by Adam Mitzner
“Annie. Anne, actually.”
“Old school. I like it.”
“She’s named after my wife’s mother.”
Asra smiled. “Me too. I mean, I’m named after my mother’s mother. I like the idea of family names. It ties the past and the future.”
Gabriel nodded. He liked that too.
The press vans were lined up one after another. They were all there: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX. Even NY1, the city’s local news station, had sent a camera crew. Gabriel pulled their vehicle beside a black-and-white cruiser parked in front of a fire hydrant.
“We just walk past the reporters,” he said. “Nothing for us to tell them yet.”
11
For once, Haley arrived on time for an appointment with Dr. Rubenstein. She took off her shoes, assumed the position on the couch, and immediately launched into the very serious problem on her mind.
Dr. Rubenstein didn’t let her get ten words out before stopping her.
“I’m sorry, Haley,” he said, not sounding the least bit contrite. “We can’t discuss this.”
She sat up so they were facing each other. One of the things that was so strange about the relationship Haley had with Dr. Rubenstein was that even though she saw him every week, and even though they had the most intimate relationship in her life at the moment, sometimes she doubted whether she could have picked the man out of a lineup. She saw his face only briefly, at the start and end of their sessions. Staring at him now, she was surprised to find that he was rather handsome. Strong-chinned with large dark eyes and a full head of chestnut curls.
Haley told him she didn’t understand. Not even a little bit. She was in extremis, and Dr. Rubenstein was her therapist.
“There are certain ethical rules that therapists need to follow,” he explained matter-of-factly without breaking eye contact. “Even regarding past acts, which this is, I prefer to err on the side of caution with my patients.”
She knew what he was saying. And why. But he had never before told her to stop talking about a subject.
“I don’t think that’s right. I mean as a legal matter, Dr. Rubenstein. I’m not talking about committing some crime in the future. This has already happened.”
She had googled this on her phone before today’s session and was confident that she was correct. After all, criminals always tell their lawyers about their guilt. Wasn’t that the whole point of attorney-client privilege? And she knew for a fact (or at least from TV) that murderers on death row were allowed to make confessions to clergy. Didn’t therapists operate under the same principles?
“I really don’t want to debate this with you, Haley,” he said, a trace of anger in his voice that contrasted sharply with the soothing way he normally addressed the issues in her life. “There are lines in the doctor-patient relationship that I will not cross. I’m sorry, but this is my call to make, based on my interpretation of my ethical obligations. I’m not going to be talked out of it by you. If you would like, I can refer you to another therapist, and perhaps he or she will have a different interpretation than I do.”
The last thing Haley wanted was a new therapist. It had taken so long for her to get to this point with Dr. Rubenstein. He knew her backstory and her secrets, at least most of them. The idea of reestablishing that intimacy with another person seemed impossible.
On the other hand, she knew that when a relationship was over, there was no point in pretending otherwise. At least the good doctor had been helpful in that regard.
“That’s what I’m going to do, then,” she said. “And I don’t expect to be billed for this session either.”
From Gabriel’s vantage point on the street, the eighteen stories of prewar limestone and brick before him looked like just another Upper East Side apartment building. The one difference was the lack of a doorman. A keyed door, which could be opened remotely by tenants to allow guests entry, was the only security.
The directory revealed that many of the residents used their units for business purposes. The apartment they were going to—7E—was listed under the name Prestige Art LLC.
Gabriel and Asra arrived to a flutter of activity. The crime scene unit techs in their windbreakers doing their thing, and half a dozen uniformed police officers milling around. A photographer was on his knees, memorializing it all.
The living room was set up like an office. A desk sat under the window on the opposite side from the front door but faced into the room, two guest chairs on the other side of it. A second seating area was in the corner, comprised of four leather club chairs surrounding a large square coffee table, which had seen better days. Its glass surface was completely shattered, and its many shards were stained with blood, as was the expensive Persian rug beneath it.
The walls were stark white, the furniture all dark. The room’s only splashes of color were provided by framed works of art on the walls. Gabriel was hardly a connoisseur, but he didn’t recognize any of the pieces. Ironically, that almost surely meant that they were valuable.
The main point of interest, of course, was the dead body lying facedown on the floor between the seating area and the desk. The male figure was clad in a white terry-cloth robe. Even from across the room, the pool of dark crimson blood around the man’s head was jolting.
A CSU tech was dusting for prints. The medical examiner, a woman named Erica Thompson, crouched by the body. She looked up and nodded toward Gabriel, and he returned the gesture.
“Why don’t you look at the body and talk to the medical examiner to find out what she knows so far,” Gabriel said to Asra. “I’m going to look around the place a little.”
Gabriel began his investigation in the kitchen. Despite its small size, it was obviously high end. The cabinetry looked custom-made, the appliances were Sub-Zero stainless steel, and the countertop was granite.
The counter was barren, aside from an older-model microwave and a state-of-the-art coffee/cappuccino machine like Gabriel had seen in high-end restaurants. He opened the fridge. It was mostly empty. Four bottles of champagne and a bottle of white wine were lying on their sides, with a few cans of Diet Dr. Pepper beside them. No perishables other than a container of half-and-half. The butter compartment and the crispers were empty. The only item that appeared to have been put there in the last few days was a container of Chinese food. General Tso’s chicken, if Gabriel had to guess from the orangey color.
The silverware drawer likewise revealed that the apartment’s occupant didn’t have people over for meals. There was a hodgepodge of utensils made out of cheap metal. The kind of spoons that would bend if you stuck them in frozen ice cream. That thought prompted Gabriel to open the freezer, which was even more barren than the refrigerator. A pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla, a bottle of vodka, and nothing else but ice cubes.
On his way to the second room, Gabriel stopped in front of a credenza against the wall. It was wood but sleek, undoubtedly purchased more for aesthetics than security. He pulled on the door. Locked. It would have been the first place a burglar would have tried, and the lock was flimsy enough that anyone who was there to steal would have been able to pry off the door easily.
That meant that whoever did this wasn’t trying to get rich. Their one and only objective had seemingly been accomplished when the dead man hit the floor.
Despite the fact that the living space was set up like an office, the second room had a king bed against the main wall. Apart from that, however, it was empty, giving off the vibe of a hotel room.
Gabriel’s first thought was that their vic was a bachelor. A man who literally lived at his office.
The bed was disheveled. Gabriel leaned over to examine the sheets. You didn’t have to have a degree in forensics to know that a woman had been in them since they’d last been laundered. A high-end man’s timepiece sat on the night table.
The bathroom reminded Gabriel of the kitchen—small but with high-end finishes. The medicine cabinet housed the essentials: toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, a bottle of aspirin, a
nd dental floss. A single white towel hung on one of the two hooks. The white robe on their vic had most likely resided on the other.
One dark suit hung in the closet. Gabriel checked the label. Tom Ford. Gabriel wasn’t much of a fashionista, but he knew that Daniel Craig had worn Tom Ford in the last few Bond films, which meant this suit didn’t come cheap. A tie and a white shirt were on a separate hanger, and a pair of black high-shine oxfords and dark socks were on the floor beneath them. Apart from that, the only other garment was a pair of boxer shorts that were on the floor beside the bed.
The lack of clothing caused Gabriel to rethink his initial bachelor-pad assumption. No one lived here full time. The term love nest came to mind, though the space could have been used for anything from an Airbnb rental to a commuter’s pied-à-terre.
Whatever the apartment’s purpose, the dead man had apparently come from a business meeting. Maybe he was on his way home before fate—or, more accurately, an attacker—intervened. On the other hand, perhaps he was planning to stay the night and wear the same suit, shirt, tie, and socks the next day.
When Gabriel reentered the main room, Asra and the medical examiner were crouching beside the body. Asra stood as Gabriel approached, but the ME continued her closer examination of the corpse.
“It looks as if the murder weapon is likely going to be the corner of the table here,” Asra said.
Gabriel nodded, looking at the relative positions of the body and table. “You said murder weapon. So not an accident?”
“He wasn’t alone. See here?” Asra was pointing at the streaked blood. “Someone moved him a bit. I’m hard-pressed to think of a scenario where he accidentally falls and there’s this kind of blood, and whoever is with him moves the body but doesn’t call the police.”
“You have a preliminary TOD?” Gabriel asked.
Asra looked to the crouching ME. This was her bailiwick, after all.
“Right now, my best guess is sometime between three p.m. to maybe eight p.m. yesterday,” Erica said while coming to her feet.
Gabriel considered the fact that the sheets had been used in the middle of the day. That said affair. Married people wait until bedtime, at least in his experience.
“The bed was used recently. For sex, not just sleeping,” Gabriel said. “Maybe that’s our vic’s less-than-helpful friend.”
“We’ll do a full workup of the sheets,” Erica said.
“Which likely means it’s a she we’re looking for,” Gabriel said.
“Not very PC of you,” Asra said, teasing him.
Gabriel considered the point. She was right. No reason the vic’s lover had to be a woman.
“You have anything we can work with, Erica?” Gabriel said with a smile, the one that usually got him what he wanted.
“Well, since you’re asking nice . . . I don’t think someone deliberately smashed the man’s head against his table. Might have happened that way, but not likely. What probably occurred was that someone took a swing at the vic, and he toppled over, causing him to hit his head, and that’s all she wrote.”
“What makes you say that?” Gabriel asked.
“The chin is scratched a bit, consistent with what you’d see from a blow to the jaw from a punch. Hard to tell definitively right now, though. Maybe he got the scratch when he hit the floor.”
“Who is he?”
“There was a wallet in his coat pocket,” Asra said. “James Sommers. His driver’s license has a SoHo home address.”
Gabriel took out his phone. “Summers like the season?”
“No. With an o.”
He typed the dead man’s name into Google. The search engine asked if he meant Jaime Sommers—the Bionic Woman. Gabriel smiled, recalling reruns of the show from when he was a kid.
“James Sommers” came up with a lot of hits. Gabriel refined the search to include “Prestige Art.”
That did the trick. Staring up from his phone was information for James Sommers, president of Prestige Art. The address listed matched this apartment. A click later, Gabriel was looking at a picture of the dead man, whose actual face he still had not yet seen.
Reid felt less than comfortable standing around outside James’s office building. He should have never even come here in the first place. Once he had and had seen all the commotion, he should have left at once. What kind of an idiot returns to the scene of the crime?
He assumed it would take Jessica close to an hour to get there from the loft, but less than ten minutes after he called, he saw her get out of a cab and run toward the front door, only to be intercepted by a uniformed policeman.
Reid watched her frantically gesturing to the cop. From her arm movements he deduced that she was asking to go inside. And from the shaking of the cop’s head, it was clear he was having none of it.
“Officer,” Reid said, walking toward them. “This is the owner of apartment 7E, Jessica Sommers.”
“Who are you?” the cop—a boy in a uniform, actually—asked.
“I’m a friend of Mrs. Sommers. I just thought it might help if I vouched for her.”
“Thank you,” the boy-cop said, seemingly not thankful at all. “I’m sorry . . . Ms. Sommers, is it?” Jessica nodded. “Let me see if a detective or someone can talk with you. But until then, you have to stay here, behind the yellow tape. No one’s allowed upstairs at this time.”
“Officer, please, I just left my teenage son in the cancer ward at Sloan Kettering. Now I’m being told that there’s some type of criminal activity in my husband’s office. I didn’t even know he was here. He told me he was in Washington, DC, last night. So, please, just tell me what’s going on. I’m begging you.”
“I don’t know any of the details. But I’ll make sure that a detective comes downstairs to talk to you as soon as they have any information.”
Reid didn’t think Jessica would remain upright when the police officer walked away. He put his arm around her, feeling her weight pull on him.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said.
She didn’t even look at him. It was as if she already knew it wasn’t going to be okay. Reid could hardly blame her, of course. He knew it too.
Neither Jessica nor Owen had replied by the time Wayne was back in his classroom, awaiting the arrival of his fourth-period class—AP bio. The kids swarmed in en masse, the normal rowdiness of seniors who had already submitted their college applications and no longer cared about anything that occurred during the school day.
Wayne had always felt a bit of resentment toward his students. To a one, they had no idea how privileged they were. The worst of the bunch actually thought he worked for them because the tiniest fraction of the ungodly tuition their parents paid went toward his salary. When Owen had fallen sick, however, Wayne’s anger toward his students intensified. Now they were not only rich but healthy, and each and every one of them took both for granted.
Normally he kept his anger toward his students in check and thought he did a pretty good job of educating them. But today, Wayne felt like he was about to burst.
“Settle down, everyone. We’ve got a lot to cover, so please, just settle down.”
“Relax, Mr. Fiske,” said Taylor Ferguson, one of God’s favorites, born rich, handsome, and smart, though not as smart as he thought. “It’s all good. No need to stress.”
Wayne shut his eyes and took a deep, cleansing breath. Now was not the time to lose control. He needed to continue as if everything were fine.
To Owen’s surprise, it had begun snowing while he was in the doctor’s office. He doubted it would stick because nothing short of a nor’easter provided snow cover in Manhattan. But for the moment, at least, the snow gave the city a magical feel.
After the doctor, Owen would usually go back to school. But he had already missed orchestra practice and music theory, which were the classes he cared most about anyway. The rest of the day held the usual math and science crap, which bored him to tears. So he cinched his winter coat and began walking toward Jam
es’s office, which was only about fifteen blocks away.
The falling snow had collected in his hair to the point that when he caught his reflection in one of the shop windows, he looked like he was wearing a powdered wig from the Revolutionary War. When he passed the diner that he and his father had gone to the other day, he caught the eyes of two girls wearing the green tartan skirts of some nearby private school—they must have been cutting class. They giggled in his general direction in a way he thought was complimentary, so he smiled back in their general direction.
A few blocks later he saw a line of police cars and an ambulance parked in front of the building where James worked. When he reached the corner, he became part of a small throng of people standing there.
Even through the crowd, Owen immediately spotted his mother. She was standing next to the long-haired guy he remembered who had taken up her attention at the party.
“Mom?” he called.
“Owen?” she answered, seeming surprised to see him.
“You told me that you’d be here, remember? That there was some problem at James’s office.”
His mother grimaced, her tell that she was about to lie. Maybe not a complete untruth, but Owen knew she wouldn’t share everything she knew.
“I’m sure it’s all going to be fine.” Then, as if she had just remembered where he’d come from, she said, “What did the doctor say?”
“He said I’m in the program. He wants me to start the chemo as soon as possible. Like tomorrow, even.”
It was almost like a switch had been flipped in her. His mother pulled him into her embrace. “That’s wonderful news.”
When she released him, the man beside her extended his gloved hand. “Hey, Owen. I’m Reid Warwick, a friend of . . . of James.”
Owen shook Reid’s hand with his own gloved one. As he did, he asked his mother, “What did they tell you about James?”
“Nothing yet. They told Reid that there was apparently some type of robbery or something in James’s office. Unfortunately, James is not answering his phone, but I know he was in DC last night, and Reid hasn’t heard from him either, so I just assume he’s still in transit. His phone must be dead, and all this break-in stuff has nothing to do with him. Anyway, a police detective said he’ll be down to talk to me soon. Of course, he said that nearly a half hour ago. I’m starting to freeze out here.”