The Wife: A Novel of Psychological Suspense

by Alafair Burke

  “So why did you lie to me?”

  “I didn’t want you to worry. Nothing happened with me and Rachel. I was certain that whatever they were looking into with Kerry would all be sorted out before long.”

  “But what if it’s not about Rachel, Jason? What if this woman, Kerry, is making accusations too?”

  He shook his head. “She wouldn’t.”

  “Rachel did,” I snapped. “Why wouldn’t this woman?”

  I saw a glimpse of concern cross his face.

  “I called her this morning and asked her.”

  “What? Jason, that’s crazy. You should have called your lawyer.”

  “We work together. I talk to her regularly. I asked her if the police had contacted her.”

  “And?”

  “She said no, and then had to run into a meeting. The call was probably less than a minute.”

  “She could be lying, Jason.” Just from watching TV, I couldn’t imagine the police coming to our house to ask about a relationship with this woman unless they’d spoken to her first. “You said there’s a problem at the company—the kickbacks or whatever. Could it be related to that?”

  “Maybe.” His gaze drifted into the distance, seeing the possibility for the first time. “Remember how I told you that I’d been trying to get one of the employees to help me prove my suspicions?”

  I nodded.

  “That was Kerry. When I told her my concerns, I could tell she knew more than she was letting on. She finally admitted that she had found internal documents that could prove their wrongdoing, but she was too scared to give me the evidence. I was trying to convince her to give them to me.” His voice trailed off.

  “Why is that your job, Jason? Couldn’t you have called the police or something?”

  “More like the FBI or State Department. But my investors would be fucked, and so would my reputation. I’d go from being Mr. Socially Responsible to a Supporter of Warlords. But if I had actual proof, not merely insinuation, if I were a whistleblower, I’d be protected. And I could probably recoup my investors’ funds, too.”

  “And that’s why you met with Kerry this week?”

  “I’ve been trying to convince her for weeks. I told her she’d be protected if she helped me expose Oasis. But then Rachel’s ridiculous complaint hit the news. My guess is that Kerry changed her mind and told her bosses what I was up to instead. I could be completely screwed.”

  A few minutes ago, he had been convinced this was nothing to worry about. Now my husband was panicking.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “The last time I met with her. She was supposed to give me documents. She wanted to meet somewhere private.”

  I felt my eyes widen.

  “I went to her house in Port Washington. Fuck, no one else was there. She can make up whatever she wants, and I can’t prove a thing.”

  When I got home, Spencer was lying on the sofa, looking at something on his phone. He tucked it under his side when I walked through the door. Stepping toward him, I could see that he’d turned off the screen.

  “So what was that?”

  I remembered a few boys eagerly passing around a magazine when I was a couple of years older than Spencer, scanning the school hallways to make sure no teachers were watching before covertly handling the transfer. Into the next backpack the magazine went. Trisha and I concocted a plan to get a glimpse at what we were missing. While Teddy Dunnigan was working on his homework at lunch, Trisha undid an extra button on her blouse and leaned over to ask if he knew the math assignment for sixth hour. While he ogled her, I slipped my hand into the open backpack on the floor behind him and made off with our bounty.

  By that time, I had seen plenty of R-rated movies and a couple of Playboys. I had even let Bill McIlroy cop a feel under my shirt. But I hadn’t seen—or heard of, or even imagined—the kinds of things depicted in the photographs in that magazine.

  Those pictures would be tame compared to the videos that were now prevalent online. I had read articles about the damage that pornography does, especially to kids, boys in particular. We supposedly had filters to keep Spencer from looking at that stuff, but I had no idea how well they worked, especially for a kid as smart as my son.

  “Nothing,” he said, a little too quickly.

  “Spencer . . . .” I started to reach for his phone, but he snatched it first.

  “Not cool, kid.”

  He relented and handed over his device.

  His browser was open to a blog called The Pink Spot. I had never heard of it.

  The photo at the top of the post was the one making the rounds—Rachel’s blurred face nuzzling up to Wilson Stewart. Someone had marked the photo with a red no-smoking insignia.

  I skimmed the post quickly enough to gather that the author was complaining about the “victimization” of the “brave woman” who had stepped forward to question Jason Powell’s “white male privilege.” I hadn’t had a chance yet to check that day’s Internet activity.

  “Now it’s a race thing?” I asked, immediately feeling guilty for speaking to Spencer about this. I was supposed to be protecting him. “It’s just one blogger.”

  “Look at the comments,” he said, not meeting my eyes.

  There were twenty-four so far, not many compared to a mainstream website, but more than a few. I finally found the one Spencer was talking about.

  His wife grew up four blocks from me. Thinks she’s hot sh*t. Always goes to the fanciest restaurants when she visits to make sure we know she “made it.” Truth is, she ran away in high school for 3 years and came home after she got knocked up. Only thing she has going for her is this guy. If he’s guilty, I say, KARMA BABY!

  I recognized the name of the commenter, Deb Kunitz, as a girl two years behind me in school.

  Another commenter had a follow-up question: I would have assumed his wife was a fellow academic or maybe in politics. Does this add another layer to the story? Maybe he can’t handle an intellectual equal?

  A second reply followed: Sounds like an interesting angle. Please DM me on Facebook if you’re willing to give me specifics. I realized that the reply had come from the author of the original blog post. She had asked Deb for a “direct message,” a private e-mail, looking for the details of my background, which apparently might provide “another layer” to Jason’s “story.”

  “The Pink Spot?” I said aloud.

  “It’s like a snarky chick website. Fake feminism, if you ask me.”

  How did my kid know all this?

  “It’s fine, Spencer.” It would take access to police reports to figure out exactly where I had been for those three years, and even those wouldn’t contain all the facts. “Don’t worry about it, okay?”

  I could tell he was thinking about saying more, but then he flashed a toothy grin over the back of the sofa. “Hey, Mom. Can you explain to me why it’s called The Pink Spot? Because I don’t understand.”

  “You’re trying to put me in the grave, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t kill me, but you totally sounded like Grandma right then.” He was back on his screen again, looking at something that had nothing to do with me.

  21

  Kerry Lynch answered the door in her work clothes, but she was holding a nearly empty wineglass, a small, fluffy white dog circling her bare feet.

  “Cute little girl,” Corrine said.

  “Boy, actually, but yeah, he’s a sweetie. Aren’t you, Snowball? I spoil him like crazy to make up for the fact I’m never home. Sorry you have a shitty mommy, baby.”

  Kerry had sounded so shaken when she called that Corrine drove all the way out to Port Washington to take her report. In truth, she could also use the overtime.

  When Corrine was standing in Powell’s foyer the previous evening, she’d seen the family photographs adorning the walls—Powell with his wife and a boy who went from missing two front teeth to a tall, lanky tween. Now that she was seeing Kerry Lynch in person again, Corrine realized that Kerry look
ed nothing like Powell’s wife superficially. Kerry was thin and pale with blade-straight, shoulder-length dark hair. Angela was curvier, with long, dark blond waves. But both women had strong, angular features, almost mannish if they hadn’t been so naturally beautiful. “Patrician” is what Corrine thought people might call the look.

  Corrine followed as Kerry went to the kitchen and grabbed an open bottle of wine from the counter. She offered Corrine a glass, which she declined, and then headed back to the living room and gave herself a generous refill. The entire house was meticulous.

  “Even after what Jason did to me, I heard a side of him on the phone this morning that terrified me. I think I made a mistake going to you.”

  “I know this won’t be much comfort, but I have never had an offender follow through on verbal threats to a witness. If they mean to do you harm, they don’t announce their plans in advance.”

  “You’re right. That was definitely not comforting,” Kerry said with a sad smile. She patted the spot next to her on the sofa, and Snowball eagerly jumped up.

  Corrine wasn’t about to tell Kerry that the road ahead of her would be easy. She would be on trial as much as Jason Powell. At least the case against him was beginning to shape up. She told Kerry about the surveillance video she had gotten from the W Hotel and the call records they’d requested, which should corroborate the fact that he’d phoned her again that morning. “ADA King will apply for a warrant for a DNA swab from Jason tomorrow.”

  “He hasn’t done that yet? I assumed it was off at the lab already.”

  “He wanted to fill out the investigation a bit more first.”

  “I gave you pictures and physical evidence. You’ve got that other woman’s story, too. What more do you need?”

  “I know it’s frustrating, but lawyers like to go in a certain order.”

  “Well, I can tell you right now, that DNA is going to be a match. Jason’s going to say it was consensual. And it will be my word against his.”

  “Actually, we already got a statement from him. He denied any kind of sexual relationship.”

  Kerry shook her head angrily and took another huge sip of wine. Corrine had seen this reaction before. Victims fully expected the perpetrators to depict them as willing participants. They braced themselves to be blamed. But for him to deny the encounter altogether was even more demeaning. If it never happened, it means absolutely nothing.

  “Trust me, Kerry, that’s actually good news. When the DNA matches, we’ll have him trapped in a lie. Plus we have photos of the marks on your wrists. And the footage from the hotel is helpful. It’s clear you were making him leave your room.”

  “But I didn’t call the police. I didn’t come forward until Rachel complained. And I continued to work with him in the meantime. I even met with him this week—here, in my house—alone.” She pulled her dog onto her lap. “He can say whatever he wants. Then how will I prove he’s lying?”

  “If anything,” Corrine said, “the fact that he met you at your house conflicts with his story that nothing unusual ever occurred between the two of you.”

  Corrine was putting the best light on this particular fact. She happened to know that ADA King was troubled by Kerry’s decision to meet Jason at her home instead of in a public place.

  “So when will he get charged?” Kerry asked.

  “My guess is that King will want you to go before a grand jury once the DNA results are back. Please hang in there, okay?”

  Kerry nodded. Corrine had done her job for now, keeping the complainant on board.

  “There’s something else you should know,” Kerry said. “Because it’s going to come out, I know it.”

  A different detective would have told her that it really wasn’t necessary. Once Jason was charged, anything Kerry said to undermine the pending case would eventually become so-called Brady material—potentially exculpatory evidence that had to be disclosed to the defense.

  Corrine said nothing, and Kerry continued. “Three years ago, I had an affair with Tom Fisher, the CEO of Oasis, my company. He was married. His wife read his texts. We got caught. People at work know. They might assume I was at it again—having an affair with a man I met at work. That’s part of the reason I didn’t say anything when it first happened.”

  “Did you have an affair with Jason Powell?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then I don’t see what a relationship you had with Mr. Fisher three years ago has to do with any of this. Okay?”

  Kerry looked relieved. She hugged Corrine at the front door and thanked her before saying good-bye.

  22

  An inch-thick stack of call records arrived for Corrine the following morning. The Powell home had no landline, but AT&T had sent logs for Jason Powell’s cell number as well as the other cell phones on the same account. She set aside the two extra logs—presumably for the wife and kid—and focused on Jason’s.

  The subpoena covered the last two months, about two weeks prior to Kerry’s assault, running all the way up until yesterday.

  She made a photocopy first and then began highlighting every appearance of Kerry’s number. As Kerry had said, they tended to speak two or three times a week, both before and after the incident. Other numbers for Oasis employees appeared on the log, too.

  Corrine placed checkmarks next to the two most recent calls from Jason to Kerry. The first was on the day the Post had broken the news of Rachel Sutton’s complaint. According to Kerry, this was when Jason insisted on seeing her in person before offering to pay her off to sign a nondisclosure agreement. The second appeared yesterday morning, when Kerry claimed Jason had threatened to kill her if she followed through with prosecution.

  King had wanted to show a judge they weren’t cutting corners. What she saw here was good enough to do the job. She called King and gave him a quick summary. “I’ll scan and e-mail the relevant pages to you.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “So you’re getting the warrant?”

  “Let me look at everything once it’s all put together.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “I’m just being thorough.”

  “No. Being thorough was getting the phone records, the hotel videos, and a statement from Powell. You have more than enough for probable cause.”

  “Not your call, Duncan.”

  “Seriously?”

  Once Corrine had sent the relevant pages to King, she flipped through the rest of the call records, looking for any patterns that stood out. The most frequent calls by all three members of the Powell family were to one another. Jason’s account had the most activity by far, as would be expected, given his work. She assumed that the next busiest, with calls made during school hours, was the wife’s. The son’s phone was barely used at all. No surprise there. For kids these days, a phone call was as outdated as the telegraph.

  She paid special attention to calls made after the news of Rachel’s complaint broke. Using Google, she identified two frequent callers as Jason’s lawyer, Olivia Randall, and another attorney named Colin Harris. She didn’t see anything else that might relate to the case.

  She was about to file the records away when her eyes flashed on an incoming call four days ago to what Corrine assumed was the wife’s cell. It was a 631 area code, Suffolk County on Long Island—the East End. It was only six seconds long—maybe a wrong number—but something about the phone number seemed familiar.

  Corrine looked at the phone on her desk and pictured the pattern of the digits on the dialpad. When she remembered a number, it was usually a combination of both the actual numbers and the shape they made on a phone. That’s why this one felt familiar. The 631 area code, plus the next three digits—796—formed a perfect square. Nothing about the next four digits rang a bell.

  Now the square-shaped combination of six numbers was burrowed in her brain, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to let go of them until she figured out where she’d seen them before. She pulled out her cell phone and scrolled t
hrough her recent calls, searching for the 631 area code. Nothing. She knew that iPhones physically retained information for the last thousand calls, but only displayed the most recent hundred. For Corrine, that was only a few days. She began deleting calls from her history to make room for older records. This was the kind of thing her ex used to call her OCD. “Like a dog with a bone,” he’d say, shaking his head.

  She finally found it five days back: four calls in total. Now she remembered. She needed background information on a rape suspect who’d previously been accused of stalking a woman he met on summer vacation. The calls had been to a detective in the East Hampton Police Department.

  She used her computer to look up the general number for the department. Same area code, same prefix, different extension.

  She wasn’t quite ready to drop the bone yet. She pulled up the driver’s license record for Angela Powell, showing a name change six years ago from Angela Mullen. She searched state police records and found a missing persons report from fifteen years ago. She did a check against the date of birth. Angela would have been only sixteen years old. She saw another entry showing the report cleared three years later.

  She picked up her phone and dialed the now-memorized square of six numbers, followed by the last four digits of the number from Angela Powell’s phone record.

  The voice was gruff. Older. “Hendricks.”

  “This is Detective Corrine Duncan with NYPD Special Victims Unit. I was hoping to talk to you about Angela Powell, aka Angela Mullen.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line, followed by a heavy sigh. “I’d like to help her out, but I don’t actually know the husband.”

  He wanted to help her, Angela, out, not you, a fellow detective. Corrine was certain she hadn’t misheard.

  “But you know why I’m calling,” she said.