Manhattan, NY Saturday, July 3, 2021
HER THOUGHTS WERE DISJOINTED AS SHE WALKED THE LONELY streets of Midtown on her way to the Grand Hyatt. Walt Jenkins had called while Avery was racing through the rest of Victoria Ford’s manuscripts and finding, astonishingly, that each had been published as a Natalie Ratcliff novel, starring the portly and loveable private eye named Peg Perugo. Avery couldn’t quite get her mind around what it all meant, other than that Natalie Ratcliff, in addition to being one of the world’s best-selling authors, was also a plagiarizing fraud.
With confusion still clouding her thoughts, she turned on Forty-Second Street and came to the entrance of the Hyatt. She rode the elevator to the twentieth floor and knocked on number 2021. The door opened and Avery quickly forgot about Natalie Ratcliff and Victoria Ford, Peg Perugo and plagiarism. Walt was dressed in jeans and an untucked button-down shirt. Avery noticed a small nick on his freshly shaven right cheek, and for some insane reason had the urge to lick her thumb and press it against his cheek to wipe the mark away. The rational part of her mind intervened with a proverbial slap to the face before she could proceed.
“I think you and I are the only ones left in this city,” he said.
Avery pushed the thoughts away and smiled. “It’s eerie, isn’t it?”
“Very. Come on in.”
Avery walked through the doorway and into the one-bedroom suite. “Nice digs.”
“I got rid of my apartment a couple of years ago,” Walt said, closing the door. “Rent in Jamaica is next to nothing, so I’ve been sitting on a little nest egg. I didn’t know how long I was going to be here, so I splurged. When you and I are done with the Cameron Young case, I think I’m going to stick around and see my parents and brother. It’s been a while.
“The case is over on the desk,” he said, pointing to the corner where a cardboard box rested on the table by the window. “The hard evidence is still in storage, but this is everything else. The original documents have been digitized, scanned, and transferred to the BCI database. These are copies, but they represent almost all the documents that made up the case against Victoria Ford.”
“Almost?” Avery asked as she walked over to the desk and sat down.
“This is everything the Shandaken police had in storage. The Cameron Young investigation was run through their office as a way to keep the peace. The local departments didn’t love when the BCI took over a case from them, so as lead detective I allowed the Shandaken chief to be the face of the investigation. I’m still waiting for a call back from the district attorney’s office to see if they have any additional documents. Twenty years later, they may be long gone. But trust me”—Walt pointed at the box on the table—“this will keep us busy for a while.”
“Can you take me through some of this?”
Walt pulled a chair over and sat next to her. “Sure. We can go start to finish. How much do you know about the murder?”
“Everything you and I discussed last night, plus what Emma Kind told me originally about it. I’ve also talked with Roman Manchester, the attorney who was set to defend Victoria.”
“Sounds like you know a lot then. How much of this stuff do you want to see?”
“Everything.”
“Okay,” Walt said. “Just a warning. The crime scene photos are disturbing.”
Avery nodded. She’d seen many crime scenes in the last few years. “I’m good.”
Walt reached into the box and pulled out a folder of photos. Avery imagined her camera guys and production team laying out the contents of this box and taking stills of the documents, highlighting in yellow the areas of transcript interviews and police reports that pertained to the story she wanted to tell. She imagined startling images of crime scene photos flashing onto television screens across America as Victoria Ford’s story unfolded.
“Here’s the body, the balcony, and the master bedroom of the Youngs’ Catskills home,” Walt said. “This is what I found when I arrived on the scene.”
Avery pulled the photo of Cameron Young hanging from the balcony so that it was in front of her. It was, indeed, disturbing. The lifeless body was suspended in broad daylight as morning fog drifted from the grass beneath him. His head torqued by the rope into a grotesque angle. As she paged through the other photos, they took her from the back lawn of the Catskills mansion, through the house, up the stairs, and into the master bedroom. She saw the rope stretched tight and running taut through the room, from the open balcony doors to the walk-in closet. She paged through the photos until she found the ones taken inside the closet, where the end of the rope was tethered to the leg of a sturdy-looking safe.
“Take me through your findings in the bedroom,” she said.
Walt leaned closer, so that he could point at each of the pictures. She noticed the scent of aftershave.
“The rope used to hang Cameron Young was determined to be from an original bundle that was seventy-five feet long when purchased. It had been cut a number of times with a serrated blade.” Walt pointed to the photo where an ominous-looking kitchen knife lay on the carpeting next to the safe. A yellow evidence placard stood next to it. “The knife came from a butcher’s block in the kitchen and had Victoria Ford’s fingerprints on it. Her blood was discovered on the carpet.”
Avery felt him lean a bit closer to shuffle through the pictures and find the image of the bloodied carpet next to the safe.
“The blood here was matched to Victoria Ford through DNA. The theory was that in her rush to set up the scene as a suicide, she cut herself while using the knife to sever the rope.”
“So this blood,” Avery said. “It was the main evidence that put Victoria at the scene?”
“The blood, and urine found in the toilet. Both matched Victoria’s DNA.”
Avery remembered Victoria Ford’s voice from the answering machine recording.