The woman who answered the front door at Virginia Mullen’s house was probably around fifty years old. Her perfectly highlighted pixie cut was at odds with her outfit—an oversize Jets T-shirt, long denim shorts, and Crocs.
“I’m looking for the home’s owner?” Corrine asked, holding up her badge to allow a closer inspection.
“She’s not here right now.”
“When do you expect her back? Her phone numbers have been disconnected.”
The woman’s brow furrowed. Like most people, she was uncomfortable with an unannounced police visit. “I’m not real sure. Her daughter was going through a rough time, so they left town for a little while.”
Through the open door, Corrine saw that the television was on, but muted. Baby toys were scattered on the floor, and one of those portable playpens was popped open in the corner of the living room. A half-eaten sandwich waited on a plate on the coffee table.
“You’re living here?” Corrine asked.
The woman wiped her hand against her shorts and offered it to Corrine for a shake. “Sorry, my name’s Lucy. Lucy Carter. Ginny and I have worked together for years. Please, come in. Careful of the mess. Grammy’s the babysitter when Mommy’s at the hair salon. My grandson’s only nine months, but he can take over a house within minutes.”
The hairstyle made more sense now.
“So are you living here?” Corrine asked again. She tried to sound officious, as if the two women had broken some kind of city code or tax rule by not reporting a change in residency.
“Just staying here, really. She gave me keys and told me to treat the house as my own until she came back. She said it was better than leaving it empty.”
“What about property taxes, insurance, that kind of thing?”
Lucy shrugged. “Hasn’t come up yet. I assume she’ll be back by then. Are you here about her son-in-law? Angela divorced him, you know. She’s got nothing to do with him anymore. That’s why they left town. Angela wanted to get her kid out of the city until the trial is over.”
“Oh, I know.” It was the same story Angela had given her super when she suddenly moved out last month. Corrine had now been searching for Angela for a week. No forwarding address. Bank accounts closed. No airline, train, or bus tickets purchased. She was a ghost.
And now her mother was gone, too, precisely as she had expected.
Corrine had a cover story ready. “It turns out Angela’s entitled to some money from when she initially posted bail for him, seeing as how he’s being held now. Do you mind if I take a look around to see if Ginny left behind any hints about where they might have gone?”
“That’d be fine.”
Corrine was rifling through a drawer in the kitchen that most people would call a junk drawer. Two notepads, but no relevant notes. Owner’s manuals, pens, a screwdriver and a hammer, a spare Honda key. “Did Ginny leave you her car, too?” The Powells had sold their Audi, but according to the DMV, Angela’s mother still had a current-year-model Honda Pilot registered in her name. Corrine hadn’t seen it in the driveway.
Lucy was finishing her sandwich on the sofa. “I assume she took it.”
Or, Corrine thought, she paid someone to scrap it so it couldn’t be searched for Kerry Lynch’s blood.
It all came back to that one nagging question: How had Jason Powell gotten to Long Island and back the night of Kerry’s murder?
Every time Corrine pictured it, she saw him in a car. She made a list of all the possibilities and started checking them in her spare time. When the taxis, rental car companies, car services, and every other way of scoring a ride from the city were exhausted, she circled back to the Audi.
She called the Manhattan dealer and asked the service department to pull up the Powells’ account, hoping a mechanic might have noticed a device used to protect the license plate from the view of automatic cameras.
The garage manager told her that Marty was the last person to work on the car. “Doubt he remembers much from a job that came in on June 6. Not exactly an Einstein.”
Corrine sat up straighter at the mention of the date. It was the last day Kerry was seen. “Do you happen to know if you gave them a loaner?”
She heard tapping on a keyboard. “Yep, the new S6. Out for three days, a hundred and sixteen miles.”
It hadn’t taken Corrine long to find the loaner in the plate-reader data from the night of the murder: outbound on the Williamsburg Bridge at 7:41 p.m., then inbound at 10:53. The time and the mileage would cover the round-trip between the Powells’ house and Kerry’s, but it didn’t get Jason all the way out to where Kerry’s body was found.
She called the Nassau County prosecutor with the evidence, but ADA Rocco was unpersuaded. She planned to argue that Jason hid Kerry’s body somewhere near her house before going back out to Long Island and moving her again. Corrine was convinced Rocco was refusing to see the truth because she had screwed up by subpoenaing Angela to the grand jury, automatically giving her immunity.
Corrine remembered what the East Hampton detective said about Angela: When push comes to shove, she trusts her mother more than anyone. Angela would have left the house shortly after the phone call from her son, and started streaming the movie as soon as she got back, while her mother was driving Kerry’s corpse to Ocean Beach. It was the only explanation.
Angela might have immunity, but Ginny didn’t, which meant Corrine might have an angle, if she could only find them.
She had searched every drawer in every room of the small house. The only hint she had gleaned came from the family photographs on the walls, nearly all of them on the beach—but the world had a lot of beaches. Her final, desperate step was to flip through each book on the built-in shelf of what had once been Angela’s bedroom. A hollowed-out book was still one of the best do-it-yourself hiding places.
A photograph slipped from a dusty, dog-eared copy of Flowers in the Attic. Two teenage girls stood on the beach, their arms around each other’s waists. Angela’s sandy-blond hair was pulled into a ponytail at the top of her head. She was wearing a high-leg one-piece that would have been trendy in the late 1990s. Her friend had short, blunt-cut dark brown hair and was wearing a bikini top and baggy, low-slung cutoff jean shorts, exposing a tattoo of a rose vine on her right hip.
Corrine was about to tuck the photo back in place when she did a double take. The location of the tattoo matched. So did the size. And something about the girl’s face seemed vaguely familiar. She looked like someone. Corrine clicked through every possibility: Angela, Jason, Kerry, Rachel, Colin, Spencer. Spencer. She remembered thinking he looked more like Charles Franklin than his mother.
She finished her search, found Lucy in the living room, and held up the picture. “Do you know who this girl is with Angela?”
Lucy made a tsk sound. “Trisha Faulkner. Those two were inseparable back in the day.” She did not make it sound like a good thing.
“Do you know where she is now?”
“Nope. She used to come and go as she pleased, even as a teenager. She up and left for good right after high school. Can’t say I blame her. That whole family’s full of criminals.”
Corrine’s gaze drifted back to the photograph, wondering if it was possible. She ran the dates in her head. “So she’s been gone for about fourteen years?”
“Well, she was a year ahead of Angela, so, yeah, I guess that’s right. Time sure does fly.”