Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

Paul, the eldest, didn’t fit the profile either. He was a scholar, sort of a lost soul, and he seemed gentle. I wasn’t sure whether he’d talked with Maggie that night. I didn’t remember seeing them together. Hayden, the Broadway impresario — sure, she looked fit and maybe tough, but where was the motive? I couldn’t think of one. Same with Megan.

I continued to suspect Fritz Heston and was frustrated by his alibi. There had to be a hole in it somewhere. But everyone had seen him leave, and the only way he could have gotten back to the house was by driving. So he would have shown up on the video cameras driving up to the house or entering it. But according to Detective Goldman, he hadn’t. Whoever killed Maggie had to know how to work the video surveillance system, enough to switch off the rear-facing cameras in the house. Who else but Fritz Heston qualified?

Or one of his employees?

Simply put, Maggie had been killed by someone connected with Kimball Pharma. They’d done it for Conrad Kimball. In one way or another, Conrad Kimball now had killed two of the closest friends I’d had, Maggie and Sean. He’d just used different weapons.

And even if Sukie Kimball no longer required my services, I wasn’t done with my work. I would take down the old man’s company. If I managed to do that, I’d be making their deaths mean something.

The man I thought of as the whistle-blower, Dr. Bill Sossong, lived in the village of Port Chester, New York, which is part of the town of Rye and is right on the Connecticut border. Port Chester was about an hour from New York City on the Metro-North rail line, but more important, it was close to White Plains, where Kimball headquarters was located. Though it’s right next to the wealthy town of Greenwich, Connecticut, Port Chester was not a particularly affluent place. Most people who lived there rented rather than owned. It looked like a working-class town that was struggling.

But Dr. Bill Sossong clearly was not. He lived in the Gray Rock neighborhood, in a big white colonial with black shutters, neatly trimmed hedges and bushes, and a beautiful green lawn that stretched all the way down to the water. Each house in the neighborhood had private waterfront access. I got there in the early afternoon and drove by the man’s house a few times. We knew — Dorothy had filled me in — that he lived with his wife, had a couple of grown children, and that he was retired. His wife volunteered at a senior citizens’ center four or five days a week. He’d been fired from Kimball Pharma, had given a number of outspoken interviews in which he criticized his former company, but then, after a few months, had fallen silent. Something had happened before he signed that NDA. I was curious.

I sat in my car, across the street and a few hundred feet down, pretending to read the Wall Street Journal but really keeping an eye on Sossong’s house. I wasn’t going to just walk up to his front door and ring the bell and risk having him shut the door on me, which is what would likely result. After about an hour and a half, the front door opened, and a trim silver-haired man emerged with a Nike gym bag slung over one shoulder. He trotted out of the house to the driveway and got into a late-model Mercedes, throwing the bag into the back seat.

I started up the car and followed him.

I kept back a distance — there were no cars between us — until we got to the main road. There he made a left on a busy street, and several other cars zipped by before I was able to get there. But I maintained an eye on him. He turned right onto Boston Post Road, and I had no choice but to pull up right behind him. He drove a thousand feet or so on the road and then turned into the parking lot of a strip mall that had a Marshall’s and the Sports Club of Port Chester. He parked, and I parked in the next row. I watched him get out, grab his gym bag, and hustle into the sports club.

I was prepared to wait for him to emerge after his workout.

Then I had a better idea. I went into Marshall’s, headed for the men’s department, and quickly scooped up a cheap pair of sneakers, socks, a T-shirt, and gym shorts. With my purchases, I headed over to the sports club, which had a high-end look. A pretty young woman in a long-sleeved black sports club of port chester T-shirt greeted me.

“I’m not a member here, but I’d like to work out.”

“Let me ask Ken, our member associate, to give you a tour.”

“I’m not sure about joining just yet, so for now I’d like a day pass.”

She sold me one for twenty-five bucks. Dr. Sossong had been there for twenty minutes. The locker room was empty. I changed, left my street clothes in a locker, and walked around the floor of the gym looking for Sossong. I found him on an elliptical trainer, already working up a sweat, watching TV. He was in the middle of a long row of empty machines, all a couple of feet away from one another.

I got on the machine next to him and started pumping away.

After a few minutes I turned to him and said, “This is the time of day to come in here, huh?”

He looked at me, smiled pleasantly. “Off hours, the place is deserted.”

Then I said, “You knew Joan Chisholm.” That was a name Dorothy had found. His former secretary/assistant.

Now he turned to me again, his eyebrows furrowed. “I did. Who are you?”

“What happened to her happened to a good friend of mine.”

Sossong squinted at me, mopped away sweat from his face with the small white towel around his neck. “Do I know you?”

“No,” I said. “But you helped me out with Phoenicia Health Sciences. You told me about Dr. Scavolini.”

“Are you the writer?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m the guy you talked to a couple of days ago.”

He expelled a lungful of air. “I told you I can’t talk to you.”

“There’s no one here to see us talk. Place is deserted.”

He got down off the machine. “You’re a persistent bastard, aren’t you?” Shaking his head, he said, “I’m under an NDA. I legally can’t talk to you.”

I followed him down the aisle between rows of machines. “You already have,” I pointed out. “Give me five minutes, and I’ll leave you alone. You won’t see me again. I promise.”

He took a swig from his water bottle. “Five minutes. But don’t come near me again. How did you find me here, anyway?”

“I heard you work out here,” I said vaguely. “Your secretary, Joan Chisholm, got addicted to Oxydone. So did my friend Sean, a man who saved my life in wartime. For me this is personal.”

We stood there, him sweating and me in my newly purchased cheap workout clothes from Marshall’s.

“Mr.... What did you say your name was? Mr. Ellis?”

“Ellison.” I’d used the name of a real journalist, in case he Googled me.

“Mr. Ellison, I don’t know how I can help you. I’ve already told you more than I should have.”

“It took real courage to become a whistle-blower,” I said. “You did it because of Joan.” I knew this from the dossier Dorothy had compiled, and he wasn’t denying it.

“I’m not a whistle-blower.”

“That’s what all the news reports called you.”

“Yeah, that’s the fake news for you. Maybe I should have become a whistle-blower. Under the False Claims Act, you can make millions of dollars if the government successfully prosecutes. Some whistle-blowers have made a hundred million bucks. But I didn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I got fired before I had the chance. After Joan died, I just started doing interviews.”

“And then stopped about a month later. You signed a nondisclosure agreement with Kimball Pharma.”

“With the Kimball Family Trust, which owns Kimball Pharma.”