Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

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.

“Bingo,” Maggie said abruptly, startling me. She pulled a thick file from the top drawer. “His kids will not be happy. But Natalya’s gonna be one rich widow.” She closed the file drawer. “Revised ten days ago. And that’s... as long as I’m staying in this claustrophobic box.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m out of here. And, Heller, you should get out of here soon too. We can’t risk staying longer.”

“Soon as I find my file. Wanna help me?”

“Just for a minute or two, but then we should leave. I’ll start with the bottom drawer. Wait.” She put up a hand and cocked her head. I listened too. I heard nothing.

She shook her head. “Okay, sorry.”

She pulled out the bottom drawer of the Oxydone cabinet and knelt on the floor as she flicked through the files.

I was not having any luck. I found a section on Development, but it was just a lot of chemical formulas and back-and-forth between scientists. A section on Investors. One drawer did contain just drug trial results. But here there appeared to be a gap, missing files about an inch thick.

As I searched the files on either side of the gap, Maggie got to her feet. A few seconds later, she whispered, “Heller?”

I turned, looked.

“You see this?”

She was pointing at a safe bolted onto the floor at the back of the little steel room.

“Check this out.”

There it was. There had to be a safe somewhere in his office. Probably others, elsewhere in the house, too. I’d come prepared for this, at least.

I stopped what I was doing, sidled over to the safe, squatted down. It was made of dull gray steel. A round digital keypad in the center of the front face, attached to a handle. This was the sort of inexpensive safe you might pick up at Home Depot. A lot of rich people are cheap when it comes to home security. This one had an electronic lock, pry-resistant hinges, one-inch-thick bolts to keep the door in place, and you could drop it from fifteen feet, no problem. But the manufacturers had put a cheap nickel solenoid in the locking mechanism.

Its Achilles’ heel.

“I’ll do the honors,” she said. She punched in four digits — “the month and date Conrad met Natalya,” she said — and it beeped without unlocking.

“As I remember, this brand uses five digits, not four.”

She punched in several other numbers. I let her try, while I pulled something out of my shaving kit. It looked like a white tube sock with something round and heavy in it.

“Keep your phone away,” I said. “This thing will wipe it clean.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a rare-earth magnet.”

These things were extremely powerful. They wiped out phones and credit cards and computer hard drives instantly.

“What do you—” she began. But then she fell silent, watching me position the magnet, in the white sock, against the top of the safe, just above the keypad. The magnet clamped right on, through the sock. I twisted the leg of the sock, fashioning a sort of handle. The magnet did as expected; then I jerked the handle and the safe came right open.

“Heller!” she whispered in astonishment.

I pulled at the sock and managed to slide the magnet off the front of the safe. That’s what the sock is for; otherwise, it’s fiendishly difficult to pull the magnet off.

I don’t know what I expected to find: More jewelry? Computer disks? Inside was just a thick Kraft-paper envelope, the old-fashioned kind that closes with a button and string.

She slipped her hand in and pulled out the envelope. Now I saw what she’d just seen. On the front of the envelope were two strips of white label tape with black lettering, all caps. They read:

TO BE DESTROYED

UPON MY DEATH

“Huh,” I said.

“I got dibs, Heller,” she said.

“I don’t think so,” I replied. “We wouldn’t have these if it weren’t for me and my magnet. You came here to find his will, and you got it.”

“We wouldn’t be in this office if it weren’t for me shutting off that alarm.”

“True,” I admitted. “Where’d you get the key to the study?”

“From my client. Who thought the alarm would be off.”

“Who’s your client?”

She shrugged. She wasn’t going to tell me. “Let me take this first,” she said, “take some pictures, hand it back to you.”

“What’s inside?” I said, ignoring her suggestion.

She was already unwinding the string from the paper button on the back of the envelope. Then she pulled out a small pile of brown folders, maybe an inch thick.

“That’s it?” I said. “Just paper?”

“Some photographs. Who’s Eric Sidney Tucker?”

“Megan’s ex-husband.”

“If Eric Sidney Tucker has a mustache, this must be photos of him in bed with some woman. Who is clearly not his wife, Megan Kimball.”

Kompromat , I thought. The Russians were famously great at collecting blackmail on people and exerting it to get their way. So was Conrad Kimball.

“He must not want his daughter to know he hired a PI on her husband,” I said. “That he has evidence against him.”

“But Megan’s divorced. Maybe she knows already.”

“Maybe, maybe not. What else is there?”

“Here’s a folder on Cameron Kimball.”

I took a look. “Jesus,” I whispered. I scanned through the folder, saw the police report, the court documents. But that wasn’t what I was looking for. “What else?”

“You mean something like this?”

She held up a thick brown file folder. Its label, in a clear plastic tab, typewritten, read, oxydone/phoenicia. That referred to the contract research organization that had done the tests whose explosive results they had buried. Phoenicia Health Sciences.

“I’ll take that one.”

“How about you let me have it until breakfast? Which is when this birthday party is over, right? That’s when I’m leaving.”

“How about you take your pictures right here?”

“You don’t trust me?”

“Of course I trust you. It’s a matter of speed.”