“Well, I know her husband was in the news about an intern. You ask me, that case sounds like a big bag of nothing, but of course you know more than what’s in the papers. I assume you’re calling about Franklin, but I don’t think the family wants me talking about it. Her dad made Harbor Grill turn off a Steelers game one time with no explanation. That’s how bad they wanted Pittsburgh wiped from the map. Tell you what? If I get her permission, I’ll give you a call, all right? Otherwise, police reports are all you’re gonna get.”
“Fair enough,” Corrine said, and hung up.
Googling “Franklin” together with “Pittsburgh” brought up a borough named Franklin, followed by dozens of listings for various businesses. She tried again, adding the names Angela Powell and then Angela Mullen into the search. Nothing.
She tried “Franklin . . . Pittsburgh . . . missing girl.” Even before she hit the enter key, the connection was beginning to come to her.
Holy shit. She actually said the words out loud when she saw the results.
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.
She considered telling him what she had learned about Angela Powell, but she saw no connection between it and the case against her husband. “Talk to you later?”
“Yeah, but hey—I had a reason for calling other than feeling sorry for myself. I got the warrant signed for the DNA swab.”
“Really?”
“I realized there were no more excuses for dragging my feet. Go big or go home, right? You’ll drop it on him today?”
“Yep. Ready to go now, in fact.”
“Sounds good.”
As Corrine hung up the phone, her thoughts flashed to Angela Powell, who had once been Angela Mullen, at eighteen years old delivering her baby in a bricked-in room in Pittsburgh, an eight-hour drive from her parents.
She couldn’t imagine how that woman was going to feel when this DNA test was a match.
23
Heads turned as we passed tables at the 21 Club. I knew we should have gone somewhere low-key downtown, but Susanna had convinced me to meet
her in midtown, promising that her “person” would seat us in the back corner. Getting there had required walking through the dining room, accompanied by a woman whose face filled television screens all over America on a daily basis.
“I’m not so sure about this,” I muttered after the waiter had taken our orders.
“Please. We walked by one person pending trial for mail fraud and another in the middle of a billion-dollar divorce. I hate to break it to you, but this crowd has more than enough of its own problems to dwell on than your do-gooder husband.”
I was thankful that the tables to either side of us were empty. “Except he’s not the do-gooder anymore, is he? Now there’s apparently another woman, and we have no idea what she may have said.”
I had given Susanna the rundown on Kerry Lynch when she called to check on me the previous night, and she’d insisted on taking me out to this lunch.
I didn’t hesitate to share everything I knew. She’d been my friend for ten years now. No one other than my parents and Spencer had been a constant in my life for that long.
When she first began treating me as her friend and not just her caterer, I worried that maybe she already knew about me. I thought she might be working an angle to earn my trust. I began testing her, mentioning details about Spencer as a baby, wondering if she’d ask about his father. I even asked her once out of the blue whether she’d ever been to Pittsburgh, and she seemed completely confused by the question. She had no idea that I was anyone other than a young mom from the South Fork who cooked good food and needed a friend.
When I decided to tell Susanna that I was the girl rescued from Charles Franklin, my parents thought I was insane to trust a journalist, of all people. But Susanna was almost like a surrogate mother. After everything she had done for me, I wanted her to really know me.
She cried when I told her and said she was sorry I was carrying that on my own. A couple of times, she asked me if I was sure I wouldn’t be happier if I told my story to the world. I could make enough money to move out of my parents’ house. I told her the same thing I would later tell Jason: I didn’t want my story to be public, and it didn’t seem right to make money off it, anyway.
And when I told her I didn’t want to write a book, or give an interview, or go to the therapy she offered to pay for, all she asked was to let her know if I ever changed my mind. She never leaked a word. When it came to me, she respected an impenetrable wall between her job and our friendship.
Now, over lunch, she was trying to reassure me that everything was going to be all right. “I know it’s verboten to say, but women do lie about these things.” She had lowered her voice, even though we weren’t within earshot of anyone else.
“You’re going to have to give back your sisterhood card if someone hears you, Susanna. You know what they say: there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t support other women.” I had told her about the police coming to the house, asking Jason if he’d ever had sex with a woman named Kerry Lynch. She agreed with me that it sounded like Kerry had leveled a new accusation, and because of the question about sexual relations, it had to be more serious than Rachel’s initial claim.
“Look, I get it,” Susanna said, tucking her chin-length, perfectly frosted bob behind one ear. “I’m always the one saying that when it’s he-said, she-said, I’ll pick the woman every time. Because ninety-nine percent of the time, women are telling the truth, and a hundred percent of the time, it’s grueling to come forward. Women are blamed, stigmatized, scrutinized, doubted. Even with you . . .”
Her voice trailed off. I suppose that in a weird way, if I had to be a victim, I was one of the lucky ones. I wasn’t a drunk college student accusing another drunk college student about a fifteen-minute incident at a frat party. I was a sixteen-year-old girl whose one mistake was to accept a ride home in a Lexus SUV from a man who told me he was a twenty-four-year old realtor from Philadelphia, visiting his grandparents for the week. Once I was in the passenger seat, he held a cloth over my face and repeated as necessary until I woke up naked on a twin bed in a pitch-black room with a pain between my legs because, as much as I had been “acting like trouble,” as my father put it, I still hadn’t done that. Not yet. I didn’t come home for three years, and only when police killed my abductor. Charles Franklin was actually thirty-one when he took me, but what did I know? Grown up was grown up.
So I was about as victim-y as a victim could be. But “even with me,” as Susanna said.
My parents, the police, and my therapist all told me to avoid coverage of the case. But they didn’t know how I used that laptop some victims’ rights group had purchased for me to help catch up with my education. I saw the discussion boards filled with comments from strangers rehashing every fact they could find about the case, including the neighbor’s observation that she had seen me outside a few times and once paying for food at the grocery store. She said I looked familiar and asked me where I lived. I told her that I was Charlie’s niece, Sandra. Why didn’t she ask for help? some of the true-crime message boards wanted to know. Why didn’t she tell them who she was?
I was about as perfect as a victim could be, but even I could not escape blame.
Susanna was still delivering her monologue. “The public’s first instinct is to disbelieve the woman, because we don’t want to admit these horrible things actually happen. So to counter that instinct, we good feminists take the position that we believe every single woman, every single time. And then the Rolling Stone article about the University of Virginia happens, and it hurts us all. So I don’t know what this woman’s angle is, Angela, but I have to think there is one. Because Jason didn’t do whatever she’s accusing him of. For once, I’m glad these cases are harder to prove than people think.”
Susanna had started out covering a crime beat in Miami after graduating from Florida State. “How so?” I asked.
“Whatever this woman’s story is, it’s going to boil down to his word against hers, and the prosecution needs proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Even if they have DNA evidence, the DA has to prove it wasn’t consensual. What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
We stopped speaking as the waiter arrived with our meals—steak tartare for both of us, the best in the city.
“The way you’re talking about it so casually,” I said after he had left. “A trial. DNA. Consent. This is my husband. We don’t even know for sure what he’s accused of.”
“Sorry. You know me. I’m blunt. I meant in the abstract. I was trying to make you feel better by breaking down the worst-case scenario. But of course it won’t go to trial. It’s going to be fine.”
“There’s no consent to argue, Susanna. Jason told me that nothing happened between him and this Kerry person.”
“As long as he didn’t say that to the police. I assumed he invoked his rights to a lawyer.”
I didn’t answer.
She put her fork down, clearly frustrated. “Jesus, someone as smart as Jason should know you never talk to the police. Ever.”
“He didn’t see the harm. He works with the woman. End of story.”
“It doesn’t matter. And again, I’m talking in the abstract again, if he—not Jason—but if a man in that position said nothing, he could always argue consent if the police matched his DNA. But if they find DNA evidence after the man denied any kind of encounter? He’s caught in a lie.” Once again, she saw from my expression that she’d gone too far. “But obviously, in this case, it’s fine. If Jason says there’s no relationship, there’s no relationship.”
I made a point to ask what was going on with her. I hate it when people monopolize a conversation with their own problems, no matter how big they are. She told me about two stories she was working on. A woman had left her husband for a man she met on the Internet, only to learn that the “other man” was an eighteen-year-old, not the forty-year-old executive he claimed to be. So far, the woman was standing by her new boyfriend, claiming that his deception was no different than shaving a few po
unds from the physical description of an online bio. The second story was about the latest methods for obtaining passports, social security numbers, and other official documents based on stolen identities. “People never get tired of following the cat-and-mouse games between white hats and black hats.”
“Maybe your smitten lady can get a fake ID for her teenage boyfriend. While you’re at it, save your research for me. If my face lands on a tabloid cover, I’m out of here.”
My attempt at humor fell flat.
“You’re worried about being discovered,” she said. It was a statement, not a question.
I told her about the comment posted on The Pink Spot blog. “I knew that girl back home. She’d say anything to put me in my place.”
“Please, that website’s got like fifty followers.”
“Does that really matter? One viral tweet could change everything.”
“Trust me. No legitimate media outlet’s going to go there without your permission. If I have to call every contact I have in the business, I’ll shut it down.”
Susanna had just insisted on paying the bill when my cell phone rang. It was Jason. I made my way to the front entrance and hit accept.
“Hey there. I’m about to leave lunch with Susanna.”
“The police were here. They had a warrant.”
I felt the steak tartare churn in my stomach. “Are you under arrest?”
“No. It was a search warrant.”
“Did you call Olivia? What are they searching for?”
“Angela, we need to talk.”
24
He had been having an affair with her, and the police had arrived at our house to collect a sample of his DNA. The reason he had summoned me home was to break this piece of news to me in person.
Kerry wasn’t merely a client contact. He had slept with her during that “lunchtime” meeting at her house last week. I didn’t ask for every detail of the relationship, but it obviously wasn’t the first time. He warned me to expect a DNA match.
I was the one who insisted that we tell Spencer. I didn’t want our son to hear about it from some kid checking his iPhone at school.
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