Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

“We’ll go with you,” Jomi said.

I shrugged. I started walking toward the Defender, and the three men fell in beside me. Two on my right, one on my left.

The left-hand guy said apologetically, “Sir, we’ve had a problem recently with volunteers in the clinic. Some of them enroll thinking they can steal meds. Last week one of them left the clinic and wandered around the building, breaking into pharmacy lockers.”

The third guy, who hadn’t spoken before, said, “We’ve had guys, they break into the dispensary, looking for amphetamines and opiates. These are lowlifes.”

“I can see why you’d be suspicious,” I said.

“You’re not wearing a uniform, and you’re not carrying your badge,” Jomi complained. Not apologetic at all.

“You guys are doing a terrific job,” I told him. “I’m going to report up the chain the high quality of your responses.” I truly was impressed. They were ruthless.

The lead guy’s radio crackled to life. “Broken arrow, broken arrow! We have an intruder. He just tried to take me down. Male, late thirties, six two, six four, dark hair. Gray pants, gray slacks. I stopped him at Dr. Scavolini’s office.”

Jomi had been looking at me the whole time, and now he stopped. We all stopped. He squared his shoulders. We were just about the same height.

“Let me see your wallet,” he said.

“Sure,” I said, and I feigned reaching for my right pocket, then jabbed my right elbow, hard, into his abdomen. Really sunk it in there. I must have connected with his solar plexus, because he gagged and staggered backward and collapsed to the ground. He was writhing in pain. Then one of them punched me in my kidney, and I saw stars.

With my left hand, I grabbed the nearest wrist of the guy to my right, then I bent my knees, which straightened out his left arm. Vising my right forearm behind his elbow, I pulled, hard. I had him in an arm bar, straining his elbow joint. At any point I could have broken his elbow. But I took pity on him. He was only doing his job. So I put on enough pressure to do some damage but let up before I heard the bone snap. He screamed. I used the levered arm to spin him counterclockwise into the guy who’d been on my left. They became momentarily entangled face-to-face. Almost intimate. I reached over with my left arm. Grabbed behind the neck of the guy who’d formerly been on my left side, pinning them together. At the same time I stomp-kicked the guy closest to me in the back of his right knee and then pulled. Both of them tumbled to the asphalt.

Behind me, Jomi was struggling to get up, and nearly succeeding, so I turned and drop-kicked him under his jaw, which put him out.

This wouldn’t put an end to them, but it certainly slowed them down. I ran for the Defender and was out of that parking lot within a minute or two. Before any of them could recover quickly enough to find their camera phone and capture my license plate.

It was nearly six a.m. by the time I got home to my loft in the Leather District. I was bruised and battered and feeling some pain. Getting kicked around when you’re twenty is one thing. But when you’re older and a security guy lands a punch pretty well near your kidney, you do feel the pain. I took a few Advil, grabbed a power nap, showered and changed and felt a little better, and had just called Dorothy and asked her to meet me in the office when my mobile phone rang.

It was an admin from the clinic I’d just escaped from. She wanted to know what had happened. I told her I’d had a panic attack from having that probe down my stomach. I couldn’t take it anymore, I’d had to leave. She told me that if I left the study at this point I was ineligible to receive any compensation. I told her that was fine with me.

Then the phone rang again, and this time it was Detective Goldman. He introduced himself, this time, as Detective Bill Goldman. Now he had a first name.

“I called you last night,” he said.

“Sorry, I was occupied.” I wasn’t going to explain.

“You turn up anything yet?”

“Not me. What about Maggie’s phone? Have you gotten her call record, at least?”

“Better than that: we have her geolocations.”

It’s amazing, and more than a little depressing, how much information law enforcement can find out about you. Not just the numbers you called but where you were when you did.

“Anything interesting?”

“Right before she went to Conrad Kimball’s place, she was in the headquarters of a company in Waltham, Mass.”

Let me guess . “Okay.”

“A company called Phoenicia Life Sciences,” he said. “Know anything about it?”

“Not enough.”

“But why do you think she was there?”

So Maggie had been after more than Conrad’s will after all. I smiled, shook my head. “Probably trying to get a copy of a clinical study that Kimball had buried.”

“All right. One more thing. What’s your read on Cameron?”

“The typical screw-up youngest son, is what I figured. He came with Maggie but left in the middle of the night, horny, on a booty call.”

“Yeah, that didn’t happen.”

“I saw him arrive home at, like, four a.m.”

“Big Boobs Betty didn’t see him. No one at the Hole in the Wall saw him that night, and he’s a frequent customer.”

As I ended the call, I was thinking about Cameron Kimball and what he might have been doing in the middle of the night, that night. Whether he might have gone to meet, and murder, Maggie Benson. He’d been seriously drunk that evening. Did he even have the capacity to do it?

I had no idea.

I walked into my office, waved good morning to Dorothy. I wanted to sit in front of my computer for a couple of minutes.

Something tickled at the back of my mind about the quotes on Arthur Scavolini’s desk. I’d taken pictures of them with my phone. The one about how science is true whether you believe in it or not. The other one about how you’re the product of whatever billion years of evolution, act like it. I entered them into Google. The last one just pulled up a bunch of Pinterest quotes laid out nicely. The first quote turned out to be by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who’s the head of the Hayden Planetarium and is on TV a lot. To lots of science nerds, he’s a rock star. A geek’s Bruce Springsteen.

Then on my phone I pulled up the photo of Scavolini with the man with the black mustache and I knew right away that it was none other than Mr. Neil deGrasse Tyson himself. Clearly a peak moment in Dr. Scavolini’s life, meeting such a celebrity.

I filed that away mentally, in case it meant anything.

Dorothy was impressed with the credit-card-size device, the solid-state drive onto which I’d copied — or at least hoped I’d copied — Dr. Scavolini’s hard drive. I’d taken it out while the red light was still on and it had still been copying. Maybe that screwed something up; who knew, with computers.

She plugged it right in, looked at her monitor, and said, “Well, you got something here.”

“Okay.”

“Arthur Scavolini?”

“Right.”

“Oh, there’s a lot here. What am I looking for, Oxydone?”

“Or whatever its scientific name was before it was called that. And Conrad Kimball.”

“Won’t take long. I’ll search and let you know.” She didn’t want me standing over her cubicle.

“Good. Let’s hope there’s a needle in the haystack.”

“You know how you find a needle in a haystack?” she said.

“No, how?”

“Magnet. You got a magnet?”

“A rare-earth one. Neodymium.”

“Well,” she said, shaking her head, “maybe we’ll get lucky. I’m impressed you got this — all on a physical penetration?”