Bad Faith

Chapter 1: The File

The file arrived on a Tuesday, which was the day Dan Kiley's life began to end in a way he wouldn't recognize until it was almost too late.

Marge Feld dropped it on his desk without ceremony. She was a compact woman in her early sixties who wore reading glasses on a beaded chain and managed the Special Investigations Unit of Coastal Fidelity Insurance with the warmth of a federal auditor. The office was a converted floor of a brownstone on Milk Street, and the radiators clanked even in September.

"Mallin, Theodore R.," she said, tapping the manila folder. "Died August fourteenth. Cape Ann estate. Sauna."

Dan looked at the file without touching it. He'd been working a pair of suspicious disability claims in Brockton, comfortable work, the kind where the claimant was always photographed carrying a kayak two weeks after filing for a herniated disc. "Heart failure?"

"That's what the ME says."

"So what's the flag?"

Marge sat on the edge of his desk, which she did only when delivering news she expected to be resisted. "Four million dollar policy. Beneficiary is the wife, Julie Mallin, née Tabor. Thirty-four years old. Former gallery assistant. Married him three years ago. He was fifty-eight."

"Age gap isn't fraud, Marge."

"No. But she has a sealed juvenile record, a previous marriage that ended with a dead husband and a payout, and she smiled at me during the preliminary interview the way a cat smiles at a bird feeder."

Dan opened the file. The photograph of Theodore Mallin showed a lean, sun-weathered man with steel-colored hair and the kind of jaw that suggested he'd once been handsome and knew it. Venture capital. Board seats. A house on the rocky shoulder of Cape Ann that was worth more than everything Dan had ever earned combined.

"We had a bad quarter," Marge continued, which was her way of saying the company was hemorrhaging. Coastal Fidelity was a boutique operation, forty employees, specializing in high-net-worth clients who wanted personalized service and the illusion that their insurer cared about them as people. A four-million-dollar payout would be a body blow. "I need this investigated thoroughly. If there's cause to deny, I need it documented. If there isn't, I need to know that too, and I need to know it before day sixty."

Day sixty. Under Massachusetts law, an insurer had sixty days to pay a claim, deny it with documented cause, or face bad-faith penalties that could triple the payout. The clock had started ticking the moment Julie Mallin filed.

"How many days in are we?"

"Nine."

Dan did the math. Fifty-one days. Seven weeks and change to determine whether a man's death in his own sauna was natural or orchestrated, whether a young widow was a grieving spouse or something worse, and whether Coastal Fidelity owed her four million dollars or nothing at all.

"I've got the Brockton cases—"

"Reassigned. This is your only file."

He looked at Marge. She looked back with the expression of someone who had already decided and was merely waiting for reality to catch up.

"My job rides on this," he said. It wasn't a question.

"Your job rides on doing it right. Whatever right turns out to be."

She left. The radiator clanked. Dan opened the file and began to read.

---

The facts, as assembled by the initial claims adjuster, were straightforward.

Ted Mallin had used the sauna in his Cape Ann home nearly every evening, a Finnish-style dry sauna built into a stone outbuilding behind the main house. On the evening of August fourteenth, he'd entered the sauna at approximately 8:15 p.m. His wife, Julie, had been in the main house. She told the adjuster she'd fallen asleep watching television and didn't realize anything was wrong until she woke at 11:40 p.m. and found Ted still hadn't come inside.

She found him on the cedar bench, dead. The sauna was still running at 190 degrees.

The medical examiner attributed death to cardiac arrest, noting that Mallin had a documented history of mild hypertension and that prolonged heat exposure could precipitate a cardiac event in a susceptible individual. There was no autopsy beyond the standard external examination and toxicology screen, which came back clean.

The police report was four pages of nothing. No signs of forced entry. No signs of struggle. No suspicious circumstances noted. The responding officer, a Gloucester patrolman named DiMasi, had written "natural death / no further action" in the disposition box.

Dan read the file twice, made notes, and then called the number listed for Julie Mallin.

A woman's voice answered on the third ring. Calm. Unhurried.

"Mrs. Mallin, this is Dan Kiley with Coastal Fidelity Insurance. I'm the investigator assigned to your husband's claim. I'd like to schedule a time to visit and ask some questions."

A pause. Not long enough to be suspicious, not short enough to be rehearsed.

"Tomorrow morning," she said. "Come at ten. I'll be in the garden."

She hung up before he could confirm.

Dan sat in his office chair, which had a broken armrest and a squeak that sounded like a small animal in distress, and stared at the photograph of Ted Mallin's sauna. Cedar walls. A digital thermostat mounted by the door. A bench where a man had sat down alive and never stood up.

He thought about the sixty-day clock.

He thought about his rent, which was due in nine days, and the child support he didn't owe because he and Lisa had never had children, but the alimony he did owe because a Suffolk County judge had decided that three years of marriage entitled her to eighteen months of payments that Dan could not afford.

He thought about the fact that Marge had used the word "thoroughly" instead of the word "quickly," which meant she wanted him to find something.

Then he packed the file into his bag, locked his desk, and drove home to the rented room in Quincy where he'd been living since March.

---

The room was on the second floor of a triple-decker on Hancock Street, owned by a retired postal worker named Gus Petridis who lived on the first floor and watched the History Channel at a volume that suggested profound hearing loss. Dan's unit was technically a studio apartment, which meant it had a hot plate, a bathroom with a shower stall the size of a phone booth, and a window that overlooked a parking lot.

He'd moved in after the divorce was finalized, after selling the condo in Somerville at a loss, after Lisa's attorney had extracted terms that left Dan with approximately enough monthly income to cover rent, food, gas, and one streaming subscription. He was forty-three years old. He had a degree in criminal justice from Northeastern, twelve years of insurance investigation experience, and a savings account with $1,847 in it.

He heated a can of soup on the hot plate and read the Mallin file a third time.

The phone rang at 8:15 p.m. He knew who it was before he answered.

"Mr. Kiley, this is Andrea Pasko from the law offices of Pasko and Sheehan. I'm calling regarding your outstanding alimony obligation."

"I'm aware of the obligation, Ms. Pasko."

"You're two months in arrears. My client—"

"I know. I'll have it by the fifteenth."

"You said that last month."

"And I'll say it again next month, and eventually one of us will be telling the truth."

A pause. Andrea Pasko was young, efficient, and completely indifferent to his circumstances. "Mr. Kiley, if payment isn't received by the fifteenth, we'll be filing a motion for contempt."

"Understood."

He hung up. Downstairs, Gus was watching something about the Battle of Midway at full volume. Dan looked at the Mallin file, looked at the soup, and thought about four million dollars.

Not his four million dollars. Julie Mallin's four million dollars. But the proximity of that number to his own poverty felt like standing at the edge of a cliff and feeling the wind push.

He set his alarm for six-thirty and went to bed.