House on Fire--A Novel

by Joseph Finder

  The first one to climb out and onto the ladder was Sukie.

  80

  Within twenty minutes, all of the Kimball family had been rescued from the second story. The fire department arrived by the time the third person was coming down the ladder. Eventually a few of the firefighters came around to the back of the house, where we were all gathered on the lawn, looking back as the flames ravaged Kimball Hall.

  Conrad looked agitated, even furious, but not scared. He was issuing instructions to Fritz.

  Cameron stood by himself, looking up at his handiwork. I heard him say, “Burn, baby, burn.”

  His face was strange, his eyes darting around frantically, and there were tears streaming down his cheeks. A couple of policemen flanked him. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  We stood back, watching the water jets douse the flames on the second story. My eyes smarted, and my throat was sore. I was waiting for Detective-Sergeant William Goldman of the Bedford Police Department, whom I’d texted in the meeting.

  “How the hell did you know about all this corporate finance?” I asked Sukie.

  “I learned from the best,” she said. She met my eyes. I knew she meant Victor.

  My stomach twisted. “Was it his idea?”

  She shrugged. Her eyes looked off somewhere into the distance.

  I knew that meant yes.

  “He told me you were a sucker for the bird with the broken wing,” she said.

  I felt the air go out of me. Finally, I said, in a cool voice, “Why did you do it?”

  She looked at me as if she didn’t understand.

  “I saw the video,” I said. “You didn’t disable all the cameras.”

  I could see a change in her gaze. It dawned on her what I meant. My scalp prickled.

  I said, “I know how it happened. Maggie, I mean. You said you had something to tell her, and you took her over there”—I pointed to the stone wall, the ledge—“and all it took was one big heave. Doesn’t matter how skilled she was, it just took one surprise push when her back was turned. No, my question is why the hell did you have to kill her?”

  I was bluffing about having seen the video, of course, but Sukie didn’t know that. She stared at me, her eyes widening.

  “I had no choice,” she whispered, almost inaudibly.

  She’d recruited me at the funeral of my friend Sean, who’d succumbed to the very drug she wanted investigated. That was no coincidence. She knew what she was doing.

  Which meant she had access to people deeply in the know. She was a woman on a mission, who claimed she’d been radicalized by the death of a close friend who’d been addicted to Oxydone.

  That’s what she claimed.

  But I knew it was something else. Over the years, greed must have overtaken her. A greed for power. I thought of what Paul had said, that there was more Conrad in her than in any of the rest of the siblings.

  That they were two birds of a feather.

  Who was the one member of the family expert in video? The filmmaker, of course.

  Who knew how to disable the cameras remotely?

  The answer had been right in front of my face the whole time.

  Oddly enough, it was her shoes that had first tipped me off, set something spinning in my mind.

  The morning after Maggie was killed, Detective Goldman had asked everyone to wear the shoes they’d worn the night before, so the police evidence unit could take footwear impressions.

  Sukie was wearing something different, I noticed.

  At dinner the night before, she’d been wearing a pair of suede pumps with an ankle strap. Jimmy Choo, I was later told. The next morning, she was wearing a pair of suede Prada sandals that crisscrossed at the toe. The brands I didn’t know.

  But I could see the difference.

  My recollection was confirmed in Anguilla, when Detective Goldman sent me video taken in the foyer of Kimball Hall on the night of Conrad’s birthday dinner. I pointed out to him that the shoes Sukie was wearing in the video were the pumps with the ankle strap. Not what she wore for the footwear impressions for the police the next morning, to mislead them.

  Then Goldman found the exact same pair of Jimmy Choos at the back of the closet in Sukie’s old room at Kimball Hall. They matched the impressions taken on the ground at the back of the house where Sukie had pushed Maggie.

  * * *

  • • •

  It had taken me a while to figure Sukie out.

  At first I’d wondered why she was so insistent on letting the protester in her backyard with the gasoline cocktail go. Until I realized she’d probably hired him in the first place. To make her seem imperiled. And to keep me on board.

  Thanks to Victor, she knew I had a soft spot for the damaged bird.

  She read me right.

  Victor had told her where my vulnerabilities lay.

  The rag was soaked in gasoline, but I bet the can was filled with water. She was probably never actually in danger.

  “Maggie wouldn’t cooperate, would she?” I said. “I knew that woman, and I knew her code of ethics. She always wanted to do the right thing, even if it was the hard thing. She didn’t find the Tallinn file, but she had dirt. Not the study, but a folder that proved the study existed. And she was going to break her confidentiality agreement with you and turn the documents over to law enforcement. To get the facts out there.”

  “We’re talking about millions of lives,” Sukie said, her eyes sparking. “Hundreds of thousands of deaths. This is a war. Don’t you see the war going on in this country?”

  I watched her, impressed. She was good.

  “Oh, sure, our government sends thousands of young people to fight wars in foreign countries,” she went on, “and gives guys like you medals for killing the enemy. But if one person has to die—”

  “Maggie wanted to hand the file over to the FBI,” I said. “You needed it kept secret. So you could use it as leverage against your father.”

  How, I wondered, would she keep me from turning a copy over to the FBI? Or some newspaper? Did she think that because we were lovers, I wouldn’t turn against her?

  She turned and saw Detective Goldman coming across the lawn.

  “How many people did you kill, Nick? The next question is, why? Because at least I know why I did what I did.” In a smaller voice she said, “I’m sorry she had to die.”

  My eyes filled. I felt more sadness than anger. Sukie was a sociopathic manipulator who needed to keep me on the trail. She’d researched me. And played me, skillfully. At one point she even pretended to want me to stop, feigning worry about my well-being, so I wouldn’t suspect her. Instead, I’d redoubled my efforts.

  Telling me to stop was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. And she knew that.

  “You didn’t really go to all those funerals, did you?” I said. “You told me you did, sure. And you went to Sean Lenehan’s because you knew I’d be there.”

  She stared at me with some combination of resentment and indignation. “Maybe not as many as I said, but I’ll be making a doc about the horrors of this epidemic, and I’m going to win a goddamned Peabody Award.”

  “From your prison cell?” I said, deliberately echoing her words.

  She just looked at me for a long moment.

  Detective Goldman nodded in my direction and said, “Susan Kimball, you have the right to remain silent.”

  I couldn’t look her in the eye.

  Epilogue

  A few days later, after the arrests of Conrad Kimball, Cameron Kimball, and Sukie Kimball, Gabe called me, sounding desperate. I told him to come by my office. He came in a half hour later, visibly upset, and showed me the Schwab app on his phone.

  “I called Schwab and they said it’s too late, there’s nothing they can do about it,” he said.

  The balance in his account was zero
.

  Four point six million dollars had disappeared.

  He was stunned and angry and despondent. “They said an authorized wire transfer was requested, and the funds have been moved to an offshore account.”

  I nodded, because I wasn’t surprised. It was Victor, after all. He’d siphoned the $4.6 million away, as he’d always planned to.

  “He played you, Gabe, just like he plays everyone,” I said gently.

  Like Sukie played me, I thought.

  “You know the old story about the little boy and the rattlesnake?”

  Gabe shook his head.

  “A little boy’s walking one day when he sees a rattlesnake on the ground in front of him, shivering,” I said. “And the snake says, ‘I’m old and freezing and about to die. Please pick me up.’ And the boy says, ‘But you’re a rattlesnake. You’ll bite me.’ The snake says, ‘No, if you pick me up, I’ll be nice. We’ll be friends.’”

  “So the boy picks up the snake,” Gabe said, impatient.

  “Exactly. And of course the snake bites him. And the boy says, ‘I trusted you! You promised me! Now I’m going to die!’ And the snake says, ‘Yeah, but you knew what I was when you picked me up.’”

  Gabe nodded.

  “Victor took advantage of you,” I said, putting my arm around his shoulders. “I’m sorry it happened. But you knew he was a snake. I told you so.”

  My phone buzzed. I picked it up. It was one of the New York Times’s health reporters. I’d gotten her name from a friend.

  “Excuse me,” I said to Gabe.

  Into the phone I said to the reporter, “I wanted to give you a heads-up. I’m about to email you a very large file of documents that I think you’ll find interesting.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Later, Cameron told the police that he meant only to burn his father’s evidence files, in the home office. He hadn’t intended for the fire to spread to the rest of house.

  He didn’t know the files were in fireproof safes and cabinets anyway.

  Sukie needed me to understand why she had had to do what she’d done. In her mind, the brilliant ends—her anti-opiate corporation—plainly justified the brutal means: Maggie’s death.

  She didn’t know that I knew the woman and cared about her.

  She also didn’t know until later that the flash drive I’d given her, ostensibly with the Tallinn files on it, actually contained the same bug I’d used at Phoenicia headquarters. It had copied the contents of her computer and emailed everything to me.

  I had plenty of evidence to give Detective Goldman.

  * * *

  • • •

  Maggie Benson’s parents were still alive, so sadly enough they had to bury their younger daughter. Maggie had also left a brother and a sister. There were a lot of family at her funeral in Madison, Connecticut, in a fine old Gothic Revival Episcopal church.

  I was surprised to see Patty Lenehan, Sean’s widow, there. She’d driven all the way from Westham, on Cape Cod, a good four-hour drive. She wanted to pay her respects.

  After the funeral service, she and I talked for a bit outside the church. We talked about Sukie Kimball and why she’d done what she’d done. She told me that Brendan was starting to do better.

  Then she told me she’d gone to see the funeral home director in Westham who was trying to rip her off. She told him that if he insisted on billing her eighteen thousand dollars, she’d go to the VA and the local newspaper.

  He quickly backed down.

  “Well done,” I said. I knew I couldn’t have done any better.

  “Don’t be a stranger, okay?” she said, her gaze lingering.

  We drove together to the cemetery, a big and beautifully landscaped place right outside of Madison. Maggie’s parents had arranged for a military honor guard detail, a couple of young army guys from the local recruiting office. They folded and presented the flag, from over her casket, to Maggie’s parents. They played taps, again using a boom box.

  It was a beautiful fall day, crisp and clear, almost cold. The trees were red and orange and gold, and leaves swirled around us. The wind was strong. My eyes watered.

  After the casket was lowered into the grave, I found Maggie’s parents. Her mother was small, like Maggie had been, and had the same beautiful eyes. The same liveliness. Her father was a big man in a wheelchair, bald and square-jawed and powerful looking, even in his old age.

  “Maggie told me about you,” her mother said. “She said you were one of the good ones.”

  I shook my head modestly. “I wish I was as good as she thought I was,” I said.

  She tilted her head, but before she could ask me to explain, her son put his arms around her.

  Maggie’s father took my hand warmly. His big hand was leathery and dry and cracked. He was looking around at his gathered tribe, his surviving son and daughter and their spouses and kids.

  “Family,” he said to me. “It’s a powerful thing, isn’t it? End of the day, it’s what holds us together.”

  I swallowed hard. I didn’t know how to reply. The sun was glittering, dancing on the autumn leaves. Finally I said, “I’d like to think so.”

  Acknowledgments

  The Kimball family isn’t based on any real-life family. Long before I decided their money derived from pharmaceuticals, I was drawn to the terrain of great family wealth, dynastic ambitions, and shame. For legal assistance I’m indebted to Joe Teig of Reed Smith, Christopher Lynch of Reed Smith, David Sheldon, George Warshaw, Mark Batten of Proskauer, Jay Waxenberg of Proskauer, Jay Shapiro of White and Williams, Lori Smith of White and Williams, and particularly Celeste Letourneau of Reed Smith.

  On the byways of the Pentagon, thanks to Lieutenant Colonel Richard (Rick) Drew. On Nick Heller’s Special Forces background, my thanks to Sean Parnell, retired Staff Sergeant Kevin Flike (an American hero), and especially retired U.S. Army Special Forces Command Chief Warrant Officer John Friberg. For the Spanish translation, thanks to Oscar De Muriel.

  The New York Times’s Barry Meier wrote an excellent book on the opioid crisis, Pain Killer, and helped me make sense of the business pressures behind it. Ed Silverman, of the invaluable STAT, was a terrific source on the pharmaceutical industry. On the development of drugs and clinical trials, I was helped by Dr. Maurizio Fava, the chairman of the department of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital; and Professor David Armstrong of the Division of Gastroenterology at McMaster University Medical Centre. Dr. Amy Cohen helped me understand grieving children and families.

  On Broadway, I got some sage insider advice from Evangeline Morphos. On documentary filmmaking, thanks to David Schisgall. My fashion gurus were Ashley Segal, Lucia Baldwin Rotelli, and Jillian Stein. Thanks to Wake Smith for details on the Choate school. On house fires and procedures, my thanks to Tim Simkins. A big thanks to a very astute hacker, Jayson Street. I’m grateful to Nick’s trainer, Jack Hoban, and to my unindicted co-conspirator, Giles McNamee. I’m grateful as well to Detective Jeremiah Benton of the Boston Police, and my own team, Clair Lamb, Karen Louie-Joyce, and Marilyn Saks Goldstein. In the UK, I’m grateful to Laura Palmer and the team at Head of Zeus for their support; and especially Clare Alexander of Aitken Alexander.

  Finally, my deepest thanks to the team at Dutton: John Parsley, Christine Ball, Amanda Walker, Elina Vaysbeyn, and Cassidy Sachs; and to my terrific agent, Dan Conaway of Writers House. Thanks once again to Emma J. S. Finder and Michele Souda, for their steadfast, loving encouragement. Most of all, for help above and beyond, I thank my brother, Henry.

  About the Author

  Joseph Finder is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen previous novels, including The Switch, Guilty Minds, The Fixer, Suspicion, Vanished, and Buried Secrets. Finder’s international bestseller Killer Instinct won the International Thriller Writers’ Thriller Award for Best Novel. Guilty M
inds and Company Man won the Barry Award for Best Thriller, and Buried Secrets won the Strand Critics Award for Best Novel. Other bestselling titles include Paranoia and High Crimes, which both became major motion pictures. He lives in Boston.

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