Page 89 of The Wife

“What are you talking about?”

“I need you to sit down.”

“I’m on the street, covered in sweat.” Last weekend at Mom’s had been a break from the city heat. I was counting down the days before I could sit on a beach again. “Just tell me.”

“I got a call from our crime beat guy. Jason’s in custody. They arrested him at his apartment.”

I turned to face Jason’s building on Eighth and Mercer, and remembered the three police cars I had seen pulled to the curb on Eighth Street on my way to therapy. I’d thought nothing of it at the time. “Is it another woman?”

“No. It’s Kerry. They’re charging him with murder, Angela.”

I reached out for something to help me stand. I was leaning against a trash can. “That doesn’t make sense. She was found all the way on Ocean Beach. That’s at least two hours away, and we gave them a timeline for the whole night.”

“Are you listening to yourself, Angela? Have you forgotten that Jason wasn’t actually with you? If they arrested him, they must have evidence. And they know you lied to the police about his alibi. I told you to come clean by now.”

Her words were still ringing in my ears when I walked into my lobby. It took a moment to register that the doorman was speaking to me. A police officer wanted to see me. He gestured to a man in a uniform, sitting on a bench by the elevator.

Technically, he was a sheriff’s deputy, not a cop, and he was there to serve me with documents. It was happening: I was subpoenaed to appear in front of a grand jury in Nassau County.

58

Netter finally answered his phone the third time Corrine tried to reach him. He obviously knew why she was calling.

“Sorry, I wanted to give you a heads-up, but the ADA’s on the warpath about leaks.”

“I could’ve at least helped you pick him.” She had learned about Jason Powell’s arrest from a news report on her car radio only twenty minutes earlier. Netter had apparently gone through the Manhattan South homicide squad instead of contacting Corrine for assistance.

“I think our DA is pissed that your DA made a statement clearing Powell before all the facts were in.”

“And what are the facts? Last I heard, you liked Fisher for it.”

“You’re won’t be happy about this, either, but we matched a piece of physical evidence near the body to the DNA swab you took from Powell. Sorry.”

Her swab; his case.

“What kind of physical evidence?” she asked.

There was a long pause, followed by another apology.

“Wow, it’s like that. Okay. I guess the wife lied to me about his alibi after all.”

“So it would appear. The ADA subpoenaed her. We’ll see if that puts the fear of god into her.”

“Assuming she lied, how’d he get to Long Island that night?”

“We’re thinking he trained it out to her place, and then used Kerry’s car to move her body to Suffolk County and back. Hey, I gotta run.”

She heard voices in the background. “Wait. Did you find blood in her trunk? Or video from the train station?”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ve got DNA. It’s locked and loaded.”

That was the problem with DNA. It made law enforcement lazy. If they convicted the wrong person years ago, they expected DNA to fix it. And if they had DNA to match? Forget about it; they were done.

As she continued to crawl through traffic, she realized that transportation was the one equalizer in New York City. Unless you were in a helicopter or a hovercraft, you had to deal with this bullshit in one form or another.

So how the hell had Jason Powell gotten to Long Island that night?

Netter didn’t seem bothered by this hole in the case, but Corrine could picture a lawyer like Olivia Randall driving a long-haul truck through it.

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