House on Fire

39

“Who was it you want me to write a letter to?” I asked Dorothy. “Some guy on a co-op board, right?” She was wearing an earth-toned silk blouse and a brown skirt and looked unusually professional once again.

She gave me the name and an email address. I jotted it down on my little black pocket notebook. She wanted a letter — an email would do — affirming that she would be employed by Heller Associates for the foreseeable future.

I didn’t plan to write such a letter, though, but she didn’t need to know that. I had other plans.

A couple of emails had come in from the City of Boston with attachments.

They concerned John Warren, the chairman of the co-op board at the Kenway Tower in Boston. The man who was giving Dorothy a hard time and who had “concerns” about her income and credit history. I knew if I bore down I’d find some dirt. You almost always do.

Was the guy a racist? Was he trying to keep her out because she was black? Possibly. Maybe even probably, but sometimes it’s hard to prove bias.

Well, I wasn’t trying to make a case. I just wanted to help Dorothy.

And I’d figured out a way. I’d gotten a copy of the assessed value of the guy’s apartment, and like I suspected it would be, the figure was ridiculously low, way below the value of a high-floor apartment in a tower in the city of Boston. I punched out the phone number for Mr. Warren, and while it rang, I quickly rehearsed what I was going to do. I’m no real estate guy, I’d say, but I can see the assessed value of your co-op is less than half what it should be. If a concerned citizen, say, were to make a phone call to the city tax authorities, your property taxes will double. And I’d hate for that to happen.

Yeah, I could do that. I could probably make the guy fold instantly. He’d let Dorothy buy in, once his finances were challenged. No matter what color her skin was, his self-interest would prevail.

I could do that. But then I was thinking of Maggie and something that happened with her years ago.

I hung up.

Instead, I put the printouts in a file folder and walked them over to Dorothy’s cubicle. I dropped the thick folder on her desk.

“Do with it what you want,” I said.

“What’s this?”

“Check out John Warren’s property taxes. How low they are.”

“That asshole John Warren from the co-op board?”

“The very one. I almost set up a meeting with him. But it’s your fight. Not mine.”

“Thank you,” she said.

I decided it was a good time to pay a visit to Phoenicia Health Sciences, just as the morning rush hour was beginning. Do a little surveillance while people were arriving at work. I threw on a suit jacket and headed out the door.

I retrieved the Defender from the garage where I parked it to protect it from the Boston snow and salt. I took the Mass. Turnpike out to I-95 into Waltham. The tree-lined road — the leaves were russet and gold — gave way to a sleek, futuristic seven-story chrome-and-glass building surrounded by cedar trees, with a couple of connected parking lots on the back side, nicely set in the landscape.

This gleaming structure was the world headquarters of Phoenicia Health Sciences. I guess there was a lot of money to be made from testing drugs. I drove around the lots. There was reserved parking for certain executives. Part of a lot was reserved for clinical study patients. The rest were unmarked.

I didn’t want to enter the building yet. I was beginning to formulate a plan, which meant I’d have to come back, and I didn’t want to be recognized on a return visit. On the way home I placed a couple of calls. One was to my old friend George Devlin, who’d been on my Special Forces A-team, a communications sergeant. Devlin now made his living as a TSCM guy, which stands for technical surveillance countermeasures. Helping companies protect against being spied on. He called himself a hacker, a label he was proud of.

I told him what I wanted to do and arranged for him to come by my office later in the week. That didn’t mean he’d actually come into my office. He lived in an immense RV, a combo home and office, and rarely emerged from it. He was terribly mutilated, from an IED. I would meet with him inside his vehicle.

When I got back to my office, Dorothy rose from her desk and said, “I’ve been doing some more digging into Kimball Pharma, and I found something interesting. I found a scientist who was fired from Kimball a couple of years ago after complaining about Oxydone. About the company’s role in pushing millions of prescriptions. Kind of a whistle-blower. But after he got fired, he stopped talking. Maybe he’ll talk to you. You might want to give him a call.”

“You think? Hell, yeah. Great. Now, I’m going to need blueprints of the Phoenicia headquarters building in Waltham. You know, the architect’s plans.”

“Why not just call the city of Waltham’s building department, see if they have building plans?”

“Because it’s a small town and people talk, and I don’t want someone there calling over to the CEO’s office at Phoenicia and saying, hey, someone was asking for the plans for your headquarters.”

“I doubt that would happen.”

“Maybe not. But I don’t want to take the chance,” I said. “I think I have a better idea.” I explained it to her. “But first, do you think you can find the whistle-blower’s phone number?”

Dorothy rarely disappointed. In one of her many databases she quickly found a home phone number for the man, whose name was Dr. William Sossong. She also emailed me a couple of articles about him. Pieces from the Washington Post and the New York Times and The Guardian that called him the “Kimball Pharma whistle-blower.” They were all from around five years ago. He had been Kimball’s principal scientist and lived in Port Chester, New York.

I pulled up a piece about him from the New York Times.

There had been dozens of articles quoting Dr. Sossong, calling him a whistle-blower.

And then five years ago he stopped doing interviews.

Normally I much prefer talking to people in person, and not on the phone. But I didn’t have time to get to him.

I dialed his number. A woman answered the phone and then put it down and called his name. A minute later, a man got on the line. “This is Bill Sossong,” he said. “Who’s this?”

I gave him the name Ben Ellison and told him I was writing a book about Kimball Pharma. He cut me off right away. “I can’t talk to you. I signed an NDA.”

As I figured.

“I can assure you right now I will protect your name and not quote a word of what you say.”

“What kind of book are you writing about Kimball?”

“It’s about the opioid epidemic and Kimball Pharma,” I said, plunging right into it, figuring the direct approach would work best with him. Most whistle-blowers risk their jobs and their livelihoods out of a sense of moral outrage. Dr. Sossong seemed to be one of those people. A guy who did the right thing and got fired for it.

“Yeah, well, I can’t discuss it.”

“No one at Kimball is willing to talk,” I said.

“I wish I could help you.”

“Let me tell you what I’m mostly interested in. There are reportsthat Kimball Pharma knew how powerfully addictive its blockbuster drug was, but hid the evidence.”

He exhaled loudly into the phone. “I’ve said all I’m gonna say on that subject. They got all kinds of reports on how people were abusing Oxydone. They knew.”

“I see.”

The man who couldn’t talk went on. “I mean, these sons of bitches knew that people were snorting Oxydone and getting addicted, but they continued telling doctors that it was less addictive than OxyContin. People were stealing it from pharmacies. Doctors were selling prescriptions. I told them about internet chat rooms I visited where drug users were talking about snorting it recreationally. But Conrad Kimball ignored it.”

“I’ve heard there was a clinical trial that Kimball somehow buried.”

“True. The FDA would never have approved Oxydone if they’d seen that study.”

“And I’m trying to find it. Apparently the study was done by a CRO called Phoenicia Health Sciences.”

“You’ll never get that out of them. Conrad Kimball wanted it to disappear, and Phoenicia obliged.”

“You think a bribe was involved?”

“Oh, for sure.”

“Did you ever see that study?”

“No. I just remember hearing it was done in Eastern Europe somewhere.”

“You think Phoenicia has a copy?”

“Absolutely.”

“Where?”

“Damned if I know.”

“What about people there who might have saved a copy? The CEO, do you think?”

“Maybe, maybe not. You know who’s likely to have a copy is a guy named Dr. Arthur Scavolini. He’s been there forever. But if he does, he’s going to keep it under lock and key.”

I asked him to spell the name. He said, “He’s their CSO, their chief scientific officer.”

“You think he got bribed?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me. He’s got the juice to make the study disappear. But you can’t quote me on any of this. You hear me? I cannot be connected in any way.”

I thanked him and quickly got off the phone. I had a lot to do that afternoon.