“But in a company the size of Kimball Pharma, there have to be others who got copies and held on to them.”
He held up three fingers. His sweat dripped off his chin onto the floor mat. “Three people,” he said. “Conrad killed that study, as soon as they heard about the addiction rate, and shut it down fast.”
“Do you have a copy?”
“It was on a website you had to sign into. If I was smart, I would have downloaded a copy. But I didn’t think.”
“So who might have one?”
“The only people at Kimball who saw the study, who got copies, are Conrad and the PI and the CMO.”
“The CMO?”
“Chief medical officer. Named Maurizio Zubiri. Brilliant guy. He’s been at Kimball forever.”
I made a mental note. “And who and what is the PI?”
“The principal investigator. The scientist who did the study. In Estonia.”
“You don’t happen to know his name, do you?”
“Come on. On a twenty-year-old study?”
“Could you find it?”
“Maybe.”
“I’m sure there were plenty of studies done on Oxydone. So other trials didn’t find the same rate of addiction?”
“The doctor in Estonia was a careful scientist. He designed a six-month study, and after only three days he noticed his subjects were going through withdrawal if they didn’t get their Oxy. He wasn’t looking for how addictive it was. He was looking for the right dose, basically. The addiction part came up as an unintended consequence. Every other study Kimball had done ignored that aspect. Shorter studies too.”
“Ignored it?”
“Clinical trials involving addictive drugs like Oxydone are extremely difficult to do. That’s why there’s so few of them. You have a high dropout rate, first of all. People in pain don’t want to get the placebo. Then there’s all the tricks a company can do. They can clean up the data. They show results only of those who complete the trial. The ones who got addicted? They get pushed out of the trial, so they don’t show up in the final results.”
“So how many people would have to be bribed to make this study go away?”
“At Phoenicia, just Art Scavolini. At Kimball, just Dr. Zubiri and the PI. Kimball Pharma is highly compartmentalized.”
“And you don’t know the name of the doctor in Estonia, so that just leaves Dr. Zubiri.”
“Right. Wait . . . Cask. Like ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’”
“Huh?”
“Mark—Marcus Kask. With a k. That was the Estonian’s name.”
“Unusual name.”
“Not in Estonia.”
“Why do the study in Estonia, of all places?”
“It’s a lot easier to enroll people in studies in the old Eastern Bloc countries. Lots of them don’t have health care, so they sign up for studies just to get covered. Also, Eastern Europe twenty years ago, it was the Wild West; you could do anything. You could massage the data. And if you didn’t like the study, you just shut it down and put it in a drawer. Total freedom. Conrad knew if there was a problem, he could bury it.”
I nodded.
“He probably knew this drug was more addictive than heroin, but he didn’t want to have that scientifically confirmed,” Sossong said.
“I see.”
“Look,” he said, “I’m talking to you because I feel bad for you. I know what it’s like to lose a dear friend to opioids. But if you ever quote me, that will ruin me, do you understand that?”
“I do.”
“Or worse.”
“Understood.”
“Now, if you don’t mind, I have to get back to my workout. Don’t let me hear from you again.”
55
Leaving Port Chester, I stopped for a late lunch at a burger place. While I ate, I searched on my phone for “Markus Kask” or “Marcus Cask.” I found plenty, in Sweden and Estonia, mostly. So that was a lost cause. I called Dorothy and asked her to search for a medical doctor and researcher in Estonia named Marcus Kask. Spelled however.
I’d paid and was on my way back to the Toyota when Dorothy called back. “I’m not sure I have the right one,” she said. “This Professor Marcus Kask, spelled with a k, was a doctor at West Tallinn Central Hospital.”
Tallinn. That had to be him. “Was?”
“Killed in a car accident on the Ring Road in Tallinn, seven years ago. Young guy too. Forty-three.”
“Shit.”
A man is killed in a car accident in a busy European city: there was nothing necessarily odd about that. But that left just the chief medical officer, Dr. Zubiri. And getting to him, a man who had worked for Kimball Pharma for years and was surely loyal, would not be easy.
* * *
• • •
Port Chester was only half an hour from Katonah and Kimball Hall, so I decided to take a drive to the Kimball house. I was thinking about Maggie. I took 684 into the Town of Bedford, and after a couple of turns found myself on the tree-lined Cantitoe Street, where Conrad Kimball lived. I slowed down when I recognized the stone gate booth and saw the street number. In the distance I could see the handsome brick gate house, which I had earlier mistaken for the main mansion. I didn’t know what I was doing there, but I knew I shouldn’t drive up to the house and call attention to myself. So I kept driving, along his property line, passing a clay tennis court near the road, and then taking a right onto Girdle Ridge Drive, which slashed through forest.
And I noticed something.
This was the end of Conrad’s Katonah property, this road here. This was the property line. And it wasn’t demarcated with a wooden fence or a chain-link one. The property was really too big to enclose with a running fence.
I pulled over when I saw an unmarked dirt road cutting through the trees on Conrad’s side of Girdle Ridge Drive. I saw tire tracks from trucks.
This was a service entrance to Kimball’s house.
I slowed and then turned onto the dirt road. It was narrow—the trees encroached close in—and the Toyota was scratched by branches.
The killer could have entered the property along this road. He, or she, wouldn’t have been spotted on video.
Or would he?
I braked, reversed, and saw a discreet CCTV camera on a telephone pole at the entrance to the dirt road from Girdle Ridge. It wasn’t exactly concealed, but it wasn’t obvious at all.
There was video back here. I wondered if Detective Goldman had seen it.
* * *
• • •
The Town of Bedford Police Department was on Bedford Road, in a redbrick building with white dormers that looked like a suburban bank office. Inside I could see it had been recently renovated.
Goldman was at his desk. He didn’t seem surprised to see me. But he didn’t want to talk in the building. He drove us to a Dunkin’ Donuts a mile or so down Bedford Road. As he drove I asked him about the dirt service entrance road and whether he’d seen the video from that camera from the night Maggie was killed.
He hadn’t, and he seemed angry at himself about it.
“I asked my partner to inventory all video cameras,” he said. “He must have missed it. Tunnel vision.”
I didn’t expect him to thank me, and he didn’t. It went unspoken. We parked, and entered the Dunkin’ Donuts. We both got coffee and sat at a table.
A guy in a black leather jacket entered, glanced over at us, and ordered something.
I went on. “Conrad must have an apartment in New York, right? A pied-à-terre?”
“Ten sixty Fifth Avenue,” Goldman said. “Eighty-eighth Street. View of the park.”
“Sounds about right. Are you any closer to finding out who killed Maggie?”
“The ME says the cause of death was blunt force trauma. She landed on her head and snapped her neck. And all the
usual broken bones and contusions and lacerations.”
“What about the manner of death?”
“ME won’t conclude anything. She was probably shoved off the cliff. The ME is holding off pending further investigation.”
“Do you have footprints from the ground?” I remembered standing on the pre-impregnated pad to create elimination prints, when Goldman questioned me back in Kimball Hall.
“We took several plaster casts of impressions in the soil. Someone appears to have scuffled with her on the ledge above the ravine.”
“Male or female?”
“We can’t ascertain that.”
“You have casts of whatever shoes or boots Cameron had on.”
“All the kids. But we’re unable to establish a match.”
“Because of the rain?”
“No, we’ve got some decent shoeprints despite the rain. Just not a match.”
“Shit. If it was Fritz Heston, we know he’s going to be careful with the forensic traces anyway,” I said. “This is his business.”
“He’d also know how to turn off any video cameras he wanted off.”
“What about Maggie’s iCloud account? She’s got photos—”
“Way ahead of you there, chief. We got access to her iCloud account, but apparently she didn’t back up her photos to the cloud. So we got no pics, and her phone was stolen.”
“Have you been able to locate it?”
“Someone must have removed the battery or smashed it or something. So no, we haven’t found it.”
The guy in the black leather jacket was waiting for his order. He stood at the delivery counter and looked around but not at us this time. He had a medium-dark complexion, looked Middle Eastern. He had black hair shaved close to the scalp, a prominent jaw, and a thin scar cutting through his right eyebrow. He took his coffee and left the shop. So: nobody of concern. But I mentally clocked the face.
I turned back to Goldman.
“Right. So listen, uh, Bill, I need to ask you a favor. I want to take a look at Maggie’s office.”
“It’s a home office, and it’s sealed.”
“Right, but could you get me in? With an escort, if you want, someone from the Manhattan PD?”
“What are you looking for?”
“To be honest, I don’t know what I’m looking for,” I said. “I know—knew her well, and I just might see something your people missed.”
Goldman scratched his goatee. “I think that can be arranged.”
56
Maggie Benson’s apartment was on 126th Street in Harlem. This wasn’t the Harlem I knew from when I was a kid. Now there were yoga studios and hip restaurants and a Whole Foods. Her building was kind of ugly, and run-down inside, with an elevator that didn’t seem to be working. I walked up the six flights. The local NYPD guy was already there. He opened the door when I knocked. The crime scene tape around the door had been broken.
“You’re from Westchester?” he said. He looked like he was twenty-two, though he had to be older.
I didn’t correct him. Let him think I had something to do with the cops. I didn’t need to talk to him. I said, “Is Crime Scene done with their work?”
“I think so, yes. They’re done with the prints and the computers and all that. But you can wear these if you want.” He handed me a pair of nitrile gloves as I entered.
I immediately smelled Maggie’s delicate patchouli scent. Not the brash perfume she’d been wearing at Kimball’s, when she was playing a role.
The apartment was immaculate, looked like it had just been cleaned and straightened out, but I knew that was just the way Maggie lived. She was an army girl through and through. On the left was a fairly big room that was clearly outfitted as her office. Framed things on the wall. Her state license. Diplomas. Certificates of attendance at training seminars—forensic analysis, debt investigations, public records searches. A small, spare home office. She didn’t meet people here, I was pretty sure. On a simple metal desk was an open laptop next to a coffee mug. The laptop was a MacBook. It was plugged in, but it was dark. The police must have finished examining it.
I touched the trackpad with a gloved finger, and the screen came to life. A log-in screen with a blank for a password. The Bash Bunny wouldn’t work here. It didn’t work on Mac computers.
I looked at the screen and thought. Maggie was a pro. The password wasn’t going to be “1234.” Though I tried it, just to be sure, and I was right. It wasn’t “1234.” I had no idea what to try. It wasn’t going to be the date that we met, that much I knew. Or “I ♥ Nick.”
This was, I realized, a fool’s errand. Going into Maggie’s apartment and hoping to find some trace evidence she might have left behind—that was ridiculous. She was a pro and as careful as I am.
The laptop sat on a yellow legal pad. Maggie always had a legal pad. She always took notes on legal pads while she talked on the phone.
This one was blank. Which probably meant that she’d taken her notes with her, folded up into a small square—also something she used to do.
I switched on the desk lamp and looked at the yellow pad, then held it up to the light at an angle.
Yes. You could see the faint indentations of what she’d written on the top sheet, which she’d removed.
The cop who’d let me in had followed me into Maggie’s office, but I could see he was losing interest. His radio blasted an indecipherable message; he picked up his handheld from his belt and spoke into it. As he did so, he walked out of the room and into the hall, and I took advantage of his absence. I grabbed a pencil from a jar of pens and pencils and did something that would make another professional groan. I shaded the surface of the paper lightly with the lead of a pencil, bringing out all the indentations in white.
The proper way to do this is to use an ESDA machine, an electrostatic detection apparatus, to lift indented writing off paper. It’s nondestructive. But I didn’t have that with me and I didn’t have the time. And for my purposes, I didn’t need it. The old-fashioned way worked just fine.
It brought up a constellation of notes in Maggie’s bold handwriting:
MEGAN KIMBALL
KIMBALL PHARM CONRAD K.
HK—>$$$?
LAST WILL & TEST. REVISED???
COMMINGLING OF FUNDS???
That last—commingling of funds—was underlined three times. Then there was a name, CONRAD BLACK, with a circle around it.
MEGAN KIMBALL—that was who had called her first, to hire her. And it was clear the call was all about Conrad, Megan’s father. Megan was asking about her father’s will, had it been revised? And something about HK and money. HK being Hong Kong? . . . Or Hayden Kimball?
Conrad Black: now, there was an interesting name. I didn’t know the man, but my father did. A bright, scholarly guy. He’s a Canadian financier, used to be called a “press baron,” who was convicted on four counts of fraud. He used to own the Jerusalem Post and the Daily Telegraph but got in trouble and went to prison for embezzlement and such. What that really meant was putting his personal expenses—household staff, private chefs, private jets, chauffeurs—on the company tab. Even though it was a publicly traded company. Was another Conrad—Conrad Kimball—doing the same thing? And why was Maggie taking notes about it?
I grabbed the marked-up piece of paper and tore it off the pad. Folded it three times, like Maggie used to do.
I felt like I had something useful now. I looked around the rest of the apartment, her bedroom, and I felt a pang. More than a pang: it was outright painful to look around and see the neatly arranged detritus of her life. A poster of Santorini—she must have traveled to Greece after she left the service. A collection of snow globes from all the places she’d lived, which was a lot. Her drawer of panties.
But I knew Maggie was too careful to leave any unencrypted disks or hard drives lying around.
There was nothing more here to find. I also, to be honest, wanted to leave. I couldn’t bear to be there any longer.
57
Sukie Kimball was surprised to hear from me. I was vague, said that I had to talk to her, that it was “family business,” and she gave me directions to her town house on Sullivan Street, in the Village.
I made a quick call and confirmed my plans: I was going to spend the night at a friend’s pied-à-terre in the city. The friend was out of town, as usual. He was a trader in diamonds and precious stones, and he spent maybe twenty days a year in Manhattan. His apartment sat empty. I dropped off my car in one of those rip-off parking garages near Central Park South and took the subway.
It was early evening when I got there. Sukie’s town house, between Houston and Bleecker, was a graceful four-story building—red brick with tall, original windows, black-painted lintels above them like eyebrows. Her studio and office was on the ground floor, the garden level, and it had a separate entrance. I rang the bell, and a young woman answered the door. Black-haired, early twenties, chunky tortoiseshell glasses. She seemed to be expecting me.
“Hey,” she said, out of breath, “Sukie’s in the editing room. Let me show you in.”
I entered an empty sort of bullpen, a collection of desks set up in cubicles, which led to a narrow hallway. The young woman said, “Did you get hassled by any protesters out there?”
I told her I hadn’t seen any.
“Oh, yeah, they’ve been here a lot in the last couple of weeks. Someone figured out she’s a Kimball, even though she’s known as Susan Garber? And they got this address—I don’t know how, but they did. I mean, she doesn’t even work for the company or anything, right? She makes her documentaries, she stays out of the whole opioid thing, and she goes to all these funerals. I mean, she’s one of the good guys!”
I told her I agreed.
She led me into the first room we came to, where Sukie was sitting at a desk with two very large monitors and a couple of expensive-looking speakers. The room was windowless and unadorned. A couch, a couple of chairs. One wall had a large corkboard covered with index cards. A rumpled middle-aged man was seated next to her. Sukie caught my eye and smiled. She was in the middle of a conversation with the rumpled guy. “Did you try Q?” she said to him.
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