by Adam Mitzner
A man was approaching. By the swagger in his step, Owen knew he was a cop even before he saw the badge dangling from a chain around his neck.
12
Gabriel found this to be the toughest part of the job. Breaking the news of a loved one’s death was always difficult, but in a murder, it was also the beginning of the interrogation.
Stepping into the cold, he saw that the snowfall was roughly the same intensity as earlier in the day. The cars already had a dusting, as did the shoulders of the people who thought it was important enough to stop whatever they had planned on doing that day in the hope that they might see a man leaving the building in handcuffs. Or more likely, based on the ambulance, laid out on a gurney.
It was always easy to pick out the family members from a crowd. Gawkers had an entirely different facial expression. For cops it was like the joke about the chicken and the pig concerning a bacon and egg breakfast. The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.
He spotted the victim’s spouse at once, aided by the fact that she fit his preconceived notion of the wife of an Upper East Side art dealer—attractive and wearing expensive shoes. Beside her was a man whom Gabriel might have mistaken for her husband had James Sommers not been lying dead upstairs. The man was also attractive and wearing expensive shoes. Between them was a teenage boy who didn’t seem like he belonged to either of them, on account of the fact that he just didn’t read as rich—he was too skinny, with long, unkempt hair and clothing on the grungy side.
“I’m Lieutenant Velasquez. Are you Ms. Sommers?”
“Yes,” the woman, who seemed barely able to speak, said.
“Let’s talk privately.” He steered the woman away. The boy should not hear what he was going to tell her. At least not from the mouth of a cop.
They walked together until they were out of earshot and a police cruiser blocked them from the boy’s view.
“I’m very sorry to tell you that your husband has been killed.”
Jessica Sommers reacted to the news that her husband was dead by bringing her gloved hands up to cover her face. It was a typical reaction, as people often sought to conceal their grief. On the other hand, it also allowed suspects to hide their reactions.
Gabriel always waited at this point, letting the spouse ask what had happened. Sometimes they didn’t do so immediately because they were in shock. But Gabriel always thought it was odd when that happened, and it usually made him think that the real reason they didn’t ask the most obvious question was because they already knew the answer.
Jessica asked a different question when her hands fell away from her face. “Can I see him?”
She wore the unmistakable mask of grief. Everything fallen: her eyes, her mouth, her shoulders. Bereavement didn’t look like anything else. Of course, that didn’t mean it couldn’t be faked.
“Yes. But not right now,” Gabriel said. “It’s a crime scene upstairs. No one’s allowed in.”
She nodded, as if she were hearing him in a foreign language and translating the words in her head. Then she asked the question that most people asked right away.
“What happened?”
“We’re still investigating. But the preliminary conclusion is that it was a homicide.”
She winced at the terminology. Gabriel had used it intentionally because of its vagueness. He wanted to see if the widow would seek more specifics. “How?” would be the most likely first question.
Instead she asked, “Who would want to kill James?”
“I was going to ask you that, Ms. Sommers. The first few hours of an investigation are the most critical, so any information you could give us would be extremely valuable. When did you last see your husband?”
“Yesterday.”
“At what time?”
She started to cry. “No. That’s not right. I didn’t see James yesterday at all. He left for work before I got up, and he went to DC last night. We spoke by phone yesterday. That’s when he told me that he needed to go to DC.”
“What time did you speak to him yesterday?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Five, maybe.”
“Can you check? It’s important to narrow down his time of death. Maybe you have the exact time on your phone.”
She pulled her phone out of her handbag. Gabriel couldn’t help but notice her screen saver was a family portrait.
“It was 4:53,” she said. “That’s when he called me.”
That tightened the time of death by ninety minutes. Of course, that was only true if she was telling the truth. It would not have been difficult for her to have killed her husband an hour earlier, then used his phone to call her own to make it seem as if he were alive at 4:53.
Jessica Sommers certainly looked sincere. On the other hand, Gabriel knew from hard experience that was the worst way to assess a witness’s veracity—by the way he or she looked. Sometimes he thought the most effective interrogations could be done blindfolded.
As if she could read his mistrust, she said, “Ask Reid.”
“Is Reid the man who is here with you now?”
“Yes. Reid Warwick. He’s my husband’s partner on the deal that caused him to go to Washington.”
“And is the boy with you your son?”
“Yes. Owen.”
Gabriel knew that as bad as it was breaking the news to this woman that her husband had been murdered, it was nothing compared to what she was about to go through in the next few minutes when she had to tell her son that his father was dead.
“Why don’t you break the news to your son, and I’ll take a moment to talk to Mr. Warwick. After that, I’d like you to come back with us to the police precinct. You might be able to give us some helpful background information about your husband.”
As she walked away from the detective and back to Owen and Reid, Jessica prepared herself to share the news with Owen. But when the moment arrived, she was unable to say the words.
“What?” Owen finally said.
She glanced at Reid; from the look in his eyes, he already knew.
“Let me give you some privacy,” Reid said.
After he departed, Owen’s patience ran out. “Just tell me, Mom.”
“He’s . . . dead,” she said through tears. Then she added, “James,” as if that part weren’t clear enough.
She threw her arms around her son, burying her face into his shoulder. Owen usually resisted any physical intimacy, but this time he put his arms around her.
When they finally parted, she saw he was crying too. It had been a long time since she’d seen Owen shed a tear.
“How could this have happened?” she asked.
Owen didn’t answer. Of course he didn’t. How could he? He was seventeen years old, struggling to survive his second bout with leukemia.
She blinked hard. The second time her eyes stayed shut. When she opened them again, she looked past Owen and blinked twice more.
“Oh my God,” she breathed.
The bystanders had finally been rewarded for their perseverance. The techs were wheeling her husband’s body out of the building.
Reid was going to leave. He figured that Jessica would have her hands full with the police, and it wouldn’t even register with her that he’d bolted the first chance he got. After all, he’d called her, which was more than his lawyer had said he should do.
“Sir,” he heard a voice call to him. The tone was such that it could only be a cop speaking.
Reid acted as if he hadn’t heard it, but a step later he felt a hand on his shoulder. When he turned, he saw the boy-cop again.
“Lieutenant Velasquez would like to talk to you for a moment,” the boy-cop said.
“I have a business thing I’m already really late to—” Reid stopped his excuse. The detective who’d broken the news to Jessica was approaching.
“Reid Warwick?” he said, extending his hand.
Reid shook it. “Yes.”
“I’m Lieutenant Velasquez. I’m sorry for your loss, but I wanted
to ask you a few questions. Ms. Sommers told me that you and her husband were business partners, and so I was hoping that you could fill me in a little on what you were working on.”
Reid’s mind whirled, trying to figure out how to get out of this.
“Mr. Warwick?” Lieutenant Velasquez said, as if he thought that Reid’s failure to respond had to do with his being in shock, rather than cold calculation.
“Yes, I’m sorry. It’s . . . I just can’t believe it. James and I were together just the other day.”
“I understand how difficult that this must be for you. I’m not sure if Ms. Sommers told you this, but we have reason to believe that Mr. Sommers was murdered. The first few hours in the investigation are critical, and we need to re-create his whereabouts over the last few days. Who he met with, what he was doing, that kind of thing.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t right now. I have another appointment, and I have to be there. Give me your card and I’ll call you later.”
Reid moved to the right and took a step forward.
Velasquez blocked him with an outstretched arm. “Sir, I’m certain that what you have to do is very important. But I’m equally certain it’s not as important as finding out who killed your friend and bringing that person to justice. I promise I won’t take up too much of your time, but I do need for you to answer some questions now. The first one is for you to explain to me the business transaction you were doing with Mr. Sommers. I understand it required that he go to Washington last night, but it seems as if that didn’t happen. Do you know why that is?”
Reid was boxed in, and he knew it. He was regretting not following his lawyer’s advice from the get-go.
“Here’s the thing, Detective . . . I can’t go into any of that because I have pretty hardcore NDAs—nondisclosure agreements—with my clients. So even just telling you what I was working on would be a violation. Obviously, you need to know this stuff, and I’m happy to tell you; I just need to get client permission first. I’m sorry. I know that is making your job harder, but I just can’t violate the terms of an agreement with a client and expect to keep the client in the future.”
Lieutenant Velasquez didn’t give ground but kept looking hard at Reid, as if that would cause him to divulge everything. Needless to say, Reid felt more than up to withstanding a withering stare.
He stepped to the left and walked by the lieutenant.
Wayne called Jessica’s phone twice more in rapid succession when he entered the faculty lounge for lunch. Still going straight to voice mail.
“Wayne will know,” Sandy Zukis said as Wayne was putting his phone away.
Zukis taught physics. He was a fat man who wore a god-awful hairpiece and had a penchant for loud plaid sports jackets.
“Know what?” Wayne asked.
“We’re engaged in a rather high-stakes wager,” Lori Tennyson said.
Lori was chairperson of the LOTE—Languages Other Than English—department.
“Lori claims that she’s a Star Wars fan, but she doesn’t think my Honda can do the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs,” said Zukis.
That was the kind of thing Zukis would bet on. Especially to pull something over on someone who enjoyed movies because they were fun and didn’t see them as an opportunity to demonstrate how smart you were.
“Um, I’m afraid I’m not in the mood for that today,” Wayne said.
“There’s twenty bucks on the line,” Zukis said. “Not to mention the pride of the science department, which she’s mocking by her challenge.”
“Just google it,” Wayne said.
Zukis was laughing. “A parsec is a unit of distance. Three point two six light-years. So when Han Solo claims the Millennium Falcon could do the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs, he’s not saying anything that anyone can’t do. Hell, I could crawl the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs, because a parsec is a distance of measure, not time. It has nothing to do with speed.” He was laughing again. “But I won’t have to crawl, because I can take a cab with the twenty bucks I just earned from Lori.”
Lori was smiling, but it was the smile of someone who knew she was being laughed at, not with. As she reached into her purse to satisfy the bet, Wayne decided to be her knight in shining armor.
“What were the actual terms of the wager?” he said.
“That, given enough time, my Honda could do the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs,” Zukis said. “It might take my Honda forever, but it would eventually cover the twelve parsecs.”
“Well, I’m not an expert, but because George Lucas isn’t here, and since you’ve empowered me with this decision, I call it a push. The Kessel Run might not be a race, after all. It could be a route. Maybe he was saying that he found a unique way to make it through that path and was able to reduce the distance to get there. Like saying you made it to the airport in fourteen miles by taking side streets. And since it’s in space, I’m not sure your Honda could navigate that path, Sandy. Even if you had all the time in the world.”
“Good enough for me,” Lori said with a victory smile that a Super Bowl champion would envy. She put the twenty dollars back in her purse. “Wayne, I owe you a drink. The Smith? After work.”
“Thanks, but I’m gonna need to take a rain check on that. Today’s not a good day for me.”
Owen’s mother told him to go to his father’s home.
That was the first significant thing Owen had learned about his parents’ divorce. He had no home of his own. Before, they’d told him to “go home.” Or they’d meet him “at home.” No qualifier needed. It was as much his as anyone else’s. But after, he was going to his mother’s apartment, or his father’s house. Neither belonged to him. He was, essentially, homeless, despite the fact that he had two bedrooms filled with his stuff.
“You sure?” he said. “I mean, I don’t want you to be alone tonight.”
She smiled through her tears. “That’s so sweet. But, yeah, I’m sure. I’m going to be at the police station for a while, and then I have some phone calls to make. It will take one thing off my plate if I know you’re being fed and getting to school in the morning. I’ll call your doctor too and set up the chemo.”
“Are you sure about the treatment?”
This question seemed to strike his mother as odd.
“Of course. Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know. I just thought . . . I mean, I know that James was paying for my treatment. I just didn’t know if . . . I guess I just don’t know.”
“I’m so sorry you need to worry about these things, Owen. But don’t. I know that this is a shock to all of us. But your treatment, that’s the most important thing in my life. Believe me about that. And we can pay for it, so at least that is going to be fine.”
13
The last time Jessica was in a police station had been when she was sixteen. She had made the mistake of accepting an offer from Ricky Solowosky to drive her home from a party at Andrea Levy’s house. They hit a DUI roadblock as soon as they reached Ryder’s Lane, and although Ricky was under the legal limit, the fact that he was seventeen and had been drinking was enough for the cops to scare the bejesus out of him.
She didn’t remember anything about the police station from that first time except that she was scared to death. She wasn’t scared this time, however. She felt nothing. As if she were dead herself.
The room she was placed in could scarcely have been made more unpleasant if that had been the police department’s intent. It was almost as cold as it was outside, forcing her to keep on her gloves and coat. There were zero windows, battleship-gray walls, a single metal table, and four metal chairs. At least it didn’t have the one-way mirror, although Jessica figured that meant only that they were filming her from somewhere else.
The young woman with an Arabic-sounding name said that she and her partner, the handsome man who’d broken the news of James’s death, would return shortly. She asked if Jessica wanted anything to eat or drink, even offering to go out to get her s
omething. Jessica declined. She was already sick to her stomach, and the thought of food, or even coffee, made her want to throw up.
Jessica had watched enough TV to know that the spouse was always the first suspect. Another thing she knew from television was that many a suspect made the mistake that ended up getting them convicted in this exact setting. On the other hand, she also knew that cops found it suspicious if the victim’s spouse was uncooperative. Which meant that, no matter what she did, she was about to make a grave mistake.
The handsome lieutenant entered the room, the female officer who had offered to get her food a step behind him.
“I introduced myself earlier, but I know that with everything that has happened, remembering names is difficult. I’m Lieutenant Velasquez. This is my partner, Detective Jamali. We’re both very sorry for your loss, Ms. Sommers.”
Her inquisitors made a handsome couple, and Jessica wondered if they were, in fact, a couple. He might be a tad old for her, probably Jessica’s age, if she had to guess. The female detective looked no more than thirty.
“As I told you before, the first few hours in an investigation are the most critical,” he continued. “We know that this is an extremely difficult time for you, but we have to ask you some questions that will hopefully help us catch whoever did this to your husband.”
Jessica felt the need to hear her own voice. “Yes. Anything I can do.”
“Thank you. How long had you and James been married?”
Jessica wondered if the lieutenant consciously used the past tense to bring home that James was truly gone or if it was what he always said in these situations.
“One year. We actually had this big party for our first anniversary on Saturday night.”
