We both thanked her and Billy uncrossed his legs and poured. I thumbed through the documents again, hiding the growing skepticism I'd been pushing back all morning. All the women named in the case files were elderly. All over eighty. All lived in the same general area west of Fort Lauderdale. All were widows.

"Not much to go on here, Billy."

"I know. And that's w-what's wr-wrong. Not w-what's there, b-but w-what isn't."

He was up now, pacing as if in front of a jury, a place his brilliant lawyer's mind could make him a star but where his stutter had never let him go.

"An acquaintance came to m-me after the most recent death, her m-mother," he said. "At the funeral sh-she saw old f-friends. Longtime folks f-from the neighborhood. Her m-mother was somewhat p-prominent and it brought many of them together for the first t-time in years."

He was staring out the big windows. Outside the city spread out in the unbroken sunlight. Billy loved high views, and the thing about South Florida from a height was its complete lack of borders. No mountains or hills or even small rises, nothing but the horizon to hold it. Billy always looked out, he never succumbed to the natural urge to look down.

"The d-daughter c-came to me with questions about the l-life insurance," he continued. "It had b-been sold. All of them had b-been sold."

I refilled my coffee, stacked the files again so each of the names lay exposed on top of one another. Billy had done some homework. The five women, all Florida born and raised, had lived somewhat similar lives, he said. They had grown up in the '30s and '40s, had raised families and worked well into their sixties. They had survived in a South Florida that in their time was a predominately Deep South society.

But all had also done an extraordinary thing. They had each bought life insurance policies for their families, sizable ones for their time, and had paid their premiums like clockwork. Then, late in life, they had inexplicably sold those long-held policies.