FOR THE REST of the afternoon, Sampson and I holed up in my office with a pair of laptops. We stayed busy watching and cataloging the extracurricular sex lives of the rich and mostly famous. It was surprisingly repetitive stuff, especially given everything that Tony Nicholson was set up to provide at the club.
The roster of power players, on the other hand, was one big holy shit after another. At least half the faces were recognizable, the kind of people you’d see at a presidential inauguration. In the front row.
The clients weren’t just men either. Women were outnumbered about twenty to one, but they were there, including a former US ambassador to the United Nations.
I had to keep reminding myself that every one of these people was—at least technically—a murder suspect.
We set up a log, using the date stamps embedded on each recording. For every clip, we wrote down the name of the clients we recognized and flagged the ones we didn’t. I also made a note of where each “scene” took place at the club.
My primary interest was the apartment over the carriage barn, which I’d come to think of as a kind of ground zero for this whole nasty murder puzzle.
And that’s where we started to pick up some legitimate momentum. Right around the time I thought my eyes were going to burn out of my head, I started to notice an interesting pattern in the tapes.
“John, let me see what you’ve got so far. I want to check something.”
All of our notes were handwritten at this point, so I laid the pages out side by side and started scanning.
“Here… here… here…”
Every time I saw someone had used the apartment, I circled the date in red pen, ticking off entries as I went. Then I went back over everything I’d circled.
“See this? They were using the studio in the back pretty regularly for a while, and then, about six months ago, it just stops cold. No more parties back there.”
“So what happened six months ago?” Sampson asked. The question was more rhetorical than anything, since we both knew the answer.
That’s when the killing started.
In which case—where were the rest of Nicholson’s disks?