House on Fire

54

The man I thought of as the whistle-blower, Dr. Bill Sossong, lived in the village of Port Chester, New York, which is part of the town of Rye and is right on the Connecticut border. Port Chester was about an hour from New York City on the Metro-North rail line, but more important, it was close to White Plains, where Kimball headquarters was located. Though it’s right next to the wealthy town of Greenwich, Connecticut, Port Chester was not a particularly affluent place. Most people who lived there rented rather than owned. It looked like a working-class town that was struggling.

But Dr. Bill Sossong clearly was not. He lived in the Gray Rock neighborhood, in a big white colonial with black shutters, neatly trimmed hedges and bushes, and a beautiful green lawn that stretched all the way down to the water. Each house in the neighborhood had private waterfront access. I got there in the early afternoon and drove by the man’s house a few times. We knew — Dorothy had filled me in — that he lived with his wife, had a couple of grown children, and that he was retired. His wife volunteered at a senior citizens’ center four or five days a week. He’d been fired from Kimball Pharma, had given a number of outspoken interviews in which he criticized his former company, but then, after a few months, had fallen silent. Something had happened before he signed that NDA. I was curious.

I sat in my car, across the street and a few hundred feet down, pretending to read the Wall Street Journal but really keeping an eye on Sossong’s house. I wasn’t going to just walk up to his front door and ring the bell and risk having him shut the door on me, which is what would likely result. After about an hour and a half, the front door opened, and a trim silver-haired man emerged with a Nike gym bag slung over one shoulder. He trotted out of the house to the driveway and got into a late-model Mercedes, throwing the bag into the back seat.

I started up the car and followed him.

I kept back a distance — there were no cars between us — until we got to the main road. There he made a left on a busy street, and several other cars zipped by before I was able to get there. But I maintained an eye on him. He turned right onto Boston Post Road, and I had no choice but to pull up right behind him. He drove a thousand feet or so on the road and then turned into the parking lot of a strip mall that had a Marshall’s and the Sports Club of Port Chester. He parked, and I parked in the next row. I watched him get out, grab his gym bag, and hustle into the sports club.

I was prepared to wait for him to emerge after his workout.

Then I had a better idea. I went into Marshall’s, headed for the men’s department, and quickly scooped up a cheap pair of sneakers, socks, a T-shirt, and gym shorts. With my purchases, I headed over to the sports club, which had a high-end look. A pretty young woman in a long-sleeved black sports club of port chester T-shirt greeted me.

“I’m not a member here, but I’d like to work out.”

“Let me ask Ken, our member associate, to give you a tour.”

“I’m not sure about joining just yet, so for now I’d like a day pass.”

She sold me one for twenty-five bucks. Dr. Sossong had been there for twenty minutes. The locker room was empty. I changed, left my street clothes in a locker, and walked around the floor of the gym looking for Sossong. I found him on an elliptical trainer, already working up a sweat, watching TV. He was in the middle of a long row of empty machines, all a couple of feet away from one another.

I got on the machine next to him and started pumping away.

After a few minutes I turned to him and said, “This is the time of day to come in here, huh?”

He looked at me, smiled pleasantly. “Off hours, the place is deserted.”

Then I said, “You knew Joan Chisholm.” That was a name Dorothy had found. His former secretary/assistant.

Now he turned to me again, his eyebrows furrowed. “I did. Who are you?”

“What happened to her happened to a good friend of mine.”

Sossong squinted at me, mopped away sweat from his face with the small white towel around his neck. “Do I know you?”

“No,” I said. “But you helped me out with Phoenicia Health Sciences. You told me about Dr. Scavolini.”

“Are you the writer?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m the guy you talked to a couple of days ago.”

He expelled a lungful of air. “I told you I can’t talk to you.”

“There’s no one here to see us talk. Place is deserted.”

He got down off the machine. “You’re a persistent bastard, aren’t you?” Shaking his head, he said, “I’m under an NDA. I legally can’t talk to you.”

I followed him down the aisle between rows of machines. “You already have,” I pointed out. “Give me five minutes, and I’ll leave you alone. You won’t see me again. I promise.”

He took a swig from his water bottle. “Five minutes. But don’t come near me again. How did you find me here, anyway?”

“I heard you work out here,” I said vaguely. “Your secretary, Joan Chisholm, got addicted to Oxydone. So did my friend Sean, a man who saved my life in wartime. For me this is personal.”

We stood there, him sweating and me in my newly purchased cheap workout clothes from Marshall’s.

“Mr.... What did you say your name was? Mr. Ellis?”

“Ellison.” I’d used the name of a real journalist, in case he Googled me.

“Mr. Ellison, I don’t know how I can help you. I’ve already told you more than I should have.”

“It took real courage to become a whistle-blower,” I said. “You did it because of Joan.” I knew this from the dossier Dorothy had compiled, and he wasn’t denying it.

“I’m not a whistle-blower.”

“That’s what all the news reports called you.”

“Yeah, that’s the fake news for you. Maybe I should have become a whistle-blower. Under the False Claims Act, you can make millions of dollars if the government successfully prosecutes. Some whistle-blowers have made a hundred million bucks. But I didn’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I got fired before I had the chance. After Joan died, I just started doing interviews.”

“And then stopped about a month later. You signed a nondisclosure agreement with Kimball Pharma.”

“With the Kimball Family Trust, which owns Kimball Pharma.”

“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.”