by Adam Mitzner
Dr. Cammerman was still wearing hospital scrubs when he entered. He looked first at Owen’s chart, then at him.
“How are you feeling, Owen?”
“I’ve been better.”
“The procedure went very well,” the doctor answered as if he hadn’t heard Owen’s response to his first question. “Now we’re at the stage where we monitor you. You’re going to feel weak for a few days. That’s to be expected. My advice to you is that you try not to overdo it. Staying in bed is just fine. If you want to get up, don’t walk very far.”
“I feel kind of like I’m going to throw up.”
“Some nausea is also to be expected. That doesn’t concern me.”
Owen was pleased that Dr. Cammerman was copacetic with him throwing up all over himself. “I also feel a little dizzy.”
“Again, that’s perfectly normal. Do you have any questions?”
“No.”
“In that case, I’ll see you tomorrow, Owen.”
Before the surgery, Dr. Cammerman told him that some people feel a sense of rebirth after a stem cell transplant. “It’s like you’re a brand-new person,” he’d said.
Owen had desperately wanted to believe that after the surgery, something fundamental in him would change. But now, having emerged from the operation, he felt no different.
Jessica sat in the family and friends area at Memorial Sloan Kettering, hanging by a string. A thin, fraying one at that.
Her mantra was baby steps. First, she had to get through James’s funeral. She had barely done that when Haley dropped her bombshell, knocking Jessica for a second loop. She’d had little choice but to cast aside Haley’s claim, however. She needed to be there for her son.
Wayne sat beside her now. Yesterday, he had undergone the donor procedure, and now he sported an ice pack on his pelvis.
“Are you in much pain?” she asked.
“Not too bad,” he said.
The last time they’d been together in a hospital waiting room was for Owen’s first chemo session, four years earlier. Jessica still remembered that day too vividly for her liking. The way she’d gripped Wayne’s hand, using every bit of her energy to not shed a tear in front of her thirteen-year-old son.
When Jessica was pregnant, she and Wayne often talked about the future their baby would enjoy. How the world would change in his lifetime and the kinds of opportunities that would be available to him. The one thing they never discussed, never even considered, was that he’d be sick. Or that before he even graduated from high school, they’d wish for nothing more than survival for their child.
“This is the worst part,” Wayne said.
Jessica smiled at his effort to be positive. “They’re all the worst parts.”
Doctor Cammerman came out at a little past three. At first, he was stone-faced, but as he got closer to them, a small smile crept to his lips. It was enough for Jessica to exhale deeply for the first time that day.
“The transplant is complete, and Owen is doing great,” he said. “He’s going to rest for another hour. Then you can visit him. Remember, the protocol has to be strictly followed, for Owen’s safety. Masks and gloves.”
It was nearly two hours before a nurse finally entered the waiting room. She told Jessica and Wayne that they were able to see their son.
The nurse didn’t take them through the door where Owen and Dr. Cammerman had exited the waiting room but instead led them to the elevator and then down several floors. Once they were on the third floor, they followed her through a maze of hallways until she pushed open a door with a sign that read RECOVERY.
If only that were true, Jessica thought.
From there they traversed another hallway, this one wider than the others, allowing for gurneys to pass both ways. At the end was another door with another sign. This one read INTENSIVE CARE.
Behind that door was a reception area, no different from the countless waiting rooms Jessica had seen. The nurse explained why this one was different.
“In the closet are surgical gowns, caps, gloves, and masks. Please put them on,” she said.
Jessica watched Wayne suit up. Once he looked like he was ready to perform surgery, she did likewise.
After they were finished, the nurse said, “Owen is in bed two. The doctor only wants you to stay for a few minutes this time. Owen needs his rest now.” She opened the door for them and stepped aside, allowing them entry.
In bed two lay their seventeen-year-old son, asleep. He didn’t look any worse for wear, but for the hospital-issued pajamas.
“Maybe we should let him sleep,” Jessica said.
Wayne nodded that he agreed.
Owen opened an eye. “Hey,” he said with a croaky, low voice.
“Hey, O,” Wayne said. “You look good, my man.”
“Thanks. Feel great,” Owen managed more clearly.
“The doctor said the operation was a total success,” Jessica said, trying to sound upbeat.
Owen nodded. “I’m really tired.”
“Just sleep,” Jessica said. “We’ll see you later.”
Owen squinted through his one open eye, apparently realizing for the first time that his parents were head to toe in hospital scrubs.
“Did you two plan on wearing the same outfits today?” he said.
If Owen had jumped out of bed and danced a jig, Jessica couldn’t have been happier. To her, his lame joke meant that maybe Wayne was right after all. Maybe the worst was over.
And then she remembered what Haley had said.
Allison suggested they meet at the St. Regis. She explained that she worked out of her home and normally brought clients to the dealer’s showroom.
Reid hardly cared. He worked from wherever money could be made, and if that was the St. Regis, so be it.
It wasn’t lost on him that Allison hadn’t selected either the Mark or the Carlyle, the two hotels closest to James’s office. That worked fine for him as well. He didn’t want to be anywhere near the scene of the crime either.
It had been the typical hurry-up-and-wait process that characterized so many art deals. After she initially told Reid that he needed to secure the Pollock sketches right away, Allison’s other commitments delayed the next step. They were supposed to meet last week, and then at the last minute she had canceled. He half expected her not to be there today either.
In the late afternoon, the St. Regis’s lobby was nearly empty. Its only occupants were a few businessmen going over spreadsheets, a family who looked as if they were on vacation—probably from Europe, based on their clothing—and one or two women that Reid imagined were prostitutes, but maybe not.
He spotted Allison with her back to the window. In front of her was a small porcelain teapot.
She didn’t rise when he approached. Nor did she extend her hand.
Reid took the chair across from her. He flagged down a waiter and asked for whatever tea Allison was having.
“So what are we going to do?” Reid said.
Allison poured her tea. “That’s it? No . . . moment of silence for James? Weren’t you friends or something?”
“More something. We were business partners, at least on this deal. And James would be the first to understand that what matters most to me is closing this deal.”
“No offense, Reid, but what matters most to me is not being in business with someone who killed his business partner. I’ve been thinking about that all week. To be honest, that’s why I canceled on you. The more I thought about the situation, I didn’t think that we should be in business together.”
“And I feel exactly the same about you, Allison. And then I remembered that we can make a boatload of money. So, even though I don’t trust you either, here I am.”
The waiter came back with a teapot for Reid.
Allison leaned in closer. He could feel the warmth of her breath.
“We seem to have a dilemma, then,” she said. “We’re both claiming we didn’t kill James. Neither one of us really believes the other.
But you want to sell the Pollocks and have no buyer; my buyer’s still interested, but I don’t have any Pollocks.”
“Your buyer’s still on the hook?”
“Spoke to him this morning.”
That was why Allison had set this meeting up. She figured it wasn’t worth knocking herself out to look for a buyer, but she wasn’t going to turn away a bird in the hand.
“He was pissed that I canceled on him the first time, and I think he was giving me the cold shoulder to put me in my place a bit. When I finally reached him, I told him that the seller had gotten cold feet. Then I suggested that if he were to sweeten the deal—say, go to a million per—I could get him to sell. Long story short, he’s back in. But he wants to do this as soon as possible. He’s afraid the seller will pull out again.”
Reid considered the proposal. He liked hearing that the price had gone up.
Still, he was getting the full-on hinky feeling now.
“So are we going to do this thing or what?” Allison asked.
Haley felt stuck in quicksand. She had always been a doer. Proactive. Looking to solve the problem at hand. It had been that impulse that led her to Jessica at the funeral. But now, with that plan in motion, there was nothing left for her to do.
Nothing except wait.
But for what, exactly? She didn’t expect to hear from Jessica again. She would either believe Haley or not.
Besides, whether Jessica actually believed her was of secondary importance. Not even secondary—irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was whether Jessica decided to keep her powder dry with the police because of what Haley told her. Since the detectives hadn’t yet come back to Haley’s apartment, she assumed that was the case.
Not being a person of interest in a murder case should have made Haley happy, but she felt little joy at the moment. After wanting James dead for almost as long as she’d been married to him, she was struggling with what to do next with her life. It was a question she had been considering since her sacking at Maeve Grant, but she’d always been able to distract herself from forward progress in her life with her revenge fantasies.
Her fantasy now fulfilled, she kept returning to the same question over and over again. What now?
At around seven, a nurse came out into the waiting room. “We just gave Owen a sedative to help him sleep tonight,” she said. “The doctor said that there will be no more visits today. He’ll let you have a longer visit tomorrow, but he wants Owen to sleep through the night. You two should take the opportunity to get some rest yourselves. It’s important for you to keep your strength up too. And not just physically. Emotionally too.”
Wayne suggested that they get a bite at the diner across the street from the hospital. He would have been more than willing to go someplace more upscale, but he doubted Jessica wanted to do anything beyond utilitarian this evening.
The hostess seated them in a booth toward the back. It could have comfortably sat six.
“Can I interest you in sharing a black-and-white malt?” he asked.
She laughed. “Yes. I think that would be . . . appropriate.”
When Owen was born, there had been a diner across the street from that hospital too. Twice a day during Jessica’s three-day stay, Wayne had gone downstairs and gotten them both black-and-white malts.
“How’s Stephanie?” Jessica asked after they’d ordered.
Wayne had not yet found a way to tell her that he’d ended things with Stephanie. “We’re taking a break,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Well, a breakup is more accurate.”
“I’m sorry, Wayne.”
“Thanks. It’s for the best.”
Wayne heard his next sentence in his head and decided it was worth saying aloud. “I think now . . . maybe more than ever, you and I just need each other.”
In the eleven days since James Sommers’s murder, Gabriel hadn’t narrowed the suspect list any more than he had in the first eleven minutes. Wife. Ex-wife. Ex-husband of wife. Business partner. Mysterious short-haired woman named Allison.
Allison hadn’t showed at the funeral, although Gabriel had known that would be a long shot. Asra suggested that Allison might be dead herself, the victim of a Reid Warwick double cross. For that reason, she had been monitoring the missing persons and Jane Does at the morgue, but no short-haired, thin women in the proper age group had turned up.
Gabriel had a different take. If Allison had been involved, he assumed she was on a beach somewhere, living off the proceeds of the deal she had decided not to split with James Sommers and Reid Warwick. That’s why he figured she had killed the former and stiffed the latter.
Then there was Ella’s theory: that Allison didn’t even exist.
Not that they needed another suspect at the moment anyway. None of the current candidates had an alibi worth a damn. Jessica Sommers claimed to be alone in her apartment all night. No one saw Wayne Fiske between the time he left school at 3:45 p.m. until his son showed up at his house at seven. Reid Warwick’s refusal to cooperate suggested that he too lacked an airtight alibi. The crazy ex-wife, who had originally been at the top of the suspect list, had the best alibi of the bunch. Her boy toy confirmed that she’d been with him (or at least on her way to him) during the time frame that James Sommers had been killed. Then again, Gabriel had the sense that her boyfriend would say anything to keep Haley coming back for more.
Unfortunately, closed-circuit TV from the Met Breuer museum didn’t capture the entryway to Sommers’s building across the street. The building’s own security system had been broken for more than a year, the landlord figuring that a visible camera made for a sufficient deterrent by itself.
Jessica Sommers’s building did have a working camera. It showed her enter at three and not leave until the following morning. On the other hand, tenants tended to know how to avoid being filmed by their own buildings’ security cameras. Which meant that Gabriel couldn’t rule out that James Sommers told his wife something on the phone that caused her to go to his office, setting in motion the confrontation that ended with him dead.
Reid Warwick’s Fifth Avenue residence had both security cameras and doormen. They all told the same story: Reid came home at a little after one in the morning with zero blood on his clothing. That was hardly airtight, of course. He could have gone to James’s office, killed his partner, and then switched clothes before coming home.
A team of cops was assigned the monotonous task of scanning video from the 7 train platform at Grand Central, hoping to see Wayne Fiske. The combination of the grainy footage and the sheer number of people crammed onto the subway platform, even off-peak, made a positive ID impossible. That kept Wayne Fiske very much still in the mix.
One of the odd quirks of law enforcement was that cell records were considered to be more private than financial records. Ever since the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision, cops couldn’t find out about a suspect’s movements through cell tower pings without a search warrant, and that required meeting the probable-cause standard. Gabriel knew that no judge would issue a warrant while they had four equally plausible suspects, so he hadn’t even tried to get one.
By contrast, a grand jury subpoena had been enough to obtain the victim’s bank records.
The Sommerses’ monthly account statements were silent as to whether they had a brokerage account, which was where real wealth would be housed. Usually, among those privileged enough to own securities, bank records showed money being transferred back and forth to the brokerage account. The lack of such transfers meant either that the Sommerses didn’t have stocks, or that they had a second source of cash that the police hadn’t discovered.
The bank records weren’t a total dead end, however. The Sommerses’ monthly expenses had outpaced their income by a significant amount over the past twelve months. Which meant that they were not nearly as well off as they appeared to the outside world. Of course, that hardly made them different from many couples these days.
But the real find was t
he payments to an insurance company. That, in turn, led Gabriel to a half-a-million-dollar policy on James Sommers’s life that named Jessica Sommers as the sole beneficiary.
And that was motive.
Jessica Sommers had told them about her son’s treatment, and how her husband had stepped up to pay for it. It was an odd thing for her to share if it pointed the finger at her, but people did strange things sometimes. The subconscious at work was often a detective’s greatest ally. She had said that her husband’s work with the mysterious Allison was going to pay for the treatment, but what if she had decided not to wait for the art sales and to instead cash in the policy for her son’s sake?
Or perhaps Wayne Fiske had been the impatient one. Maybe his ex-wife had confided that they didn’t have the money for the treatment, and she was hoping that her husband could come up with it. And he decided to take matters into his own hands to save his son, which had the added benefit of eliminating his romantic rival.
It wasn’t just the money that was causing Gabriel to think the cuckolded ex-husband was looking very good for this. CSU had found a plethora of fingerprints at James Sommers’s office, but only one match: Wayne Fiske.
Unfortunately for Mr. Fiske, all teachers are fingerprinted due to an NYC Department of Education regulation. As a result, there was hard proof that he’d been in the office of his ex-wife’s now-dead husband. The fingerprint evidence couldn’t pinpoint the exact day or time he’d been there, however. But fingerprints don’t last forever.
Of course, Gabriel was certain that some of their other suspects—Jessica Sommers, Reid Warwick, and Allison—had also left prints. After all, there was no dispute that all three had been in Sommers’s office in the forty-eight hours prior to his death. The problem was that their fingerprints weren’t housed in any law enforcement databases. And even if they were, their presence in James Sommers’s office was not incriminating in and of itself.
