Page 72 of The Wife

Corrine woke up her computer and looked through old e-mails to jog her memory. “Yeah, she e-mailed them to me as attachments.”

“Straight from her phone? Right in front of you?”

“No. She showed them to me on her phone and sent them to me when she got home. Why?”

“Because Olivia Fucking Randall swears there’s a problem with them, but won’t tell me how she knows that. Specifically, she wants to confirm the date the photographs were taken.”

“I’m looking at the files on my computer. The date on my files is May 19, but that’s when she sent them to me.”

“Well, I just learned way more than I wanted to about digital photographs from our geek here. It looks like Kerry exported the original photograph into a jpeg file before she sent it to you, which is why the date on thefileis the day she filed her complaint. But if you look at the photo’sproperties, it says the image is from the night of April 10, which is the night she says he assaulted her at the W. No problem, right? Except Olivia’s saying you can easily change that on any Mac. She’s demanding that we produce the actual device used to take the photographs so she can examine the microdata to see if the date was changed.”

“She thinks Kerry took the pictures later and lined them up with the date we’d have hotel footage.”

“That’s my guess. Please tell me you looked at Kerry’s wrists the day she made the complaint.”

Corrine closed her eyes. “Of course not. She said the assault was six weeks earlier. And before you ask, she was wearing a long-sleeved dress. I wouldn’t have noticed if she’d still had the marks.”

“Damn it.”

“I found out something else that’s not going to make you very happy either.” She summed up her reasons for believing that Kerry’s boyfriend, “Jay,” might have been Jason Powell.

“And you said before, it doesn’t matter.”

“I didn’t think before that she might be lying about the date of those pictures. The guy with the PD in Port Washington mentioned looking at contacts in Kerry’s phone, so he must have gotten a warrant to unlock it. Let me call him.”

Netter picked up immediately.

“You still have Kerry’s phone there?”

He said that he did.

“Can you do me a favor and look through her photographs? I’m looking for April tenth.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Nothing?”

“No, I got a picture of a meatball pizza on April eighth, and a picture of Snowball four days later. What am I looking for?”

“Three pictures of injuries on her wrists. Scroll through and see if you can find anything. Maybe it’s closer to May nineteenth.”

“Nope, nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“You want to drive out here or what? I’m telling you, it’s not here.” Kerry must have deleted the photos after she e-mailed them to Corrine. “And I got hold of that restaurant guy. He’s out surfing in Montauk today, but he’s coming back tomorrow to work a shift. I’m supposed to talk to him at four.”

Tomorrow was Saturday, her day off. Fuck it. What else was she going to do? “Do you mind if I come out and meet him with you?”

“No skin off my back.”

46

“A jury would let me walk if I knocked you into a coma right now.” The nice thing about Susanna was that I never needed to wonder what she was actually thinking. “No offense, but I want to run your life until you come to your senses.”

We were in her apartment on Central Park South. It was Saturday, the only day when she didn’t have studio obligations. When I arrived at eleven, she had her sideboard covered with Bloody Mary mix and vodka, lox and bagels, caviar and blinis, and a bottle of chilled and very expensive champagne. She told me she splurged because I had been living like a hermit for nearly a month. But now the caviar and blinis were gone, I was picking at the remaining lox and capers, and she was threatening to knock me out for defending Jason.

“For all we know, she’s turned up by now,” I said. “I mean, she slept with my husband. She could be hooking up with anyone for a night or two.”

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