager in the Sydney office of a major French multinational insurance company. He had worked there for 15 years in a number of departments, from customer service to underwriting, IT and actuarial and was now a senior claims manager in the life insurance division. He was not stimulated by his job but treated it as a source of funds for his surfing and his drug habit. His fellow workers were either adoring fans of his surfing exploits (as shown on his many YouTube GoPro videos) or willing recipients of his sexual offerings. There was a deep and fertile pool of adoring young women.

All in all, Craig’s life had played out pretty much exactly as he wanted, he thought. The only problem was that his salary, like those of most middle-ranking office drones, was far too small for his many needs. Craig spent his day signing off on life insurance claims that ranged from $50,000 to $990,000, that being the upper limit he was authorised to clear. Anything from a million dollars upwards had to go to the divisional director for her signature before the funds were released. He was getting sick of doling out this money to other people while he took home an amount that just covered his living expenses and leisure activities. It wasn’t fair! He became even more disgruntled every time the local CEO was in the paper bragging about the billions of dollars profit he was making for the company and how he was going to spend his exorbitant multi-million dollar bonus on more diamond knuckle-dusters for his teenage bride.

The unfairness of it all had for years worked its insidious way into Craig’s psyche. Finally, after a particularly long and uncomfortable trip sitting in the back of a plane from Hawaii next to a sweaty, obese 45-year-old mother and her 6-year-old brat, he had resolved to get some of this cash flowing his way.

Craig was a good planner and this skill had served him well in his slow climb up the corporate ladder. He had worked on a number of projects over the years delivering ‘business process improvement’ across the company. This had given him a thorough understanding of how the life insurance process worked from beginning to end, including the potential loopholes or control weaknesses that had so far not been plugged.

Life insurance is not a good way to spend your hard earned money unless you have a terminal illness that nobody knows about but you. Then you have to hoodwink the insurers into accepting the risk. The truth is that most people in countries not in war zones can expect long and healthy lives. A fair number of them work this out and stop paying for totally unnecessary life insurance policies as soon as they can. For instance, such insurance is not a lot of use to the vast majority of young families with large mortgages, due to the incredibly high property prices in Sydney. They often take it out only because the bank insists. The banks, of course, frequently collect a commission from the insurer along the way, assuming that they don’t actually own the insurance company.

Craig knew all this, and he also knew that the policies at his company held by people who each year let them lapse was in the thousands. There was a half-hearted sales process in place that had been started just after a business process improvement project to address ‘revenue leakages’. After an initial burst of enthusiasm from the telesales team who were to call these people within 90 days of the last paid monthly premium and offer to reinstate them, it was discovered that the company only paid a bonus on the missed premiums. So the telesales people stopped doing this and only chased new business. By the time that Craig was hatching his plan, pretty much every lapsing policy had been allowed to die a natural death.

The chances of these people trying to make a claim on the lapsed policy was almost zero, especially when Craig was careful about his selection of those to back up his personal plan. The clever idea was that he produced a monthly report which picked up the lapsing policies and would select one that looked likely just before the 90-day grace period expired. He would then change the contact details on the paperwork to a mailbox that he rented in a newsagent at Kings Cross, update the premiums and then continue to pay them at post offices in cash, every month for at least a year. After that, he then ‘killed’ the policyholder.

He had decided that given the hundreds of people who died on the roads each year, traffic accidents were a useful cause of death and would not raise any questions among the team who processed the falsified documents. As long as the policy was under a million dollars, the final approval came from Craig. He was home free.

Even if the policyholders did die, the only evidence relatives would find in the deceased’s personal papers was an insurance policy that had expired over a year before. The chance of their making a claim was slim to none.

After six months of meticulous planning, going over the details of his plan time and time again, Craig decided he was ready to give it a go. He had found a great candidate. Brad Jones was a 28-year-old accountant living in a flat he had bought in trendy North Shore Neutral Bay. Since Brad Jones had a very large mortgage, the bank had insisted on a mortgage insurance policy.

Brad was unmarried and had named his sister Alice, his only living relative, as the beneficiary of the policy. She would also inherit the flat with the idea that she could use the payout to settle the mortgage.

Brad had held on to the policy for three years, but had recently stopped paying the premiums. After a Facebook search, Craig discovered that he was about to be posted to the London office of Price Waterhouse Coopers and was looking for tenants for his flat. Perfect!

Craig was excited and nervous. He stayed back late at work one Friday, three days short of the mandatory lapse date and logged on to the system using one of his team’s user ID. Maddissynn was an airhead who always used the name of her cat with the current month as her password.

He was surprised to find himself shaking and had to try three times to change the contact details before he got it right. Take a deep breath—you can do this, he muttered nervously to himself after his second attempt was rejected. Please note that you have one more attempt remaining before your account is locked and you will need to contact IT support to have your access reinstated, was the helpful message on the screen.

Craig carefully retyped each character: M e o w l y c y r u s 0 4

He took a long deep breath.

Welcome Maddissynn

Slowly exhaling, Craig made the necessary changes, logged off and went home. Luckily he had just restocked with some excellent buds from a mate of his who lived in the bush. Tonight he was going to celebrate.

He waited for nearly two years before psyching himself up to make the ‘claim’. He fabricated a death certificate for Brad stating death was due to ‘rupture of aorta, following road traffic accident’, filled in the claim form in the name of Alice Jones and placed it in the mail.

Everything worked like a dream. Craig collected a cheque for $350,000 from the post office box he had entered on the claim form and paid it into his special overseas account after ‘Alice’ had endorsed it over to the fictitious name on the account.

Then he set about identifying his next targets. Over the next four years Craig ‘killed’ another ten people and amassed nearly $8 million in his retirement fund. Following his careful selection of Brad Jones, he found a number of young, outwardly healthy people with no dependants and large mortgages, who lived in places spread around Australia. As each person’s policy lapsed, he carefully changed their contact address, paid their arrears and kept it up to date for a couple of years before faking their death.

But now he was starting to get bored. He was now in his early 40s with no obligations and his retirement fund was beckoning. The young women at work were less inclined to succumb to his advances, and his occasional ‘puff’ of heroin had turned into a regular intravenous bender every weekend. He was going to have to get his hands on the money he had stashed away overseas to begin his fully funded retirement.

But just after returning from his regular Christmas surfing trip, his carefully planned future started to disintegrate. He was having lunch at the crowded, noisy food court underneath the company building when his peace was shattered by the piercing voice of the blonde and vacuous office receptionist at the next table. She was regaling her friends at the top of her voice about an incident that had happened that morning.

Oh My God! she began. You won’t believe what happened to me this morning!

Her friends noisily encouraged her to reveal all.

This total drug-fucked junkie whore just walked in waving a bit of grubby paper and shoved it under my nose, screaming at me to give her the money. I was really, really pissed off. Think of what I could of caught if I touched it!

Ooh yuck, and other expressions of sympathy emanated from her cheer squad.

She thought that she could just give me the paper and I would pay her money! The stupid fucking bi-atch didn’t even understand that it was a life policy and not a savings account.

How can you not know that? Stupid cow! chimed in the friends.

I told her to fuck off.

Really? In reception? Did anyone hear you?

Actually I said to her: Madam, this is not a policy you can cash in. The only way you can collect is if the policyholder dies, and then only if the policy is paid up to date."

Her friends rallied, asking what happened next.

She sure didn’t like that! She told me her brother was an accountant who had been living in London and was coming back to Sydney. He had asked her to cash in the policy since he needed the money. I ask you! She was a fucking lunatic. I told her that her brother could be God Almighty and would still have to die to get the money. Then she started to yell and scream at me, saying that her brother Brad would be there tomorrow and he would sort me right out. I called Security. That was when I told her to fuck off.

Then what?

She threw the scungy bit of paper at me and ran out. Fucking useless fat Leb security guard turns up once she’s a hundred metres down the street.

Shut up! Don’t you know Shazza’s dating Rafiq? Don’t be such a racist!

After this, the conversation turned to the interesting matter of whether Shazza was going to convert to Muslimism and what colour the babies would be.

Craig was paralysed with shock. This had to be Brad Jones the accountant. What was he going to do? Where had he gone wrong? He had to get back to the office straight away and get hold of that piece of paper the ‘junkie whore’ had thrown at the receptionist. Then he needed to calm down and make a new plan.

He quickly gathered up the remainder of his chicken-and-rocket wholemeal wrap and raced upstairs.

Rafiq was loafing around in the reception area and was only too happy to hand the offending piece of paper to the important manager. Craig took it and went back to his office. Yes, it was the same Brad Jones that Craig had ‘killed’ in the random accident four years before.

But who on earth was the ‘junkie whore’? Suddenly he remembered the sister, Alice. Craig thought fast. He didn’t want any traces of his research on the company computers, so he feigned a gastro attack, apologised to his team and headed home to do some serious searching for Brad and Alice.

Brad was still living his life large on Facebook. It announced that he was coming back to Australia and would be looking for a job. 756 of his Facebook Friends had welcomed his impending return with dozens of invitations to drinks and parties. One of them was Alice Jones. Brad followed the links to find a hard-partying, skanky-looking woman who was apparently 24 years old, even if she looked at least 50. According to her version of her life, her arsehole brother was about to return from overseas and was kicking her out of his flat. She was quite outraged that Brad had wanted her to pay rent. Several of her Facebook friends agreed that this was indeed quite unreasonable.

At this point, since Craig had the policy document, it looked as though the situation could be contained. There was probably no need to worry, even though Alice was clearly a drug addict and so quite unpredictable. He would, however, be extra-vigilant should she decide to take the matter further.

Unfortunately for him, this is exactly what Alice did.

The amount in dispute, $350,000, is a large amount of money to most people, and Alice, who had already worked out how to spend it, saw the insurance company as snatching it away from her. She was so furious after her encounter with the receptionist that she ran all the way down George Street and straight into the front door of the police station near Town Hall. The young constable on duty at the front desk was not inclined to believe a word that was coming out of Alice’s mouth, due to his already extensive experience of dealing with junkies and also because she didn’t have any paperwork to back up her incoherent screeching.

However, policemen are bureaucrats and there are always forms to fill in for any situation. The constable patiently filled in a form so that Alice could lodge a complaint of fraud against the insurance company. He told the slightly mollified woman that he would give the form to the Fraud Squad and they would be sure to follow this up for her.

Alice then went back to Brad’s flat and continued to ‘tidy up’, hoping to find more valuables that she could steal from her brother before he returned.

It was a bit of a miracle that the complaint form made it out of the front office at the police station, but within a couple of weeks