by Blake Pierce
She started to get off the barstool as if to leave when he suddenly raised his beer bottle. For a long moment she thought he might smash it on the counter and attack her with it. Instead he put it to his lips and chugged what was left. Then he wiped his mouth and gave her a big smile.
“Let’s go.”
*
Sumner seemed mostly unfazed on the drive to the station. As they passed the homes in his neighborhood, he talked comfortably with Ryan about whether the Lakers or Clippers would finish the season with a better record.
The only time he seemed even momentarily distracted was when they passed an attractive woman returning home from a walk with her cute golden retriever. In the rearview mirror, she saw the chef’s gaze linger on the woman a little longer than usual. Jessie wondered if he was imagining sleeping with her or killing her.
After that, the basketball talk resumed, which was fine with her. It kept Sumner relaxed and chatty and allowed her to settle on the best approach once they had him at the station. Unfortunately, the ride over lasted all of six minutes and by the time they pulled into the station lot, she hadn’t come up with any brilliant ideas.
She looked at the man as he eased slowly out of the car and ambled leisurely into the station beside them. Carrying his dinner in a Tupperware container, but seemingly without a care in the world, his lack of concern had her starting to doubt herself.
Could someone this accommodating, this unflustered, be their guy? The answer, in her experience, was absolutely. The problem was, even if they had the right guy, if they couldn’t prove it and he didn’t implicate himself, there was nothing they could do.
They led him into the same interrogation room where they’d questioned Dr. Gahan, who was now on suicide watch in a holding cell downstairs. The tablecloth they’d used to mask the sterile metal surface underneath was still there.
“Don’t you guys have an office or at least some desk we can use?” Sumner asked when he saw the barren room.
“We’ve actually been working out of here,” Ryan said without missing a beat. “Our station is downtown. We’ve been helping the SMPD out on this case and this is what they had available. It doesn’t really matter where we are though. We’ll bring the laptop with the pictures in here. Just give us a minute to get organized.”
“So I should wait here?” Sumner asked, looking around as if he couldn’t believe how far from Michelin-starred restaurants he’d come.
“It’s nothing fancy,” Jessie admitted. “But have a seat. Enjoy your dinner. We can’t offer you a beer but I can get you a soda or coffee if you like.”
“Water’s fine,” he said, “and maybe a fork for my food.”
“You got it,” she told him, jokingly assuming a faux snooty tone. “Only our best plastic utensils for you, sir.”
He chuckled politely as they stepped outside and closed the door. Ryan turned to her.
“I’ll get the laptop while you get the other stuff,” he offered. “Maybe on the way back, one of us will figure out how to break this guy, because he is the coolest customer I’ve come across in a long time.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” she said. “I’ve been trying to figure that out since the second we left his place and I’ve got nothing so far.”
“Well, I’d say we’ve got about five minutes before he starts to get suspicious and bails or worse, asks for a lawyer.”
Jessie thought about that for a second and a crazy thought came into her head.
“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”
“What—let him walk?” Ryan asked incredulously.
“No, preempt him on the lawyer. One thing I’ve noticed about Curt Sumner is that he’s pretty pleased with himself. He hides it underneath the gracious manner but the guy clearly has a massive ego. The very fact that he came here at all, that he’s sitting in that room, willing to talk to us, suggests that he thinks he’s playing a game that he can’t lose. Set aside the potential triple murderer thing. He’s still got the arrogance of a celebrated chef who was done wrong. He wants to prove just how clever he is. I say we let him.”
“How?”
“Read him his rights when we get back in there,” she said. “Make it seem like you’re embarrassed to have to do it at all, but procedure requires it. Dare him to ask for a lawyer. I think he’s too proud to do it.”
“That’s an awful big risk, Jessie,” Ryan warned. “If he actually asks for an attorney, we’re screwed.”
“I have a feeling we may be screwed anyway. If Sumner is guilty, that means he’s been planning each of these murders for months. Other than a temporary setback because of one bedroom that was converted into two at Whitney Carlisle’s house, he hasn’t made any mistakes that we know of. Right now, we don’t have anything definitive to tie him to these crimes. I think we have to try something bold. Are you with me?”
Ryan smiled.
“Jessie Hunt,” he said staring deeply into her eyes, “I don’t know if this will work, but I can promise you one thing: I’m always with you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
Ryan waited until the time was right.
First he and Jessie showed Curt Sumner the photos of the women and their homes.
“I remember that house now,” he said, referencing the Faheys’ mansion. “It was pretty impressive. But the woman doesn’t jump out at me.”
Ryan placed a photo of the Carlisle home in front of him.
“Does this look familiar?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” Sumner said, shaking his head regretfully, “but it really doesn’t.”
Ryan dropped another photo on the table, this time of Whitney on her couch, hugging Yaz the dog. He studied Sumner’s face but the man didn’t react to it at all. He looked up.
“I feel bad,” he said. “But at a certain point, a lot of these folks just start to run together for me.”
Ryan nodded as if that was perfectly normal.
“Thanks for looking at all of them,” he said. “I do have a few more questions for you that might really help us, but in order to ask them, we have to go through the whole ‘read you your rights’ thing. I hate to throw that at you when you’ve been so cooperative. But it’s technically required and since you don’t seem to have any issue being forthcoming, I’m hoping it won’t change anything. You mind?”
He thought he’d done a pretty good job of seeming uncomfortable with what he was asking while simultaneously making it seem like no big deal. But that wasn’t really the point. He didn’t honestly think he was tricking Curt Sumner. Like Jessie said, they were challenging him. Would he end this shared veneer of polite engagement? Would he get cold feet when facing actual stakes?
“It’s a little weird,” Sumner said, “but I guess I don’t mind, though I can’t promise I won’t change my mind along the way.”
“Totally reasonable,” Ryan said, before launching into the Miranda warning. When he finished informing their guest that he could remain silent and had the right to an attorney, he wrapped up as casually as he could. “So after hearing all that, are you still cool talking to us?”
“For now, sure,” Sumner said cautiously, though his body language—he was almost vibrating with anticipation—suggested he was eager for what was coming.
“Great, thanks,” Ryan said. “So, to formally get it on the record, you said you remember Siobhan Pierson and her home as well as Gillian Fahey’s home, but you can’t specifically recall Fahey herself, or Whitney Carlisle?”
“That’s right,” he confirmed.
“Did you ever run into them after the House Cooks you did?”
“No. If I had, I suspect they would have said something to me, which would have helped me remember them better,” he pointed out, borderline condescendingly. “But since I don’t, I assume I never came across them.”
“It’s just that despite the population, this seems like a pretty small town,” Jessie noted.
“That’s true,” Sumner agreed. “And I have definitely bum
ped into clients in the past but I usually don’t recognize them. They’ll see me and reintroduce themselves. I try to be polite about not recalling them but like I said, I have so many events that it’s really hard.”
“Understood,” Ryan said, before making the best of an awkward transition. “Just to get it out of the way, where were you last night?”
Sumner smiled.
“Is this the alibi portion of the interview?’ he asked.
“It is.”
“Last night I had a House Cook,” he replied without hesitation.
“What time was that?” Ryan wanted to know.
“Seven p.m.”
“What about before then?” Jessie asked.
“I was home prepping for it.”
“From when to when?” Ryan pressed.
As Sumner answered their rat-a-tat questions, his head bobbed back and forth like he was at a tennis match. But he didn’t seem rattled. He looked like he was enjoying himself. Ryan had never seen a suspect, innocent or guilty, delight in an interrogation so much. He didn’t know what to make of it.
“I left the office around four thirty,” he answered. “Then I went home for my usual late afternoon walk. It’s my one chance to decompress all day. After that I spent the next hour and a half prepping before heading over to the client’s.”
Ryan noted that the guy claimed he was “prepping” during the exact window of Whitney Carlisle’s death.
“You drove?” Jessie asked.
“Walked actually,” he corrected. “A lot of my clients live close enough for that. In this case, I just put the supplies in a wagon and wheeled everything over.”
It went on like for that for a while. When they moved on to the night before last, when Gillian Fahey was murdered, Sumner’s answers were equally succinct and unflappable; same thing for the night of Siobhan Pierson’s death. At no point did the man look like he was sweating it.
Ryan glanced over at Jessie, who was giving him her patented “we need to talk” expression.
“Why don’t we take a break for a few minutes?” he suggested. “Everyone can stretch their legs, use the restroom. Since we missed dinner, Ms. Hunt and I can grab a quick snack.”
“Okay,” Sumner said, standing up. “Do we have a lot more of this or are we nearly through?”
“I think we’re almost done,” Jessie said quickly, surprising Ryan. “We just need to dot some i’s and cross some t’s.”
“Can’t we just do that now?”
“We could,” she said, guiding him to the door, “but to be honest, I really have to pee. I promise we’ll be quick.”
Once outside, Ryan motioned for a young, dark-haired officer named Wiedlin, who was standing guard outside the room, to come over, then turned back to Sumner.
“Guests aren’t allowed to wander the station unaccompanied so Officer Wiedlin will escort you to the facilities,” he said. “Let’s meet back here in ten.”
Sumner left with the officer while Ryan and Jessie retreated to their stifling conference room.
“Please tell me you’re holding back some incredible insight,” he said once they were alone, “because from where I was sitting, that interview was a disaster for us.”
“That’s why I wanted the break, Ryan,” she said. “I agree that it was disaster. I just wanted to stop the bleeding.”
“Well, we better think of something quick,” he replied, “because our case against this guy is on life support.”
*
Jessie had lied.
She didn’t really need to use the restroom. But it turned out that Ryan did, which left her sitting alone at the conference room table with her head in her hands. A little voice in her head began to ask if maybe she hadn’t gotten it wrong again; if perhaps the real killer was out there right now while she was wasting time in here. Shaking her head, she silently ordered the voice to shut up. Running out of time and ideas, she called Jamil.
“Any updates?” she asked hopefully.
“Nothing that will make you happy,” he told her. “I checked Sumner’s phone and vehicle data for the nights of all three murders. Both were exactly where they should have been during the time of each death.”
“What about that client list?” Jessie asked, trying not to let the bad news overwhelm her.
“Still looking,” he replied. “I’ve gone back about four months so far, but haven’t found anything suspicious. One male client died about six weeks ago but it doesn’t look connected. He was on vacation in the Bahamas at the time. It was declared a heart attack. Also, he was eighty-seven.”
“Okay, keep looking,” she instructed. “Anything else before I let you go?”
“I also screened the YouTube tutorial Sumner did tonight. It was uploaded at the time he said that it was, which supports his alibi. The clocks in the kitchen are visible and they match his story too.”
“Okay, thanks, Jamil. I’ll get back to you.”
She hung up and let everything he’d said sink in. She consoled herself with one bit of positive news. If Sumner was making the YouTube video up until they knocked on his door, at least he hadn’t had time to kill anyone between when he left work and their arrival at his house. So that left two options: either he really was planning to kill someone for the third straight night soon after preparing and enjoying a hearty Italian meal, or he had decided to take a night off from murdering women.
Jessie could feel the hands of the clock in her own head clicking loudly with each passing second. She was absolutely certain that Curt Sumner, and not Dr. Gahan, was their killer. It wasn’t so much his answers as the way the presented him.
There was a coolness to him that seemed at odds with the circumstance he was in. No matter how innocent a man was, being brought in and questioned about the murders of multiple women he’d interacted with should have been a bracing, even scary experience. But Sumner didn’t exude even a hint of apprehension. It just felt wrong. It felt like the behavior of a guilty man who knew he was going to get away with it.
But she couldn’t prove it. And if they had to let him go, the pressure on Captain Decker to publicly announce Gahan as the culprit would be overwhelming. An innocent man might go to prison or worse, while a guilty man walked free, all because she couldn’t do her job.
Stop it! Focus. Work the problem. Find the solution. There has to be one.
She lifted her head, closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and fixed all her attention on Curt Sumner. He was so smooth, so practiced. She cast her mind back to when they first arrived at his place and did a mental scroll through their visit, trying to recall if there was any point when he hadn’t been completely in control. For a full two minutes, she stayed like that—eyes closed, breathing deeply in and out, reliving all the moments leading up to this one.
Suddenly her eyes popped open.
There was no time at the house when Sumner was even slightly off his game. But there was a moment when he lost his discipline ever so briefly. It just wasn’t in his house. It was in the car on the drive to the police station.
She reached for her phone. Ryan had to get back in here now.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
“Slow down,” Ryan demanded, swallowing a big piece of granola bar. “I’m gone a few minutes and the whole world explodes. What did you have Jamil check again?”
Jessie silently instructed herself to speak clearly and with deliberation. It wasn’t that easy with so many thoughts pinballing around in her brain at once.
“Let me back up,” she said more calmly than she thought possible. “A lot has happened while you were getting yourself a snack but leaving me hungry. When we drove Sumner back here from his house, I was watching him in the rearview mirror. He was happily chatting away with you about basketball teams. The only time he wasn’t ‘on’ was when he got distracted by a woman returning home from walking her dog. He watched her for just a second longer than casual interest would justify.”
Ryan walked over to her without a word, removed anot
her granola bar from his pocket, and placed it on the desk beside her.
“Sorry,” she said meekly.
“Forgiven,” Ryan replied. “Okay, so he was hot for some neighbor?”
“That’s what I thought at the time. Actually, that’s one of two things I thought—that he wanted to sleep with her or to kill her. And that’s when it hit me: maybe that wasn’t just gallows humor. Maybe he really did want to kill her.”
She paused briefly, waiting to see if he had any questions.
“Don’t stop on my account,” he said.
“Okay,” she continued. “So I used Google street view to find the house again, and then gave the address to Jamil to work his magic. Want to know what he found?”
She couldn’t help but allow herself this one moment of self-satisfaction. Ryan generously let her luxuriate in it before replying.
“Yes please.”
“The couple who live there are Colin and Sheena Lennox. He’s a doctor. She’s a real estate agent. They are also former clients of Chef Curt Sumner. Before I even asked, Jamil was pulling up footage from their security cameras. He sent them to me. Take a look.”
She watched Ryan as he studied the same clips she just had. In the first one, Sheena Lennox left her house with her dog and headed left along the sidewalk for a few paces before disappearing from the frame. The screen went black.
“Jamil said this next clip is from forty-five seconds later,” she said.
It showed a man walking on the sidewalk in front of the same house. He was very tall and wore black pants and a black hooded sweatshirt that hid his face. He stopped directly in front of the house and bent down to tie his shoe. He moved gingerly, as if in pain. He stood up with similar caution. Then after staring in the direction Lennox had gone for several seconds, he turned and walked back in the same direction he came from. He moved tentatively, as if still in discomfort from bending down. He left the frame and the clip ended.