Corrine’s mind was swirling with questions. She scribbled key words on her notepad so she wouldn’t forget them.
“She told this friend Samantha about the rape after it happened?” Kerry said she never spoke to anyone about it until she reported it to Corrine.
“No, sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest that. Samantha only heard about it when everyone else did, at that big press conference the lawyer held.”
“Did she say what the problems were at work?”
“Nah. Pretty vague. Something about Kerry being in the doghouse—quote, unquote—for the last few years.”
That timing lined up with what Kerry had told Corrine about her affair with the company’s CEO, Tom Fisher.
“And what about the breakup? Was that also a few years ago?”
“She said Kerry started talking about the dude maybe five months ago. She referred to him as Jay, but never gave a last name and kept blowing her off about getting to meet him. Samantha even asked her once, point-blank, if the guy might be married. I heard all about how Kerry was smart in every way, except she falls head over heels for the wrong guys and lives her whole life around them. I’ve got a sister like that—anyway, Kerry stopped talking about the guy around the time the news of her complaint against Powell came out. So now I got to figure out who Jay is. Didn’t find anyone by that name in her cell phone, and that seems weird. I’ll have my tech guy look at it to see if maybe it all got deleted. And, oh shit—I still need to find that delivery guy from the restaurant.”
Corrine hung up, trying to quell the worry building in the back of her mind. Kerry was a beautiful, successful single woman. Of course she probably had a boyfriend. There’s no reason that would have come up in conversation with Corrine. And maybe Kerry was secretive about him at work because she’d already been churned through the gossip mill over her affair with Tom Fisher.
But she couldn’t ignore the warning signs. If Jason Powell was telling the truth about an affair with Kerry, she might have referred to him as “Jay” around the office to keep the relationship on the down-low.
She had told Brian King that it really didn’t matter to her whether Kerry had had an affair with Jason, but now that the evidence was sitting there, she wanted to know the truth. But the missing-person case belonged to Port Washington Police, and her case against Powell was on hold. Corrine didn’t have an angle to work.
Corrine walked the twenty feet to her lieutenant’s office and tapped on the open door. After she filled him in on what she knew about Kerry’s disappearance, he said what she expected: Let Port Washington handle the investigation, and in the meantime hope they find her, alive and well.
She couldn’t argue with his logic, but she was still standing in his doorway.
“Damn it, Duncan. I got detectives I have to yell at to do more work, and now I’m yelling at you to give it a rest. Go home.”
“It’s only two o’clock.”
“Not literally. I mean—Jesus, get out of here. If she doesn’t turn up in the next day or two, we can talk again. Until then, she’s Long Island’s problem.”
Corrine was at her desk an hour later when the number for the main switchboard at the district attorney’s office appeared on her cell phone screen. “Duncan.”
“It’s King.” He was back to being King now, not Brian. She preferred it that way.
She started to fill him in on her conversation with Sergeant Netter, but he interrupted.
“The pictures of Kerry’s wrists—how do we have those files?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how did we physically get them? She took the photos herself, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So how’d she send them to you? E-mail? Text? Did you plug in her phone? Like, technically, how did we get them? You gave them to me as jpeg files.”
Corrine woke up her computer and looked through old e-mails to jog her memory. “Yeah, she e-mailed them to me as attachments.”
“Straight from her phone? Right in front of you?”
“No. She showed them to me on her phone and sent them to me when she got home. Why?”
“Because Olivia Fucking Randall swears there’s a problem with them, but won’t tell me how she knows that. Specifically, she wants to confirm the date the photographs were taken.”
“I’m looking at the files on my computer. The date on my files is May 19, but that’s when she sent them to me.”
“Well, I just learned way more than I wanted to about digital photographs from our geek here. It looks like Kerry exported the original photograph into a jpeg file before she sent it to you, which is why the date on the file is the day she filed her complaint. But if you look at the photo’s properties, it says the image is from the night of April 10, which is the night she says he assaulted her at the W. No problem, right? Except Olivia’s saying you can easily change that on any Mac. She’s demanding that we produce the actual device used to take the photographs so she can examine the microdata to see if the date was changed.”
“She thinks Kerry took the pictures later and lined them up with the date we’d have hotel footage.”
“That’s my guess. Please tell me you looked at Kerry’s wrists the day she made the complaint.”
Corrine closed her eyes. “Of course not. She said the assault was six weeks earlier. And before you ask, she was wearing a long-sleeved dress. I wouldn’t have noticed if she’d still had the marks.”
“Damn it.”
“I found out something else that’s not going to make you very happy either.” She summed up her reasons for believing that Kerry’s boyfriend, “Jay,” might have been Jason Powell.
“And you said before, it doesn’t matter.”
“I didn’t think before that she might be lying about the date of those pictures. The guy with the PD in Port Washington mentioned looking at contacts in Kerry’s phone, so he must have gotten a warrant to unlock it. Let me call him.”
Netter picked up immediately.
“You still have Kerry’s phone there?”
He said that he did.
“Can you do me a favor and look through her photographs? I’m looking for April tenth.”
“I don’t see anything.”
“Nothing?”
“No, I got a picture of a meatball pizza on April eighth, and a picture of Snowball four days later. What am I looking for?”
“Three pictures of injuries on her wrists. Scroll through and see if you can find anything. Maybe it’s closer to May nineteenth.”
“Nope, nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
“You want to drive out here or what? I’m telling you, it’s not here.” Kerry must have deleted the photos after she e-mailed them to Corrine. “And I got hold of that restaurant guy. He’s out surfing in Montauk today, but he’s coming back tomorrow to work a shift. I’m supposed to talk to him at four.”
Tomorrow was Saturday, her day off. Fuck it. What else was she going to do? “Do you mind if I come out and meet him with you?”
“No skin off my back.”
46
“A jury would let me walk if I knocked you into a coma right now.” The nice thing about Susanna was that I never needed to wonder what she was actually thinking. “No offense, but I want to run your life until you come to your senses.”
We were in her apartment on Central Park South. It was Saturday, the only day when she didn’t have studio obligations. When I arrived at eleven, she had her sideboard covered with Bloody Mary mix and vodka, lox and bagels, caviar and blinis, and a bottle of chilled and very expensive champagne. She told me she splurged because I had been living like a hermit for nearly a month. But now the caviar and blinis were gone, I was picking at the remaining lox and capers, and she was threatening to knock me out for defending Jason.
“For all we know, she’s turned up by now,” I said. “I mean, she slept with my husband. She could be hooking up with anyone for a night or two.”