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 For kids these days, a phone call was as outdated as the telegraph.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 through 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.
“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.