“What makes you say that?” Gabriel asked.
“The chin is scratched a bit, consistent with what you’d see from a blow to the jaw from a punch. Hard to tell definitively right now, though. Maybe he got the scratch when he hit the floor.”
“Who is he?”
“There was a wallet in his coat pocket,” Asra said. “James Sommers. His driver’s license has a SoHo home address.”
Gabriel took out his phone. “Summers like the season?”
“No. With an o.”
He typed the dead man’s name into Google. The search engine asked if he meant Jaime Sommers—the Bionic Woman. Gabriel smiled, recalling reruns of the show from when he was a kid.
“James Sommers” came up with a lot of hits. Gabriel refined the search to include “Prestige Art.”
That did the trick. Staring up from his phone was information for James Sommers, president of Prestige Art. The address listed matched this apartment. A click later, Gabriel was looking at a picture of the dead man, whose actual face he still had not yet seen.
Reid felt less than comfortable standing around outside James’s office building. He should have never even come here in the first place. Once he had and had seen all the commotion, he should have left at once. What kind of an idiot returns to the scene of the crime?
He assumed it would take Jessica close to an hour to get there from the loft, but less than ten minutes after he called, he saw her get out of a cab and run toward the front door, only to be intercepted by a uniformed policeman.
Reid watched her frantically gesturing to the cop. From her arm movements he deduced that she was asking to go inside. And from the shaking of the cop’s head, it was clear he was having none of it.
“Officer,” Reid said, walking toward them. “This is the owner of apartment 7E, Jessica Sommers.”
“Who are you?” the cop—a boy in a uniform, actually—asked.
“I’m a friend of Mrs. Sommers. I just thought it might help if I vouched for her.”
“Thank you,” the boy-cop said, seemingly not thankful at all. “I’m sorry . . . Ms. Sommers, is it?” Jessica nodded. “Let me see if a detective or someone can talk with you. But until then, you have to stay here, behind the yellow tape. No one’s allowed upstairs at this time.”
“Officer, please, I just left my teenage son in the cancer ward at Sloan Kettering. Now I’m being told that there’s some type of criminal activity in my husband’s office. I didn’t even know he was here. He told me he was in Washington, DC, last night. So, please, just tell me what’s going on. I’m begging you.”
“I don’t know any of the details. But I’ll make sure that a detective comes downstairs to talk to you as soon as they have any information.”
Reid didn’t think Jessica would remain upright when the police officer walked away. He put his arm around her, feeling her weight pull on him.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said.
She didn’t even look at him. It was as if she already knew it wasn’t going to be okay. Reid could hardly blame her, of course. He knew it too.
Neither Jessica nor Owen had replied by the time Wayne was back in his classroom, awaiting the arrival of his fourth-period class—AP bio. The kids swarmed in en masse, the normal rowdiness of seniors who had already submitted their college applications and no longer cared about anything that occurred during the school day.
Wayne had always felt a bit of resentment toward his students. To a one, they had no idea how privileged they were. The worst of the bunch actually thought he worked for them because the tiniest fraction of the ungodly tuition their parents paid went toward his salary. When Owen had fallen sick, however, Wayne’s anger toward his students intensified. Now they were not only rich but healthy, and each and every one of them took both for granted.
Normally he kept his anger toward his students in check and thought he did a pretty good job of educating them. But today, Wayne felt like he was about to burst.
“Settle down, everyone. We’ve got a lot to cover, so please, just settle down.”
“Relax, Mr. Fiske,” said Taylor Ferguson, one of God’s favorites, born rich, handsome, and smart, though not as smart as he thought. “It’s all good. No need to stress.”
Wayne shut his eyes and took a deep, cleansing breath. Now was not the time to lose control. He needed to continue as if everything were fine.
To Owen’s surprise, it had begun snowing while he was in the doctor’s office. He doubted it would stick because nothing short of a nor’easter provided snow cover in Manhattan. But for the moment, at least, the snow gave the city a magical feel.
After the doctor, Owen would usually go back to school. But he had already missed orchestra practice and music theory, which were the classes he cared most about anyway. The rest of the day held the usual math and science crap, which bored him to tears. So he cinched his winter coat and began walking toward James’s office, which was only about fifteen blocks away.
The falling snow had collected in his hair to the point that when he caught his reflection in one of the shop windows, he looked like he was wearing a powdered wig from the Revolutionary War. When he passed the diner that he and his father had gone to the other day, he caught the eyes of two girls wearing the green tartan skirts of some nearby private school—they must have been cutting class. They giggled in his general direction in a way
