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 the 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.
Wayne Fiske and Haley Sommers were a different matter, however. They had no good reason to explain their presence
