Such a Perfect Wife Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgments

  Praise

  About the Author

  Also by Kate White

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  SHE SENSES DANGER EVEN BEFORE SHE HEARS THE SOUND.

  It’s a gorgeous morning, cloudless and just cool enough, perfect for a run. She left the house eager to be on the road, especially after skipping the day before.

  But it seems weirdly quiet to her, quieter than it should be. The few houses she passes sit forlornly, their windows dark, and so far she hasn’t encountered a single car or cyclist. Just up ahead there are woods on each side, and though the wind is moving through the tree leaves—she can see it—she can’t hear the rustling. It’s as if someone has turned off all the sound today, except that of her footfalls on the blacktop. And her breathing.

  Her body feels off, too. She’s been jogging for a mile, her white T-shirt already damp with sweat, and it’s usually by this point that the endorphins have kicked in, or whatever it is that creates that floating, free-form sense of calm and elation she always runs to meet.

  But elation hasn’t happened. Rather, she feels a low-grade unease, almost like a hum. An unexplainable instinct that she shouldn’t be here on this road—this usually serene, peaceful place—at this exact moment in time.

  I should turn back, she thinks. She’s only done that once before, when she couldn’t massage away a cramp in her calf muscle. She’d hobbled home, annoyed at herself for not having stretched enough beforehand, and held an ice pack to her leg. Within minutes the cramp had vanished and she’d deliberated going out again, but it seemed as if her chance had come and gone.

  Yes, go home, she tells herself. Trust your gut. She’ll run later, when people are home from work and out in their yards.

  It’s then that she hears the car come up behind her. She sidesteps to the left a little, still running, waiting for it to pass. But it doesn’t. Instead, the car slows, as if following her. An image flashes in her mind of a mountain lion, stalking its prey, closing in on its kill from the rear.

  The driver’s just worried about hitting me, she tells herself. She turns her head to see. But already her heart is pounding in fear.

  Chapter 1

  THE PHOTO OF SHANNON BLAINE I’D COME ACROSS ON the website for her area newspaper reminded me of a woman I used to see running on my block in Chelsea, on her way to the west side jogging path: slim and fit and pretty, with long butter-colored hair, and—if appearances could be believed—totally at ease in her own skin.

  On a warmish Monday morning in late September, Shannon had apparently set off for a jog along a series of roads near her home in Lake George, New York, a small town thirteen miles from Glens Falls and roughly two hundred miles north of New York City. Running was something she did most days, her me-time, I supposed, after dropping off her two kids at school.

  Except, on this day, she never returned.

  Here’s what else I knew from the reading I’d done about the case: The first time anyone realized the thirty-four-year-old mother had vanished was at three o’clock, when she failed to collect her kids from school. The assistant principal, assuming that the parents simply had their wires crossed about who was handling pickup that day, alerted the husband, Cody Blaine, thirty-seven. No mix-up, Cody told her. Though he said he hadn’t spoken to Shannon since breakfast, he knew she planned to be there. After reportedly trying and failing to reach his wife himself, he arranged for his sister-in-law to head to the school as he raced home from his office. The front door was locked, Shannon’s car was in the driveway, and though her cell phone was missing, her purse lay on the kitchen counter. There was not a single clue to indicate her whereabouts.

  Along with two friends, Cody searched the roads within a roughly ten-mile radius of his home—this was later verified by the two male friends. Failing to find Shannon, Cody alerted the sheriff’s department. Shortly afterward, an official search was initiated, which as of today, Wednesday, involved dozens of law enforcement members, hundreds of volunteers, police choppers, and canines.

  I’d covered several other cases in which a woman had gone missing, so I knew law enforcement was not only busting their butts searching for Shannon but also questioning registered sex offenders in the area. Sexual predators were known to patrol areas in cars for hours, hunting for an opportunity to strike, and one such predator could have spotted Shannon on the road while she was jogging and snatched her before she barely knew what was happening.

  And surely they were also checking out Cody. Was he a womanizer? Had he recently doubled Shannon’s life insurance policy? Was there a history of domestic troubles or abuse?

  Cody, according to the paper, had only a partial alibi for Monday morning. After dropping off some paperwork with his assistant at his office, he supposedly drove about thirty minutes south to inspect a plot of land he was thinking of purchasing for his business. No one saw him on that site, but his assistant reported that he had called her twice from the road to touch base about work issues and had sounded “perfectly normal.”

  It’s true what you’ve heard, by the way. That the husband is almost always a person of interest in a wife’s disappearance and/or homicide, even if the cops don’t announce it. Maybe Cody had a temper or was having an affair with someone he’d managed to find even more tantalizing than Shannon and he knew that divorce would cost him a bundle or end up restricting access to his kids. Or a divorce might have even required that he step down from his position as president of Baker Beverage Distributors, which Shannon’s deceased father had founded and designated his son-in-law to run. There was a decent chance Cody had blood on his hands.

  Or at the very least, blood in the trunk of his car.

  I’d been handed the chance to cover the story on Tuesday night by a new online publication called Crime Beat. It was owned and run by a cocksure former journalist named Dodson Crowe, who’d inherited a bundle from his father and was using the cash to call his own shots now. I was impressed with the un-cheesy tone and quality of the site, and when Crowe had approached me, I’d eagerly agreed to freelance for him if the right story presented itself.

  It had taken me about two seconds to say yes to this one. “If we’re lucky, it’ll have a few nice layers,” Crowe had said on the phone. “Maybe not as crazy as Gone Girl, but there might be something weird or kinky going on. Especially with the husband.”

  Yes, maybe, I thought. But I never believed in letting my imagination off the leash too soon on a story. Better to dig, listen, and see where all the threads led me to instead.

  I’d spent a few hours that night scanning upstate media coverage of the case, much of it in the area newspaper, the Glens Falls Post Star, by a reporter named Alice Hatfield, though the Albany-area TV stations were in on the action as well and had posted updates on their websites. I also watched a video of the press conference the county sheriff had conducted earlier that day, and searched for whatever I could find out about Cody Blaine, which turned out to be very little. He was
originally from Texas and had served with the army in Afghanistan.

  Finally, I searched to see if there’d been any other incidents of missing women in the area. Nothing noteworthy surfaced. About ten years ago, two twenty-year-old females had disappeared from a campground on the east side of Lake George, but the police never found any evidence of a crime and eventually concluded that they’d likely taken off for parts unknown in search of their next big adventure.

  I left my apartment in Manhattan early Wednesday morning after espressos and bagels with Beau Regan, the man I’d been living with—mostly high on the blissful scale—for the past couple of years. (At thirty-six, I felt kind of goofy calling him my “boyfriend.”) Beau was also leaving the city later that day, bound for Bogotá, Colombia, to make a documentary about several contemporary Colombian painters. I was going to miss him, and I welcomed the distraction of my assignment upstate. We kissed each other goodbye and hugged tightly before I left, promising to text each other when we’d both arrived at our destinations.

  The drive north in my Jeep Cherokee, mostly along the New York State Thruway, took roughly four hours, and I found myself growing more pumped up with each mile. My first job after college, fourteen years ago, had actually been as a junior reporter for the Albany Times Union, an hour south of where I was headed. I’d been assigned to the police beat, covering everything from drug busts to hit-and-runs to homicides. From that time on, true crime became my genre of choice. I’ve never understood exactly why, but I’m drawn to tales of the dark things people do, fascinated by how needs turn twisted and monstrous and end up wreaking such havoc. And the puzzles of those stories captivate me, too—figuring out the who and the where and the how and the why. I have an insatiable desire to know, even if the answers sometimes chill my blood a few degrees.

  After a stint in newspapers, I moved to Manhattan and began writing for magazines, but with print publications in free fall these days, I’d turned to writing true-crime books, most recently A Model Murder, based on one of the cases I’d covered. Though reporting for Crime Beat called for temporarily ditching the research for my next book, it also meant covering a story in real time again, something I hadn’t done much of lately. As the scenery whipped by my window, I realized just how much I’d missed it. The game was afoot, and it felt good to be in the mix.

  What I didn’t love was the fact that I’d be arriving two full days after Shannon had disappeared, but I had every intention of catching up fast. And with any luck, the story would feature the kind of riveting layers Dodson was itching for.

  A big chunk of the route north was fairly monotonous, but about twenty minutes from the end, I took a curve in the road and the Adirondack Mountains suddenly slid into view, these blue-green giants that made me catch my breath. During my stint in Albany I’d never managed to make it this far north, which I could see now was a shame. Since it was only late September, the trees hadn’t changed colors yet, but many of the leaves were tipped with yellow and rust, and some of the tangled brush below was already vivid shades of burgundy and lipstick red.

  As I neared the village of Lake George, I finally caught a glimpse of the lake, the lapis-blue water sparkling in the sun. But I probably wasn’t going to see much of it today. My immediate destination was the hastily organized volunteer command center, a.k.a. Dot’s soft-serve ice cream shop, which apparently had closed for business after Labor Day. I abandoned the highway at exit twenty-one and continued north on Route 9N.

  It was noon when I finally pulled into the parking lot at Dot’s, and I was lucky to find a spot—the place was packed with cars, vans, SUVs, and pickup trucks. Even with my window up I could hear the insistent buzz of a helicopter circling in the sky above. Instantly I felt a double dopamine rush from simply being there. I was smack in the middle of a missing-person case that was packed with not only known unknowns but hopefully some tantalizing unknown unknowns as well.

  Before stepping out of my Jeep, I stole a couple of minutes to suss out the scene at the far end of the lot. Volunteer centers for missing-person searches, at least from my experience, were generally set up in church basements, hotels, or volunteer firehouses, any space big enough to handle the swarm of people coming and going. A soft-serve ice cream shop was a pretty surreal choice—I mean, there was a giant chocolate-dipped cone with two eyes and a smile greeting everyone from above the door. Considering what was going on, it seemed like a smiley face above the gates of hell. But the place reportedly had been offered by a friend of Shannon’s family.

  I counted a half-dozen people inside the shop, and about thirty more milling around near the front of the building, under an overhang with cedar picnic tables arranged beneath it. They were dressed in jeans and sturdy-looking shoes, and for the most part their expressions were grim. Searchers, I assumed, who would be covering a broader area than had first been examined by authorities.

  Of course that assumed Shannon actually had gone running Monday. At the press conference yesterday, the sheriff explained that Shannon’s oldest child, an eight-year-old boy named Noah, told authorities that when his mother dropped him and his six-year-old sister, Lilly, at school, she’d been wearing a white T-shirt, dark shorts, and running shoes, and Cody Blaine had reported that those items weren’t in her dresser. But so far the authorities had failed to locate a single person who’d noticed Shannon on the road that morning. According to the owner of the Lake Shore Motel, who was interviewed by the Post Star, Shannon Blaine crossed the road in front of his establishment every day—but not this past Monday. He claimed to have turned over security camera footage to the police that backed up his statement.

  Had Shannon changed her route for some reason? Had she been abducted before making it as far as the motel? Or had she never actually left her house for a run that day?

  I squinted through my windshield, searching for anyone I might recognize from photos I’d viewed online. Cody Blaine didn’t appear to be here. Nor was Shannon’s mother. But I was pretty sure that a woman beneath the overhang was her older sister, Kelly Claiborne, who, I’d learned, worked as a reading specialist. As I watched, she yanked a handful of sheets of paper from a cardboard box and began to distribute them. I realized that the people gathered around weren’t searchers after all but rather volunteers who would soon be tacking up or handing out flyers about Shannon.

  It was time to get my ass in gear and cover as much ground as possible before the next press conference, scheduled for five o’clock.

  When I swung open the door of my Jeep, I found that the air, laden with the scent of resin from the pine trees all around me, seemed about ten degrees cooler than it had been in Manhattan, a bigger change than I’d anticipated. I felt suddenly stupid in my pink cashmere tee, tan skirt, and suede mules. But I certainly wasn’t going to take the time to drive to my motel to check in and change.

  I grabbed a jean jacket from the back seat and made my way toward Kelly. She had long hair like her sister, though hers was brown, and pulled back today in a ponytail. She was tall—at least five ten—and fairly slim, dressed in jeans, running shoes, and a zipped navy sweater. From a distance, her stance and decisive-looking gestures gave her the look of someone organizing a political rally, but as I drew closer, I could see from her pinched expression how distressed she was.

  “Who wants to head up to Ticonderoga?” she called out, waving a fresh stack of flyers. Next to her was a box loaded with thumbtacks.

  “I can take that area if you want,” a middle-aged guy volunteered. “You want me to just tack these to trees and stuff?”

  “Trees, utility poles. But even better is getting them into shops and restaurants. That’s where the real traffic is.”

  “Gotcha.”

  “Talk to the manager or owner, engage them. Tell them about Shannon if they don’t know already. Encourage them to call if they’ve seen anyone remotely fitting her description.”

  She had a real no-nonsense style and a precise way with her words, perhaps reflecting how she work
ed with her reading students.

  I hung back, waiting for Kelly to go through the procedure with a couple dozen people. After the last one departed, she let out a tense sigh and I stepped forward.

  “Kelly, hi, my name is Bailey Weggins.”

  She ran her gaze over me, somewhat distractedly.

  “Great, thanks for coming,” she said. “But do you have any other shoes? Those are gonna be a bitch to canvass in.”

  “I’m actually a reporter. With Crime Beat. I was hoping you had a few minutes to talk.”

  “Is that a TV show?”

  “No, an online publication. We want to cover the story, of course, but we’re interested in getting the word out about Shannon as well.”

  She scrunched up her mouth and nodded at the same time, one gesture almost contradicting the other. I assumed she had mixed feelings about doing interviews. They took up time she could be using to corral and organize volunteers, but she was also eager for Shannon’s image to be displayed as widely as possible.

  “Give me a couple of minutes. I need to check in with a few people inside, and then we can talk.”

  I thanked her, and as she hurried into the building, I plucked a flyer from the box. The word Missing ran boldly in red above two color photos of Shannon, both solo, which captured her gorgeous blond hair and grass-green eyes. At the very bottom was a promise of a reward—$15,000 for any information leading to her whereabouts—as well as the tip-line phone number and email address.

  “Well, well,” I heard a sly male voice announce behind me. “Look who’s in town.”

  I spun around to discover Matt Wong, an obnoxious reporter who was now doing his own stint at the Albany Times Union. He’d recently taken a gig there after years of freelancing in New York City, where we’d sometimes crossed paths. I should have known he’d turn up here.

  “Hi, Matt. How you doing?”

  “Really, really well . . . Shannon’s not a friend of Kim’s, is she?”

  “Kim?” I asked, having no clue what he was talking about.