The Perfect Marriage(60)


She handed him a wooden stick. The kind that reminded Wayne of the spoon that came with Dixie cups when he was a kid.

“Do I have to do it?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, what was your question?” Lieutenant Velasquez asked.

He had an intimidating stare. Wayne remembered how his father would look at him like that.

“I asked you if I can legally say no to your request,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady.

“I don’t see why you would do that. Unless, of course, you’re afraid that providing your DNA might incriminate you.”

That answered Wayne’s question. Although he already knew as much. He’d googled it. If they didn’t have a warrant, which they apparently didn’t, he didn’t have to do anything.

“I’ve got nothing to hide, but I do have a deep distrust of the police state,” Wayne said. “I don’t want my DNA in some database for . . . well, forever, being used in ways that I have no idea.” He laughed. “I mean, I’m not even on Facebook.”

Neither of the officers thought that was funny. “Mr. Fiske,” Lieutenant Velasquez said in a tone used to convey the utmost seriousness of the matter, “up until this moment, we did not think of you as a suspect. But if you refuse to provide your DNA, we have to reconsider whether we’re looking at this right. My experience is that people with—as you said—nothing to hide don’t refuse to provide their DNA. So, to be very blunt about it, right now I’m asking myself, why would a smart man like Wayne Fiske refuse to provide DNA evidence—”

“Unless he’s guilty of murder,” Detective Jamali finished the sentence.

“I’ve got nothing to hide,” Wayne said again, wishing he hadn’t. He was protesting too much. “But I do know my rights. And unless you have a warrant, I have every legal right to decline your request. So that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Were you ever in Mr. Sommers’s office?” Lieutenant Velasquez asked.

“What?”

“Simple question. Yes or no, were you ever in James Sommers’s office?”

“Of course. I pick Owen up there sometimes,” he said.

“When did you do that last?”

Wayne decided he had said too much. “I need you to leave now.”

In the brief standoff that followed, Wayne could tell that the lieutenant was considering whether to arrest him right then and there.

“Okay. Thank you for your time.” Lieutenant Velasquez extended his hand as if to say, No hard feelings.

Wayne kept his in his pockets.

“Goodbye. Please let yourselves out.”





19

“Do you think they could have been in on it together?” Asra asked.

It was the morning after every single one of their suspects refused their DNA requests. Gabriel hated the feeling that a murderer was laughing at him, but he could almost hear the cackle.

“Possible,” he said. Indeed, a part of him was hoping that was the explanation. Conspiracies never held together. Like the old saying goes, a secret can only be kept between two people if one of them is dead. “But it sounds pretty unlikely. I mean, Jessica Sommers leaves her husband of seventeen years for another man, and then conspires with that same ex-husband to kill her new husband?”

“It makes sense if the only way to save their son was collecting on that insurance policy,” Asra said. “But I still think it’s more likely that Wayne Fiske did it alone. The wife was clearly hoping her husband would sell the artwork to fund her son’s treatment. But the ex-husband, he might leap on a surefire way to get his son’s treatment paid for. And if it means that the guy who stole his wife drops out of the picture, that sounds like a win-win to me.”

“How’d he even know about the policy?”

“She probably told him. The policy had a cash surrender value. Maybe she mentioned to her ex that they could cash it in and put that toward the treatment cost, and he decided it would be better to off the husband and use the proceeds to pay for the whole shebang.”

“And now she’s protecting him?” Gabriel asked.

“Wouldn’t you protect your ex-wife if she was a murderer?”

Gabriel considered that scenario. He couldn’t imagine ever not loving Ella, and he also couldn’t imagine ever cooperating with the police to put his wife behind bars, no matter what she had done. Not only because he loved his wife, but also for his daughter’s sake. And if Ella’s crime had been in furtherance of protecting Annie, he’d definitely stand by her, without a moment’s hesitation. Which was why he concluded that, if faced with the same calculus, Jessica Sommers would opt to keep the father of her seventeen-year-old son, a son who was suffering from leukemia, in his life and out of jail. And that would include lying about whether he’d been in her husband’s office recently, and giving Wayne a heads-up that the NYPD was coming to ask him that same question.

“So you’re giving the first Mrs. Sommers a pass?” Gabriel asked. “Even with that voice mail? And why on earth doesn’t Reid fill us in about Allison if Wayne Fiske is our guy?”

The questions hung in the air. Asra didn’t have a good answer to either.

“Let’s look at it from a different angle,” Gabriel said. “Maybe the murder has nothing to do with insurance at all. It could very well be a business deal gone bad. If Allison was working on a multimillion-dollar drug deal, we wouldn’t be thinking twice about spouses and ex-spouses. I’m not sure that this art transaction was any more legal.”

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