The Perfect Marriage(56)
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 inside James Sommers’s place of business.
18
That forensic presentation was being made by the Assistant Medical Examiner, Erica Thompson. Gabriel found her something of a breath of fresh air from the sixtysomething grumpy white men who typically filled the medical examiner’s office. Not only was she smarter than most of her colleagues, she also explained her findings in a way that didn’t require you to be a medical examiner yourself to understand.
“Sorry about the delay in getting you this information,” she said. “We’ve been backed up like you wouldn’t believe. Also, I didn’t think too much was going to be different from what I saw at the scene. Which turned out to be pretty much the case. Like I said before, cause of death is blunt force trauma. The man’s head hit that coffee table at just the right angle and velocity. Or, from his perspective, precisely the wrong one. There were no drugs or alcohol in his system, so nothing that impaired him in any way to make the death blow easier to inflict. Time of death is a little narrower than originally estimated. The revised window is four p.m. to seven p.m.”
“If he was the caller to his wife’s phone at a few minutes before five, then we can shave an hour off the front end of that,” Asra said.
“If you can make that evidentiary assumption, then yes,” Erica replied.
“Even so, I was hoping for a time of death that might rule somebody out,” Gabriel said. “All of our people of interest are still in play during that window.”
“Sorry. I can only tell you what the science tells me,” Erica said. “But here’s something that might be of some interest to you. Remember I noted the scratch on his chin? Well, it is consistent with his being struck by someone’s fist. But he does not have any marks on his own hands.”