House on Fire--A Novel

by Joseph Finder

  I was one of the pallbearers, along with one of Patty’s brothers and a couple of nephews and the only other guy there from our Special Forces A-team, a guy we called Merlin. His real name was Walter McGeorge. He had been our communications sergeant. After he left the service, he’d become an expert in technical surveillance countermeasures—finding bugs and such. Merlin lived in Maryland, where he was a serious sport fisherman and kept a boat on the Chesapeake Bay. He looked the same as always—a small, compact guy who could have been a jockey. He’d shaved his mustache and was wearing a black suit and well-shined shoes. He didn’t give Patty a hug but extended his hand to shake. He was always formal, to the point of uncomfortable, around women. He wore a green blazer with a regimental tie, because he was a member of the Special Forces Association. I didn’t belong. I just wore a black suit. Patty asked me to say a few words, and so I did, about how he’d saved my life.

  Then everyone drove to the veterans’ cemetery in the town of Bourne, half an hour away. It was a lushly landscaped nature preserve. There, they gave Sean a military burial. Four young army soldiers, in their dress blues, draped Sean’s casket with an American flag. As we carried the casket to the grave site, a few among the gathering saluted. Vets, they had to be.

  One woman stood out from the other mourners. She was a hippieish woman in her thirties, wearing a busily colored fringed, crochet-knit shawl over a black dress. I’d noticed her before, at the church, sitting off by herself. I remembered the shawl. Now she was standing alone in the third ring of mourners around the grave. She didn’t look like she came from here. I couldn’t figure her out. My first thought was that she was a journalist, but then I ruled that out—she was dressed too nicely. I also had the strong feeling she’d been looking at me.

  The brief burial service began, led by their local priest, who had silver hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Two servicemen, dressed in blues, took the flag off Sean’s casket and proceeded to fold it crisply and carefully. Each fold represented something. When they were finished, only the stars showed. One member of the honor guard presented the flag to Patty. He spoke the memorized line: “On behalf of the President of the United States, the United States Army, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”

  Her eyes pooled with tears, which streamed down her face as she accepted the flag.

  They fired three shots in the air. Then one of them pulled out a bugle and put it to his mouth. Taps issued from a boom box while he pretended to play the tune. Merlin and I and a couple of other guys saluted as the casket was lowered into the grave. I gave Patty a hug and then her kids, and then I backed away to let others greet her.

  People drifted away. Merlin put a hand on my shoulder. “I thought he was in rehab.”

  “He was for a while.”

  Merlin fidgeted, then looked over at the grave site, where the casket had just been lowered into the ground. “What a great guy he was. Just—I mean, he never settled for the easy way out, did he? Always volunteered for the hard schools, wanted to be on point. The lead climber. The jumpmaster.”

  “That was Sean,” I said. He’d always gravitated to the more dangerous jobs in training. Always volunteered to run the rifle range, which is a lousy job. When we did training jumps from the C-130, he was the guy who inspected the parachutes and the helmets and tugged at the straps before anyone could jump. It was a serious responsibility. Nobody wanted to do it but Sean.

  “Sort of a badge-hunter,” Merlin said, “but he always wanted to be the number one guy in the stack.”

  I nodded. In close-quarters battle, you didn’t want to be the first guy in.

  The first guy in the stack was the one who got shot, if it was going to happen. When you’re walking through the mountains of Afghanistan, the first guy in line is the one who’s going to trigger a land mine. But Sean always volunteered to do it.

  “Not to mention he saved my life,” I said.

  “Yeah, there’s that.”

  I sensed someone approaching, and I turned to see the hippie woman come up to me. “I liked what you said earlier,” she said.

  “Are you a relative?” I asked. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Nick Heller.”

  “Not a relative. And yeah, I know who you are.”

  Up close her attire seemed less hippie, more boho—artsy, funky. Her shawl looked expensive. Designer, maybe. I noticed her unlined features, the irises that seemed to flicker between gray and brown. “Oh, yeah?” I said.

  She gave me a long, measuring look as if she was making a decision. Finally, she said, “Can we talk?”

  6

  Montanaro’s was a large, roomy restaurant on Route 6 that was known to the locals for its excellent Italian food, its homemade pasta and fresh-baked bread, and the best pizza outside of New Haven, Connecticut. It was dismissed by summer visitors, who preferred the seafood shacks, which they considered more authentic, like outsider art. That was just fine with the locals.

  We met in the parking lot. The day was chilly and raw, and it felt good to walk into the humid warmth of the restaurant. The place was deserted. It was in between lunch and dinner, but they were willing to let us just order soft drinks. After we were seated, I glanced at the menu, changed my mind, and ordered some fried calamari and rigatoni with vodka sauce. When she ordered a garden salad, I figured she’d stop at that, but she went on to add the lasagna al forno. So we were having lunch, this mystery woman and I. She had dark brown hair cut in a sort of shag, just touching her shoulders. She had a sharp nose and lively brown eyes, but she just missed being pretty. A slight rearrangement of her refined features and she would have been.

  She took off her shawl. Underneath she was wearing a black crepe gathered midi dress. The heavy crepe material looked very high-end, like it was cut to fit her. She wore dark opaque stockings and black suede booties with chunky wooden heels. Diamond stud earrings and a single diamond pendant around her neck. The whole outfit looked Parisian, very free-spirited. I pay close attention to what women wear, not because I care about fashion but because I think women tell you a lot with what they choose to wear, much more than men do. This woman was artistically inclined, and wealthy, and unconventional.

  “Okay,” she said, folding her hands on the table. Her nails were painted the color of a bruise. “My name is Susan Kimball. You’ve probably heard of my father, Conrad Kimball.”

  “As in the Kimball Gallery at Harvard?”

  “And the Kimball Wing of the National Gallery, and the Kimball School of Medicine, and on and on.”

  “And Kimball Pharma.”

  She arched her brows. “Exactly.”

  The Kimball name was on countless buildings around the world and wings of museums. Conrad Kimball was a great philanthropist. He was also known to be a rapacious entrepreneur. I knew only the basics about the guy. The company he’d founded, Kimball Pharmaceutical, made the opioid drug Oxydone, the drug that Sean Lenehan had overdosed on.

  The waitress brought a steaming loaf of crusty bread impaled by a steak knife. I cut a few pieces and offered the basket to Susan. She took a piece, and then I did.

  “You didn’t know Sean, and you’re not related to him,” I said. “Nobody here knows you. So why are you here?”

  “Because I knew you’d be here.”

  I paused a moment, considered asking her how. Decided not to. “You could have emailed me.”

  “You don’t have a website.”

  “That’s true.”

  “You’re also not listed anywhere. Neither is Heller Associates.”

  “Also true.” My clients all get to me through word of mouth. I prefer that to advertising on the World Wide Web and putting a big target out there for bad guys to try to hack.

  “You’re not on Facebook or Twitter, at least not under your name. But I heard about you. So I hi
red someone to find you.”

  Another private investigator, no doubt. Well, I wasn’t in hiding either, so finding me wasn’t that impressive an achievement. “Well done,” I said. “What can I do for you, Susan?”

  “You’re a, what? Private intelligence agent?”

  “Something like that.”

  “So, not a private investigator?”

  “Not just.” I reached for another piece of bread. “So you showed up at the burial of someone you don’t know—is that, maybe, a little strange, considering where your family’s fortune comes from?”

  “Or maybe it’s totally appropriate,” she said defiantly, her nostrils flaring.

  “Do you know how Sean Lenehan died?”

  “Overdose of Oxydone. A hundred and thirty people die from an opioid overdose every day. Nearly fifty thousand every year. And then there’s the two million people who are addicted and desperate.”

  I looked at her with surprise.

  “The drug is fiendishly addictive,” she said. “And it made Daddy a billionaire many times over.”

  “Are you on the outs with him?”

  She shook her head. “Though I’m sure he considers me a disappointment.”

  The waitress placed a dish of fried calamari in front of me.

  “You like squid?” I said.

  “Love it. Thank you. I’m famished.” She took a piece with a lot of tentacles on it. The squid was crisp and delicious and not too oily.

  “Were you cut out of the will or something?”

  She shook her head again. “Not that I know of. Though he’s not above doing it. May I call you Nick?”

  “Sure.”

  “Call me Sukie.”

  “Sukie,” I said. “What do you do, Sukie?”

  “I’m a documentary filmmaker. As Susan Garber, which is my mother’s maiden name.”

  “Do you go to a lot of funerals like this?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do. This is, let’s see, the twenty-seventh opioid-related funeral I’ve attended in the last two months.”

  “All people you don’t know.”

  “One I knew, actually. A friend of mine OD’d on heroin. She’d started with Oxydone in the hospital. You get addicted and then your prescription runs out, and it turns out heroin is a lot cheaper than pills and gives you the same high. But no, I don’t know most of these people.”

  I nodded, chewed. “How do you find them?”

  “The funerals?”

  “The Oxydone-related deaths.”

  “I told you, I hire people who find me names. Lots to choose from.”

  “When you go to all these funerals, do they know who you are?”

  “No.”

  “Do you introduce yourself?”

  “Oh, God no.” She carefully selected another tentacle piece. “I’d be tarred and feathered.” She held the piece up in the air at the end of her fork. “I’d be deep fried.”

  “So what’s the point?”

  “Why do I do it? Because I think some member of my family ought to bear witness to the victims of the drug that made us all rich. Since we sold them all the poison that killed them. Does that make sense?”

  “Sure, I guess so.”

  “Come face-to-face with what the poison is doing. I looked at that widow today, I saw her weeping, and her three young kids, and I just thought—I just can’t live with that. Our family business isn’t about curing pain. It’s about causing it.”

  “But you still haven’t told me what you want.”

  “Very simple. I want you to find—and steal—a document.”

  “A document.”

  “Let me give you the short version. It’s a clinical trial, a study that was done on Oxydone while it was being developed. It was a bombshell study. It showed how dangerously addictive Oxydone was. If the government, the FDA, had found out about that study, they’d have killed Oxydone instantly. Considered it a threat to public safety. The drug would never have been allowed to go on the market.”

  “So the government never found out about the study?”

  “Somehow they buried it. My dad must have arranged to make it disappear. I don’t know, exactly. I just know the rumors. He knew what a huge moneymaker Oxydone could be. How it could transform Kimball Pharma. And he didn’t want anything to get in its way.”

  “So you want me to find a copy of this clinical trial. Which would be like, what? A couple of thick file folders’ worth of paper? Or a computer file?”

  “Hard copy. My dad’s old-school. He’s eighty years old. Prefers paper. Always has.”

  “How long ago was the study done?”

  “Probably twenty years ago.”

  “Then there’s almost certainly a digital copy of it. A PDF file. That’s the first thing I’d look for. And let me save you some money. You don’t need to hire me for this.” Rich people love bargains more than anyone. “Hire a hacker to break into the Kimball Pharma network. If you hired me, that’s what I’d do—I’d go out and hire a hacker myself, probably. So why not cut out the middleman?”

  “Because all the digital copies have been purged from the company’s network. I’ve hired people to look for me. All evidence of that trial has been deleted from the digital archives.”

  “Maybe. But every company keeps corporate archives. Hard copy. It’s your dad’s company—do you know where Kimball Pharma stores its paper files?”

  “There’s a central filing facility at the headquarters building in Purchase, but I’ve checked it already. That file is missing.”

  “There have to be backup files at some place like Iron Mountain.” That was a company that stored corporate records, physical and electronic, in underground vaults and warehouses. They did what they called “information management,” a great vague phrase. They also shredded sensitive files, which they call “secure destruction.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But I know there’s a copy somewhere.”

  “Unless all copies have been destroyed.”

  “You don’t know my father. He throws nothing away. The original packrat. In his office at home he keeps all the most sensitive company and personal files, in locked file cabinets. Understand, this is a man who reads newspapers and books only in print. He totally distrusts the cloud. He thinks people who trust the cloud are naive and will regret it, and soon.”

  “Which home? I’m sure your father has more than one.”

  “I’m talking about the house in Katonah, New York. The house where we all grew up.”

  “Have you looked there?”

  “Are you kidding? My dad always keeps his office locked when he’s not there. He’s a very suspicious man.”

  “Sukie, why do you want this document?”

  She tipped her chin to one side. “I have my reasons.”

  “That’s not good enough,” I said. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m about to cause trouble. A lot of it.”

  7

  I’m guessing if a document like that were made public, it would be financially devastating to Kimball Pharma,” I said.

  “More than that. We could well end up with criminal indictments against the top officers at Kimball—starting with my father.”

  “So if you made it public, you’d be putting him in prison.”

  “He’d have put himself there. Look, this is the right thing to do. The moral thing to do. Because Oxydone is dangerously addictive, and they should be forced to admit it. They should be made to pay for their deception.”

  “But I assume you’d pay too. As an heir. You okay with that?”

  “Okay with that? I want that, desperately. It’s the only way anything changes. This is a business that feeds off addiction like a vampire drinks blood. You think another Facebook group, another devastatingly barbed tweet,
another strongly worded op-ed in the New York Times is going to make a difference?” She shook her head. “People are dying, Nick. Every goddamn day.”

  “What turned you?”

  “In what way?”

  “Something radicalized you. Caused you to start questioning your family’s role. What happened?”

  She stirred Splenda into her coffee, which was lightened with half-and-half. “It was what happened to a college friend of mine. Woman named Charlotte, on the college women’s squash team. She was great at everything—Chaucer to football. Great athlete. Four years ago, something happened to her. She threw out her back, then had spinal surgery, and was put on painkillers. Oxydone, of course. Her parents had just died in an auto crash; she’d just gone through a messy breakup with her boyfriend. I don’t know what else. What I do know is she quickly became addicted to Oxy. And one day she OD’d. Was it deliberate? Was it an accident? I have no idea. But they found a couple of empty Oxydone inhalers in her bathroom and she died in the shower.” She spoke not very loudly but fervently. “And I thought, my God, we did it, we poisoned her. And before long I started to realize that this was happening all over the place. Do you know every year we lose more veterans to opiates than we lost to the Iraqis? Or ISIS?”

  I nodded. Sean’s was just one death. She was seeing opiate-related deaths on a wholesale level. “I understand,” I said. “It’s just—”

  “You think I’m crazy.”

  “No, it’s not that. I’m not clear on what you’re trying to accomplish. What you’re trying to do.”

  “I want leverage. I want blackmail.”

  “For what? Not—for money?”

  “Nothing for me. I want to force my father to set up a network of clinics around the world to take care of the people he’s addicted.”