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
