Free In Death's Shadow by Marcia Talley Page A

with my laptop and a glass of freshly brewed iced tea to see—in the good old American "if it sounds too good to be true it probably is" tradition—what I could find out about viaticals.
    A half moon floated in the blue of the late morning sky as I powered up Google and typed in "viatical": 36,000 hits.
    I sat back, stunned. Thirty-six thousand hits for a word I'd never even heard of until a week ago? Where had I been? Living under a rock?
    I typed in “Tammy Faye Bakker." Only 8,660 hits, and everybody's heard of Tammy Faye Bakker. I'd definitely been living under a rock. On the planet Pluto.
    I clicked the back button, returning to "viatical."
    Skimming through the first screen of entries more or less confirmed what Valerie had told me: viatical settlements had been introduced in the early years of the AIDS epidemic, largely for humanitarian reasons, to improve the final days of AIDS patients. If you have a life insurance policy, the reasoning went, why not use it for living?
    What Jablonsky had neglected to mention was that with the advent of protease inhibitors and other powerful medications that help prolong the lives of AIDS patients, the pool of qualified applicants had begun to dry up. In response, viatical settlement firms cast their nets wider, targeting individuals with illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, or heart disease. Then the viatical market virtually exploded, spreading beyond the terminally ill to reach out to the elderly—the older and more affluent (and sicker!), the better. Who could lose? The seller gets a large sum of money immediately; the broker collects a commission for his efforts; the buyer snags a life insurance policy at a discounted rate and collects the face value of the policy upon the individual's death. And because death is inevitable, there can be no default on payment. Right?
    I figured there had to be a catch.
    I rose from my chair, picked up my glass of tea, and began a slow stroll around my garden, just to mull it all over. More or less absentmindedly, I deadheaded a rose, picked three leaves out of the birdbath, and was setting up the sprinkler to water a patch of droopy hollyhocks when I noticed the garbage bag that had flattened my primrose border.
    I knew the culprit: Lillian Perry, a lovely but confused seventy-five-year-old suffering from mid-stage Alzheimer's disease. She shared the house next door with her attorney son, Bradford, who had moved to Annapolis several years ago. In her own mind, Lillian had never left her Tennessee farm, and she continued to dispose of her garbage in the approved Thomasboro, Tennessee, way—she chucked it over the barbed-wire fence and into a sinkhole.
    As a way of getting acquainted with your neighbors, tossing garbage over the fence left a lot to be desired. But it launched—so to speak—our friendship with Brad, so until it got out of control, neither Paul nor I were inclined to complain.
    I dragged the Perrys' garbage over to our can and stuffed it in.
    When I returned to my computer for another go, a dropdown window was flashing like a billboard on Times Square in the upper right-hand corner of my screen. I clicked to get rid of it, but my aim was off, so I opened the window instead. Some Ph.D. with more abbreviations after his name than there were letters in the alphabet desperately wanted me to buy his book on viatical fraud.
    Inspired by the good doctor, I clicked back to Google and typed in "Viatical fraud."
    Seven thousand hits. Plus. Holy moley!
    I picked an article at random. In it, a state regulator reported that a patient with a life expectancy of ten months was paid twenty percent of the death benefit of his policy, which, had he been less sick, desperate, and ill-informed, could have netted him eighty percent or more. In general, though, sellers had few complaints. It was the buyers further up the food chain who often got screwed.
    In the mid-nineties, I learned, the word went out—in venerable publications such as the New