House on Fire

52

It was nearly six a.m. by the time I got home to my loft in the Leather District. I was bruised and battered and feeling some pain. Getting kicked around when you’re twenty is one thing. But when you’re older and a security guy lands a punch pretty well near your kidney, you do feel the pain. I took a few Advil, grabbed a power nap, showered and changed and felt a little better, and had just called Dorothy and asked her to meet me in the office when my mobile phone rang.

It was an admin from the clinic I’d just escaped from. She wanted to know what had happened. I told her I’d had a panic attack from having that probe down my stomach. I couldn’t take it anymore, I’d had to leave. She told me that if I left the study at this point I was ineligible to receive any compensation. I told her that was fine with me.

Then the phone rang again, and this time it was Detective Goldman. He introduced himself, this time, as Detective Bill Goldman. Now he had a first name.

“I called you last night,” he said.

“Sorry, I was occupied.” I wasn’t going to explain.

“You turn up anything yet?”

“Not me. What about Maggie’s phone? Have you gotten her call record, at least?”

“Better than that: we have her geolocations.”

It’s amazing, and more than a little depressing, how much information law enforcement can find out about you. Not just the numbers you called but where you were when you did.

“Anything interesting?”

“Right before she went to Conrad Kimball’s place, she was in the headquarters of a company in Waltham, Mass.”

Let me guess. “Okay.”

“A company called Phoenicia Life Sciences,” he said. “Know anything about it?”

“Not enough.”

“But why do you think she was there?”

So Maggie had been after more than Conrad’s will after all. I smiled, shook my head. “Probably trying to get a copy of a clinical study that Kimball had buried.”

“All right. One more thing. What’s your read on Cameron?”

“The typical screw-up youngest son, is what I figured. He came with Maggie but left in the middle of the night, horny, on a booty call.”

“Yeah, that didn’t happen.”

“I saw him arrive home at, like, four a.m.”

“Big Boobs Betty didn’t see him. No one at the Hole in the Wall saw him that night, and he’s a frequent customer.”

As I ended the call, I was thinking about Cameron Kimball and what he might have been doing in the middle of the night, that night. Whether he might have gone to meet, and murder, Maggie Benson. He’d been seriously drunk that evening. Did he even have the capacity to do it?

I had no idea.

I walked into my office, waved good morning to Dorothy. I wanted to sit in front of my computer for a couple of minutes.

Something tickled at the back of my mind about the quotes on Arthur Scavolini’s desk. I’d taken pictures of them with my phone. The one about how science is true whether you believe in it or not. The other one about how you’re the product of whatever billion years of evolution, act like it. I entered them into Google. The last one just pulled up a bunch of Pinterest quotes laid out nicely. The first quote turned out to be by Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who’s the head of the Hayden Planetarium and is on TV a lot. To lots of science nerds, he’s a rock star. A geek’s Bruce Springsteen.

Then on my phone I pulled up the photo of Scavolini with the man with the black mustache and I knew right away that it was none other than Mr. Neil deGrasse Tyson himself. Clearly a peak moment in Dr. Scavolini’s life, meeting such a celebrity.

I filed that away mentally, in case it meant anything.

Dorothy was impressed with the credit-card-size device, the solid-state drive onto which I’d copied — or at least hoped I’d copied — Dr. Scavolini’s hard drive. I’d taken it out while the red light was still on and it had still been copying. Maybe that screwed something up; who knew, with computers.

She plugged it right in, looked at her monitor, and said, “Well, you got something here.”

“Okay.”

“Arthur Scavolini?”

“Right.”

“Oh, there’s a lot here. What am I looking for, Oxydone?”

“Or whatever its scientific name was before it was called that. And Conrad Kimball.”

“Won’t take long. I’ll search and let you know.” She didn’t want me standing over her cubicle.

“Good. Let’s hope there’s a needle in the haystack.”

“You know how you find a needle in a haystack?” she said.

“No, how?”

“Magnet. You got a magnet?”

“A rare-earth one. Neodymium.”

“Well,” she said, shaking her head, “maybe we’ll get lucky. I’m impressed you got this — all on a physical penetration?”

“Right.”

“Can I ask what you’re going to do with whatever you find?”

“Me? Oh, I’m planning to bring Kimball Pharma down.”

“Very funny, Nick.” She smiled a sort of contorted smile and didn’t look at my face. She would have seen that I wasn’t laughing.

At first it seemed that we’d struck out. There was plenty of correspondence between Dr. Scavolini and top officers at Kimball Pharma, but none of it had to do with Oxydone. Other drugs, yes. In the meantime, I called the other scientist on my list, Dr. Sossong, the whistle-blower.

His wife answered the phone, just like last time. I gave my name, again, as Ben Ellison, one of my cover names. I reminded her that I was writing a book. This time she put her hand over the phone, and I could hear muffled conversation. She came back on the phone and said, “I’m afraid Bill won’t be able to speak with you.”

“Tell him I have one last question, that’s all. It’s important.”

Dorothy entered my office, and I put up an index finger to ask her to wait.

Dr. Sossong’s wife put her hand over the phone again, and I could hear more muffled talk. Finally Dr. Sossong got on the line. Much less friendly than last time. “Listen, fella, I told you already, I can’t talk to you. I legally can’t talk. I shouldn’t have talked to you the other day.”

“This will be off the record,” I said. “Your name won’t be associated in any way with—”

“Don’t call again,” he said, and I heard a click. He’d hung up.

Dorothy said, “Are you interruptible?”

“Now I am.” Before she could start, I said, “Could you do a social media search on Dr. William Sossong?”

She nodded, once. “Okay.”

“That file I downloaded — I had to interrupt it before it was done copying. Is it okay?”

“It’s okay. But I have a question for you. How could there be no documents that contain the word ‘Oxydone’ on his entire hard drive?”

“Maybe because the drive was only partially copied. Or maybe it’s not under the trademark name.”

She looked down. That morning she was wearing dark jeans and a lime-colored silk top and ridiculously high heels. Her usual look. “I have another possible answer to that question,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“So I found this big PDF file among his documents, and I tried to open it. It said it was a corrupted file. Huge file, like a hundred gig. But I had a thought. What if it’s an encrypted file?”

“Would they look the same?”

“At first, yes. And one of the documents I found on the doctor’s hard drive was an instruction manual for VeraCrypt.”

“Which is an encryption program?” I asked, because I wasn’t sure.

“Right.”

“Which is the program he used to encrypt the file,” I guessed. “So can you decrypt it? Like brute-force it?”

“Nick, I used to work at the NSA, do you remember? Where I had access to basically the most powerful computers in the world? We couldn’t crack it.”

“So you can’t?”

“Maybe the NSA can do it by now, who knows. But with the computing power I have, we’re left with one option.”

“Guess the password,” I said.

“There you go.”

“You try the usual suspects?”

“I got together a whole list. Date of birth, date of his wife’s birth, his kids’ birthdays, the names of his wife and his kids, the date of their wedding. I even tried Neil deGrasse Tyson.”

“Nothing, huh?”

“Nothing.”

“Do we know how long the password is? How many characters?”

“No idea. They recommend more than twenty characters.”

“It could be any length?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s discouraging. Why would he encrypt just one document?”

“It might turn out to be a folder. It could be a whole bunch of documents, all password-protected.”

“Okay. So what are the odds of cracking this password?”

“The odds? Zero, Nick. The odds are zero.”

“But you’re not giving up.”

“If you don’t mind, I want to give it a go.”

I smiled. She didn’t give up easily. “Go for it.”