I drove across the Ed Koch Bridge, made a U-turn in Queens, and then doubled back over a second bridge to Main Street on Roosevelt Island. The trip took twenty-seven minutes. The tram takes three.
We followed East Loop Road to the underdeveloped southern tip of the island, where there was a cluster of vehicles from various city agencies. One of them, an NYPD generator truck, lit up a gray stone hulk that looked like an abandoned medieval castle waiting for the wrecking ball.
“Good morning, Detectives,” a familiar voice called out.
It was a few minutes after midnight, so technically it was morning. And nobody is more technical than our favorite anal-retentive, obsessive-compulsive crime scene investigator, Chuck Dryden.
“It’s my first homicide in 10044,” he said, walking toward us.
I smiled as I imagined him racing home after work to color in another section of his Zip Code Murder Map.
“What do you know about autoerotic asphyxia?” he asked.
“As much as I know about Russian roulette,” Kylie said. “It’s a game you can win a hundred times, but you can only lose once. Who’s our victim?”
“Caucasian female, thirty-eight years old. Driver’s license in her purse ID’s her as Aubrey Davenport.”
That explained the Red connection. Davenport was a documentarian whose films focused on social justice: the impact of oil spills, wrongful medical deaths, gun violence in America—the kind of polarizing journalism that gets some people to write their congressman and others to send her hate mail.
We made our way over the rocky ground to where she was lying facedown on a blanket. She was naked except for a pair of panties around her ankles. Her back was covered with welts, and she’d been trussed with several lengths of blue fabric, one end knotted around her neck, the other attached to her ankles. I’ve seen hundreds of dead bodies, but I was unnerved by the grotesqueness of this one.
“Was she sexually assaulted?” Kylie asked.
“No evidence of penetration,” Dryden said. “No sign of a struggle. She cooperated with whoever tied her up. She was as much a volunteer as a victim.”
“You telling me she signed on for this?” I said. “Whiplashes and all?”
Dryden shook his head. “You have much to learn about sexually deviant behavior, grasshopper.”
“All I know is what I heard from the missionaries. Feel free to enlighten me, sensei.”
He cracked a smile, which for Chuck Dryden is the equivalent of a standing ovation. “AEA is for the most part a male sport—often people you’d never suspect. Family men, respected pillars of the community who get off by cheating death. They tie ropes around their neck and genitals, attach the other end to a pipe or a doorknob, and then masturbate, slowly lowering their bodies to cut off the oxygen to their brain, which I’m told gives them the best orgasm they’ve ever experienced…although sometimes it’s also their last.
“Most of the recorded deaths are people who do it solo, but this woman didn’t want to take chances. She had a spotter, most likely a man. His role was to tie her up and to help her if anything went wrong. Her biggest mistake was trusting him. Look at this knot.”
He pointed to a loop in the middle of the sash. “It’s supposed to be a slipknot, a fail-safe that she can pull at any time to set herself free. But he tied it so that instead of releasing, it tightened.”
“A good lawyer will say it could have been an accident,” Kylie said. “Not everyone has a merit badge in autoerotic knots.”
“And that’s exactly what the killer would like us to think,” Dryden said. “But look at these ligature marks around her neck. If she had control over her oxygen flow, they would be on a downward angle toward her legs. But these are going in the opposite direction, and they’re deep, which to me indicates he was standing over her, and pulling up hard. I’d like to see a lawyer talk his way out of that.”
“What about the scratches on her throat?” I asked.
“Self-inflicted. She realized what the killer was doing, but it was too late. She didn’t have the strength to put up a fight. Bottom line: Aubrey Davenport did not die because of kinky sex gone wrong. She was murdered.”
“Thanks, Chuck,” I said. “I’m looking forward to hearing you say those exact words in front of a jury. Who found the body?”
“A couple of fourteen-year-old boys with a twelve-pack who were planning a memorable evening and got more than they bargained for. They called it in at 9:36. Time of death is anywhere in the eight-hour window prior to that.”
“What else was in her purse besides her ID?”
“Cash, credit cards, cell phone, a parking stub from a garage in Brooklyn time-stamped 4:52 p.m., and a SIG Sauer P238, which she unfortunately didn’t get to fire.”
“Prints?”
“This place is too rocky for me to come up with any usable fingerprints, but I do have three very telling footprints.”
“Can you get a cast? A shoe size?”
“They’re not the kind of feet that wear shoes.” Dryden smiled. He enjoyed leading us up to the mountaintop, especially when he was the one who discovered the mountain.
He shined his flashlight on three equidistant circles in the dust a few yards away from the body.
“There was a tripod there,” he said. “Whoever killed her filmed it.”
CHAPTER 6
It’s gotten easier for people to get away with murder in New York City.
While the brass at One P P are quick to promote the fact that homicides in our city are at historic lows, there’s one statistic they don’t like to talk about. In four out of every ten cases, the killer isn’t caught.
Other cities with the same problem can blame it on the rise of drug and gang homicides. When drug dealers or gangbangers start killing, the neighborhood goes blind. No witnesses usually means no arrests.
But New York has a singular reason for our less-than-stellar batting average.
9/11.
When the towers fell, Ground Zero became the emotional focal point of our national tragedy. But for NYPD, it was the biggest crime scene in the city’s history. That morning, 2,749 men, women, and children were murdered, and every homicide demanded our full attention—one victim at a time.
The task of bringing closure to thousands of families fell squarely on the shoulders of our most seasoned detectives. It was physically and emotionally draining police work, and within two years of the attacks, three thousand of our best investigators pulled their pins. They retired, and an additional eight hundred detectives were reassigned to the new counterterrorism unit.
That left a hole that has never been filled. To this day there are precinct detectives working everything from petty larceny to major felonies who have hundreds of unsolved crimes on their plates. They catch new cases faster than they can clear the old, and there’s no one available to share the load.
That kind of clearance rate won’t cut it at Red. So when we need backup, we get it. At 1:45, while Kylie and I were still combing the grounds of the Renwick Smallpox Hospital, I got a call from Danny Corcoran, a detective second grade working out of Manhattan North.
I knew Danny from the One Nine. He’s smart, thorough, and gifted with a wicked sense of humor.
“Zach,” he said, “I heard you need some grunt work on a homicide, and I just got the good news that I’m your designated grunt.”
I gave him a quick overview and told him to secure Aubrey Davenport’s apartment and office, in Manhattan, and her car, which was in a garage in Brooklyn.
“And I need a next of kin,” I said. “Kylie and I will do the notification.”
“I’m on it,” he said. “By the by, I’m breaking in a new partner. Tommy Fischer.”
“And?”
“He’s got his pluses and his minuses.”
“What are the minuses?” I asked.
“Lactose intolerant. On the plus side, he’s a great kisser.”
I hung up, laughing. I realized it was the first time I’d laughed since I followed the mayor into The Pierre six hours earlier, and it was a welcome release. Kylie and I were looking at two very ugly cases, and it felt good to know that I could count on Danny Corcoran to break the tension along the way.