Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

“Go back and amend your statement,” said Sukie. “Tell them the truth.”

“The goddamned cameras,” he said. “I totally forgot about them.”

“You were embarrassed,” Megan said. “You wanted to protect Beth. That’s why you didn’t give them a full account the first time. Like that. Which is about the size of it, right?”

“The point is,” Paul said, “this woman was intoxicated and for some reason decided to walk the property, and she must have fallen to her death. It’s as simple as that.”

I made a let’s-get-out-of-here gesture with my head, and Sukie followed me out of the room and into the hallway. I walked a distance down the hall, away from the game room, so we couldn’t be overheard.

“It’s handled,” I said. “The detective is going to make some calls. If I check out, he’ll keep it quiet.”

“Sort of professional courtesy?”

“Something like that. But now I need to get out of here. Either we go for a drive or I’ll get an Uber.”

Sukie called for her car and announced to her siblings that she was going back to the city. She tracked down her father and said goodbye. Ten minutes later we were sitting in the back of the town car.

I didn’t talk much in the car, because I’m a suspicious type myself and have been burned by limo drivers before who listen for pay. But when we got to the Westchester Airport, where she was dropping me off, we both got out and stood outside the terminal in the cold air while her car waited in the lot.

“Look,” I told her, “the reason I didn’t get any files is that I let Maggie take them first.”

“Maggie.”

“The real name of the woman who was killed.”

“And you know this how?”

“Because we were friends. We worked together in the Pentagon, and she later became a private investigator.”

“She was a PI too?”

I nodded.

“Cameron brought her in? Cameron? ”

“Well, Megan hired her.”

“For what?”

“Megan wanted to see your father’s latest will. To see how much he’s leaving to Natalya. And find out who was left out.” I told her briefly about our breaking into Conrad’s study and my finding the safe room. And the safe. And the envelope of photos and documents Conrad Kimball wanted destroyed upon his death. But the Phoenicia study seemed to be missing.

When she’d heard enough, she said, “Oh, dear God, she was killed. The woman was murdered.”

“I think so.”

“By whom?”

“Somebody working for your father, I assume.”

“Fritz?”

“He’d be at the top of my list of suspects.”

“Oh, God . They could be coming after me! If they figure out that I’m trying to get this clinical trial— Jesus, Nick, I could be a target.”

“You’re a member of the family, let me remind you. You’re safe. And no one knows what I was doing. They don’t know I got into your father’s study. As long as no one knows—”

“I want you to stop. The job is completed.”

“I haven’t gotten the documents.”

“I don’t care. You tried, you came close, we’re done.”

I looked at her. “Do you know why I took the job in the first place?” I said.

“Because I asked you.”

“No,” I said. “Because of a man named Sean Lenehan, whose funeral you attended. A man who saved my life.”

She fell silent, looked down. Played with the rings on her fingers. “I understand,” she finally said. “But I want you to stop. You’re done.”

I nodded, looked away. In fact, I wasn’t going to stop now. Sean and Maggie both were killed, in different ways and for different reasons, because of the same drug.

No, I wasn’t done.

Seven years ago

“Somebody hurt you,” I said to Maggie.

A long, long silence during which my mind revved.

“I was raped.” She said it in an oddly affectless, far-away-sounding voice.

“My God.”

“It’s the kind of thing that can mess with your mind.”

I put my arm around her. “Of course it is. Talk to me. How long ago did it happen?”

“Five months ago.”

“Did you report it?”

“He... he’s a four-star.”

“Who?”

She shook her head.

“Why don’t you want to tell me who it was?”

“Is it okay if we don’t talk about this?”

“I don’t know, is it really okay? Because, Maggie — maybe you should talk to someone.”

She remained silent.

“What happened to the guy?” I said.

“Nothing.”

Over the next half hour it came out. She hadn’t filed any reports. She finally told me the name of her attacker. General Garrett Moore. Of course I’d heard of him.

“He called me and asked me to come to a meeting in his hotel room. This was in Vienna.”

“Don’t tell me he was in a bathrobe.”

She nodded. Attempted a smile. “Almost. Just a pair of gym shorts and an erection. I thought I was there for a business meeting. Silly me.” She lowered her voice to a murmur. “He said he’d been thinking of me a lot. He — wouldn’t stop. He physically restrained me — he wouldn’t stop.”

“Jesus.”

She sobbed silently, convulsively. I held her. After a while I said, “Are you in his chain of command?”

She shook her head.

“Pretty... ballsy to go after an investigator like you.”

“He didn’t think it was rape.”

“What?”

“He said he was just doing what I ultimately wanted. What he knew I wanted. Thing is, he’s done this with other women. I’ve heard the rumors.”

“You’ve told people?”

“You’re the only one I’ve ever told. Promise me you won’t do anything,” she said.

“You haven’t said anything to anyone? Why not?”

“Because... Heller, I like what I do, okay? I don’t want to be the girl who brought down General Garrett Moore. That would turn into my entire identity. You know how many enlisted guys would take a goddamned bullet for General Moore?”

“But couldn’t you file a restricted report?”

“And then you think it’s prosecuted? It’s ignored, and I’m ostracized. Do you know how powerful a general is? He can influence promotions, assignments, fitness reports, investigations, all sorts of things.”

“I know.”

“You file a charge against a general and you’re teasing a snake.”

“If he raped you — if it comes out—”

“It’ll be my word against his. He’ll deny it, of course. Oh, sure, if I insisted, we could move forward with a legal claim. And it would blow up my life here. I’d be radioactive. So, yeah, after the rape I made a decision. I didn’t want to be that girl. I just wanted to put it behind me.”

“Maggie,” I said softly, “this is not behind you.”

At the JetBlue counter at the Westchester Airport, I bought a ticket to Albany, New York. Then I called my father’s lawyer and arranged to visit him in prison.

“He has a condition,” the lawyer told me.

“You mean senile dementia? That again?”

At one time he was pretending to have some kind of unspecified senility and was asking for compassionate release. But he couldn’t keep up the ruse. He got tired of acting demented.

“That’s not what I mean,” the lawyer said.

“What kind of condition?”

“He’ll tell you. He may not talk to you unless you agree to his condition.”

The lawyer wouldn’t explain beyond that, and I didn’t push it. I got on my flight, and by the afternoon I had arrived, in a rented car, at the grimy Victorian Gothic redbrick prison, the medium-security Altamont Correctional Facility.

It had once been a hospital for the criminally insane, the Altamont Lunatic Asylum, and it was still a forbidding place. I went through the security procedures, the metal detector and the ion scan and two metal cages, until I got to the visitors’ room, which smelled, as always, of ammonia and sweat. Its floor was green linoleum, its walls beige, a large mural painted on the visitors’ side.