“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 you 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?”