CHAPTER 39
Manhattan, NY Saturday, July 3, 2021
THEY HURRIED BACK THROUGH THE EMPTY STREETS. AVERY WAS SILENT as she stood next to Walt in the elevator. When he opened the door to his suite, she walked over to the desk and sat down. She pulled the photos in front of her again and paged through them until she found the ones she needed, positioning them side by side on the surface of the desk.
“Look here.”
Walt leaned over her shoulder. “What am I looking at?”
“See this knot?” Avery asked, pointing to the knotted rope attached to the leg of the safe. “And these?” She pointed to the knots tied around Cameron Young’s wrists.
“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.