Page 81 of The Wife

I couldn’t believe how smart my kid was.

“Mom?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you want me just to come home? I can handle it. I promise.”

I sucked in my breath. I had given myself so many pep talks about finally living on my own. I didn’t need Jason. I didn’t need anyone. “You don’t mind?”

“Definitely not. Everyone’s starting to stink up here. We take showers, and somehow we get smellier every day.”

My laugh was more of a snort. I missed my kid. I told Kate I’d be picking Spencer up tomorrow.

51

Corrine woke up Monday morning to a call out at Columbia University. What was her early morning was the middle of the night for a college student. For all the headlines about college responses to sexual assaults on campus, universities seemed to be getting worse, not better, in their procedures. By the time Corrine arrived, the victim had already spoken to three friends, a student residence adviser, a faculty mentor, a student services counselor, and a university health clinic nurse. Only the nurse had encouraged the woman to call the police department. From what Corrine could gather, the rest of the crew spent that time convincing the woman that the police would arrest her for using Ecstasy with the suspect the night before, that she could file a complaint through the university system, and that criminal charges could ruin the suspect’s life.

By the time Corrine got to SVU, it was a little after noon. She found a thick mailing envelope on her desk chair. It was from the Pittsburgh Police Department. She opened it to find the reports she had ordered when she first learned that Angela Powell had once been Angela Mullen, the girl recovered after police fatally shot Charles Franklin near the Canadian border.

Corrine flipped through the pages. Photographs of the house that had been Angela Powell’s prison for three years, including two unmade twin beds and a crib with soiled linens. A doctor’s report, describing Angela’s refusal to let anyone else hold the baby until her mother showed up. An FBI agent’s report, detailing Daniel and Virginia Mullen’s threat to sue if their daughter and grandson weren’t released to come home immediately. Background on Charles Franklin: one arrest for indecent exposure outside a public restroom, but no conviction; child pornography found in the house; the typical statements from neighbors saying he seemed so “normal.” A printout of a photograph of him on a gurney, his face already gray and bloated, blood clotted in his dark brown hair.

Even in death, Charles Franklin exhibited physical traits Corrine recognized from photographs of Angela’s son, Spencer: the dark hair, wide nose, low forehead. She hoped that there was some part of Angela’s brain that protected her from seeing the resemblance.

Toward the bottom of the pile, she found the documents describing the discovery of the second victim, the one Angela had been instructed to call Sarah after Franklin brought her back to the home two years earlier. Franklin told Angela he finally got lucky on a trip to Cleveland when a girl “even dumber than you” accepted the offer of a ride home while waiting for a bus across the street from a shopping mall. He threatened to kill them both if they spoke a word of their previous existence under his roof, but Angela remembered Sarah telling her once that the only thing worth seeing where she grew up was the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. She was fourteen years old when Franklin abducted her, making her about sixteen when it was all over.

The girl’s decomposed body had washed up near the Pennsylvania-Ohio state line nearly two weeks after Franklin dumped her in Lake Erie. Two bullet wounds at the base of her skull. Putrefication had taken its toll. She was unrecognizable. A tattoo approximately three inches by two on her right hip was unidentifiable, too, other than the fact of its existence.

The most recent document in the file was written almost a year and a half after Franklin was fatally shot during the rescue. The police and FBI had searched all missing-person reports from Ohio and the surrounding states, but nothing matched the description they were able to provide of “Sarah.” The case, for all practical purposes, was closed. As far as Corrine could tell, no one had ever come forward to claim Sarah as their child. The parents who had allowed a fourteen-year-old to get a tattoo must not have looked especially hard when she disappeared.

Corrine felt empty when she had finished reading. Death wasn’t a good enough punishment for a savage like Charles Franklin.

Corrine started to carry the file to the shredder, but stopped herself. She found space at the back of her bottom desk drawer. She’d keep it there for a while, just in case she needed it.

52

Two Days Later

“TheLong Island Presshas the story.” It was Brian King on the phone. Corrine didn’t need to ask which story he meant. “They called me to see if I consider Powell a suspect in Kerry’s disappearance.”

“And what did you say?”

“That any questions concerning Ms. Lynch should be directed to the police department where she lives.”

“Very diplomatic.”

“Except the reporter’s no idiot. Her follow-up was whether we were still prosecuting Powell.”

“And?”

“I said the case was on hold, pursuant to a court order.”

“So why are you calling me?”

“Who else am I supposed to vent to? Don’t you want to know what I found out?”

Of course she did.

“That guy you met out there is still the lead: Netter. He said Tom Fisher refused to answer any questions—about the affair, about where he was last Wednesday night, about Kerry’s work for the company, about Oasis’s international operations. Blanket invocation of the Fifth. And the realtor who was going to list Kerry’s house said Kerry wasn’t interested in looking for a new place. She said she wanted to—quote—‘take her money and get out of Dodge.’”

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