The Perfect Marriage(44)

A few steps into the walk, he reached for his cell to call Owen again. At last, he saw that he had a text.

But when he clicked on it, it was not from Owen. Instead it was from PayPal, telling him that a thirty-seven-dollar Uber had been charged to his account. That was the fare to go from Manhattan to Queens, which meant that his son was now at his house.

This wasn’t one of his normal nights with Owen, though. Yesterday had been. Moreover, the timing wasn’t right. Owen had gone straight from the doctor, apparently, which meant he had missed the rest of the school day. And although Owen taking an Uber to Queens wasn’t unprecedented, he knew better than to blow that kind of money during daylight hours when the subway provided perfectly suitable transportation.

He called Owen again, hoping he’d pick up. No such luck. Straight to voice mail. Same thing happened when he tried Jessica.

It took Wayne more than an hour to get home by train. (A thirty-seven-dollar Uber was outside his commuting budget.) Owen was on the living room sofa when Wayne walked in. He was playing the violin. A new piece, Wayne thought, given that he didn’t recognize it.

There were few things that Wayne enjoyed more than his son’s playing, which always made it seem that everything was right in the world. Like that old saying about music having charms to soothe the savage breast . . . Hearing Owen made Wayne’s dread disappear.

“Hey, O. You know how much I love to see you, but I still need to ask—what are you doing here?”

“Mom told me to come here. James was killed.”

Leave it to Owen to impart this news with the emotional detachment of an anchorman reporting on a natural disaster. But that’s what life as a teenager was like, Wayne knew. Or maybe only for his teenager.

Wayne didn’t verbally respond, though his mind was going a mile a minute while his son continued in the same flat inflection. “Someone broke into his office and killed him. Mom left me at the doctor because she got a call from the police or something. After I was done, I met her at James’s building. There were cops all around, and they weren’t letting anyone inside. Mom went to the police station to . . . answer questions, I guess. She told me to come here.”

“That’s terrible. I’m . . . sorry.”

“Yeah. It’s . . . I mean, who would want to kill James, you know?”

Wayne didn’t respond. He assumed that Owen knew perfectly well that Wayne would be at the top of the list of people who wanted James dead.



“First impressions?”

The question was aimed at assessing Asra’s detective skills, as Gabriel had already formed his own first impressions about the case. From the look on her face, Asra intuited as much, which meant that she had actually passed this test before even answering his question.

“Whether it’s murder or not, I don’t know, but someone was definitely with him when it happened, and that’s not a good look for them not being guilty of something.”

Gabriel nodded for Asra to continue.

“If you’re asking me to speculate on who might be the person who was with Mr. Sommers at the time of his demise, certainly the business partner looks good for that. He’s big, so I could see him landing a punch like the one that took Sommers down. I also got the impression that Reid’s the kind of guy who’s not opposed to starting a fight. And given his refusal to cooperate, he might as well have put a target on his forehead.”

“What do you think about the wife?”

“Seems legitimately distressed to me. And I don’t see her going to his place of business to kill him.”

“Maybe she showed up at the office and saw this Allison person and her husband going at it. There’s a scuffle and he winds up dead.”

“How does Allison make it out alive?”

“Maybe she ran the moment Jessica arrived, and that’s when the marital discord turned deadly. Then again, this might be a classic Occam’s razor situation.”

“How so?” Asra asked.

“We’ve got someone who’s made a death threat against the vic. His ex-wife. Hard not to conclude that Haley Sommers is our murderer when the guy ends up dead less than a week later.”

They’d used James Sommers’s face to unlock his phone. Nothing was suspicious about his phone activity, no obvious mistress or dispute with anyone. They called the number listed under the contact Allison a few times, but no one answered. Gabriel was certain that when they checked the number, they’d find it was a burner.

The one outlier in this perfectly normal, enemy-free life was a voice mail James Sommers had received from his ex-wife on the day of his wedding anniversary to Jessica:

“James, you miserable fuck. I hope you and that skank bitch of a wife of yours both die. But don’t worry, after you’re dead, I’ll be sure to dance on your graves.”



Reid knew that Allison would call. It was only a matter of time.

It came at 10:00 p.m. that night.

“Why the fuck didn’t James meet me at the train?” she said. “And why won’t he return my calls and texts?”

“I wouldn’t take it personally, sweetheart.”

“Where the hell is he?”

“Six feet under.”

“What?”

“You heard me. James is dead. He was murdered.”