Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

“We all are.”

“Not Molly. Not Andrew.”

“They’re just dealing with their father’s death differently.”

“But why the hell is he angry at me ?”

“He’s angry at you for not protecting him.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!”

“Of course not,” I said. “But it’s natural. He’s overwhelmed. He’s thinking he has to step into his father’s role. People keep telling him he’s now the man of the family. That it’s his job to take care of his siblings and you. You gotta let him know he can be a kid.”

“Yeah,” she said, but it didn’t sound like agreement, and I’m not a therapist. She finished her bourbon and splashed some more into her glass. She tipped the bottle at me, and I shook my head. I was still working on my first.

“Oh, Nick, I’ve been approached on this huge class-action lawsuit against Kimball Pharma and the Kimball family.”

“What kind of lawsuit?”

“Supposed to be the biggest class-action lawsuit since tobacco, twenty years ago. The lawyer told me that Kimball knew how addictive Oxydone was.”

“Are you going to do it?”

“I think so. I need to make money any way I can.”

I was sorely tempted to tell her what I’d seen and what I was on the hunt for. What if I could deliver to her lawyers the very proof they were seeking? But I didn’t want her talking, possibly endangering herself — how did I know? So I kept silent. She stood up and said it was late, and I stood up too.

Suddenly she was kissing me, urgently at first. Her mouth was hot on mine, and I could taste the bourbon. I kissed back. Patty was so sexy, and I’m human. I’d always found her attractive. She held my face with her hands. Her tongue, cold from the bourbon, probed my mouth.

Then I pulled away. Her eyes were large. “What?”

I whispered, because sound carried far in that small house. “Look, you know I’m attracted to you, Patty, that’s obvious. Maybe a little too obvious.”

“So what are you—?”

“You’re a little drunk.”

“I have the right to get drunk. I just buried my husband, for God’s sake.”

“Of course you do. But I think maybe this is too soon.”

It feels like a betrayal, I thought, but didn’t want to say it.

Patty was looking for comfort, that was all, and I had just denied it to her. It felt like the right thing to do, but that didn’t mean it felt good.

Breakfast was a little awkward. Not on my part, but Patty seemed embarrassed around me. Brendan was much more communicative than he’d been the day before. I left before Patty and the kids had to head out the door — she to the hospital, they all to school — because I had to get to the office as soon as I could. We all hugged goodbye, and I kissed Patty on the cheek.

I texted Dorothy and asked her if we could meet first thing.

She was there before me. I’d run into some bad rush-hour traffic around Braintree. Dorothy handed me a mug of black coffee as I entered my office. She was wearing jeans and a black sleeveless top.

“Whoever killed Maggie Benson also took her phone,” I said.

“And you want to locate that phone.”

“That’s an interesting idea. I’ll call the detective who’s on the homicide. But I had a different thought. I saw her taking pictures of Kimball’s documents on her phone. Won’t they be backed up to her iCloud account? Won’t they be on some Apple server somewhere?”

She shrugged. “The detective can serve a warrant on Apple. Maybe he did already.”

“I’ll ask.”

“And then they get in line. It’s a long line — takes a couple days. Apple gets a lot of warrants. Unless it’s a missing person’s case, say. Those, Apple will give them within minutes. People think they have some right to privacy — wrong, they do not. Cloud storage falls under their terms of service, which basically says, ‘We cooperate with law enforcement.’”

“So how can I get it?”

“Without knowing her Apple ID and password, you’re stuck. You can’t.”

“Shit.” I picked up one of my Blackwing pencils and drummed its eraser on the desktop, making a rhythmic tattoo.

“Plus, Nick, you don’t know the pics ever got backed up to the cloud.”

“We don’t?”

“Only if her phone was set to automatically sync with iCloud. But there’s different settings. I set mine to sync only when it’s plugged in. I do that to save battery.”

“So the pictures might not even have been backed up.”

She nodded. She seemed to be about to say something. I said, “What?”

“What are you doing?”

“Doing?”

“This case. You said the client wants the investigation shut down.”

“She does.”

“So what, we’re going to work for free? For a woman who’s loaded ? My God.”

“This is about Maggie now,” I said. I didn’t explain.

My mobile phone rang. It was George Devlin.

His big white RV, bristling with antennas, was parked outside on the street. I knocked on the exterior to let him know I was there, then opened the door and got in.

Inside the light was dim, and it took my eyes a while to adjust.

George Devlin did not go out in public, not since he returned from the war. He lived in dim light because he didn’t want to be seen. When he joined my Special Forces A-Team, he was a happy, upbeat, and very handsome guy. A chick magnet. Someone on the team dubbed him Romeo, and it stuck.

Until the day that an IED nearly killed him. He survived, but most of his face was gone. Now it was a welter of scar tissue. He had nostrils but no nose, a jagged slash of a mouth. Some might have called him a monster.

George was sitting on a stool in the darkness, in front of a slim counter that held electronic equipment, secured to the walls of the RV. He spoke in a raspy whisper, because his vocal cords were badly damaged. “Do you have any drawings?”

“Blueprints,” I said, and handed him the sheaf of papers on which the drawings had been printed.

He moved his head close to the pages and looked them over in silence.

“You targeting the executive suite?”

“Right.”

“Seventh floor. What’s the company?”

“Phoenicia Health Sciences?”

“Sounds like a government cat’s paw.” He loathed the government and considered all law enforcement agencies to be the enemy.

“It’s not. It’s a CRO — a company that does tests for pharmaceutical companies.”

“What does this have to do with Sean Lenehan?”

I explained quickly about Sukie Kimball and how she wanted proof that her family’s company had buried the evidence that Oxydone was dangerously addictive. After a slight pause, I told him about Maggie’s murder. He didn’t know her, of course, but I wanted him to understand that for me, this was personal.

“Well, I want to tell you something,” he said, and he swiveled on his stool to look at me directly through his one eye. Pulled out a small white inhaler and breathed in through it. “I am constantly in pain, Heller.” His mouth made a clicking sound. “And only Oxydone gets me through.”

I nodded. Said nothing. It sounded like an advertisement. Only Oxydone gets me through . The man had to live his life not only terribly disfigured but in physical agony.

He went on. “Is Oxydone addictive? Of course it’s addictive. I’m an addict. But I can’t imagine life without it.”

I didn’t know what to say. He didn’t mind being an addict. As long as he kept getting a prescription, and he was somehow able to function, who was I to say it was wrong? But that didn’t diminish one bit my determination to find proof of the goddamned study. Because for everyone like Devlin there was someone else — maybe ten people — who were helpless under the drug’s spell.