Red Alert(NYPD Red #5)(64)

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?”

She smiled. “I’m fine, Zach. Well, maybe not fine. I’m sickened, but I’m not walking out on this.”

“Let’s start with his alibi,” I said, flipping through my notebook. “Aubrey parked her car in the garage in Brooklyn at 4:52 p.m. on May seventh. I don’t know how she got to Roosevelt Island, but most likely it was in Langford’s car. It was rush hour, so she couldn’t have gotten there much before five thirty. The body was called in shortly after nine thirty. When I spoke to Langford the following day, he said he had been at a medical conference in Albany. But was he there during that four-hour window when Aubrey was murdered?”

“Was there even a conference?” Kylie said.

“Hold on.” Jason began tapping away on his laptop. It took him a few seconds to come up with an answer. “There was a substance abuse conference at the Albany Marriott on May seventh and eighth,” he said.

“What’s the number of the hotel?” Kylie asked. “We can call and find out when he checked in.”

“We could do that,” Jason said, “and hope that we could convince some hotel desk clerk to cooperate without a warrant. Or…” His fingers flew across the keys.

Thirty seconds later, he found what he was looking for.

“Or,” he repeated, “we could check the good doctor’s credit card charges and find out that he bought gas at the Plattekill rest stop on the New York State Thruway at 10:34 p.m. on May seventh, and he checked into the Albany Marriott at 12:10 a.m. on May eighth.”

“It’s a three-hour drive from New York,” Kylie said. “I’d like to check his GPS and see where he started from.”

I turned to Cheryl. “What’s your take, Dr. Robinson?”

She took a deep breath and looked at the monitor. The screen was dark now, but the memory was vivid. Then she turned back to the group. “I think we were wrong to assume that all the men on these videos had a strong motive for killing Aubrey,” she said. “Judge Rafferty practically laughed it off. Most of the others would be subjected to public humiliation, but they’d bounce back. Men like that always do. People tend to be forgiving when politicians, sports heroes, and movie stars are caught up in a sex scandal. But they’d never forgive the one man Aubrey trusted to help her. Morey Langford’s private practice, his hospital affiliations, his broadcast contracts, would all disappear overnight. He’d be ruined. If you need a motive for murder that will stick with a jury, you’ve got one.”