Page 34 of The Wife

She checked the dates of Angela Mullen’s missing persons report and the date it was cleared. It all fit.

Charles Franklin. She wouldn’t have remembered the name off the top of her head, but the case was plastered across the news for a few days when it went down. A neighbor kept hearing a baby from Franklin’s house, even though Franklin, a quiet contractor, lived alone for all anyone knew. When the neighbor asked him about it, he told her it was the television, but she had never heard television noise from another house before. Suddenly, the few times she had seen his “nieces” visiting the house took a darker turn, so she called the police to be safe. That phone call set in motion the discovery of a chilling scene inside the house, followed by a three-day manhunt.

The Pittsburgh Police Department sent out one officer—alone—to do a knock-and-talk at the house. He was knocking for a third time and about to give up when the garage door opened, and Franklin’s white Lexus SUV reversed from the driveway at high speed and took off down the street.

Inside the house, the police found an upstairs bedroom with an interior brick wall erected just inside the window. From the outside, the neighbors saw curtains and darkness. The occupants inside were barricaded with no light and a padlock on the door. The room contained two twin beds and a crib. From the appearance of dark blond hair on one pillow and dark brown hair on the other, police concluded that at least two people—probably girls—slept there. And, of course, the baby.

An APB went out for both Franklin and the SUV. Three days later, a pair of hikers in Niagara Falls, New York, spotted a man carrying water toward a tent. After the wife heard the sound of a baby crying, she decided that the man resembled the picture she’d seen in a televised Amber Alert that morning as they were leaving the hotel. After checking the details on her phone, she was even more suspicious. She made her husband help her scour the parking areas until she found a white Lexus SUV with Pennsylvania plates, but the tag numbers didn’t match the alert. The husband waved down a park ranger. Within minutes, it was confirmed: the plates had been switched, but the vehicle identification number on the dash was Franklin’s.

Corrine didn’t know all the details of the attempted rescue, but she imagined helicopters and teams of officers in both uniform and plain clothes. What she did know from her quick scan of the news reports was that, when police arrived, Franklin ran toward the tent instead of obeying police commands to stop and raise his hands. He was fatally shot.

Police found a nineteen-year-old woman and her baby inside the tent. The woman said that Franklin had abducted her three years earlier. After she became pregnant about a year after the kidnapping, he abducted a second, younger girl. The woman gave birth to the baby in the locked room upstairs. Then, three days prior to the rescue in Niagara Falls, Franklin suddenly ordered both of the girls to grab the baby and get into the SUV in the garage. As Franklin was backing out of the driveway, the two girls had pounded on the car windows from the back seat when they saw the police officer at the front door, but the doors were locked and they couldn’t get out.

Only the nineteen-year-old and the baby survived.

After hearing the news alerts about the search for him and his vehicle too many times on the car radio, Franklin had pulled off I-90 in the dark, stopped near a body of water—presumed to be Lake Erie—shot the younger girl, and dumped her corpse in the water. When Franklin got back into the SUV, he commanded the remaining victim to “look older,” or the same would happen to her. The police theorized that he killed the younger victim so they would not fit the description of a man traveling with two girls and a baby; as the older of the two victims, the survivor might be able to pass as his wife. Plus, she was the baby’s mother. In short, he kept her and threw the other one away.

What did any of this have to do with Jason Powell? Did his connection to Angela and her son make him a good person? Or was he a predator who recognized something vulnerable in her?

Corrine’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the phone. She recognized the number on the digital screen as the main switchboard for the district attorney’s office.

“Duncan,” she answered.

“Hey, it’s Brian.”

“Hey.” It took her a second to connect “Brian” to ADA King.

“Thanks for sending the phone records. And for driving out to Port Washington to talk to Kerry. And for getting a statement from Powell. It’s good work.”

He sounded different than usual. Quieter. More contemplative. “Yeah, okay.”

Silence filled the line. She could tell that he didn’t want to hang up.

“Is this about the Martin case?” she asked.

Robert Martin was an Academy Award–winning director who had been accused of raping a twenty-three-year-old production assistant while his crew ignored the sounds of screams from his trailer. After a four-week trial, the jury acquitted on all counts.

He sighed. “And the Santos case. And we may as well throw in Pratt and Isaacson while we’re at it.”

Santos was the cop acquitted of raping a woman he’d escorted home after her cabdriver complained she was vomiting in the back seat. Pratt was the Columbia Law School student acquitted of raping a fellow student after the annual law review bash. Isaacson was the hedge-fund guy whose rape case was pleaded down to a misdemeanor after the DA’s office had its ass handed to it four days straight in trial.

It had not been a good streak for the high-profile prosecutions of sex offenses in Manhattan.

“This is a winnable case,” Corrine said.

“Not good enough. I need a slam dunk.”

“No such thing in this line of work.”

“I should sell out to the man and defend polluters and Ponzi schemers.”

“No, you shouldn’t.”

“Do you want to go to dinner?”

“I’m going to dinner, King. But not with you.”

She could picture him laughing at the other end of the line. “Day-um,” he said.

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