House on Fire--A Novel

by Joseph Finder

  His wife answered the phone, just like last time. I gave my name, again, as Ben Ellison, one of my cover names. I reminded her that I was writing a book. This time she put her hand over the phone, and I could hear muffled conversation. She came back on the phone and said, “I’m afraid Bill won’t be able to speak with you.”

  “Tell him I have one last question, that’s all. It’s important.”

  Dorothy entered my office, and I put up an index finger to ask her to wait.

  Dr. Sossong’s wife put her hand over the phone again, and I could hear more muffled talk. Finally Dr. Sossong got on the line. Much less friendly than last time. “Listen, fella, I told you already, I can’t talk to you. I legally can’t talk. I shouldn’t have talked to you the other day.”

  “This will be off the record,” I said. “Your name won’t be associated in any way with—”

  “Don’t call again,” he said, and I heard a click. He’d hung up.

  Dorothy said, “Are you interruptible?”

  “Now I am.” Before she could start, I said, “Could you do a social media search on Dr. William Sossong?”

  She nodded, once. “Okay.”

  “That file I downloaded—I had to interrupt it before it was done copying. Is it okay?”

  “It’s okay. But I have a question for you. How could there be no documents that contain the word ‘Oxydone’ on his entire hard drive?”

  “Maybe because the drive was only partially copied. Or maybe it’s not under the trademark name.”

  She looked down. That morning she was wearing dark jeans and a lime-colored silk top and ridiculously high heels. Her usual look. “I have another possible answer to that question,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “So I found this big PDF file among his documents, and I tried to open it. It said it was a corrupted file. Huge file, like a hundred gig. But I had a thought. What if it’s an encrypted file?”

  “Would they look the same?”

  “At first, yes. And one of the documents I found on the doctor’s hard drive was an instruction manual for VeraCrypt.”

  “Which is an encryption program?” I asked, because I wasn’t sure.

  “Right.”

  “Which is the program he used to encrypt the file,” I guessed. “So can you decrypt it? Like brute-force it?”

  “Nick, I used to work at the NSA, do you remember? Where I had access to basically the most powerful computers in the world? We couldn’t crack it.”

  “So you can’t?”

  “Maybe the NSA can do it by now, who knows. But with the computing power I have, we’re left with one option.”

  “Guess the password,” I said.

  “There you go.”

  “You try the usual suspects?”

  “I got together a whole list. Date of birth, date of his wife’s birth, his kids’ birthdays, the names of his wife and his kids, the date of their wedding. I even tried Neil deGrasse Tyson.”

  “Nothing, huh?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do we know how long the password is? How many characters?”

  “No idea. They recommend more than twenty characters.”

  “It could be any length?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s discouraging. Why would he encrypt just one document?”

  “It might turn out to be a folder. It could be a whole bunch of documents, all password-protected.”

  “Okay. So what are the odds of cracking this password?”

  “The odds? Zero, Nick. The odds are zero.”

  “But you’re not giving up.”

  “If you don’t mind, I want to give it a go.”

  I smiled. She didn’t give up easily. “Go for it.”

  53

  Gabe’s apartment was a dump. It was on the top floor of a shambling triple-decker on Putnam Ave. that had once been painted red. The paint had peeled so badly you could barely tell the color anymore. In front of the house the trash containers were tipped over. Half a bicycle was locked to a parking meter. What looked like a discarded baby stroller blocked the front door. His name wasn’t on the bell, which read KOWALCZYK, the name of one of his roommates. It was around ten A.M., which meant Gabe was sleeping, but he wasn’t answering his cell. So I rang the doorbell.

  A few seconds later the front door buzzed open—no one asked who I was—and I took the splintering wooden stairs up two flights. The stairway stank of boiled cabbage.

  The door to Gabe’s apartment was marked with a cheap plastic gold-colored number three that had been nailed on with one nail. It rattled as I knocked.

  The door came open, and some guy in his early twenties with a wild head of hair stuck his head out. The apartment behind him was dark. “Yeah?”

  “Looking for Gabe.”

  “Hold on,” he said, as unfriendly as possible, and he closed the door. I waited a beat. Gabe came to the door a minute or so later. Clearly he’d been asleep. “What’s up, Uncle Nick?” He was blinking in the light. “What time is it?”

  I could smell beer and cigarettes and a strong note of weed. His breath was bad.

  “You done with the Camry?”

  “Oh, yeah, hold on.” He pushed the door closed.

  “Am I not allowed to come in?” I said.

  “It’s gross, Uncle Nick,” I heard him say behind the door. He came back a moment later with the car keys and dropped the ring in my outstretched palm. “Thanks again.”

  “Sorry to wake you up,” I said. “Why did your grandfather want to talk to you?”

  “Victor?” He put on an innocent look. “Because he’s my grandpa.”

  “Did he want something from you?”

  Gabe swallowed and looked away. He couldn’t have looked guiltier. “No. He just wanted to see me.”

  “Victor wanted you to drive all the way from Boston because he wanted a visitor?”

  “I’m not just a visitor. I’m his only grandchild. You know that.”

  “Gabe, what are you not telling me?”

  “Nothing. He just said, you know, I’m his only grandchild, and you’re never going to have kids, so I’m probably the only one he’s ever gonna have.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “okay. Listen. About Victor—just be careful of him. He’ll ask you to do things; you’ve gotta be careful.”

  “He’s behind bars, Uncle Nick. I mean, what can he do to me?”

  I shook my head. “I just want you to be careful around Victor Heller.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It took me three and a half hours to drive to Port Chester, New York. I took the Mass. Turnpike to 84 and then 95. My mind kept returning to Maggie Benson’s death. I realized I knew nothing about funeral plans for her or anything like that. I called Detective Goldman. “Did you find a next of kin for Maggie Benson?” I asked.

  “She has a brother and a sister in Connecticut, along with her parents,” Goldman said.

  “I’m just wondering if a funeral’s being planned.”

  “Sorry, don’t know.”

  I asked if he had any updates on Maggie’s murder, and he did not.

  I thought about the houseful of suspects—the Agatha Christie aspect. I went through a mental list of Kimball siblings. Cameron? I remembered seeing him return to his room at four in the morning. The youngest Kimball kid seemed the most likely suspect in Maggie’s murder, but for what motive? That stumped me. He also seemed so slight and physically unprepossessing, it was hard to imagine him shoving a strong woman like Maggie. Though I suppose anyone can shove anyone else off the edge of a cliff if it’s done suddenly. Theoretically he could have pushed Maggie to her death. He just didn’t fit the profile.

  Paul, the eldest, didn’t fit the profile either. He was a scholar, sort of a lost soul, and he seemed g
entle. I wasn’t sure whether he’d talked with Maggie that night. I didn’t remember seeing them together. Hayden, the Broadway impresario—sure, she looked fit and maybe tough, but where was the motive? I couldn’t think of one. Same with Megan.

  I continued to suspect Fritz Heston and was frustrated by his alibi. There had to be a hole in it somewhere. But everyone had seen him leave, and the only way he could have gotten back to the house was by driving. So he would have shown up on the video cameras driving up to the house or entering it. But according to Detective Goldman, he hadn’t. Whoever killed Maggie had to know how to work the video surveillance system, enough to switch off the rear-facing cameras in the house. Who else but Fritz Heston qualified?

  Or one of his employees?

  Simply put, Maggie had been killed by someone connected with Kimball Pharma. They’d done it for Conrad Kimball. In one way or another, Conrad Kimball now had killed two of the closest friends I’d had, Maggie and Sean. He’d just used different weapons.

  And even if Sukie Kimball no longer required my services, I wasn’t done with my work. I would take down the old man’s company. If I managed to do that, I’d be making their deaths mean something.

  54

  The man I thought of as the whistle-blower, Dr. Bill Sossong, lived in the village of Port Chester, New York, which is part of the town of Rye and is right on the Connecticut border. Port Chester was about an hour from New York City on the Metro-North rail line, but more important, it was close to White Plains, where Kimball headquarters was located. Though it’s right next to the wealthy town of Greenwich, Connecticut, Port Chester was not a particularly affluent place. Most people who lived there rented rather than owned. It looked like a working-class town that was struggling.

  But Dr. Bill Sossong clearly was not. He lived in the Gray Rock neighborhood, in a big white colonial with black shutters, neatly trimmed hedges and bushes, and a beautiful green lawn that stretched all the way down to the water. Each house in the neighborhood had private waterfront access. I got there in the early afternoon and drove by the man’s house a few times. We knew—Dorothy had filled me in—that he lived with his wife, had a couple of grown children, and that he was retired. His wife volunteered at a senior citizens’ center four or five days a week. He’d been fired from Kimball Pharma, had given a number of outspoken interviews in which he criticized his former company, but then, after a few months, had fallen silent. Something had happened before he signed that NDA. I was curious.

  I sat in my car, across the street and a few hundred feet down, pretending to read the Wall Street Journal but really keeping an eye on Sossong’s house. I wasn’t going to just walk up to his front door and ring the bell and risk having him shut the door on me, which is what would likely result. After about an hour and a half, the front door opened, and a trim silver-haired man emerged with a Nike gym bag slung over one shoulder. He trotted out of the house to the driveway and got into a late-model Mercedes, throwing the bag into the back seat.

  I started up the car and followed him.

  I kept back a distance—there were no cars between us—until we got to the main road. There he made a left on a busy street, and several other cars zipped by before I was able to get there. But I maintained an eye on him. He turned right onto Boston Post Road, and I had no choice but to pull up right behind him. He drove a thousand feet or so on the road and then turned into the parking lot of a strip mall that had a Marshall’s and the Sports Club of Port Chester. He parked, and I parked in the next row. I watched him get out, grab his gym bag, and hustle into the sports club.

  I was prepared to wait for him to emerge after his workout.

  Then I had a better idea. I went into Marshall’s, headed for the men’s department, and quickly scooped up a cheap pair of sneakers, socks, a T-shirt, and gym shorts. With my purchases, I headed over to the sports club, which had a high-end look. A pretty young woman in a long-sleeved black SPORTS CLUB OF PORT CHESTER T-shirt greeted me.

  “I’m not a member here, but I’d like to work out.”

  “Let me ask Ken, our member associate, to give you a tour.”

  “I’m not sure about joining just yet, so for now I’d like a day pass.”

  She sold me one for twenty-five bucks. Dr. Sossong had been there for twenty minutes. The locker room was empty. I changed, left my street clothes in a locker, and walked around the floor of the gym looking for Sossong. I found him on an elliptical trainer, already working up a sweat, watching TV. He was in the middle of a long row of empty machines, all a couple of feet away from one another.

  I got on the machine next to him and started pumping away.

  After a few minutes I turned to him and said, “This is the time of day to come in here, huh?”

  He looked at me, smiled pleasantly. “Off hours, the place is deserted.”

  Then I said, “You knew Joan Chisholm.” That was a name Dorothy had found. His former secretary/assistant.

  Now he turned to me again, his eyebrows furrowed. “I did. Who are you?”

  “What happened to her happened to a good friend of mine.”

  Sossong squinted at me, mopped away sweat from his face with the small white towel around his neck. “Do I know you?”

  “No,” I said. “But you helped me out with Phoenicia Health Sciences. You told me about Dr. Scavolini.”

  “Are you the writer?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m the guy you talked to a couple of days ago.”

  He expelled a lungful of air. “I told you I can’t talk to you.”

  “There’s no one here to see us talk. Place is deserted.”

  He got down off the machine. “You’re a persistent bastard, aren’t you?” Shaking his head, he said, “I’m under an NDA. I legally can’t talk to you.”

  I followed him down the aisle between rows of machines. “You already have,” I pointed out. “Give me five minutes, and I’ll leave you alone. You won’t see me again. I promise.”

  He took a swig from his water bottle. “Five minutes. But don’t come near me again. How did you find me here, anyway?”

  “I heard you work out here,” I said vaguely. “Your secretary, Joan Chisholm, got addicted to Oxydone. So did my friend Sean, a man who saved my life in wartime. For me this is personal.”

  We stood there, him sweating and me in my newly purchased cheap workout clothes from Marshall’s.

  “Mr. . . . What did you say your name was? Mr. Ellis?”

  “Ellison.” I’d used the name of a real journalist, in case he Googled me.

  “Mr. Ellison, I don’t know how I can help you. I’ve already told you more than I should have.”

  “It took real courage to become a whistle-blower,” I said. “You did it because of Joan.” I knew this from the dossier Dorothy had compiled, and he wasn’t denying it.

  “I’m not a whistle-blower.”

  “That’s what all the news reports called you.”

  “Yeah, that’s the fake news for you. Maybe I should have become a whistle-blower. Under the False Claims Act, you can make millions of dollars if the government successfully prosecutes. Some whistle-blowers have made a hundred million bucks. But I didn’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I got fired before I had the chance. After Joan died, I just started doing interviews.”

  “And then stopped about a month later. You signed a nondisclosure agreement with Kimball Pharma.”

  “With the Kimball Family Trust, which owns Kimball Pharma.”

  “Why?”

  “Why did I do it? Because I came to my senses.”

  “Because he offered you a lot of money to stop talking?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Bought you a nice house in the Gray Rock area.”

  He looked at me in surprise. “How do you know that?”

 
“I do my homework.”

  “My income is dependent on keeping my trap shut. And my family’s financial security is important to me.”

  “How would they know if you talked to journalists or not?”

  “Conrad’s security people are aggressive.”

  “Fritz.”

  “You know Fritz Heston?”

  “We’ve met.”

  “Conrad runs Kimball Pharma like his own personal fiefdom. Fritz and his security officers are like his personal bodyguards.”

  “Did they ever threaten your life?”

  “Obliquely.”

  “Would they—?”

  “Harm me? If I started talking again? Sure.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because of all the lawsuits. Billions of dollars are at stake here. That gets out, about the Estonia study, what they called the Tallinn file, and Kimball’s going to go under. Go bankrupt.” He mopped his face with the towel again. “Kimball is under huge pressure these days. All the protests. Conrad was always sort of paranoid, but he’s gotten worse as he’s gotten older. And Fritz does whatever Conrad says. But the company is vulnerable. I mean, their drug portfolio has always been too dependent on Oxydone. Their antidepressant never really caught on. There are better blood pressure drugs than the one they offer. Their migraine drug never made it to market. It’s all about Oxydone. What is your book about, again?”

  “I want to prove Kimball Pharma knowingly brought a drug to market that they knew was dangerous.”

  “Hey, some of the people who use Oxydone really need it. Cancer patients and such. But that doesn’t account for most of its use. I mean, people inhale Oxydone like they’re snorting cocaine.”

  “I’m talking about the Tallinn file.”

  “Art Scavolini wouldn’t talk to you, huh? I’m not surprised. He probably got a nice payday too for keeping his mouth shut and making sure that study disappeared, and he doesn’t want to screw it up.”

  “I haven’t given up,” I said.

  “No. You don’t seem like a guy who knows when to quit. You’re not going to find that study. Kimball Pharma paid for it, and they own it, and it’s under lock and key somewhere.”