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Angela Evans entered a conference room on the eleventh floor of the federal courthouse on Spring Street and slapped a thick stack of papers on the table. The rest of the newly formed task force was already assembled.
    “Hey, Angela, what are you trying to do, blind us?” Zack Hargrove, another AUSA, shielded his eyes with his forearm. “How about turning down the wattage on your ring finger?”
    The entire team—Zack, a paralegal, two case agents, and a junior attorney—erupted in laughter.
    “Alright everybody, that’s enough.” Angela pretended to chuckle along with them. “This is really getting old.” Her three-carat, princess-cut diamond was still the butt of jokes even though she’d been wearing it for almost six months. Would it ever stop?
    She actually considered the ring embarrassingly pretentious, but her fiancé, Judge Cornell L. Waters, III, was all about the show. So she quietly concealed her disdain and responded to his proposal with a soft yes , when she was actually thinking, I’m not so sure .
    “So where’s my wedding invitation?” Zack asked, refusing to lay off.
    A pretty boy with blue-green eyes and well-moussed blonde hair, Zack enjoyed being the center of attention. As usual, his Ralph Lauren suit and Italian shoes made him look more like a big firm partner than a government lawyer.
    Angela winked at him. “Your invitation’s in the mail.”
    She took a seat at the head of the table with a confidence gained from nearly a decade of putting criminals behind bars. First as a deputy district attorney and now with the U.S. Attorney’s office. Tough, smart and passionate in her professional life, her personal life was another story.
    “Let’s get started.” Angela’s hair was a crinkly mass of natural curls that resembled a limp afro from a distance. Her narrow face and wide brown eyes were striking enough to grace the cover of a fashion magazine.
    She eyed the box of Krispy Kreme donuts in the center of the table. It wasn’t even two o’clock yet and she only had nine Weight Watcher points left for the day. One donut would wipe out seven of them. Maybe stuffing her face with donuts was the easiest way out. Sorry. Couldn’t shed the twenty pounds. Have to call off the wedding since I can’t find a dress that fits.
    Angela directed her attention to Tyler Chen, who’d just joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office after three years at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. “Tell us what you found out.”
    “The U.S. Attorney’s Offices in Las Vegas, New York and Miami are close to returning indictments against a company called The Tustin Group,” Tyler began. “The company is pressuring terminally ill people to sell their insurance policies.”
    “Sell them?” asked Salina Melendez, a paralegal who was attending Southwestern Law School at night. “Who would buy somebody’s insurance policy?”
    “An investor,” Tyler said. “It’s called a viatical settlement and it’s sort of like a reverse mortgage. Except these companies trade in people, not property.”
    Angela nodded. “Say, for example, you’re dying and you’ve got a policy worth a hundred grand,” she explained. “A viatical broker will go out and find somebody willing to pay you a portion of the face value. All you have to do is name the investor as your beneficiary. After you die, the investor collects the full value.”
    “Six months ago,” Tyler continued, “one of The Tustin Group’s principals began operating in California under the name Live Now, Inc. It stands to reason that if they’re pressuring people in the other states, they’re probably doing the same thing here. Main Justice wants to make this a multi-district indictment.”
    “Sounds like a sad way to make a buck,” said Jon Rossi, a case agent with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service. He was a forty-plus, rail thin, vintage car enthusiast. The AUSAs always worked their cases with agents from one of the federal law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI or