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.