House on Fire--A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY JOSEPH FINDER

  FICTION

  The Moscow Club

  Extraordinary Powers

  The Zero Hour

  High Crimes

  Paranoia

  Company Man

  Killer Instinct

  Power Play

  Suspicion

  The Fixer

  The Switch

  Judgment

  NICK HELLER SERIES

  Vanished

  Buried Secrets

  Guilty Minds

  NONFICTION

  Red Carpet: The Connection Between the Kremlin and America’s Most Powerful Businessmen

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2020 by Joseph Finder

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  DUTTON and the D colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  has been applied for.

  ISBN 9781101985847 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9781101985854 (ebook)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  for

  H.D.F.

  and

  E.J.S.F.

  Contents

  Also by Joseph Finder

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Not for the first time, he puzzled over the curious nature of families—that family bonds tended to keep together people who had little in common.

  He would never have chosen the members of his family as friends.

  —Lydia Davis, Sketches for a Life of Wassilly

  1

  So how are you going to do it?” the guy asked me.

  “‘Do it’?”

  He paused, glanced around—there was no one else in my office—and muttered, barely audible, the words he didn’t want to say aloud. “Kill him. How are you going to kill him?”

  “The less you know,” I said, “the better. For both of us. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

  He didn’t answer me. “It has to look like an accident,” he said. “Or a random . . . whatever.”

  I gave him a long, direct look, blinked once. He’d told me that three times already.

  Mort Vallison was sixty, but he looked ten years older. He was a once-handsome man under a lifetime of stress. He had short gray hair, neatly parted, and sincere brown eyes, but they were haunted. Hollow. He wore an expensive-looking navy-blue blazer and pricy shoes. He was not born to wealth, which was probably why he always dressed expensively.

  He looked away. Vallison had insisted on coming to my office rather than have me come to his company headquarters. My firm, Heller Associates, is located in an old brick building in Boston’s financial district, a renovated nineteenth-century lead-pipe factory with a steampunk look to it: the bare brick walls, the exposed ductwork, the big factory windows. The office used to belong to a dot-com that sailed high and crashed and left behind their Humanscale chairs.

  “He’s embezzling,” he said. “But we haven’t been able to catch him at it.”

  Vallison was the co-owner of a chain of excellent restaurants in Boston and down the East Coast, Neptune Seafood, a Boston institution. He was a wealthy man, with an impressive home in Chestnut Hill. He was convinced that his partner, Herb Martz, was cheating him out of millions of dollars. But he wasn’t able to prove it. This on top of animosity that had accrued over the years had driven him to extreme measures. He wanted me to arrange Martz’s death, and do it undetectably. He was offering a lot of money for the job.

  “I don’t need to know,” I said. “The less contact we have, the better. And I’m going to need you to pay me in cryptocurrency—bitcoin, Ethereum, or whatever. The last thing we need is a money trail.” He didn’t seem to understand, so I explained it to him. He was a restaurateur, not a tech guy.

  * * *

  • • •

  Herb Martz, his partner, kept to a routine. He lived with his wife in a condo in the Four Seasons. He saw a personal trainer three times a week, early in the morning
. He went into work at ten, to their offices on the waterfront. He usually had lunch at one of the Neptunes around the city: a hamburger, most of the time. I guess he was tired of seafood.

  The next day, late morning, I followed him from the Neptune Seafood at the Prudential Center to a sketchy hotel in Kenmore Square not too far from Fenway Park. I took my gray Toyota Camry. I have two cars; the other one is a truck, a Land Rover Defender in Coniston green. But that’s a distinctive-looking vehicle. Whereas the Camry is so anonymous it’s nearly invisible in traffic. That’s the superpower of an ordinary car.

  Martz parked his black Mercedes S-Class in a garage next to the hotel, and I pulled into the garage a few cars behind him. I followed him out of the garage and into the lobby. The guy at the desk asked him if he had luggage, and he said no. He checked into the hotel and checked out half an hour later.

  He was, I assumed, seeing a mistress. And given how quick the assignation was, I figured it had been going on for some time. They knew each other, so they could get right down to business. Skip the preliminaries.

  I followed him out of the hotel and back to his car. I took the stairs and got there before he did. From a distance, I watched him return to the Mercedes. Then I came around to the passenger’s side and got in.

  Stunned, he whipped around to look at me. Martz was a rough-looking, pot-bellied guy in his sixties with gin blossoms on his cheeks and tobacco-stained teeth. He wore a blue down vest over his dress shirt. “What the hell?” he said. “Jesus. You scared the shit out of me.”

  I said nothing. I took out my iPhone and hit play.

  So how are you going to do it?

  “Do it”?

  Kill him. How are you going to kill him?

  “Motherfucker,” Martz said. “Like I told you. He has some bullshit excuse about how—”

  “So what do you want to do?” I interrupted. “I’ll go through some of our options.”

  “Did he pay you already?”

  “Half.”

  “You planning on keeping that payment?”

  “Nah, it’s forensic evidence. Connects him to the cyber wallet.” Everyone thinks cyber currency keeps you anonymous. But there are tricks you have to do to hide your identity, and neither of these guys knew them. “So come on, how do you want to play this?”

  Martz was staring off into space, like he was thinking. “How much more would it cost if you finished the job?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “You want to bring in law enforcement, right?”

  “Finish the job. As in finish him. Take the bastard out.”

  I wasn’t surprised, frankly, and I played it cool. “That’s not on the menu.”

  “Don’t bullshit me,” Martz said. “You think I didn’t do my due diligence? I know your reputation. You’re ex–Special Forces. You’ve killed guys for a living. You’re trained for this.”

  “Yeah, we were more about winning hearts and minds.”

  “You’ve confirmed that I’ve got a problem. Nice work. Now make my problem go away. I’ll pay you another forty thousand. Make it worth your time. Call it a happy ending.”

  “I think I’ll take a pass.”

  “I’m a paying customer, Heller. You ever hear the expression ‘The customer is always right’?”

  “Thing is, Herb, you’re not the customer.”

  “The client, then.”

  “Yeah, you’re not the client either.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  I couldn’t keep a little grin from my face. I pointed out the window, where six state troopers were surrounding the car, ready to arrest Martz.

  “The hell—?”

  “See, you’re the target. First rule in my trade: always know who you’re working for, and always know the play. Yep, I did my due diligence too. And I found another play.”

  The car door on the driver’s side opened, and one of the troopers said, “Step out of the car, Mr. Martz.”

  2

  Originally, Herb Martz had come to see me to get proof his partner, Mort Vallison, was trying to kill him. The brake lines on his Mercedes had been cut, he said. He wanted me to get the proof on tape so he could go to the police and get his partner put away.

  It took me almost a week to get to Mort, because it had to be done subtly. Eventually I ran into him in Oak Long Bar in the Copley Plaza, where Herb told me he hung out sometimes, managed to bump into him as we both stood at one end of the crowded bar.

  Soon we’d struck up a conversation about my military days and how the world would just be better off with some people taken out, wouldn’t it? I let him know, as subtly as I could, that once in a while I did favors for friends along those lines. And sure enough, he was intrigued. He asked for my business card.

  I gave him one.

  A week later, Mort came to my office to discuss business. I assured him the office was a safe place to talk. He wanted me to get rid of his partner. Not that I asked, but he gave a reason that almost held up: his partner was embezzling profits from the company, had been doing so for decades.

  You’d be surprised how often I get asked to kill people, to do “hits.” I have to explain that it’s not in my list of client services. But something about Herb Martz didn’t smell right.

  So I agreed to take on the job.

  Right away I got in touch with my friend Major Liz Rodriguez from the state police’s Special Investigations Unit, and she liked my idea of setting up a sting.

  My instincts proved correct. It turned out that both Mort and Herb had been illegally diverting cash from Neptune Seafood for years, cheating the government out of tens of millions of dollars in taxes. And both of them were under investigation by the IRS.

  Herb was afraid Mort would weaken and rat them out to the IRS, turn state’s evidence, expose their long-running scam. Mort was a man who was constantly honored for his philanthropy, and he simply couldn’t cope with the disgrace of going to prison. He would try to make a deal.

  The two men deserved each other.

  Right about now the two of them were probably in separate interview rooms at state police headquarters in Framingham. I was guessing that each of them was trying hard to make a deal.

  Neither one of them would escape prison now.

  The only downside in this? I wasn’t going to get paid.

  * * *

  • • •

  I didn’t get to the office until early afternoon. I waved hello to the scowling Mr. Derderian, who was in the doorway of his high-end oriental carpet shop next door. The sign on my second-floor office door reads HELLER ASSOCIATES—ACTUARIAL CONSULTING SERVICES, which cuts down on foot traffic. I keep a very low profile. In my line of work, the less my face and name are known, the better.

  My receptionist and office manager, Jillian Alperin, was eating a late lunch at her desk. Jillian, covered with tattoos and piercings, had turned out to be quite bright. She was still a little intimidated by me, though, which was fine.

  “A couple of messages for you already, Nick,” she said after taking a large swallow of her—what was it again?—tempeh.

  “Thanks. Dorothy?”

  “In the break room, I think.”

  Dorothy Duval, my forensic data tech and researcher, was making a fresh pot of coffee, even though that was really Jillian’s job. She just liked doing things for herself because she liked them done right.

  Dorothy had a style all her own. Her head was close-shaven, and she normally wore very large earrings. But today she was dressed more conservatively than usual, in a black pencil skirt and blue blazer over a white blouse, and normal-size earrings.

  She noticed me checking her out and said, “I had a meeting.” Her coffee mug was at the ready. It read Jesus Saves, I spend. She was a devoted churchgoer with a sense of humor about the Lord.

 
“Business meeting?”

  “Personal.” Then she took a breath. “Well, I’m not going to hide it from you, because I need your help. I was just interviewed this morning by the chairman of the co-op board of a building I want to buy into.”

  “Co-op board? Isn’t that a very New York thing?”

  “We’ve got a few in Boston,” she said impatiently. “This one’s called the Kenway Tower on Comm. Ave. In Kenmore Square.”

  “What kind of questions did he ask?”

  “That’s the thing, Nick. On the phone he was as friendly as can be. Really talkative, about how great the building is, and the neighborhood. He wanted to ask me about the NSA, and I think he really dug all the secrecy, the stuff I couldn’t talk about.”

  Dorothy used to work at the National Security Agency but apparently hadn’t been a good personality fit. So she got a job at a private intelligence firm in DC, Stoddard Associates, where I also used to work before I went off on my own. Later I asked her to join me at Heller Associates. My first and most important hire.

  She went on. “So I was expecting the third degree when I came in this morning, and instead they could barely get me out of there fast enough. I mean, the dude’s face fell when he saw me.”

  “Uh-oh.” The board of a co-op association has the power to determine who gets to buy into the building.

  “Yeah, that’s what I was thinking too, uh-oh. They didn’t know I was black until they met me. Then it was like, ‘Later, dude.’”

  I thought about mentioning the fact that, with her shaved head and her extreme ear piercings, the hedgerow of silver hoops outlining the curving helix of each ear, she could look a little fierce. But it didn’t seem like the right time to say it. And she was making her bow to conventionality by wearing a blue blazer and, I noticed, high-heeled shoes.

  She continued. “He said he had some concerns about my income and my credit history.”

  “Meaning your income’s not enough to afford—”

  “No, it is enough. I mean, I could always use a raise, to make it easier, but the numbers work, and I’ve saved up a lot. I’ve had years of decent, steady income.”

  “So what was his problem?”