Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

“Do you know how Sean Lenehan died?”

“Overdose of Oxydone. A hundred and thirty people die from an opioid overdose every day. Nearly fifty thousand every year. And then there’s the two million people who are addicted and desperate.”

I looked at her with surprise.

“The drug is fiendishly addictive,” she said. “And it made Daddy a billionaire many times over.”

“Are you on the outs with him?”

She shook her head. “Though I’m sure he considers me a disappointment.”

The waitress placed a dish of fried calamari in front of me.

“You like squid?” I said.

“Love it. Thank you. I’m famished.” She took a piece with a lot of tentacles on it. The squid was crisp and delicious and not too oily.

“Were you cut out of the will or something?”

She shook her head again. “Not that I know of. Though he’s not above doing it. May I call you Nick?”

“Sure.”

“Call me Sukie.”

“Sukie,” I said. “What do you do, Sukie?”

“I’m a documentary filmmaker. As Susan Garber, which is my mother’s maiden name.”

“Do you go to a lot of funerals like this?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. This is, let’s see, the twenty-seventh opioid-related funeral I’ve attended in the last two months.”

“All people you don’t know.”

“One I knew, actually. A friend of mine OD’d on heroin. She’d started with Oxydone in the hospital. You get addicted and then your prescription runs out, and it turns out heroin is a lot cheaper than pills and gives you the same high. But no, I don’t know most of these people.”

I nodded, chewed. “How do you find them?”

“The funerals?”

“The Oxydone-related deaths.”

“I told you, I hire people who find me names. Lots to choose from.”

“When you go to all these funerals, do they know who you are?”

“No.”

“Do you introduce yourself?”

“Oh, God no.” She carefully selected another tentacle piece. “I’d be tarred and feathered.” She held the piece up in the air at the end of her fork. “I’d be deep fried.”

“So what’s the point?”

“Why do I do it? Because I think some member of my family ought to bear witness to the victims of the drug that made us all rich. Since we sold them all the poison that killed them. Does that make sense?”

“Sure, I guess so.”

“Come face-to-face with what the poison is doing. I looked at that widow today, I saw her weeping, and her three young kids, and I just thought — I just can’t live with that. Our family business isn’t about curing pain. It’s about causing it.”

“But you still haven’t told me what you want.”

“Very simple. I want you to find — and steal — a document.”

“A document.”

“Let me give you the short version. It’s a clinical trial, a study that was done on Oxydone while it was being developed. It was a bombshell study. It showed how dangerously addictive Oxydone was. If the government, the FDA, had found out about that study, they’d have killed Oxydone instantly. Considered it a threat to public safety. The drug would never have been allowed to go on the market.”

“So the government never found out about the study?”

“Somehow they buried it. My dad must have arranged to make it disappear. I don’t know, exactly. I just know the rumors. He knew what a huge moneymaker Oxydone could be. How it could transform Kimball Pharma. And he didn’t want anything to get in its way.”

“So you want me to find a copy of this clinical trial. Which would be like, what? A couple of thick file folders’ worth of paper? Or a computer file?”

“Hard copy. My dad’s old-school. He’s eighty years old. Prefers paper. Always has.”

“How long ago was the study done?”

“Probably twenty years ago.”

“Then there’s almost certainly a digital copy of it. A PDF file. That’s the first thing I’d look for. And let me save you some money. You don’t need to hire me for this.” Rich people love bargains more than anyone. “Hire a hacker to break into the Kimball Pharma network. If you hired me, that’s what I’d do... I’d go out and hire a hacker myself, probably. So why not cut out the middleman?”

“Because all the digital copies have been purged from the company’s network. I’ve hired people to look for me. All evidence of that trial has been deleted from the digital archives.”

“Maybe. But every company keeps corporate archives. Hard copy. It’s your dad’s company — do you know where Kimball Pharma stores its paper files?”

“There’s a central filing facility at the headquarters building in Purchase, but I’ve checked it already. That file is missing.”

“There have to be backup files at some place like Iron Mountain.” That was a company that stored corporate records, physical and electronic, in underground vaults and warehouses. They did what they called “information management,” a great vague phrase. They also shredded sensitive files, which they call “secure destruction.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But I know there’s a copy somewhere.”

“Unless all copies have been destroyed.”

“You don’t know my father. He throws nothing away. The original packrat. In his office at home he keeps all the most sensitive company and personal files, in locked file cabinets. Understand, this is a man who reads newspapers and books only in print. He totally distrusts the cloud. He thinks people who trust the cloud are naive and will regret it, and soon.”

“Which home? I’m sure your father has more than one.”

“I’m talking about the house in Katonah, New York. The house where we all grew up.”

“Have you looked there?”

“Are you kidding? My dad always keeps his office locked when he’s not there. He’s a very suspicious man.”

“Sukie, why do you want this document?”

She tipped her chin to one side. “I have my reasons.”

“That’s not good enough,” I said. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

“No,” she said. “I’m about to cause trouble. A lot of it.”

“I’m guessing if a document like that were made public, it would be financially devastating to Kimball Pharma,” I said.

“More than that. We could well end up with criminal indictments against the top officers at Kimball — starting with my father.”

“So if you made it public, you’d be putting him in prison.”

“He’d have put himself there. Look, this is the right thing to do. The moral thing to do. Because Oxydone is dangerously addictive, and they should be forced to admit it. They should be made to pay for their deception.”

“But I assume you’d pay too. As an heir. You okay with that?”

“Okay with that? I want that, desperately. It’s the only way anything changes. This is a business that feeds off addiction like a vampire drinks blood. You think another Facebook group, another devastatingly barbed tweet, another strongly worded op-ed in the New York Times is going to make a difference?” She shook her head. “People are dying, Nick. Every goddamn day.”

“What turned you?”

“In what way?”

“Something radicalized you. Caused you to start questioning your family’s role. What happened?”

She stirred Splenda into her coffee, which was lightened with half-and-half. “It was what happened to a college friend of mine. Woman named Charlotte, on the college women’s squash team. She was great at everything — Chaucer to football. Great athlete. Four years ago, something happened to her. She threw out her back, then had spinal surgery, and was put on painkillers. Oxydone, of course. Her parents had just died in an auto crash; she’d just gone through a messy breakup with her boyfriend. I don’t know what else. What I do know is she quickly became addicted to Oxy. And one day she OD’d. Was it deliberate? Was it an accident? I have no idea. But they found a couple of empty Oxydone inhalers in her bathroom and she died in the shower.” She spoke not very loudly but fervently. “And I thought, my God, we did it, we poisoned her. And before long I started to realize that this was happening all over the place. Do you know every year we lose more veterans to opiates than we lost to the Iraqis? Or ISIS?”