“I’m not lying to you. I may be leaving out some of the details, but—”
“So you’re sticking to your story that you had a pathetic evening last night?”
“I may have exaggerated that one.”
“And when I asked ‘What’s going on between you and Kylie?’ and you said ‘Nothing,’ was that an exaggeration, or were you just leaving out the details?”
“Maybe a little of both.”
“I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m starting to understand why you weren’t happy to see me this morning.”
“Can I explain?”
“Go for it,” she said. “They say the truth shall set you free.”
Maybe so, but in this case, I was afraid that the truth would only dig me a deeper hole. So I started with a half-truth.
“I’m investigating Kylie’s boyfriend,” I said. “I think he may be involved in that poker game robbery.”
“And this is something Cates asked you to do?” Cheryl said.
“Nobody asked me. I see a crime; I try to solve it. I’m a cop.”
“A cop who’s trying to put his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend in jail.”
“Bullshit. You think this is personal?”
“Zach, everything with you and Kylie is personal.”
“She’s my partner. If C.J. used her to get invited to that poker game, I think she’d want to know before he uses her again.”
“Did she ask you to protect her from C.J.?”
“Of course not.”
“Maybe that’s because she’s a grown woman who can take care of herself. She’s also a smart cop, which means if you suspect C.J. because he’s the new guy at the table, don’t you think that thought might have crossed Kylie’s mind as well?”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
Cheryl kept going. “You say you’re her partner, and you think she’d want to know if C.J. were using her. And yet you lied to her last night about what you were up to. What happens if you catch him? Are you going to arrest him?”
“No. Shelley has already said he won’t press charges.”
“So what do you think he’ll do?”
“Knowing Shelley, he’ll give the guy a chance to pay the money back and quietly slip out of town.”
“So C.J. will be out of Kylie’s life,” Cheryl said. “Mission accomplished, partner. You just better hope she never finds out that you’re the one who got rid of him.”
Clearly the truth had not set me free. I’d only told Cheryl part of what I’d been up to, and all I’d managed to do was piss her off. The rest would have to wait.
“We’d better get back to work,” I said. “Let’s finish this up another time.”
I opened the stairwell door, and we walked back into the squad room.
“Good timing,” Kylie said. “Aubrey’s hard drive is hooked up to a monitor. It’s ready for us in the conference room.”
I turned to Cheryl. “I’m glad you’re back. I’ll see you tonight.”
“What do you mean tonight? I’m going with you now.”
“With us? We’re going to screen Aubrey Davenport’s video files.”
“I know. That’s why Cates called me this morning. You’re two cops working a homicide where the victim had deep-rooted psychosexual disorders. Cates thought it might help if an actual psychologist sat in and screened the videos with you.”
“Great idea,” Kylie said, giving me a thumbs-up.
I followed my ex-girlfriend and my current girlfriend into the conference room so we could watch sex tapes together. It was definitely not the threesome of my dreams.
CHAPTER 59
Jason White, our resident computer genius, was waiting for us in the conference room. Normally, he’s a high-energy guy with a passion for mountain bike racing, complex techno problems, and caffeine, but this morning he looked as joyless as a funeral director.
“Good morning, Detectives, Dr. Robinson,” he said. “Brace yourselves. It’s going to be a long day.”
“What have you got?” I said, taking a seat.
“Aubrey Davenport was making a documentary. From what we could piece together, she video-ambushed thirty-two different men. She used code names, but some of them, like Judge Rafferty, are immediately recognizable. Given a little time, I’m sure our facial-recognition software can ID them all. We’ve organized the files according to date last opened. Every single one of them was opened after Aubrey’s death.”
“That would be our blackmailers’ handiwork,” Kylie said. “Can you tell if they edited anything?”
“They didn’t,” Jason said. “They just watched. The last file modified was Sunday, May seventh—the day before the murder. It’s Aubrey’s on-camera introduction to the film. It’s only two minutes and twenty-four seconds long. The rest of the footage is Aubrey having sex with these men. None of it is pretty. It’s still unedited and will take you about fourteen hours to screen. Less time if you high-speed through it. More time if you get sick to your stomach and have to walk away from it.”
“Let’s start with the introduction,” Cheryl said.
Jason double-clicked a file, and the screen faded to a shot of Aubrey Davenport sitting on a tall director’s chair. She wore dark gray pants and a soft dove-gray cashmere sweater. Her hair, which had been matted with dirt when I saw her on Roosevelt Island, was a rich chestnut and fell to her shoulders in waves. Her eyes were bright and intelligent, and she had just enough makeup on to make her camera-ready without looking made-up. She was attractive, intense, and very much alive.
She didn’t introduce herself. She just started talking to the camera in a clear, confident voice.
“My sex addiction began at the age of twelve, when I found my father’s stash of porn tapes. At that age I had a pretty good idea what sex was all about, but this wasn’t that. This was much more interesting: bondage, discipline, dominance, submission. My fascination was instantaneous, and I wanted to be like the women in those videos.”
The camera began to drift in slowly.
“By fourteen, I’d had several flings, but they were with clumsy teenage boys who wanted nothing more than to stick their dicks in a hole. And then I found Brad Overton. He was thirty-eight, a film producer, and I was sixteen, an unpaid summer intern. Brad was handsome, powerful, and when he came on to me, I couldn’t say no. I didn’t want to say no. Not to the drugs, not to the physical pain, not to the degradation. This was the sex I’d been dreaming of.”
As I got drawn into her story, I realized the camera was pulling me in as well. It had moved to a medium shot and was continuing to drift closer still.
“When the summer was over, my job ended, and Brad replaced me with another girl. I spent the next twenty-three years trying to replace Brad. One man after another, raging sadists who hurt me physically and emotionally, and all I could do was beg for more. Until one day…”
She paused, and I held my breath.
“Until one day,” she repeated, “I didn’t just want them to hurt me. I wanted them to kill me.”
At this point, the camera stopped moving. Aubrey’s face filled the screen. Her eyes were moist.
“I am an addict,” she said, her voice cracking slightly. “A slave to my sexual addiction. This documentary is about men who prey on women like me. It’s all shot with hidden cameras. I don’t have to tell you their names. You’ll know them. Watch them hurt and humiliate me. They think they’re in control. But I’m the one with the power. I’m the one doing the humiliating.”
She took one more long pause.
“I’ve been hurt enough,” she said. “This film is how I will heal.”
The screen went to black, and white type slowly faded up onto it.
SEX SLAVE
A film by Aubrey Davenport
CHAPTER 60
Nobody said a word.
Finally, Cheryl broke the silence. “That poor woman. What a tortured life.”
“Jason, how many of the men in these videos have y
ou positively identified?” Kylie asked.
“Nine,” Jason answered, “but we’ve only had the footage for a couple of hours. Give us a day, and we’ll ID them all.”
“Do you know what Janek Hoffmann looks like?”
“The guy you arrested? Yeah. We looked for him. He’s not in the mix.”
Kylie looked at me. “Do you still think Janek killed her?”
“There is plenty of circumstantial evidence,” I said. “Her car parked a block from his apartment is hard to ignore. Plus he doesn’t have an alibi.”
“He also doesn’t have a motive.”
“You don’t need a motive when you have a history of ’roid rage. Kylie, he beat her up bad in the past.”
“But this time she wasn’t beat up. And the murder wasn’t the result of a flash of rage. It was too well planned and executed. Aubrey caught thirty-two men on hidden camera, every one of whom had a better motive to kill her, steal her laptop, and make sure this documentary would never see the light of day.”
“If they knew it existed.”
“One of them did,” Kylie said. “Our job is to find out which one.”
“Or eliminate all thirty-two of them and keep trying to make a case that will convict Janek.”
“Guys, it’s going to be a long day,” Cheryl said. “Can you save the detective talk until after you actually know what you’re talking about?” She turned to Jason. “Play the tapes, please.”
“She shot the first one fourteen months ago, Doc,” Jason said. “The latest is dated two weeks before she died.”
“Start with the oldest one first,” Cheryl said. “There may be a narrative thread in there.”
On the other hand, it seemed more likely that the killer was a recent victim who caught Aubrey taping him and wasted no time eliminating her. But I wasn’t going to argue with Cheryl. I’d pissed her off enough for one day.
There was no thread. Just a theme: paraphilia. It’s a shrink term for what most people would call really weird sex. Some of the men were much older than Aubrey—father figures. No big surprise. The rest of them were more age-appropriate, but they were all authority figures: a deputy police commissioner, a college professor, and of course Judge Rafferty.
The sex ran the gamut from standard fare soft-core porn, to the more exotic BDSM, to perversions I’d never heard of, much less seen. I’d have been uncomfortable watching it on my own, but sitting through it with my girlfriend to the right of me and my ex-girlfriend to the left made it excruciating.
By noon we’d waded through fifteen videos. “Should we send out for lunch?” Jason asked.
“I can’t watch this and eat,” I said. “Let’s walk over to Gerri’s Diner.”
“Let’s watch one more, and we’ll be halfway through,” Cheryl said.
“Good idea,” I said.
The sixteenth film started like all the others. Aubrey had a pinhole camera in her shoulder bag that she’d turn on just before meeting up with her latest target. Then she’d give a brief cryptic introduction.
“This one may be the biggest hypocrite of them all,” Aubrey said. She was in an elevator. The doors opened; she walked down a hall and rang a doorbell. A man opened the door, but the camera was so close that all we could see was his shirt and tie.
The two of them walked into a second room, and then Aubrey removed the bag from her shoulder and carefully set it down at table height so that the camera would pick up the entire room.
Kylie and I both stood up. The man was not yet on camera, but we didn’t need to see him to make a positive ID. The curtained windows, the upholstered furniture, and the deep red Persian rug all looked familiar.
But the clincher was the giant poster of Dumbo the flying elephant hanging on the wall behind Dr. Morris Langford’s desk.
Cheryl leaned forward and pointed at the screen. “Zach,” she said. “I’ve been to that office.”
“We all have,” I said.
And then the man who told us how hard he had worked to help Aubrey overcome her addiction stepped into the frame, undid his belt, unzipped his fly, and let his pants drop to the floor.
“On your knees,” he said.
CHAPTER 61
I watched the video with my fists clenched. Of all the men who had taken advantage of Aubrey, Langford was the most despicable.
“For her, sex had to be loveless and punishing,” he had told us. He had analyzed her addiction, and then, privy to her darkest secrets, he made sure he gave her the high she was looking for.
“Sick son of a bitch,” Kylie said. “It proves he lied to us, but we still have to prove he killed her.”
Shrinks don’t shock easily, but Cheryl looked nothing short of horrified.
“Are you okay?” I said.
She rolled her eyes. Of course she wasn’t okay. Langford was a colleague, a highly regarded sex therapist. I could only imagine what she felt like watching him violate one of the basic moral principles set forth in the code of medical ethics.
“We’re about to go all detective on this case,” I said. “Do you want to stay?”
She smiled. “I’m fine, Zach. Well, maybe not fine. I’m sickened, but I’m not walking out on this.”
“Let’s start with his alibi,” I said, flipping through my notebook. “Aubrey parked her car in the garage in Brooklyn at 4:52 p.m. on May seventh. I don’t know how she got to Roosevelt Island, but most likely it was in Langford’s car. It was rush hour, so she couldn’t have gotten there much before five thirty. The body was called in shortly after nine thirty. When I spoke to Langford the following day, he said he had been at a medical conference in Albany. But was he there during that four-hour window when Aubrey was murdered?”
“Was there even a conference?” Kylie said.
“Hold on.” Jason began tapping away on his laptop. It took him a few seconds to come up with an answer. “There was a substance abuse conference at the Albany Marriott on May seventh and eighth,” he said.
“What’s the number of the hotel?” Kylie asked. “We can call and find out when he checked in.”
“We could do that,” Jason said, “and hope that we could convince some hotel desk clerk to cooperate without a warrant. Or…” His fingers flew across the keys.
Thirty seconds later, he found what he was looking for.
“Or,” he repeated, “we could check the good doctor’s credit card charges and find out that he bought gas at the Plattekill rest stop on the New York State Thruway at 10:34 p.m. on May seventh, and he checked into the Albany Marriott at 12:10 a.m. on May eighth.”
“It’s a three-hour drive from New York,” Kylie said. “I’d like to check his GPS and see where he started from.”
I turned to Cheryl. “What’s your take, Dr. Robinson?”
She took a deep breath and looked at the monitor. The screen was dark now, but the memory was vivid. Then she turned back to the group. “I think we were wrong to assume that all the men on these videos had a strong motive for killing Aubrey,” she said. “Judge Rafferty practically laughed it off. Most of the others would be subjected to public humiliation, but they’d bounce back. Men like that always do. People tend to be forgiving when politicians, sports heroes, and movie stars are caught up in a sex scandal. But they’d never forgive the one man Aubrey trusted to help her. Morey Langford’s private practice, his hospital affiliations, his broadcast contracts, would all disappear overnight. He’d be ruined. If you need a motive for murder that will stick with a jury, you’ve got one.”
“In that case,” I said, “I’m skipping lunch and the other sixteen videos and paying Dr. Langford a house call.”
“Let’s do it,” Kylie said, her adrenaline pumping—a fired-up female cop eager to race out the door to take down a repugnant male predator.
Cheryl, of course, shared none of Kylie’s enthusiasm. “Good luck,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, her eyes unable to hide the disillusionment she felt inside.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I
know how much you admired him.”
“I did. And now I don’t.” She took another deep breath. “Great police work, Detectives,” she said, her voice reenergized. “Now go get the bastard.”
CHAPTER 62
“Is he good to go?” Kylie asked as we sped across the 79th Street transverse.
It was the classic question. Translation: do we have enough evidence to arrest him?
“No,” I said. “The video doesn’t prove he killed her, and the fact that his Albany alibi is full of holes doesn’t put him on Roosevelt Island with Aubrey. All we can do is smile, be superpolite, and ask him if he’d be so kind as to come back with us to the station and help us with our investigation.”
“Superpolite doesn’t sound like me,” Kylie said.
“Good call,” I said. “Let me do the talking.”
Kylie turned onto West End Avenue and parked the car in front of the same hydrant she’d blocked the week before. This time a doorman came running out of the building, waving his arms. He was about thirty, tall, with large bony hands and a thin-lipped scowl on his face that looked like it was painted on permanently.
“You can’t park there, lady,” he yelled.
“Wanna bet?” she said, flashing her badge.
“So what’s the deal?” he said. “You two cops are going to lunch for what—two hours? I need that space for people who are getting in and out of cabs.”
“Relax, pal,” I said. “We’ll be out of here in ten minutes. We’re going to see one of your tenants.”
“Which one?”
“We’d rather not be announced,” Kylie said.
“And I’d rather your car weren’t blocking the front of my building. Life is full of disappointments, sweetheart. Which tenant?”
I’d never seen him before. He hadn’t been on the door the night we first visited Langford. But I knew the type. Somewhere along the way he’d been soured on cops, and Kylie’s in-your-face approach didn’t help change his mind.
“Dr. Langford,” I said.
He flashed a victory scowl. “Your names?”