Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

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.

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 filled 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.”