Джозеф Файндер - House on Fire

Absolutely the wrong way to run. This fire was too fast-moving.

Instead, I ran to the window. It looked out over the rear terrace. Directly below were paving stones. A drop of approximately twenty-five feet onto stone would break bones. I thought of Anguilla and reassured myself that I’d done it before.

But then I remembered that in Anguilla the drop had been far less.

I unlocked the window and pulled it open, and immediately I felt an inrush of air. I heard a shout.

I yelled, “Over here!”

Then the door to the room came open and a pillar of black smoke billowed into the room. Now the thick, dark fog was everywhere. I gasped for breath and could feel the heat scorching my lungs, my throat. Everyone was coughing now, bent over.

I shoved a standing globe aside and clambered out the window, holding on to the frame. Directly below me was the patio stone, but maybe ten feet away from the house was a patch of evergreen shrubs, what looked like boxwood or arborvitae. My eyes were watering from the smoke; I could barely make out the shapes. I knew that if I was able to leap out of the window to a distance of ten feet from the house, my fall would be broken by the shrubbery. If I fell short of that, my neck would be broken.

“Over here!” I shouted again.

Finally I could hear distant sirens. The driveway was half a mile long; it would take a few minutes before the firemen were able to get out the ladders. And longer till they found us.

I decided to jump.

I lowered myself out the window, grasping on to the windowsill, down an arm’s length, and pushed off against the exterior wall of the house.

Then I let go.

Kept my feet down, my legs and feet pressed tightly together.

My knees slightly bent for the impact.

Feet down.

I crashed into the thicker branches of the taller shrub, which jabbed painfully, like knives, into my ankles and thighs. I let out a yell. I was hurt. But I had landed, and without any broken bones, as far as I could tell.

I took a few uncertain steps. Then, limping a little, I forced myself to run across the patio past another ornamental shrub, over to the garden shed. There I found a ladder, as I’d hoped I would. I lifted it off its hooks, ran with it back to the window to the map room.

Fully extended, it was a little too long, but that was better than too short.

The first one to climb out and onto the ladder was Sukie.

Within twenty minutes, all of the Kimball family had been rescued from the second story. The fire department arrived by the time the third person was coming down the ladder. Eventually a few of the firefighters came around to the back of the house, where we were all gathered on the lawn, looking back as the flames ravaged Kimball Hall.

Conrad looked agitated, even furious, but not scared. He was issuing instructions to Fritz.

Cameron stood by himself, looking up at his handiwork. I heard him say, “Burn, baby, burn.”

His face was strange, his eyes darting around frantically, and there were tears streaming down his cheeks. A couple of policemen flanked him. He wasn’t going anywhere.

We stood back, watching the water jets douse the flames on the second story. My eyes smarted, and my throat was sore. I was waiting for Detective-Sergeant William Goldman of the Bedford Police Department, whom I’d texted in the meeting.

“How the hell did you know about all this corporate finance?” I asked Sukie.

“I learned from the best,” she said. She met my eyes. I knew she meant Victor.

My stomach twisted. “Was it his idea?”

She shrugged. Her eyes looked off somewhere into the distance.

I knew that meant yes.

“He told me you were a sucker for the bird with the broken wing,” she said.

I felt the air go out of me. Finally, I said, in a cool voice, “Why did you do it?”

She looked at me as if she didn’t understand.

“I saw the video,” I said. “You didn’t disable all the cameras.”

I could see a change in her gaze. It dawned on her what I meant. My scalp prickled.

I said, “I know how it happened. Maggie, I mean. You said you had something to tell her, and you took her over there” — I pointed to the stone wall, the ledge — “and all it took was one big heave. Doesn’t matter how skilled she was, it just took one surprise push when her back was turned. No, my question is why the hell did you have to kill her?”

I was bluffing about having seen the video, of course, but Sukie didn’t know that. She stared at me, her eyes widening.

“I had no choice,” she whispered, almost inaudibly.

She’d recruited me at the funeral of my friend Sean, who’d succumbed to the very drug she wanted investigated. That was no coincidence. She knew what she was doing.

Which meant she had access to people deeply in the know. She was a woman on a mission, who claimed she’d been radicalized by the death of a close friend who’d been addicted to Oxydone.

That’s what she claimed.

But I knew it was something else. Over the years, greed must have overtaken her. A greed for power. I thought of what Paul had said, that there was more Conrad in her than in any of the rest of the siblings.

That they were two birds of a feather.

Who was the one member of the family expert in video? The filmmaker, of course.

Who knew how to disable the cameras remotely?

The answer had been right in front of my face the whole time.

Oddly enough, it was her shoes that had first tipped me off, set something spinning in my mind.

The morning after Maggie was killed, Detective Goldman had asked everyone to wear the shoes they’d worn the night before, so the police evidence unit could take footwear impressions.

Sukie was wearing something different, I noticed.

At dinner the night before, she’d been wearing a pair of suede pumps with an ankle strap. Jimmy Choo, I was later told. The next morning, she was wearing a pair of suede Prada sandals that crisscrossed at the toe. The brands I didn’t know.

But I could see the difference.

My recollection was confirmed in Anguilla, when Detective Goldman sent me video taken in the foyer of Kimball Hall on the night of Conrad’s birthday dinner. I pointed out to him that the shoes Sukie was wearing in the video were the pumps with the ankle strap. Not what she wore for the footwear impressions for the police the next morning, to mislead them.

Then Goldman found the exact same pair of Jimmy Choos at the back of the closet in Sukie’s old room at Kimball Hall. They matched the impressions taken on the ground at the back of the house where Sukie had pushed Maggie.

It had taken me a while to figure Sukie out.

At first I’d wondered why she was so insistent on letting the protester in her backyard with the gasoline cocktail go. Until I realized she’d probably hired him in the first place. To make her seem imperiled. And to keep me on board.

Thanks to Victor, she knew I had a soft spot for the damaged bird.

She read me right.

Victor had told her where my vulnerabilities lay.

The rag was soaked in gasoline, but I bet the can was filled with water. She was probably never actually in danger.

“Maggie wouldn’t cooperate, would she?” I said. “I knew that woman, and I knew her code of ethics. She always wanted to do the right thing, even if it was the hard thing. She didn’t find the Tallinn file, but she had dirt. Not the study, but a folder that proved the study existed. And she was going to break her confidentiality agreement with you and turn the documents over to law enforcement. To get the facts out there.”

“We’re talking about millions of lives,” Sukie said, her eyes sparking. “Hundreds of thousands of deaths. This is a war. Don’t you see the war going on in this country?”