She led me down the hallway to my bedroom, pointing out the rooms on the way. She silently pointed at a bedroom door that I assumed was her father’s suite. Outside my room I gave her a kiss on the lips, the way real lovers would. She didn’t exactly respond, but she didn’t bat me away either. I think she was surprised. But at the same time she was making it clear that I was to stay within the boundaries we’d agreed on. Keep it strictly professional. Yes, I was playing her boyfriend, but Dr. Kimball didn’t believe in cohabitation before marriage. So it was separate bedrooms.
Mine was a blue-painted guest room with a four-poster bed. On the wall, an antique tapestry. A dresser with folded towels on top.
The next part was hard: waiting until the house was asleep, which I’d worked out with Sukie would be by around two o’clock in the morning. I was too tense to nap. I was as tight as a bowstring. So I lay on the bed and read my email on my phone, then read the news, and thought. I kept checking my watch. The minutes crept by. I thought about Maggie.
I heard nothing from any of the adjoining rooms. Attribute that to top-notch work by artisan stonemasons imported from Italy and their early-twentieth-century craftsmanship. When labor was cheap, and good stone and fine wood were plentiful.
Then I retrieved my tools from the pockets of my suit and placed them in my leather dopp kit, my shaving kit. I changed into sweats and a T-shirt. Lay back down on the bed and waited.
Finally, it was two in the morning.
20
I stood up, grabbed my shaving kit, and quietly went out into the hall, passing Conrad’s bedroom suite as if in search of the hall bathroom. The floor, fortunately, was covered in a long oriental runner that must have been custom woven for the original owner a century ago. It also muffled my footfalls, which was great. I was barefoot and knew how to move stealthily in a silent house, but creaky old wooden floors were often a problem in grand houses. The house where I spent my childhood had creaky floors.
The hallway was dark. But I had studied the blueprints, and I knew where I was going.
Conrad Kimball’s study was on the first floor in the other wing of the house. I reached the stone staircase I’d climbed a few hours before. A skylight filtered faint moonlight. I descended the carpeted stairs.
Were there servants around and awake? Maybe, but if so, they were unlikely to question a houseguest, even one roaming the house at two in the morning.
I walked on, my bare feet touching the cold stone of the tiled foyer. The old man’s study was around the corner, the first door on the left, off a small alcove. Across the hall was a swinging door that led into the kitchen. I knew this from the blueprints.
The study door was closed. It was a heavy, medieval-looking door made out of carved wood, of the sort you might see in Game of Thrones. But mounted on the right side of the door was a modern contraption, a small steel number pad with a bright red pinpoint LED light.
Which meant, of course, that the office was alarmed. That I hadn’t expected. Not when his family was in residence.
Shit.
That wasn’t the end of the road, though. I took note of the alarm manufacturer, conveniently right there on the control pad. It was a newly installed system, and it was wireless. There were ways to defeat—jam—wireless systems. I’d be better prepared the next time I visited.
So there would have to be a next time.
Conrad Kimball was an extremely suspicious man. That wasn’t surprising after all. Kimball Pharma was a company under fire these days, and so was the Kimball family.
I turned to go. And then I heard footsteps, someone advancing along the hall very quietly. Very slowly.
21
Someone was coming around the corner. I immediately backed up against the doorway, flattening myself so I was momentarily out of his line of sight. For a few seconds.
A whisper: “Heller? What the hell?”
Maggie. In jeans and a white T-shirt and white sneakers. She still had her coppery wig on. At least I assumed it was a wig. A big purse was slung over her shoulder.
“Mags? I was going to ask you the same thing.”
She moved in close, and then she kissed me, to my surprise. Then backed up a few inches. “I got dibs, Heller,” she whispered.
“On what?”
“On the files is what, and you know it.”
I nodded. “The alarm is on.”
“What’d you expect? You have any idea how paranoid the man is? A couple of months ago, he brought in some high-end security contractors to protect his home files. Now he always sets the alarm. Lets his housekeeping staff in to clean but only when he’s there. He’s protecting something.”
“Probably all his company’s dirty secrets. Do you have the alarm code?”
“He doesn’t trust his own kids, Heller. No, I don’t. But I don’t think I’m going to need it. Not as long as I have this.” She pulled out a handheld device with four antennas on it like teeth of a comb.
“Wi-Fi jammer?”
She smiled. This little gimmick blocked the signal between the control panel and the alarm sensors, temporarily disabling the alarm. I saw the red LED light go dark. She leaned forward and inserted a key in the lock. She turned the key, then pulled open the door. No alarm sounded, no noise.
It was pitch-black inside.
“We have two hours,” she said.
“How do you know that?”
“If the sensor doesn’t receive a signal in a hundred twenty minutes, the alarm goes off. It’s a countermeasure.”
“Anything else to worry about inside? Motion sensor?”
“Not in his home office.”
“Pressure pads?”
“Highly doubt it.”
She followed close behind me as I entered, then closed the door after us. She stood her Wi-Fi jammer on the floor right next to the door.
I exhaled. I could hear her breathe too, could smell her perfume. Something different from what she used to use. Brassier. A perfume called Opium, I decided. Part of her disguise. In the old days she wore patchouli. I closed my eyes and opened them again, letting my eyes get used to the dark. It wasn’t pitch-black after all. Faint mottled moonlight came in through the leaded-glass diamond-pane windows.
“What are you after?” I asked.
“The files.”
“Which ones?”
She paused. “Not gonna say.”
“Who hired you?”
“Can’t say. You?”
“Same. Where’d you get the key?”
She shrugged. “Can’t say.”
“You have any idea where the files are?”
“Not exactly. Could be anywhere. But I’m interested in the fact that he had a safe room put in a few months back. With a concealed entrance.”
“For the files, you think?”
“Dunno. Maybe it’s only for Natalya’s jewelry. So I plan to search the whole office.” She pulled out a tiny LED flashlight and swept it back and forth across the room. I could make out some shadowy details, including a large, ornately carved desk. Books lined the walls. A Chesterfield-style leather sofa, with matching hulking leather Chesterfield chairs facing it on the other side of a coffee table.
Nothing that looked like a filing cabinet.
I glanced back at the desk drawers. Possible. I took out my own little Maglite and approached the desk, tugging at the top right drawer. It slid open. No lock.
I smelled lemon-oil furniture polish and cigars. I focused the light. A Scotch-tape dispenser, a checkbook, a couple of pens and sharpened pencils, a pair of scissors.
The next drawer down was taller and more likely to contain files. That one came right open as well, revealing a stack of individually wrapped reams of computer paper. Nothing else. Conrad Kimball’s files weren’t in his desk.
I turned around to see Maggie, meanwhile, inspe
cting the bookshelves closely with her flashlight. She’d mentioned a safe room with a concealed entrance. A safe room, also known as a panic room, is a hardened shelter installed in a private residence that can be used by the homeowners to hide in order to stay safe during home invasions. Some of them, like the civil defense shelters of the early sixties, were big enough, with enough supplies, to live in for a few weeks. It would also make a logical place to hide something valuable.
My flashlight beam raked the walls of the study, the bookshelves, looking for cleverly built-in cabinetry. Lines in the wood that looked wrong. Seams. But I found nothing. Just books. The floor was covered in an antique-looking Aubusson carpet. The windows had recently been fitted with alarm contacts.
I noticed a door that I remembered from the plans led to a bathroom. That was worth checking out. I opened the door, saw a narrow space. An old-fashioned toilet with a pull-chain water closet above, black and white tiles on the floor, subway tiles on the walls. An old pedestal sink. All probably original to the house.
And it had windows that opened to the outside. I entered the bathroom, inspected the windows, saw no alarm contacts. They hadn’t bothered to alarm the bathroom window. Had I known this, I could have sneaked in that way, from outside, avoiding the alarm entirely.
Then a faint sound came from the hallway.
The sound of a door closing.
22
Maggie and I looked at each other. We couldn’t really see each other’s eyes, but we both knew what to do. We immediately dropped to the floor, scuttled across the carpet, and squatted down behind the biggest pieces of furniture we could find—the bulky Chesterfield armchairs—flattening ourselves on the floor. Staying out of sight lines in case someone entered the study.
Breathing slowly, I calmed myself and waited for the study door to open.
Conrad Kimball was a light sleeper. Maybe he was a night owl. If he entered the room and switched on the lights, we were both well and truly screwed.
Maybe he was looking for something. Maybe he forgot something.
Maybe Maggie’s intel was bad and a pressure-sensitive silent alarm under the Aubusson had alerted him.
Breathing through my nostrils, I once again managed to steady my pulse. I waited to be discovered.
After all, I was staging a break-in from within the target’s house. The target being a highly suspicious man. Who had at least three outsiders as houseguests: Maggie, me, and Paul’s brilliant Moroccan girlfriend.
I found myself staring at the carpet, at the wooden baseboard. Once my eyes had acclimated to the dark, I could see an odd, misplaced seam in the polished cherrywood baseboard molding. I shone the flashlight on it, pulsed it on and off, and confirmed that there was a vertical seam where—given the high-end craftsmanship that went into building this house, the uninterrupted length of the boards—there shouldn’t be.
A repair? Possibly, but not likely.
So while I listened for the door to open, I crawled across the carpet on my hands and knees and drew closer to the errant seam. I felt it, touched the baseboard, hoping for something like a spring-loaded touch-latch that would open some hidden compartment in the bookcase. I was thinking of a kick panel that might unlock a hidden door. But nothing clicked or moved. I looked more closely, searching for telltale traces of dust that might indicate an air leak from an adjoining room, due to temperature differentials or pressure changes. But I saw none.
I waited for a few more seconds, perfectly still. The door to the study didn’t open.
No one walked in or walked by.
A false alarm. A servant using the bathroom, maybe. No one was coming.
I caught Maggie’s eye and decided to stand. I saw nobody. I thought about the blueprints of the study I’d examined. I distinctly remembered seeing a large closet in the plans, but there didn’t appear to be one here anymore.
So I took out a tiny infrared thermal camera and attached it to my cell phone. I focused on the bookshelves and saw a spill of blue at the baseboard molding, about two or three feet wide.
The blue indicated cold air.
That told me that behind the wall of books was an unheated space; the closet that used to be here had been walled over.
Or converted into a safe room but covered with a bookcase to conceal its entrance. I began testing each shelf, pressing here and there, looking for a spring latch. Maggie got to her feet, saw what I was doing, and started testing the risers, the vertical boards that comprised the bookcases, while I tested the horizontal boards. But nothing clicked. Nothing moved.
Maybe you had to pull a certain book. I’d seen that trick before. Mostly in movies, but occasionally in real life, inspired by the movies. But nothing popped open.
Until Maggie touched the edge of a lower shelf a few inches off the ground and something gave way. A thud, and then a section of shelves jutted open. The shelves were bolted to a metal door. I grasped the edge of the heavy door—heavy because of all the books, plus it was steel—and pulled it open.
The safe room.
Lined with filing cabinets.
She smiled at me. “We’re in,” she said.
23
We were standing in a small white-painted steel room with a steel floor and rows of gray steel filing cabinets lining two of the walls, narrowing the space where you could stand. Overhead lighting had come on as soon as we entered. I could tell this safe room had been assembled from prefab steel panels, built to a standard size. This one was probably eight by ten. On the back wall were a few shelves. I saw jewelry boxes with pearl necklaces and diamond brooches and other costly items like that, laid out on black velvet. On display like a jewelry store. Natalya’s stash, no doubt.
“Jesus,” she breathed.
But Maggie wasn’t looking at the jewelry. She was focused on the file cabinets.
I pulled the bookshelf-door behind us closed. It clicked shut. Somewhere a ventilation fan began to whirr faintly. I’m not claustrophobic, but this was a small space. It was built to house files and jewelry, not really as a panic room, where the family could hide out in case of an intrusion. It was too cramped to hold more than a couple of people, and there were no visible supplies.
“Leave the door open,” Maggie said.
“Why?”
“I want to hear noises.”
“Fair enough,” I said, and pushed the door open. The vent fan went off.
I said in a low voice, “We’re probably looking for different things. But we can help each other. So what are you looking for?”
This time she didn’t hold back. “His new will. The kids are afraid they’re getting written out and Natalya’s getting written in. They think she’s manipulating Conrad, that she’s all about the Benjamins. What about you?”
“There was a drug trial done on Oxydone years ago. Found that the drug was dangerously addictive in humans and warned against marketing it. That trial was buried, but the files on it are probably somewhere in here.”
“Always thought that was just a rumor.”
“What?”
“That they had proof how addictive it was but somehow the FDA got paid off or something.”
“All I know is there’s a file, and it’s here somewhere.”
She tugged at a steel cabinet labeled LEGAL, but the drawers were locked. I pulled at the one right in front of me, marked FAMILY, and that too was locked.
Then I found a cabinet labeled OXYDONE: EARLY DEVELOPMENT.
“You got a pick set?” she said.
“Of course.”
I took out my leather shaving kit and removed a flat pick with a hook on it. I did the gentlemanly thing and turned to the Legal cabinet first, the one Maggie was interested in. It was a four-pin file cabinet lock. It couldn’t have been easier. I pushed in, then pushed down, and the lock popped out. She pulled at the top drawer, and it opened.
&n
bsp; “You’re good,” she said. “I forgot how good.”
“Learned from the best.” I had no doubt she knew how to pick locks too—she’d probably taken the government course “Defense Against Methods of Entry,” a series of classes on how to break into places. I’d taken such a course, though by then I already knew how to pick locks, courtesy of a repo man I once met at Norman Lang Motors in Malden, Mass. That’s where I used to hang out a lot with my friend whose dad owned it.
Then I turned back around and found the Oxydone file cabinet and picked its lock. I’d gotten it down to five seconds, which wasn’t bad.
“Estate plans,” she muttered. “We’re in the right area code. Thank you.”
“How much time do we have on the clock?” I asked her.
“Hour and a half. Being conservative.” She took out an iPhone.
For the next few minutes there was just silence, broken only by the rustling of paper files, the occasional camera-lens-click from her phone. It was starting to get hot in there.
A lot of what I do is routine. Scut work. It’s not dramatic, it’s not cinematic, but it’s a major part of my job. I pored over as many files as I could.
I was able to pick each cabinet open in less than five seconds. In the Family cabinet I found a section labeled PSYCHIATRIC INVENTORIES/CONFIDENTIAL. There, I found psychiatric evaluations of each of his five children. One folder was marked “Susan Kimball.” I pulled it out, feeling a little guilty. Skimmed it. Read phrases like “Subject is a bright, intense individual who is somewhat naive for her age.” And “used to being bullied by her powerful father.” And “likely to be a follower rather than a leader . . . Fear of being taken advantage of . . . Particularly vulnerable to humiliation.”
Then I skimmed the one marked “Cameron Kimball.” Various phrases jumped out at me—“motor vehicle homicide” and “sealed juvenile record.” These files represented nearly fifty years, beginning with when Conrad Kimball started his medical practice and soon thereafter acquired the small pharmaceutical company, Cedar Laboratories, that later became Kimball Pharma.
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