“Yes. The medical examiner made a note on those. Hold on.”
Walt sat down next to her and pulled the autopsy report from the box. He paged through it for a moment.
“Here.” Walt placed the report on the desk and pointed at the sentence where Dr. Lockard had made his remarks. “The medical examiner described the knots as alpine butterfly knots. He said they were commonly used in mountain climbing.”
“He’s wrong,” Avery said.
“About what?”
“They’re not mountain climbing knots, they’re sailing knots. I tie them nearly every weekend.”
“Sailing knots?”
“Yes. They’re bowline knots. I’m sure of it.” Avery looked up from the photos and spoke in a singsong voice. “Up through the rabbit hole, round the big tree; down through the rabbit hole and off goes he.”
Walt raised his eyebrows.
“It’s the jingle used to remember how to tie the knots. I learned it when I was a kid in Sister Bay. Telling you about sailing camp jogged my memory.”
“Okay,” Walt said, shrugging his shoulders. “So they’re sailing knots. What does that tell you?”
“It tells me that whoever tied them had to have used both hands.”
“Right. The medical examiner made the same point. The knots could only be tied using both hands, and it was therefore impossible for Cameron Young to have tied his own hands. It’s one of the ways we ruled out suicide.”
“So, where’s the blood?” Avery asked.
“The blood? I showed you.” Walt pointed back to the photos. “We found heavy droplets of Victoria Ford’s blood in the carpeting next to the safe.”
“Yes, I see that. And that’s a lot of blood dripped onto the carpeting. But if I have the sequence of events correct—that Victoria cut herself first, while she was severing the rope so that she could tie it to the safe in order to drop Cameron Young over the balcony—wouldn’t there be evidence of this injury on the rope? If Victoria cut herself to the extent that all this blood dripped onto the carpeting of the closet, where’s the rest of the blood in the crime scene?”
Walt cocked his head and leaned back in his chair, Avery could tell, heavy in thought.
“This bowline knot she supposedly tied, for instance,” Avery continued. “Just as the medical examiner concluded, she would have had to use both hands to tie it. If one of her hands was bleeding, you’d think the rope would have Victoria’s blood smeared all over it. It’s a white rope and there’s not a drop of blood on it. Or on the safe. And you’d expect somewhere on Cameron Young’s body there would also be evidence of this injury Victoria supposedly suffered just before lugging the body to the balcony. No?”
Walt rubbed a palm over his cheek but didn’t speak. It was then that Avery knew she had a story she could run with. If a few questions about the crime scene could plant doubt in the mind of the lead detective, it was certainly enough to captivate a television audience of fifteen million. And if a cursory look through the case against Victoria Ford had raised such glaring problems, it was certainly possible that other discrepancies were waiting to be discovered in the Cameron Young file.
Something else occurred to Avery as well. A growing sense of obligation. Victoria Ford’s voice echoed in her mind again.
Find a way, Em. Find a way to prove it. Please? Just find a way to prove to the world that I’m not the monster they’ve painted me to be.
CHAPTER 40
Manhattan, NY Saturday, July 3, 2021
THE ONLINE STALKING COULD EASILY BE ACCOMPLISHED ON HER OWN laptop, and in her own hotel room—alone and isolated in her own Avery Mason bubble of safety. But tonight she refused to allow rational thought to win out over mirthful. She and Walt felt they had made a small break in the case, and she felt a thrill from working together. She was enjoying his company and knew that working late in his hotel room was a potential conduit to intimacy. When this first occurred to her after they finished reviewing the crime scene photos, Avery’s instincts had been to grab her purse and leave, her mind dominated as it were with troubling worries that being intimate with a man would somehow expose her as a fraud. But she decided that her entire existence could not be spent in a perpetual state of flux and fear. At some point she would have to either merge her two lives—the fraudulent with the honest—or decide to leave one of them behind.
This battle was taking place inside her head as she sat next to Walt on the couch while he typed the names into the search engine. They had decided to start with the spouses, and it didn’t take long to find Cameron Young’s widow and Victoria Ford’s widower.
“Jasper Ford is a real estate agent here in New York,” Walt said. “That’s how they met.”
“Who?”
“The Fords and the Youngs. They met when Jasper Ford sold Cameron and Tessa the Catskills home. They became friends after that. Tessa Young mentioned it during one of her interviews.”
They stalked Jasper Ford for a while but found nothing interesting. Eventually, they turned their attention to Tessa Young. Cameron Young’s widow was a fifty-five-year-old professor of English literature at Columbia. She was remarried and, according to Whitepages.com, lived in a walk-up in Hell’s Kitchen. She had a twenty-year-old daughter who was a junior at Boston College.
“Look at this,” Walt said. He had Tessa’s Facebook page open and was scrolling through her timeline. “Nearly every post from this summer was made on her sailboat. And she belongs to the New York Yacht Club.”
Avery leaned over to look at the images.
“That’s another part of their history,” Walt said. “Tessa and Cameron were avid sailors. They invited Jasper and Victoria out for a sail after they closed on the Catskills mansion. They became friends after that.”
“The lady would certainly know how to tie a bowline knot,” Avery said. “And if Tessa had found out about the affair . . .”
Walt sat back from his computer and took a deep breath. “Let’s not jump to conclusions we can’t prove. Other than a flimsy theory on knots, nothing puts Tessa Young at the crime scene.”
Avery looked back at the monitor. “Maybe I’ll reach out to her.”
“And ask about a twenty-year-old homicide you’re attempting to tie her to? Really bad idea.”
“I’m not tying anyone to anything,” Avery said. “But Tessa and Jasper are worth talking to. They’re on my list of people to contact.”
“Not if you’re taking the angle that Tessa Young could be involved with her husband’s death. It’s a bad idea, Avery.”
The way he said her name, staring at her, sent a flutter through her chest.
“Look,” he said. “If we really think there’s something to any of this, we root out the details and go to the authorities to show them what we have. I still have plenty of contacts. But bowline knots and the absence of blood on the rope are not going to change any minds, especially twenty years later. Getting a case reopened is a monumental task. Before I reach out to any of my old contacts, we’re going to need something stronger than a lack of blood on a couple of sailing knots. The fact that Victoria Ford’s blood was on the carpeting will trump any lack of blood elsewhere. We need something more.”