Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

“Right.”

“Can I ask what you’re going to do with whatever you find?”

“Me? Oh, I’m planning to bring Kimball Pharma down.”

“Very funny, Nick.” She smiled a sort of contorted smile and didn’t look at my face. She would have seen that I wasn’t laughing.

At first it seemed that we’d struck out. There was plenty of correspondence between Dr. Scavolini and top officers at Kimball Pharma, but none of it had to do with Oxydone. Other drugs, yes. In the meantime, I called the other scientist on my list, Dr. Sossong, the whistle-blower.

His wife answered the phone, just like last time. I gave my name, again, as Ben Ellison, one of my cover names. I reminded her that I was writing a book. This time she put her hand over the phone, and I could hear muffled conversation. She came back on the phone and said, “I’m afraid Bill won’t be able to speak with you.”

“Tell him I have one last question, that’s all. It’s important.”

Dorothy entered my office, and I put up an index finger to ask her to wait.

Dr. Sossong’s wife put her hand over the phone again, and I could hear more muffled talk. Finally Dr. Sossong got on the line. Much less friendly than last time. “Listen, fella, I told you already, I can’t talk to you. I legally can’t talk. I shouldn’t have talked to you the other day.”

“This will be off the record,” I said. “Your name won’t be associated in any way with—”

“Don’t call again,” he said, and I heard a click. He’d hung up.

Dorothy said, “Are you interruptible?”

“Now I am.” Before she could start, I said, “Could you do a social media search on Dr. William Sossong?”

She nodded, once. “Okay.”

“That file I downloaded — I had to interrupt it before it was done copying. Is it okay?”

“It’s okay. But I have a question for you. How could there be no documents that contain the word ‘Oxydone’ on his entire hard drive?”

“Maybe because the drive was only partially copied. Or maybe it’s not under the trademark name.”

She looked down. That morning she was wearing dark jeans and a lime-colored silk top and ridiculously high heels. Her usual look. “I have another possible answer to that question,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“So I found this big PDF file among his documents, and I tried to open it. It said it was a corrupted file. Huge file, like a hundred gig. But I had a thought. What if it’s an encrypted file?”

“Would they look the same?”

“At first, yes. And one of the documents I found on the doctor’s hard drive was an instruction manual for VeraCrypt.”

“Which is an encryption program?” I asked, because I wasn’t sure.

“Right.”

“Which is the program he used to encrypt the file,” I guessed. “So can you decrypt it? Like brute-force it?”

“Nick, I used to work at the NSA, do you remember? Where I had access to basically the most powerful computers in the world? We couldn’t crack it.”

“So you can’t?”

“Maybe the NSA can do it by now, who knows. But with the computing power I have, we’re left with one option.”

“Guess the password,” I said.

“There you go.”

“You try the usual suspects?”

“I got together a whole list. Date of birth, date of his wife’s birth, his kids’ birthdays, the names of his wife and his kids, the date of their wedding. I even tried Neil deGrasse Tyson.”

“Nothing, huh?”

“Nothing.”

“Do we know how long the password is? How many characters?”

“No idea. They recommend more than twenty characters.”

“It could be any length?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s discouraging. Why would he encrypt just one document?”

“It might turn out to be a folder. It could be a whole bunch of documents, all password-protected.”

“Okay. So what are the odds of cracking this password?”

“The odds? Zero, Nick. The odds are zero.”

“But you’re not giving up.”

“If you don’t mind, I want to give it a go.”

I smiled. She didn’t give up easily. “Go for it.”

Gabe’s apartment was a dump. It was on the top floor of a shambling triple-decker on Putnam Ave. that had once been painted red. The paint had peeled so badly you could barely tell the color anymore. In front of the house the trash containers were tipped over. Half a bicycle was locked to a parking meter. What looked like a discarded baby stroller blocked the front door. His name wasn’t on the bell, which read kowalczyk, the name of one of his roommates. It was around ten a.m., which meant Gabe was sleeping, but he wasn’t answering his cell. So I rang the doorbell.

A few seconds later the front door buzzed open — no one asked who I was — and I took the splintering wooden stairs up two flights. The stairway stank of boiled cabbage.

The door to Gabe’s apartment was marked with a cheap plastic gold-colored number three that had been nailed on with one nail. It rattled as I knocked.

The door came open, and some guy in his early twenties with a wild head of hair stuck his head out. The apartment behind him was dark. “Yeah?”

“Looking for Gabe.”

“Hold on,” he said, as unfriendly as possible, and he closed the door. I waited a beat. Gabe came to the door a minute or so later. Clearly he’d been asleep. “What’s up, Uncle Nick?” He was blinking in the light. “What time is it?”

I could smell beer and cigarettes and a strong note of weed. His breath was bad.

“You done with the Camry?”

“Oh, yeah, hold on.” He pushed the door closed.

“Am I not allowed to come in?” I said.

“It’s gross, Uncle Nick,” I heard him say behind the door. He came back a moment later with the car keys and dropped the ring in my outstretched palm. “Thanks again.”

“Sorry to wake you up,” I said. “Why did your grandfather want to talk to you?”

“Victor?” He put on an innocent look. “Because he’s my grandpa.”

“Did he want something from you?”

Gabe swallowed and looked away. He couldn’t have looked guiltier. “No. He just wanted to see me.”

“Victor wanted you to drive all the way from Boston because he wanted a visitor?”

“I’m not just a visitor. I’m his only grandchild. You know that.”

“Gabe, what are you not telling me?”

“Nothing. He just said, you know, I’m his only grandchild, and you’re never going to have kids, so I’m probably the only one he’s ever gonna have.”

“Yeah,” I said, “okay. Listen. About Victor — just be careful of him. He’ll ask you to do things; you’ve gotta be careful.”

“He’s behind bars, Uncle Nick. I mean, what can he do to me?”

I shook my head. “I just want you to be careful around Victor Heller.”

It took me three and a half hours to drive to Port Chester, New York. I took the Mass. Turnpike to 84 and then 95. My mind kept returning to Maggie Benson’s death. I realized I knew nothing about funeral plans for her or anything like that. I called Detective Goldman. “Did you find a next of kin for Maggie Benson?” I asked.

“She has a brother and a sister in Connecticut, along with her parents,” Goldman said.

“I’m just wondering if a funeral’s being planned.”

“Sorry, don’t know.”

I asked if he had any updates on Maggie’s murder, and he did not.

I thought about the houseful of suspects — the Agatha Christie aspect. I went through a mental list of Kimball siblings. Cameron? I remembered seeing him return to his room at four in the morning. The youngest Kimball kid seemed the most likely suspect in Maggie’s murder, but for what motive? That stumped me. He also seemed so slight and physically unprepossessing, it was hard to imagine him shoving a strong woman like Maggie. Though I suppose anyone can shove anyone else off the edge of a cliff if it’s done suddenly. Theoretically he could have pushed Maggie to her death. He just didn’t fit the profile.