The Wife: A Novel of Psychological Suspense

by Alafair Burke

  “Way too much information,” King said. “Get to the punch line: Who’s Lana Sullivan?”

  “Two prostitution convictions since she took that little car ride with Powell, plus an outstanding warrant—at least as of this morning—for an FTA from misdemeanor court six months ago.”

  “You picked her up on the warrant?”

  “Gave her a chance to clear it and get a new arraignment ticket if she had a chat with me.” She’d fail to appear for that one, too, but that wasn’t Corrine’s problem. “She confirmed that Powell was her john that night.”

  “You know how many dicks she’s seen since then? She was telling you what you wanted to hear.”

  Corrine was shaking her head. “She’d never been arrested at that point. A cop made her show ID. She was scared, so the incident was clear in her mind. She said Powell spent more time making excuses for employing her services than actually using them. He was talking about how the wife didn’t let him touch her anymore, but he loved her too much to leave.”

  King looked unimpressed. “His entire defense is that he’s a married man who sleeps around on his wife. Proving that he went to a hooker three years ago doesn’t really change anything.”

  “No, but it might make a difference to the wife. Right now, she probably believes him. If she starts to see another side of him—”

  “The side that bitches about her to random hookers—”

  “Maybe she’s got something to say to us.” New York’s version of the spousal privilege was narrow compared to other states. The government could force a spouse to take the stand, and only private communications between spouses were protected, not other forms of evidence, such as observations through sight or smell. In short, there was a lot of wiggle room as long as they could convince Angela Powell to cooperate.

  “All right, you’re not pissing me off after all,” King said. “That was good work.”

  Corrine wondered if she should tell King what she knew about the wife’s background, but wasn’t sure she could trust him. He was under pressure to win. She could imagine him threatening to use the information at trial to get her to testify against her husband. For Corrine, using her husband’s infidelity as a chip was fair game; using Angela’s own victimization was crossing the line.

  “You still look miserable,” Corrine said. “Do you ever not look miserable?”

  He faked a large, cheesy smile. “I’m ecstatic. Honestly: What’s your read on Kerry?”

  Corrine shrugged. “You want the real answer?”

  “No. I asked you a question so you’d make up a bunch of bullshit.”

  “You know how it is. The stories never line up. No one’s version is ever a hundred percent accurate. The hard part is figuring out which parts are wrong, and more importantly, why they’re wrong. Bad guys out-and-out lie because they’re trying to protect their asses. But victims? That’s trickier. Some of them almost apologize for the bad guys as they’re reporting the facts, because they’re full of guilt, blaming themselves. Or they mitigate the awfulness of what happened to them, because the full weight of it would kill them if they stopped to absorb it. Or they say they didn’t drink, or didn’t flirt, or didn’t unhook their own bra, because they’re afraid that to admit the truth would be giving him permission for everything that happened after.”

  “You should give lessons on this stuff, Duncan. That was heavy. So what about Kerry? Which camp is she in?”

  “I assume you have a reason for asking. What’s scaring you about her?”

  King paused to throw the takeout container in the garbage can beneath his desk. “I think Olivia Randall got under my skin. This trial’s going to be a cluster. Randall says Kerry’s lying because Powell was about to expose her company for falsifying some kind of financial records to cover up kickbacks to bad guys in where-the-fuck-a-stan-istan. The whole thing made my head hurt. Did Kerry mention any of this to you?”

  Corrine shook her head. “No, but there’s something else. It could be related, I guess. An affair with the CEO.”

  “You knew that?”

  “I didn’t think it was either material or exculpatory.” Those were the magic buzzwords for Brady material, the evidence that King would have been required to turn over to Powell’s defense team.

  “Well, his attorney says it gives Kerry a motive under the circumstances to help the company malign Jason Powell. She was on the outs at work because of the affair. According to Powell, Kerry told him that the only reason she wasn’t fired was because she threatened to sue them for discrimination. She was super paranoid about the company monitoring her e-mails and company cell phone, so that’s supposedly why there are no texts or messages to back up his claim of a relationship with her.”

  Corrine reminded him that the absence of an affair would also explain the absence of romantic correspondence between them.

  “I know, but I’ve got to admit, it makes me more than a little nervous that Powell knew she was cheating with the boss. If they were purely business, how would he know the details of an affair she had three years ago?”

  “He had other contacts at the company. Kerry told me everyone at work knew. Grist for the rumor mill.”

  “Except Powell knew the wife’s name—Mary Beth, by the way. He knows they have three kids, and that Mary Beth was so pissed off when she found the texts that she told their oldest daughter what Dad had been up to. And he claims to know that the daughter showed up at Kerry’s house, calling her a slut from the front yard. You think those are the kinds of details an outside consultant overhears at a meeting? Sounds to me like bedtime chatter, swapping tales about the exes.”

  “So let me talk to Kerry,” Corrine said. “See what her version is.”

  “I already tried, and that’s an even bigger problem. She got defensive, accusing me of blaming the victim. And she refused to talk to me at all about her company. She claimed it was proprietary business information, and that sharing it could get her fired.”

  “By the very company Powell claims she’s colluding with.” Corrine could already picture Powell’s defense in the courtroom.

  “Exactly.” King wasn’t done listing his concerns about Kerry’s motivations. “Oh, and don’t let me forget this part: Did you know Kerry hired a lawyer?”

  “She may need one if she thinks the company’s looking to fire her.”

  “Except she didn’t hire an employment lawyer. She said she hired someone to protect her ‘victim’s rights.’” He placed air quotes around the words with both hands. “She wouldn’t give me the lawyer’s name, but she definitely doesn’t want to answer any hard questions—the kinds she’ll face on cross. And if Olivia Randall finds out our victim’s hired a lawyer already, she’s going to claim that the real motive for this case is money in a civil suit.”

  “So where does that leave us?”

  “It leaves me with a case my boss wants me to take to trial. I tried telling him I have a bad feeling, but all he knows is that we’ve got a rich celebrity accused by two different women in a week. If we don’t charge him, he’ll be accused of favoritism. When I told him Olivia Randall was here trying to get the case dumped, he told me I could offer him seven years. Seven years? You can kill someone in this city and get seven years. He’s going to make me try the case, and Olivia Randall’s going to make it feel like getting stabbed in the eye every single day for a month straight.”

  “So are we going to arrest him on a warrant, or let him turn himself in?”

  “Oh, there’s no doubt he’s getting a perp walk. I’ve got the affidavit for the arrest warrant ready to go, just like I promised the boss. You ready to pick this guy up? If we’re lucky, you might bump into the wife and have a little chat with her about the hooker. She may be a total doormat, but no woman wants to know she’s been swapping bodily fluids with a pro.”

  29

  I should have known that nothing good was going to come of my phone call to Olivia Randall when she began with her attempt at small talk. “So Jason tol
d me you drove Spencer to camp this morning?” I heard a pause midsentence and pictured her checking her notes to confirm my son’s name.

  “Yeah, up in Westchester, outside South Salem. Almost Connecticut, really.”

  “That’s great that he gets to go to camp. Gives you a break, right?”

  I was glad we weren’t speaking in person, so she couldn’t see my glare.

  “Jason said you wanted to speak to me?”

  She thanked me for calling and explained again why she had kept me out of her meetings with Jason and Colin. I assured her it wasn’t necessary to repeat the reasons.

  “So my understanding is that Jason has told you that our defense is that the contact between him and the complainant was consensual.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did he also tell you that he doesn’t have any texts or e-mails to prove they had a relationship?”

  “No.” He hadn’t told me that, but it explained why I hadn’t been able to find any, despite all my attempts.

  “Obviously it would be helpful if a third party could corroborate his version.”

  “If anyone could, it would have been Colin. He already told me that he suspected, but didn’t really know anything.”

  “I wasn’t talking about Colin. I was talking about you. Jason indicated that you may have been aware that there was someone else.”

  “You’re asking me to lie for him. Just say it.”

  “No, I’m explaining how you might be in a position to help, if you wanted to. I understand that this isn’t easy. To be clear, Jason has no idea I’m talking to you about this, and it has been a real challenge to get him to open up to me about your marriage, although I’m sure you can see how it will be relevant to his case.”

  I closed my eyes. I could feel all of the doors ripping open around me, and there was no way I could pull them shut. Every new word she spoke made me feel dizzy.

  “He says that intimacy—or physical intimacy, at least—has not been a regular part of your marriage, and not at all for three years.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Please, hear me out. We have a good argument for consent, and all we really need is reasonable doubt. But it’s hard to paint Jason as the good guy when his defense is that he was leading a secret life, cheating on his wife. If that part of your relationship was over, if you knew—if even part of you knew . . . Some couples have unspoken understandings. Maybe the two of you even had a good reason for separating that aspect of intimacy from your marriage.”

  She knew. She fucking knew. It wasn’t going to be enough for me to smile and stand by Jason’s side and make sure the whole world knew that I believed he was innocent. She needed me to be the reason he cheated. I would be the screwed-up wife who was too frigid to keep a young, attractive man happy in the bedroom. He would seem heroic for loving me in the first place and then staying with me despite all my damage.

  I cut to the chase. “You think the DA will back off if he knows I’m the girl who spent three years getting tortured by Charles Franklin.”

  “I’ll be honest, Angela. This is not exactly my favorite part of the job. But, yes, your background gives a different dimension to your marriage and therefore to Jason’s interactions with this woman.”

  So I was right. Jason had told her about me, unless, of course, Olivia had found out on her own, which seemed plausible. “I didn’t know about Kerry,” I said. “At least, not specifically about her. And definitely not about a three-month relationship.”

  “So three months is longer than you suspected?”

  Of course. Why did she sound confused? Had it been longer? “Jason told me it was three months.”

  “Okay, but you’re saying that you did suspect outside encounters of some kind, but without, let’s say, an emotional affair. Is that a fair representation?”

  If this was what it felt like to have someone who was supposedly on our side question me, I could not imagine what it would be like to get cross-examined by the lawyer trying to put my husband behind bars.

  “I need to think about this. I don’t want to talk any more right now.”

  “That’s fine. I totally understand. But, Angela, please remember: this woman is trying to destroy your husband, which means she’s destroying your family. That’s going to have consequences for both you and Spencer.” At least this time she didn’t hesitate on my son’s name. “Helping Jason helps the two of you, too.”

  I heard Jason calling out my own name from downstairs. “Hold on,” I yelled, breaking one of my own house rules. “I’m talking to Olivia.”

  “Angela!”

  Jason was screaming loud enough for people outside to hear. I asked Olivia to hold on and walked from the bedroom to the top of the stairs. I saw Jason being placed in handcuffs in the threshold of our open front door.

  For more than a week, I had been expecting this moment, imagining it about to turn the corner at any second. But Jason hadn’t. His expression was panicked, and his eyes looked up at me, pleading.

  “Olivia, they’re here,” I said into the phone. “The police. They’re arresting Jason. He didn’t do this. Please, you have to help him.”

  III

  People v. Jason Powell

  30

  What does it mean to know something?

  I remember Mr. Gardner, my ninth-grade teacher, asking us that question. He was widely regarded as the school’s smartest, most challenging teacher, which meant that most of us had no idea what he was talking about most of the time.

  It was supposed to be a lesson about the importance of choosing words carefully. He began by asking us how many facts we thought we knew to a certainty. A long list grew on the chalkboard: the price of a Snickers bar in the vending machine, the name of our PE teacher, our birthdays. Then he said, “Okay, so what if I told you that the penalty for being wrong about one of these facts was having to spend the entire summer in school? Now how many things do you know?”

  We immediately second-guessed our so-called knowledge. Maybe prices were being changed at the machine as we spoke. Maybe Ms. Callaway got married, changed her name, and never told the students. And maybe the hospital was wrong about whether we were born a little before midnight or a little after.

  “And if the penalty for an error was losing a limb?” Mr. Gardner asked.

  The lesson: we don’t really know anything. Not really.

  To know something, he argued, was not the same as to be certain beyond all doubt. And to believe something was definitely not the same as to know it.

  With that as a backdrop, I’d say the first time I knew Jason cheated was almost exactly two years ago. We had taken a rental in the Hamptons for six full weeks. The cost of renting a small cottage, half a mile from the ocean, was twice what my mother made in a year. That was the bizarro economy of the South Fork these days.

  It was a splurge, but Jason assured me we could afford it. He had launched the consulting company and had extra money coming in, on top of the book money we had sunk into the house. We only had one car, of course—the Subaru, before Jason decided we should get the Audi—but that wasn’t a problem. Most days, the three of us were together. To the extent we needed supplementary transportation, the rental house came with bikes. And I could always call my mom in a pinch.

  That particular day, I had gone to Susanna’s to help prepare for a dinner party. Jason said he had a meeting at a potential client’s house in Bridgehampton, so Spencer tagged along with Mom on a housecleaning. I was riding my bike home from Susanna’s when I thought I spotted our car parallel-parked on Montauk Highway, in the overflow parking area for Cyril’s. It was postbeach cocktail hour, the time when people popped in for late lunch lobster rolls, predinner raw oysters, and a lot of frozen blender drinks.

  I was stopped on my bike—one foot on the gravel, one on a paused pedal—next to my own car, watching my husband talk to a woman I’d never seen before. He was drinking beer from a pint glass, looking exactly like himself, but the woman was more
easily readable. She was flirting. She flipped her long hair a lot, licked her glossy lips, maintained good eye contact. She could have given instructions in a magazine. When I saw her touch Jason’s knee, part of me wanted to storm into the crowd, announce my presence, and ask Jason to introduce me to his friend.

  I didn’t. I pedaled back to our rented cottage and waited for him to come home. When he finally arrived almost three hours later, he immediately took a shower. I picked up his shirt, dropped so casually on the floor, and held it to my face. It smelled like the beach. That night, when he crawled into bed with me and held my hand, I fiddled with his ring. His tan line was faded.

  Was it enough proof that I was willing to spend the rest of summer in school, or lose a limb? No, but all the signs were there. We hadn’t touched each other—not that way—for more than a year. More hours away from home, with vague explanations for his whereabouts. That girl at Cyril’s. He’d clearly taken off his ring. At that point, I “knew,” to the extent that word has meaning. And yet I didn’t say a thing. What Jason’s attorney had called an “unspoken understanding” had been set into motion.

  At the time, that’s not how I thought of it. Even as I leaned on the borrowed bicycle in the gravel parking lot, watching him flirt with a stranger, I almost felt closer to him. It was part of the bargain that was now our life together. We were supposed to have a normal marriage, but one half of the couple—me—wasn’t normal, so neither were we.

  But I had lived with far more dangerous secrets, and so we went on.

  31

  Corrine immediately spotted two news vans when she pulled up in front of the special victims unit. A group of people clustered on either side of the walkway leading into the building.

  Her original plan had been to fingerprint Powell at the Sixth Precinct, less than a mile from his address, then transport him to Central Booking on Centre Street. King disrupted that plan by instructing her to go to SVU instead. It wasn’t the usual process, and it meant a round-trip drive to Harlem and back.