He spun when he saw me. “Hey, Uncle Nick, everything okay?”
“Can you take lunch?”
“Let me ask my boss.” Gabe, who was seventeen, had gotten tall and scrawny, with a mop of black curly hair. For the last year he’d been living in the third floor of a three-decker on Putnam Avenue in a part of the city called Cambridgeport. He went off to talk to a chubby, bearded, and bespectacled guy about ten years older. Then he came back and said, “Half an hour long enough?”
“Let’s do it.” Together we walked out of the store.
The Chinese place next door where we liked to go was closed for renovations, so Gabe said, “You mind going to a vegan place?”
“No problem.” I’d felt like having a hamburger, but I had a feeling I would end up having a tempeh burger. “How goes the writing?” Gabe was a terrifically talented graphic artist and novelist. He wanted to make a living writing graphic novels but realized it wasn’t easy, so he worked uncomplainingly at the record store to support himself. College, he had decided, was not for him.
His mother wasn’t supporting him. I think she wanted him to try to support himself, fail at it, and return home, realizing how hard the world was out there. And then, she probably figured, he’d beg to go to college.
“I’m almost done with a book,” he said.
“When do I get to see it?”
“When I’m ready to send it to publishers. Not before.”
I remembered his mother nagging him for spending too much time on his graphic novel work. Once he’d gotten into trouble at his private boys’ school in DC for some graphic novel he’d written and illustrated that made fun of teachers and administrators. He was really good.
He was wearing a black-and-white ringer T-shirt for the Blinders, with red barbed wire around the name. “What happened to Slipknot?” Slipknot was a heavy metal band that Gabe used to love when he was in high school.
“Nothing happened to Slipknot. I’m just into these guys more.”
“Are they heavy metal too?”
He scoffed. “They’re British. Political punk rock. They’re awesome.”
“Okay.”
We ended up at Veggie Annex, which featured acai bowls and carioca smoothies. Not my kind of place, but we barely had time to eat anyway, so I didn’t. “Uncle Nick,” Gabe said, scarfing down his acai bowl, “I need to make more money somehow. Rent in Cambridge is insane.”
“Why don’t you live with Nana?” His grandmother, my mother, had a condo in Newton.
“Nah. I’d just get in the way.”
“You wouldn’t. She loves you, you know that.”
“I know. It’s just . . . living with your grandmother, you know?”
I didn’t pursue it any further. “You need money?” His mother would be furious if she knew I’d offered him a loan.
“Yeah, but not from you.”
I respected that. “Could you take a second job?” I hoped he wasn’t asking to work for me. He and Dorothy for some reason didn’t get along. Having him around my office could be a problem.
“Yeah, I was thinking about how you’re doing work for some big pharmaceutical company, and I decided I want to be a human guinea pig,” he announced. I’d told him over the phone what case I was working, but with Gabe you never knew what penetrated.
“What does that mean?”
“Like, one of the guys in the shop was telling me that the Harvard Business School has lab-based studies in human behavior, and they pay you for it. Or there’s research studies at Harvard Med that pay you thousands of dollars for spending a couple of weeks in a hospital taking some drug or some placebo or something. For, like, getting endoscopies or colonoscopies.”
“You would voluntarily have a colonoscopy?”
“If I got paid enough, yeah, sure.”
I shook my head. Then I told him about my conversation with my father, his grandfather, how Victor Heller wanted to see him.
“I’d kinda like to see him, but Mom won’t let me.”
“Do you want me to talk to your mother about it?”
He nodded. “She’s already so weird about me not living at home in DC. Yeah, could you?”
“I will.”
“Thanks. She listens to you.”
“No problem.”
“Where’s the jail, like upstate New York somewhere?”
“Near Albany. About three hours and change from Boston. You can drive, right?”
“Yeah, but I don’t have a car.”
“You can borrow one of mine.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“The Defender?”
“You don’t want to drive the Defender for six hours on the highway going sixty or seventy. It’s gonna be awfully loud inside.”
I walked Gabe back to the record store after half an hour, my head somewhere else. He’d given me an idea, and I needed to get back to the office right away to act on it.
41
Maggie Benson was killed by someone working for Kimball Pharma, I suspected, maybe because they thought she was threatening to uncover some kind of corporate wrongdoing. Maybe they knew she had broken into the file room in Conrad’s home study. Probably they assumed she’d found something explosive. If it wasn’t Fritz Heston himself who did it, it was someone else connected with the company who killed her, because of what she’d found.
They did it to protect Conrad Kimball. So I wanted to find whoever killed Maggie, and in the process, I vowed, I was going to take this company down by whatever means possible.
It was already personal. Now it bordered on obsession. Sukie had fired me, but I was unfiring myself.
Everything started with Phoenicia Health Sciences, the company that did the addiction study and then buried it. I had to get into Phoenicia somehow. And Gabe had given me an idea.
On the Phoenicia website was a link that read, Volunteer for a study. I clicked it, and it took me to a page with a very long list of human clinical trials that you could volunteer for. All for different drugs. They wanted people with high LDL cholesterol or Parkinson’s disease. Or smokers. People with major depressive disorder. That sort of thing. But some asked just for healthy volunteers between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five.
What caught my eye was the compensation. They were offering five and six thousand dollars, even over eight thousand dollars in some cases. The higher-paid ones were longer studies—you had to live in a corporate facility, basically, for several weeks or even months. There was probably some area within the company’s headquarters where they had pastel colors on the wall and offices that had been turned into bedrooms where they could watch you on video. I couldn’t imagine wanting to do that. But I guess the money was pretty good.
And you could feel good about doing it too. There was a lot of pretty language. “When you take part in paid clinical trials,” it read in big type, “you are helping to advance the human journey to new discoveries that will vastly improve lives worldwide for decades to come.”
Maybe some people did it for altruistic reasons. Most did it for money.
I thought about what Gabe had said about human guinea pigs. I did some Googling. These were people whose entire job was being a medical drug research subject. They did study after study; they lived in hospitals and office suites converted into sort-of bedrooms and had their blood pressure measured and their blood drawn and endured colonoscopies and bronchoscopies and all that sort of thing. It was a full-time job, and it paid okay.
I just wanted to find a study that required one or more overnight stays at Phoenicia headquarters and required healthy volunteers.
I found one that was studying “brain changes and people’s responses to painful stimuli,” where you got three MRIs. No thanks. I found one study for a drug that required two overnight stays. It didn’t say what the drug was, but I fi
lled out the online form and clicked Submit.
* * *
• • •
Meanwhile, Dorothy was doing a deep dive on Phoenicia. After considerable searching, she discovered that the company’s CFO was on vacation, in Costa Rica. “At least, according to his Facebook page. Man, people are so indiscreet on social media.”
“Excellent. What’s their accounting firm?”
“They use Deloitte.” That was one of the big four accounting companies. “Anything else?”
“Do you have the name of the CFO’s admin?”
She nodded. “I’ll send it to you right now.”
She drifted out of my office, and a minute later a box popped up on my computer screen with a name and phone number. I called it.
When Jennifer Talalay, the CFO’s admin, answered, I said, “Jen? This is Tom Rogin over at Deloitte, and we’ve got a problem I was hoping you could take care of.”
“Problem?”
“Yeah, and I really don’t want to bother Bob in Costa Rica.”
“Sure, tell me what I can do.” She was reassured by the fact that I knew her name and that I knew Bob Newell’s vacation plans. She had no reason to wonder whether I really was an accountant.
“Here’s the thing,” I said. “The city assessor is saying that your square footage for personnel is three thousand square feet more than what we’ve stated. This puts us in a different tax bracket, which we don’t want.”
She chuckled. “No, sir.”
“So we’re pushing back, and to that end, I’m going to need a set of building plans or drawings ASAP for the audit.”
“Drawings?”
“Bob said if anyone can find the plans, it’s you.”
She asked for an email address. I gave her the fake one, at DeloitteUS.com, that Dorothy had set up for me. It would auto-forward to me. I don’t even think DeloitteUS.com was a real domain name, but five minutes later she had emailed me the building plans for Phoenicia’s world headquarters.
Then my phone rang again.
“Mr. Heller? This is Catherine from Phoenicia Health Sciences. You’re interested in participating in a clinical trial?”
“Yes, that’s right.” I settled back in my chair.
The woman’s voice over the phone was businesslike but friendly. She had a great Boston accent. “This is a clinical trial that requires taking an investigational drug or a placebo.”
“Okay.”
“Mr. Heller, this study will involve a blood draw or an IV as well as an ultrasound and an overnight stay.”
“I understand.”
She then asked me a series of questions—race, ethnicity, height and weight, blood pressure, did I smoke, how many alcoholic drinks did I have per week . . . Did I know where Phoenicia was located. The study, she told me, started next Wednesday. That was too far off.
“There’s nothing sooner?”
“That’s when this study begins. Why, is that—”
“I know I probably should have gotten to this earlier, but my week off started yesterday, and I wanted to make some money as soon as I can. I was hoping to get into a study tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Not possible?”
She hummed to herself, loudly tapped at keys. “We actually have a cancellation in a study that begins in three days. I guess the volunteer took sick. This study requires a healthy donor. You’re not a smoker, are you?”
“No.”
“Does that work?”
“I think I can make it work,” I said, smiling. I thanked her and hung up.
There was a knock at my office door, and Gabe entered. He was wearing his black leather jacket. I said, “Hey.”
“Hey, Uncle Nick, can I borrow a car?”
“You already heard from your grandfather?”
He nodded. “I’m going to drive out there tomorrow morning. I got the day off from the record shop.”
I thought a moment. “Not the Defender. I need it. Plus, like I said, you don’t want it on the Mass. Turnpike. It’s loud.”
“That’s okay.”
“You can take my Toyota. But be careful.”
“Cool. I will. Not a scratch.”
I was only a little worried about my car, but I let it go, because my intercom was buzzing again.
“Nick, it’s Patty Lenehan.”
I picked right up. “Patty?”
Her voice was raspy. “Nick, I’m so sorry, but I really need you back here.”
“Everything okay?”
“I can’t—I just can’t—it’s Brendan. He’s angry all the time, and he’s taking it out on me. He’s been breaking things, and he refuses to do anything I ask him to do. He says he hates me. I just can’t get to him. He needs you. I need you.”
I hung up and tossed Gabe, my other surrogate son, the keys to the Toyota.
42
Seven years ago
When news of General Garrett Moore’s sudden and unexpected early retirement came out, Maggie’s reaction stunned me.
She was livid.
“You gave me your word, Heller!” she yelled. Her eyes were wild. “You promised me you wouldn’t do anything about it.”
For a moment I didn’t know how to respond. “You think I could have this guy walking around with impunity after what he did to you? With power over other people? That was unacceptable.”
“Oh, unacceptable? Nick, this was never about you and what you think is acceptable or not. No, you don’t get to do that. This was my fight, and you wanted to make it yours—and you don’t get to do that.”
I stared in disbelief.
“What happens when people find out? They’ll think you took revenge on him because I had eyes for him. For the general.”
“Well, that’s bullshit.”
“How easy do you think it is for me to continue in my job after this? For you this is just one battle. For me—for any woman in my position—it’s a war. It’s something we deal with day in and day out.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Men always know better,” she said hotly, “right?”
That evening ended our relationship. My apologies did nothing. She was furious at me, and, though it took me a while to get it, I eventually came to understand. It wasn’t my battle to fight. It was hers.
I’ve always taken on other people’s battles, even when I shouldn’t. It’s a lesson I still haven’t really learned.
43
Early the next morning I gassed up the Defender—the hundred miles or so from Boston to Westham would use more than half of the Defender’s tank, and the fuel tank held fifteen gallons. I headed out through rush-hour traffic down the Southeast Expressway, that terrible, always-choked highway out of Boston. Patty Lenehan had sounded like she was at her wits’ end but said she could wait until today.
My mobile phone rang, and I glanced at it. A 914 area code, which meant Westchester County. I knew it wasn’t Sukie, because her cell started with 917. I didn’t recognize this number.
“Is this Mr. Heller?” A gruff male voice.
“Speaking.” I changed lanes and headed toward Route 3.
“This is Detective Goldman from the Town of Bedford Police.”
“Oh, yes,” I said.
“Remember I said I might have some additional questions regarding the death of Margret Benson? So a couple of things have come up, and I wonder, are you available to talk for a few minutes?”
I suppose I could have told him that I was driving and call him later, but I was far too curious about what he was calling for. Because I had a pretty good idea where this was going. He’d seen me on the surveillance video at Kimball’s house. What else could it be?
“Sure,” I said, my stomach tight.
“A couple of loose ends came up. When we talked at the Kimba
ll residence, you told me that you spent the night sleeping in your bedroom in the east wing, does that sound right?” Cars were starting to pass me. The Defender engine roars loudly when you step on the gas, so I was instead easing up, trying to keep the noise level down. I moved to the right lane.
“That’s right.”
“Which parts of the house did you visit when you stayed there?”
“Let me see. Besides my bedroom on the second floor, I saw the rooms everyone else saw—the smaller dining room, the library, the kitchen. . . . Let’s see, the room where you questioned me in the morning . . .”
“No other rooms in the house?”
“The game room in the basement.”
“Any other rooms?”
“It’s possible, but not that I can recall right now.”
“I see.”
He was silent for long enough that I thought the call might have gotten cut off.
“Hello?”
“Yes, Mr. Heller. Would there be any reason why we might find any information that said you were in a room that you say you weren’t in?”
A carefully worded question. And an accusation. We have information proving you were in parts of the house you’re not telling us about.
You’re a liar.
“Sure, it’s possible. I forget what-all I saw. I was a guest of Sukie’s and I went where she went.”
He wasn’t happy with that answer. “You said you slept through the night, is that right?”
“I don’t think I said that.”
“You said, ‘I was here, sleeping in my bedroom in the east wing.’”
“I don’t think I said I slept through the night. I never sleep through the night.”
In fact, I usually do sleep through the night, most nights. I’m untroubled, usually, by insomnia. And to be indelicate, I usually don’t have to get up to pee in the middle of the night like a lot of guys.
“So you didn’t sleep through the night? The night you stayed at the Kimball house?”
“I got up a few times, as I recall. To use the bathroom.”
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