If this were the first time we’d had this conversation, it might have felt like he really did want what was best for me. But Jason had always known about Susanna’s open invitation to help me “go public,” as she called it, and had never questioned my rejection of it until he himself became a public figure. He talked about the cloud over my life, but it had become a cloud over his too. And maybe the freedom he cared about now was his and not mine.
When I didn’t respond, he knew to pivot the conversation again. “Oh, and Olivia wanted to talk to you. I told her you’d give her a call when you have a chance. I mean, if that’s okay?”
I nodded. “Yeah, I’ll call her in a bit. I just want to chill out for a while after that drive.”
“No problem. I was about to order some wine from Astor Place. Any requests?”
I shook my head. As far as I was concerned, there were only two kinds: red and white, and I’d drink either with anything.
“By the way, did you call the dealer yet?” I asked.
“Jesus, Angela, seriously?”
“What? That wobble in the front end’s still there, and it’s still under warranty.” The last time he drove it, he said he could barely tell what I was talking about. I should have known that he wouldn’t make the service appointment.
“Excuse me for not keeping up with your to-do lists during all this.”
“You want your wife and son to get in a car accident because you’re too busy dealing with your mistress to make a phone call?” I knew I was being a bitch, but one of the rules when we bought that car was that he’d be the one to oversee the maintenance. One of our other splurges when Jason started making outside money was to upgrade our wagon from the Subaru to an Audi. The only improvement I cared about was the built-in GPS and satellite radio. I had no interest in taking care of a fancy German car with all the other bells and whistles.
His voice softened. “Fine, I’ll call the dealer.”
“And can you ask them to install the GPS update while they’re at it?”
I was almost daring him to say something. How many times had he told me to use my phone like everyone else? Both he and Spencer teased me mercilessly for my airplane-mode-in-the-car rule. It’s called airplane mode, not car mode, Mom! I didn’t care what everyone else did. I’d read an article two years earlier about people who crashed when their phones rang unexpectedly. I wasn’t going to risk Spencer’s life because I couldn’t go offline for a little while. I knew the two of them cheated by silencing their phones instead, but the rule stood.
Once again he pretended to defer to me. “No problem,” he said. “And please let me know once you’ve talked to Olivia. I appreciate your doing that.”
He was about to leave the room when I stopped him. “You didn’t tell her, did you? About me?” I had seen what she’d done to Rachel to help her client.
There was no hesitation in his reply: “Of course not.”
I didn’t believe him.
28
Brian King was wrestling a dumpling between chopsticks when Corrine knocked on his open office door.
“You can use a fork, you know. Chinese people will forgive you.”
“Seems wrong somehow. I once stopped seeing a woman because she ordered a banana daiquiri at a wine bar.”
“Good riddance to her. I’ve got something for you.” She dropped the lab results on his desk. The DNA on Kerry Lynch’s skirt and panties was Powell’s. “We were expecting it, but now it’s official.”
“Hate to break it to you, but I already got the heads-up. Is it bad that I was kind of hoping it would be a bust?”
He nudged the takeout container in her direction, and she plucked a dumpling with her fingers.
“I know you’ve got a losing streak right now—”
“The office has a losing streak,” he corrected.
“Fine, whatever. But this case is winnable.”
“Except he’s got one of the best defense attorneys in the city. Not surprisingly, she called me within half an hour of my getting the results, asking for a meeting. She’s got a way of nabbing inside information. I think half of law enforcement is secretly in love with her.”
“If she were a man, you’d admire his vast network of contacts.”
“If she were a man, I wouldn’t have asked her out two years ago, only to get shut down. She was in here this morning giving me a preview of what we’re looking at if we go to trial. They’re claiming consent, and not just the one time. According to Powell, he and Kerry have been having an affair since last October.”
“Bullshit. Why didn’t he say something the first time I asked about her?”
“Because you showed up at his house while his wife and kid were within earshot. And he didn’t think it was relevant. They’ll argue you misled him into thinking you were still investigating Rachel Sutton’s complaint, so he didn’t see the harm of lying about a completely consensual extramarital dalliance.”
“We did mislead him. That’s what you told me to do.”
“Yeah, well, maybe we were being a little too cute. I wouldn’t be surprised if a judge suppressed his statement altogether.”
Corrine reminded him of the footage from the hotel elevator. “He said, ‘What did I do?’ It’s basically a confession.”
“You don’t understand how Olivia Randall operates. It’s scorched earth. She’ll hire experts to say that lipreading isn’t scientifically reliable. And if she loses that, she’ll get a linguistics professor to testify he said something else. Every single piece of evidence will be a battle. And even if the evidence comes in, she’ll say he was so anguished about having cheated on his beloved wife that he was racked with guilt when he left her room.” He re-created the moment, placing his hands on his head. “‘What did I do?’ And my boss has made it damn clear that I have to win this case.”
“Well, I think I have something that potentially helps.”
When she first ran Powell for priors, the only entries she found were an incident when Powell witnessed a domestic violence assault in Washington Square Park and a report from a fender-bender. After Kerry came forward, Corrine ordered copies of the reports to make sure she wasn’t missing anything.
The assault incident was from eight years ago and, if anything, made Powell seem like a hero. He saw a man push his girlfriend to the ground and continue to try to grab her arm as the two of them walked away together. He followed the couple, asking the woman if she needed help. The man took a swing at Powell, who responded by punching the man in the face and breaking his nose. A bystander called 911, making it clear that Powell had acted in self-defense.
At first glance, the report from the car accident, five years later, was a snoozer. A taxi pulled away with a fare and sideswiped Powell’s Subaru in full view of a patrol officer. According to the report, Powell planned to seek repair of his car through his own insurance and did not want the incident reported. Corrine suspected that the taxi driver had mouthed off to the officer, because he had insisted on writing up the accident and forwarding the report to the city’s taxi and limousine commission. It was the kind of thing that happened hundreds of times a month in this city, except that on that specific day, Jason Powell had a passenger in his car, a twenty-four-year-old white female named Lana Sullivan.
So curiosity kicked in again, and Corrine ran Lana Sullivan for hits. Three years ago, if the patrol officer had run her for warrants, he would have come up empty-handed. But that was three years ago.
“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.”