Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

“Why?”

“Why did I do it? Because I came to my senses.”

“Because he offered you a lot of money to stop talking?”

“Something like that.”

“Bought you a nice house in the Gray Rock area.”

He looked at me in surprise. “How do you know that?”

“I do my homework.”

“My income is dependent on keeping my trap shut. And my family’s financial security is important to me.”

“How would they know if you talked to journalists or not?”

“Conrad’s security people are aggressive.”

“Fritz.”

“You know Fritz Heston?”

“We’ve met.”

“Conrad runs Kimball Pharma like his own personal fiefdom. Fritz and his security officers are like his personal bodyguards.”

“Did they ever threaten your life?”

“Obliquely.”

“Would they—?”

“Harm me? If I started talking again? Sure.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because of all the lawsuits. Billions of dollars are at stake here. That gets out, about the Estonia study, what they called the Tallinn file, and Kimball’s going to go under. Go bankrupt.” He mopped his face with the towel again. “Kimball is under huge pressure these days. All the protests. Conrad was always sort of paranoid, but he’s gotten worse as he’s gotten older. And Fritz does whatever Conrad says. But the company is vulnerable. I mean, their drug portfolio has always been too dependent on Oxydone. Their antidepressant never really caught on. There are better blood pressure drugs than the one they offer. Their migraine drug never made it to market. It’s all about Oxydone. What is your book about, again?”

“I want to prove Kimball Pharma knowingly brought a drug to market that they knew was dangerous.”

“Hey, some of the people who use Oxydone really need it. Cancer patients and such. But that doesn’t account for most of its use. I mean, people inhale Oxydone like they’re snorting cocaine.”

“I’m talking about the Tallinn file.”

“Art Scavolini wouldn’t talk to you, huh? I’m not surprised. He probably got a nice payday too for keeping his mouth shut and making sure that study disappeared, and he doesn’t want to screw it up.”

“I haven’t given up,” I said.

“No. You don’t seem like a guy who knows when to quit. You’re not going to find that study. Kimball Pharma paid for it, and they own it, and it’s under lock and key somewhere.”

“But in a company the size of Kimball Pharma, there have to be others who got copies and held on to them.”

He held up three fingers. His sweat dripped off his chin onto the floor mat. “Three people,” he said. “Conrad killed that study, as soon as they heard about the addiction rate, and shut it down fast.”

“Do you have a copy?”

“It was on a website you had to sign into. If I was smart, I would have downloaded a copy. But I didn’t think.”

“So who might have one?”

“The only people at Kimball who saw the study, who got copies, are Conrad and the PI and the CMO.”

“The CMO?”

“Chief medical officer. Named Maurizio Zubiri. Brilliant guy. He’s been at Kimball forever.”

I made a mental note. “And who and what is the PI?”

“The principal investigator. The scientist who did the study. In Estonia.”

“You don’t happen to know his name, do you?”

“Come on. On a twenty-year-old study?”

“Could you find it?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m sure there were plenty of studies done on Oxydone. So other trials didn’t find the same rate of addiction?”

“The doctor in Estonia was a careful scientist. He designed a six-month study, and after only three days he noticed his subjects were going through withdrawal if they didn’t get their Oxy. He wasn’t looking for how addictive it was. He was looking for the right dose, basically. The addiction part came up as an unintended consequence. Every other study Kimball had done ignored that aspect. Shorter studies too.”

“Ignored it?”

“Clinical trials involving addictive drugs like Oxydone are extremely difficult to do. That’s why there’s so few of them. You have a high dropout rate, first of all. People in pain don’t want to get the placebo. Then there’s all the tricks a company can do. They can clean up the data. They show results only of those who complete the trial. The ones who got addicted? They get pushed out of the trial, so they don’t show up in the final results.”

“So how many people would have to be bribed to make this study go away?”

“At Phoenicia, just Art Scavolini. At Kimball, just Dr. Zubiri and the PI. Kimball Pharma is highly compartmentalized.”

“And you don’t know the name of the doctor in Estonia, so that just leaves Dr. Zubiri.”

“Right. Wait... Cask. Like ‘The Cask of Amontillado.’”

“Huh?”

“Mark — Marcus Kask. With a k. That was the Estonian’s name.”

“Unusual name.”

“Not in Estonia.”

“Why do the study in Estonia, of all places?”

“It’s a lot easier to enroll people in studies in the old Eastern Bloc countries. Lots of them don’t have health care, so they sign up for studies just to get covered. Also, Eastern Europe twenty years ago, it was the Wild West; you could do anything. You could massage the data. And if you didn’t like the study, you just shut it down and put it in a drawer. Total freedom. Conrad knew if there was a problem, he could bury it.”

I nodded.

“He probably knew this drug was more addictive than heroin, but he didn’t want to have that scientifically confirmed,” Sossong said.

“I see.”

“Look,” he said, “I’m talking to you because I feel bad for you. I know what it’s like to lose a dear friend to opioids. But if you ever quote me, that will ruin me, do you understand that?”

“I do.”

“Or worse.”

“Understood.”

“Now, if you don’t mind, I have to get back to my workout. Don’t let me hear from you again.”

Leaving Port Chester, I stopped for a late lunch at a burger place. While I ate, I searched on my phone for “Markus Kask” or “Marcus Cask.” I found plenty, in Sweden and Estonia, mostly. So that was a lost cause. I called Dorothy and asked her to search for a medical doctor and researcher in Estonia named Marcus Kask. Spelled however.

I’d paid and was on my way back to the Toyota when Dorothy called back. “I’m not sure I have the right one,” she said. “This Professor Marcus Kask, spelled with a k, was a doctor at West Tallinn Central Hospital.”

Tallinn. That had to be him. “Was?”

“Killed in a car accident on the Ring Road in Tallinn, seven years ago. Young guy too. Forty-three.”

“Shit.”

A man is killed in a car accident in a busy European city: there was nothing necessarily odd about that. But that left just the chief medical officer, Dr. Zubiri. And getting to him, a man who had worked for Kimball Pharma for years and was surely loyal, would not be easy.

Port Chester was only half an hour from Katonah and Kimball Hall, so I decided to take a drive to the Kimball house. I was thinking about Maggie. I took 684 into the Town of Bedford, and after a couple of turns found myself on the tree-lined Cantitoe Street, where Conrad Kimball lived. I slowed down when I recognized the stone gate booth and saw the street number. In the distance I could see the handsome brick gate house, which I had earlier mistaken for the main mansion. I didn’t know what I was doing there, but I knew I shouldn’t drive up to the house and call attention to myself. So I kept driving, along his property line, passing a clay tennis court near the road, and then taking a right onto Girdle Ridge Drive, which slashed through forest.