“He did,” Avery said.
“What the hell does that mean?”
Avery looked over at Walt. “It’s their safe word.”
Walt raised his eyebrows.
“Couples who partake in BDSM sex create a safe word—a random word they utter whenever things are getting too rough or dangerous. As soon as the word is spoken, the game is over.”
On the monitor, Victoria Ford crouched down next to Cameron Young, dropped the whip on the floor, and unbuckled the restraints that held his wrists to the bottom of the boarding horse. A moment earlier, she was delivering what Avery interpreted as playful punishment. But one slash of the whip had gone too far and they quickly ended things. Now she was rubbing his back.
Are you okay?
Victoria’s voice came through loudly from the speakers. Too loudly, as Walt had maxed out the volume a moment earlier trying to capture Cameron Young’s muffled voice. He quickly turned the volume down. On the screen, Cameron Young climbed off the apparatus and he and Victoria walked off screen. A door could be heard opening, likely the bathroom. The video played on in silence.
“He got spooked,” Avery said. “It looked pretty innocent until that last strike with the whip. It went a little too far.”
Walt sat back on the couch, rubbing a hand over his chin. Finally, he looked at Avery. “So their role-playing had limits.”
“It appears that way. Which doesn’t jive with the crime scene and the violent whip marks noted on Cameron Young’s body.”
Avery and Walt continued to stare at the monitor. The spanking horse sat in the otherwise empty shot of the studio. Victoria and Cameron had disappeared a few seconds earlier.
“Why didn’t they stop the video when they were done?” Avery asked.
“What do you mean?”
“They were supposedly creating a sex tape to watch back later for their own kicks. But when things went too far and the fun ended, why didn’t one of them stop the camera?”
The screen suddenly went black. Avery noticed the confused look on Walt’s face as he leaned over and tapped the mouse pad to rewind the video to the spot where Victoria and Cameron walked off screen. He pointed to the timer on the bottom of the screen and then fast-forwarded the video until just before the screen went blank.
“Sixty seconds,” he said. “Exactly sixty seconds.”
“What’s that mean?” Avery asked.
“Motion activated cameras are triggered when the sensor detects movement. They continue recording as long as motion is detected. When the movement stops triggering the sensor, the camera shuts off after sixty seconds.”
Avery looked over at him, and then it hit her. “That’s why the shot was off centered. They didn’t know they were being recorded.”
CHAPTER 48
Manhattan, NY Sunday, July 4, 2021
THEY BOTH NEEDED A BREAK AFTER WATCHING THE VIDEO OF VICTORIA Ford and Cameron Young. Avery stepped into the bathroom to freshen up after Walt suggested they find a proper bar that served proper drinks. It wasn’t the video that had him thirsting for alcohol, but the conclusions they had made during the viewing. Watching the video today, far removed from his role as lead detective on the case, and without the enormous pressures he felt at the time to find answers, it was easy to see that the video had been recorded in secret. It was easy to see that neither Victoria nor Cameron knew they were being recorded.
Walt lifted the plastic evidence bag that had contained the thumb drive and read the writing scrawled across it, indicating the date and time the evidence had been logged. The label on the bag also included the location where the thumb drive had been found—in the desk drawer of Tessa Young’s office at the Catskills mansion. Why, Walt wondered, would Cameron Young make a sex video of himself and his mistress and then keep it in his wife’s desk drawer?
Combined with the other problems he and Avery had uncovered about the case, the revelations they made about the video were enough to make him believe he’d gotten his first homicide investigation terribly wrong. Was it worse that the accused was dead rather than in prison? If convicted and incarcerated, at the very least there was hope that some sliver of justice could still be served by bringing the new evidence forward and attempting to overturn the conviction. In this case, though, there was no way to provide Victoria Ford with justice. Posthumous exonerations were as valuable as a winning lottery ticket one day past its expiration date.
Walt pulled the thumb drive out of the computer and dropped it back into the evidence bag. Then he suddenly realized that with Avery in the bathroom, two hours after he’d arrived at the Lowell, he was alone in her hotel room. He still sat on the small sofa with Avery’s laptop open on the coffee table in front of him. He looked around the room. He examined the bed where the stacks of Avery’s research rested in separate piles. He noticed a paperback novel on the top of each pile of paper. On the desk near the window was another heap of papers. Next to the laptop on the coffee table were pages containing the details of the Victoria Ford identification.
Walt reached for his breast pocket. This time he did not just feel for the small, thin box that was there, he removed it and held it in his hand. His heart rate picked up. Simply holding the listening devices caused a visceral reaction inside him. The past three years of his life had been tormented by deceit. By the ravages of loving a woman who had kept secrets from him and betrayed him in a way that was nearly unforgiveable. As he stared at the listening devices, he wondered if he were any better than Meghan Cobb. His gaze roamed the room, moving from the nightstand that held the telephone and alarm clock, to the closed bathroom door, and back to the coffee table in front of him. As the analytical part of his mind calculated the most strategic places to secure the listening devices—one under the lip of the nightstand, one under the coffee table, and one in the bathroom in case Avery used her cell phone there—some other part of his mind screamed for him not to do it.
Walt took a deep breath, rubbed the back of his neck, and set the metallic box on the edge of the coffee table. He was lost in conflicted thought when he noticed the postcard among Avery’s research. It looked to have been ripped to shreds and then painstakingly taped back together. The pieces mostly fit, at least to return continuity to the postcard, but the edges were poorly opposed and uneven. He lifted it off the table and inspected it. A short message was written on the back of the card:
To the one-and-only Claire-Voyant, Just hanging out and watching the Events of America. Could use some company.
On the bottom of the card Walt saw three numbers scrawled innocuously. Almost as if they were an afterthought:
777
Walt flipped the card back over to inspect the front. Pieced together and taped over was a picture of a wooded cabin set among trees whose leaves had been turned ginger by autumn. The handle of the bathroom door clicked. The noise startled him and the postcard slipped from his grip and fell to the floor. Its momentum took it under the couch. Before he had a chance to retrieve it, Avery appeared in the vestibule outside the bathroom.
“You ready?” she asked.
Walt stood quickly. “Yeah.”
His heart pounded and the perspiration returned to his forehead. As he walked across the hotel room and toward the door, he passed Avery and headed out into the hallway. She closed the door behind them and checked that it was locked.