“Shhh!” Nessa shushed her.
Spencer Harding was born John Anderson, the only child of a Manhattan orthodontist. He spent the first fifteen years of his life in this middle-class building on the Upper West Side. At three bedrooms, the family’s apartment was spacious by New York standards, but hardly ostentatious. Classmates from P.S. 333 remember young John as a studious, sensitive child with a passion for art. He’s said to have started his own collection at the age of ten, purchasing a work that would one day be valued at over six million dollars.
But John Anderson’s idyllic childhood wasn’t to last. Shortly after his sixteenth birthday, his parents were murdered in a tragic home invasion. The killers were never captured. John received a small fortune in life insurance, which was placed in a trust he could claim when he turned eighteen. He lived with a classmate’s family until he graduated from high school. Then, John Anderson disappeared.
“How about that?” Jo sneered. “His parents were murdered. He’s fucking Batman.”
“If he’d been fucking Batman, this would be much more interesting,” Harriett said, and they both cracked up.
“You two obviously aren’t listening,” Nessa said. “Good old Spencer must have murdered his parents.”
“You think?” Jo asked.
“Pretty sure,” Nessa said.
“Yeah, sounds about right,” Harriett said. “No one gets rich that fast without having blood on his hands.”
No one seems to have seen or spoken to John for the next ten years—until the day he reappeared in Manhattan. Now, however, he was calling himself Spencer Harding. And thanks to extensive plastic surgery, he was virtually unrecognizable. He’d created a new identity for himself—one he fiercely protected.
In 2001, a new gallery opened in Chelsea. Its handsome young owner seemed to have an inexhaustible source of private funding. Soon his client list rivaled those of far more established dealers. Their curiosity piqued, a few of his competitors hired private investigators. But no one could ever find out much about the mysterious Spencer Harding. Though often photographed out on the town with models and actresses, he avoided publicity and never gave interviews. Those who knew him say he rarely spoke about himself or his background. The little clues he dropped never added up to much. One of Spencer’s clients was certain he’d been raised in L.A. Another had been told he was English by birth. But DNA evidence has now confirmed that Spencer Harding was indeed John Anderson, the orphaned teen from the Upper West Side.
By 2005, Spencer Harding had become one of the wealthiest men in the country and the handsome bad boy of New York society. But many Americans first heard his name four years ago, when he married the Olympic athlete Rosamund Stillgoe. It was, by all accounts, a whirlwind romance. Depressed after a torn ligament kept her from competing in the Olympics, Rosamund was swept off her feet by the dashing multimillionaire, whose penthouse apartment famously featured its own helipad. Little did she know that her Prince Charming would turn out to be a monster—or that the helicopter in which he’d whisked her away would one day serve as his coffin.
“Who writes this shit?” Jo asked. “Is there some kind of style guide you can buy if you’re hired to write for the Dead Woman Industrial Complex?”
“I find the music quite captivating,” Harriett said. “That lonesome guitar twang really speaks to the unfolding tragedy.”
“Ladies,” Nessa chided them. “Focus?”
Later on Newsnight: Rosamund Harding cut off contact with her family and disappeared from public view. Was her disappearance by choice? Or was she being held captive by her husband?
Jo sobered instantly at the sight of the Hardings’ wedding portrait. “Poor Rosamund,” she muttered. “If only we’d known what she was trying to tell us with that apple. We could have rescued her from the Pointe on Memorial Day.”
“I wish we had,” Harriett agreed. “I underestimated her husband. I didn’t think he’d kill her. I can’t make the same mistake again.”
“So you don’t know what’s going to happen?” Jo said, just to confirm.
“I see the war, not the battles,” Harriett replied.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Jo asked.
“Stop!” Nessa once again brought them to order. The show had begun again with news footage taken the day Nessa had discovered the girl in blue.
On May sixth, three local women stopped along Danskammer Beach. They took a little-used path that led from the road to the water. Along the way, they discovered a nude corpse in a thick black trash bag, its drawstring tied in an elaborate bow. The body belonged to a young Black female, whom authorities estimated to be between the ages of seventeen and nineteen. There were signs of intercourse, but no wounds or bruising on the body.
Chief John Rocca of the Mattauk Police Department says the medical examiner had no trouble determining the cause of death.
Jo recoiled at the sight of the police chief in his formal uniform, sitting across from the show’s host. Square-jawed, laconic, and handsome, Rocca was the type of man that movies and television had trained her to trust. She knew millions of Newsnight viewers would take what he said as the gospel truth.
“How did the girl die, Chief Rocca?”
“She died of a fentanyl overdose.”
“Given the cause of death, did you have any theories about what might have happened?”
“Yes, sir. We initially believed the body belonged to a sex worker who had likely overdosed in the company of a client. We thought the man must have panicked and disposed of the body off Danskammer Beach Road. That theory seemed to be proven when a woman came forward and claimed the girl was her daughter.”
“Was the girl her daughter?”
“No. The moment I met the woman, there was something about her story that didn’t quite click with me. DNA tests later confirmed that she was not related to our Jane Doe in any way.”
“Then who was the mystery woman?”
“An actress paid to impersonate the girl’s mother.”
That’s when the case, which had seemed so clear-cut, suddenly began to look much more complicated.
“You located the woman and brought her in for questioning?”
“We did,” said Rocca.
“And what did she tell you?”
“That she’d been employed by a man named Danill Chertov.”
Jo paused the program on an image of Chertov. “Spencer Harding’s bodyguard!” Jo exclaimed. “I fucking knew it!”
“Yeah, but there’s something wrong with all of this.” Nessa looked spooked. “The police are claiming they did DNA tests. But Franklin and I were the ones who had the tests done. The department refused.”
Harriett snorted.
“What?” Jo demanded.
“Nothing,” Harriett said.
“No, seriously.” Nessa had grown used to her friend’s bizarre sense of humor, but this time Harriett had gone too far. “What do you think is funny about all of this?”
“You’ll see,” Harriett said. “Continue, please.”