The evening after Mandy’s funeral, Newsnight aired a special episode devoted to the Danskammer Beach murders. For a week, sensational promos had teased exclusive details and never-seen-before evidence. At showtime, Jo, Nessa, and Harriett gathered in front of Jo’s giant television. The police had been uncharacteristically tight-lipped since Spencer Harding’s death. The investigation was still ongoing, they said, whenever the media asked. Now they’d granted Newsnight access to their case files. At least that was what Jo, Harriett, and Nessa assumed. No one from the show had contacted the three of them. Even Josh Gibbon, who’d been busting his ass to keep investigating the case, had no idea what the revelations would be.
The show started with a picture pulled from a magazine. It showed Spencer Harding standing in his art gallery. Hanging on the walls were paintings worth millions, but Harding seemed oblivious to their presence. His suit screamed power, as did his stance. He glared at the camera with his arms crossed, as if warning it to keep its distance.
This evening on Newsnight: Spencer Harding was the undisputed king of the New York art world. Over the course of two decades, he rose from obscurity to become the most powerful and influential dealer in Manhattan—some might even say the world. Brilliant, handsome, and phenomenally wealthy, he counted the world’s richest men as his friends and clients. Those who worked with Spencer say he was gifted with impeccable taste and an uncanny eye for talent. None of his colleagues or clients ever suspected Spencer Harding was hiding a sinister secret—or that the beachside mansion where he threw glamorous parties also doubled as a slaughterhouse, to which he lured innocent young women before robbing them of their lives.
“Jesus Christ. They’re making him sound like a James Bond villain,” Jo groaned as the show’s title sequence rolled. “Do we really have to watch this shit?”
Nessa paused the television and turned to Jo. “Yes,” she said. “We do.”
“Here.” Harriett passed her joint to Jo. “This will help.”
Jo took the joint. Art would recognize the smell when he got home from the movies with Lucy, but under the circumstances, she knew he wouldn’t hold it against her.
Jo inhaled deeply as the show’s host appeared on the screen. The wind tousled his silvery hair as behind him waves crashed onto Danskammer Beach.
Spencer Harding’s downfall began on a sunny morning in the final days of spring. That’s when three local women stopped here on this lonesome road that runs along Danskammer Beach, just outside the picture-perfect town of Mattauk, New York. They told police they were out for a walk by the shore. What they discovered, just off a narrow trail that snakes down to the water, would shake two communities to their core. By the end of the summer, both Spencer Harding and his wife, famed diver Rosamund Stillgoe Harding, would be dead. The bodies of three young women would be lying in the county morgue. And headlines would be fixated on the man who’s become known around the world as the Collector.
“What?” The pot hadn’t done much to mellow Jo’s mood. “The only paper that called him the Collector was the fucking New York Post.” Other media hadn’t dared follow suit. Jo, Harriett, and Nessa had made it clear from the beginning that they would only grant interviews to outlets that agreed to a set of conditions Jo had typed up. Condition number one: No comic book nicknames.
“I’d prepare myself for a few more unpleasant surprises, if I were you,” Harriett told her.
“Why?” Jo demanded. “What do you know?”
“I know how the world works,” Harriett responded.
Jo rolled her eyes. “Fine. Don’t tell me.” A picture appeared on the screen—an average-looking child who showed no signs of growing into a man as conventionally handsome as Spencer Harding had been. “Oh, great, here comes the supervillain’s origin story.”
“Shhh!” Nessa shushed her.
Spencer Harding was born John Anderson, the only child of a Manhattan orthodontist. He spent the first fifteen years of his life in this middle-class building on the Upper West Side. At three bedrooms, the family’s apartment was spacious by New York standards, but hardly ostentatious. Classmates from P.S. 333 remember young John as a studious, sensitive child with a passion for art. He’s said to have started his own collection at the age of ten, purchasing a work that would one day be valued at over six million dollars.
But John Anderson’s idyllic childhood wasn’t to last. Shortly after his sixteenth birthday, his parents were murdered in a tragic home invasion. The killers were never captured. John received a small fortune in life insurance, which was placed in a trust he could claim when he turned eighteen. He lived with a classmate’s family until he graduated from high school. Then, John Anderson disappeared.
“How about that?” Jo sneered. “His parents were murdered. He’s fucking Batman.”
“If he’d been fucking Batman, this would be much more interesting,” Harriett said, and they both cracked up.
“You two obviously aren’t listening,” Nessa said. “Good old Spencer must have murdered his parents.”
“You think?” Jo asked.
“Pretty sure,” Nessa said.
“Yeah, sounds about right,” Harriett said. “No one gets rich that fast without having blood on his hands.”
No one seems to have seen or spoken to John for the next ten years—until the day he reappeared in Manhattan. Now, however, he was calling himself Spencer Harding. And thanks to extensive plastic surgery, he was virtually unrecognizable. He’d created a new identity for himself—one he fiercely protected.
In 2001, a new gallery opened in Chelsea. Its handsome young owner seemed to have an inexhaustible source of private funding. Soon his client list rivaled those of far more established dealers. Their curiosity piqued, a few of his competitors hired private investigators. But no one could ever find out much about the mysterious Spencer Harding. Though often photographed out on the town with models and actresses, he avoided publicity and never gave interviews. Those who knew him say he rarely spoke about himself or his background. The little clues he dropped never added up to much. One of Spencer’s clients was certain he’d been raised in L.A. Another had been told he was English by birth. But DNA evidence has now confirmed that Spencer Harding was indeed John Anderson, the orphaned teen from the Upper West Side.
By 2005, Spencer Harding had become one of the wealthiest men in the country and the handsome bad boy of New York society. But many Americans first heard his name four years ago, when he married the Olympic athlete Rosamund Stillgoe. It was, by all accounts, a whirlwind romance. Depressed after a torn ligament kept her from competing in the Olympics, Rosamund was swept off her feet by the dashing multimillionaire, whose penthouse apartment famously featured its own helipad. Little did she know that her Prince Charming would turn out to be a monster—or that the helicopter in which he’d whisked her away would one day serve as his coffin.
“Who writes this shit?” Jo asked. “Is there some kind of style guide you can buy if you’re hired to write for the Dead Woman Industrial Complex?”
“I find the music quite captivating,” Harriett said. “That lonesome guitar twang really speaks to the unfolding tragedy.”
“Ladies,” Nessa chided them. “Focus?”
Later on Newsnight: Rosamund Harding cut off contact with her family and disappeared from public view. Was her disappearance by choice? Or was she being held captive by her husband?
Jo sobered instantly at the sight of the Hardings’ wedding portrait. “Poor Rosamund,” she muttered. “If only we’d known what she was trying to tell us with that apple. We could have rescued her from the Pointe on Memorial Day.”
“I wish we had,” Harriett agreed. “I underestimated her husband. I didn’t think he’d kill her. I can’t make the same mistake again.”
“So you don’t know what’s going to happen?” Jo said, just to confirm.
“I see the war, not the battles,” Harriett replied.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Jo asked.
“Stop!” Nessa once again brought them to order. The show had begun again with news footage taken the day Nessa had discovered the girl in blue.
On May sixth, three local women stopped along Danskammer Beach. They took a little-used path that led from the road to the water. Along the way, they discovered a nude corpse in a thick black trash bag, its drawstring tied in an elaborate bow. The body belonged to a young Black female, whom authorities estimated to be between the ages of seventeen and nineteen. There were signs of intercourse, but no wounds or bruising on the body.
Chief John Rocca of the Mattauk Police Department says the medical examiner had no trouble determining the cause of death.
Jo recoiled at the sight of the police chief in his formal uniform, sitting across from the show’s host. Square-jawed, laconic, and handsome, Rocca was the type of man that movies and television had trained her to trust. She knew millions of Newsnight viewers would take what he said as the gospel truth.
“How did the girl die, Chief Rocca?”
“She died of a fentanyl overdose.”
“Given the cause of death, did you have any theories about what might have happened?”
“Yes, sir. We initially believed the body belonged to a sex worker who had likely overdosed in the company of a client. We thought the man must have panicked and disposed of the body off Danskammer Beach Road. That theory seemed to be proven when a woman came forward and claimed the girl was her daughter.”
“Was the girl her daughter?”
“No. The moment I met the woman, there was something about her story that didn’t quite click with me. DNA tests later confirmed that she was not related to our Jane Doe in any way.”
“Then who was the mystery woman?”
“An actress paid to impersonate the girl’s mother.”
That’s when the case, which had seemed so clear-cut, suddenly began to look much more complicated.
“You located the woman and brought her in for questioning?”
“We did,” said Rocca.
“And what did she tell you?”
“That she’d been employed by a man named Danill Chertov.”
Jo paused the program on an image of Chertov. “Spencer Harding’s bodyguard!” Jo exclaimed. “I fucking knew it!”
“Yeah, but there’s something wrong with all of this.” Nessa looked spooked. “The police are claiming they did DNA tests. But Franklin and I were the ones who had the tests done. The department refused.”
Harriett snorted.
“What?” Jo demanded.
“Nothing,” Harriett said.
“No, seriously.” Nessa had grown used to her friend’s bizarre sense of humor, but this time Harriett had gone too far. “What do you think is funny about all of this?”
“You’ll see,” Harriett said. “Continue, please.”
“Was the Mattauk Police Department already familiar with Mr. Chertov at the time?”
“Yes, sir. Our department had had at least one prior run-in with Mr. Chertov. We knew he worked as a bodyguard for Spencer Harding.”
“Did you think that Mr. Chertov was acting on his employer’s orders in this case?”
“We did. When the actress came forward to identify the body, she brought documents that would have been difficult to forge. A birth certificate. An immunization schedule. It was not a cheap operation. Someone with deep pockets had to be footing the bill.”
“Spencer Harding?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why would a wealthy, well-known art dealer pay an actress to impersonate a dead girl’s mother?”
“To convince my department to close the case.”
“Why would he want the case closed?”
“That was the question we wanted to answer.”
“At what point did Harding become a person of interest in the Danskammer Beach case?”
“The day the actress identified Mr. Chertov as her employer we placed Mr. Chertov and Mr. Harding under surveillance.”
Nessa pressed pause. “What the hell?” she said. “That can’t be true.”
“Is he claiming he suspected Spencer Harding all the way back at the beginning of June?” Jo asked.
Harriett sniggered. The snigger turned into a chuckle and the chuckle into a howl. “I saw that plot twist coming a mile away! Keep going!” she urged. “Press play!”
“What are you laughing about?” Jo demanded. “This isn’t goddamned funny.”
“She’s stoned,” Nessa grumbled.
“Yes, and yet I’m the only one who knows what’s going on.”
June sixth, exactly one month after the body was discovered on Danskammer Beach, a deliveryman on his way to Culling Pointe came across an accident on Danskammer Beach Road. When police arrived at the scene, Rosamund Harding was discovered in the driver’s seat, dead from what the medical examiner would later determine was a head injury. She appeared to have been alone at the time of the accident.
“Chief Rocca, was there anything about the accident that struck you as strange?”
“To start with, it was an unusual location for an accident. Danskammer Beach Road is straight and flat. We don’t see many crashes out there, and when we do, they’re alcohol related. We did not believe Mrs. Harding was intoxicated at the time of the crash. But it wasn’t until we discovered that the vehicle’s internal computer network had been hacked that we suspected Ms. Harding had been the victim of foul play.”
“So someone remotely hacked into the car and caused the fatal crash?”
“The accident took place at four fifteen a.m. The car’s black box showed that in the moments before the crash, the vehicle had been steadily accelerating until it was traveling at well over one hundred miles per hour. Three seconds prior to the collision, the headlights were cut. Sunrise that morning was at five forty-six a.m. There are no streetlights along Danskammer Beach Road, and it was a moonless night. Mrs. Harding would have been driving blind.”
“You would have to be a pretty good hacker to orchestrate something like that.”
“Yes.”
“Good hackers don’t come cheap, do they?”
“No, sir, they do not. On the dark web, prices for a murder of this sort tend to start in the low to mid six figures.”
“A fortune to most, but a pittance to a man like Spencer Harding.”
“That is correct.”
“When you informed Mr. Harding of his wife’s death, what was his response?”
“He received the news with very little emotion. The officer who placed the call referred to him as ‘robotic.’”
Knowing that Spencer Harding would do his best to thwart any investigation into his wife’s death, police began by looking into Rosamund Harding’s life. Their inquiries took them to a women-only gym in downtown Mattauk—the same place where officers had first encountered Danill Chertov. One afternoon, while Rosamund Harding was working out on a treadmill, Chertov had barged into the gym in search of her. After an altercation with the establishment’s owner, the police were called. Chief Rocca had a hunch that the gym might hold a clue to Rosamund Harding’s fate.
“And what did you find?”
“In the locker she rented? Gym clothes. A pair of sneakers. But my gut told me there had to be more. I had my men execute a search of a locker that hadn’t been rented to Mrs. Harding but was locked nonetheless. That’s where I found the photo.”
“You’re aware that the owner of the gym claims she was the one who discovered the photo in Rosamund Harding’s locker?”
“She let me and my men into the locker room.”
“And that’s it?”
“That was the extent of her involvement at the time.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Jo wasn’t sure she’d heard that right.
“Did he just make that all up?” Nessa asked, one hand clenching Jo’s arm.
A professional lawman’s hunch led to a smoking gun—a Polaroid of a naked girl. The moment Chief Rocca saw it, he knew it was the same girl they’d found dead by Danskammer Beach weeks earlier. On the upper right corner, forensic technicians found a partial thumbprint.
“Who did the thumbprint belong to?”
“It belonged to Mr. Chertov.”
“How do you think the picture ended up in the locker?”
“We believe Mrs. Harding discovered it among her husband’s belongings at home and placed it there for safekeeping. Unfortunately, that discovery likely led to her untimely death.”
“What did you do after you identified the owner of the fingerprint?”
“We immediately sought to bring Mr. Chertov in for questioning. But we wanted to do so without tipping off his employer, whom we knew to be a flight risk.”
“You were worried that Spencer Harding would get wind of the plan and fly away.”
“Yes, literally.”
Jo turned down the volume as the show transitioned into another commercial break. “Have I stepped into an alternate universe?” she asked. “In my world, none of this happened. Am I right?”
“You are indeed,” Harriett said.
“Franklin said there were no fingerprints on the photo—just two partial prints inside the locker that couldn’t be identified,” Nessa pointed out.
“Clearly someone was lying,” Harriett said. “I’m fairly certain it wasn’t Franklin.”
“But this is the chief of police. How could he make something like that up?” Nessa marveled.
“Who’s going to call him a liar? The case is closed,” Harriett said.
“We could!” Jo argued.
“He hasn’t mentioned our names once,” Nessa muttered. “It’s like we don’t even exist.”
“He’s rewriting the story,” Harriett explained in a tone that suggested she shouldn’t have to. “You guys have been around the block a few times. Don’t you know this is what they do? By the end of this, we’ll have a whole new set of heroes and villains.” She pointed at the television. “Go ahead, turn it back up.”
Unfortunately, Danill Chertov proved elusive. It wasn’t until the evening of June eighth that he was pulled over by a Mattauk police officer stationed along Danskammer Beach Road. Over the next twenty-four hours Chertov would make a confession that would chill even a seasoned law enforcement officer like Chief Rocca to the bone.
“He told us Rosamund Harding had been killed because she discovered evidence of her husband’s secret fetish.”
“Fetish?”
“Spencer Harding had a sexual fixation. He liked very young women.”
“You mean girls?”
“Some of them were underage, yes.”
“But that wasn’t where his deviance ended, was it?”
“No. Harding liked the girls to be unconscious when he abused them.”
“As though they were dead?”
“Yes.”
According to Chertov, Harding had people who would supply him with young women between the ages of fifteen and nineteen. Some were sex workers. Other girls were abducted from their own neighborhoods. They would be drugged and sexually assaulted in the beachfront mansion while Harding’s wife was away. On the occasions when his wife was inconveniently at home, she would be drugged as well.
“How many girls were there?”
“According to Chertov? Too many to count.”
“What happened to all of them?”
“Most were driven home while still groggy, with several hundred dollars stuffed into their pockets and no memory of what had happened to them.”
“But some never made it home.”
“No.”
At least three of the girls died of overdoses at Harding’s beach house. When that happened, Chertov would place the body inside two heavy-duty lawn bags and drive it to the forgotten trail off desolate Danskammer Beach. The same night, under the cover of darkness, a local fisherman named Randall Duffy would land his boat on Danskammer Beach, pick up the bag, and cram it into an old metal lobster trap. Then he would toss the trap and its contents onto an underwater heap of abandoned lobster traps.
“How many traps are down there?”
“Thousands. After all the lobsters died in ninety-nine, that’s where the local fishermen sank their traps.”
“So when he dumped a body, Randall Duffy knew the odds were pretty good that no one would ever find it.”
“It was a needle in a haystack.”
Unfortunately, the perfect plan depended on a less-than-perfect man. Randall Duffy used the money he made from dumping bodies to fund a heroin addiction. Police believe he died of an overdose just hours before he was scheduled to make his last pickup from Danskammer Beach. According to Danill Chertov, he had no idea that the body he’d left in the scrub was still there, just waiting to be found.
Jo stopped the video on an image of Randall Duffy standing on the fishing boat he’d used to dump the bodies, wearing only a pair of swim trunks. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, with a perfectly round, hairless head and a perfectly round, hairless belly to match.
Nessa squinted at the screen. “I’ve never seen that guy before.”
“Me either,” Jo agreed.
By the evening of Tuesday, June ninth, Chief Rocca had heard more than enough from Danill Chertov. An arrest warrant was issued for Spencer Harding. But by the time the billionaires on Culling Pointe were woken up by the sound of sirens outside their windows, the man who had raped countless young women and murdered at least four people was gone, his helicopter en route to Manhattan. At ten to midnight, it would make a fatal plunge into the harbor, less than a mile from the famed Statue of Liberty.
“What happened? How did he get away?”
“He was tipped off,” Rocca said.
“By someone inside of your department?”
“No, sir. By a podcast.”
Nessa gasped. “That lying motherfucker.”
That very same night, the popular podcast They Walk Among Us released what it called a “special episode.” It featured an interview with two of the women who had discovered the first body. They claimed to also know the location of two additional bodies at the bottom of the ocean off Danskammer Beach. The host of the podcast, Josh Gibbon, sent a scuba diver down to check out their claim. The video footage was posted online the same night as the podcast. It clearly showed the remains of two bodies crammed into lobster traps.
“How did these women know where to look for the bodies Danill Chertov had paid Randall Duffy to dump in the ocean?”
“I’m sad to report that they were tipped off by a detective on the case. He was apparently involved with one of the women.”
“Detective Franklin Rees.”
“That is correct.”
“And what happened to this detective?”
“He has since been relieved of his duties.”
And for good reason. Thanks to that leak, Spencer Harding was able to flee Culling Pointe before authorities arrived to arrest him. Until Harding’s body is recovered from New York Harbor, we have no way of knowing what brought down his helicopter. For now, all we know is that the man who brought suffering and heartache to so many will forever go unpunished.
Nessa was sobbing.
“I can’t watch any more of this,” Jo said.
“You must,” Harriett insisted. She was no longer laughing. In fact, she’d never sounded so serious. “You have to see what they’re willing to do.”
After Harding’s death, two bodies were recovered from the water off Danskammer Beach. One belonged to a local girl, Mandy Welsh. The second body has yet to be identified. Spencer Harding’s house was also searched, and thanks to information gathered from Danill Chertov, a hidden room was uncovered.
“It’s been called a sex dungeon.”
“I would say that’s an apt description.”
“What did you find?”
“A safe filled with pictures. Thousands of Polaroids of girls lying lifeless on the bed in the sex dungeon.”
“Pictures like the one Rosamund Harding had hidden in her locker.”
“Yes, sir.
“Why Polaroids?”
“No digital files means you can’t be hacked. As long as you can keep the physical photos under lock and key, you don’t have to worry about anyone seeing them.”
“But it sounds like Rosamund Harding found one.”
“Yes. It seems one of the photos never made it into Harding’s safe. His wife may have stumbled across it.”
“That must have been extremely disturbing for her.”
“I’m sure it was. Some of the photos we retrieved from that house will probably haunt me for the rest of my life.”
“Why did Rosamund Harding hide the photo in a gym locker? Why didn’t she go straight to the police?”
“We believe she lived in fear of her husband. This was a brilliant, powerful man with more money than he could possibly spend. We know from her browsing history that she was desperate to escape. But no one came to her rescue, and in the end, the man she married took her life.”
“How do you think Harding got away with it for so long?”
“No one would have ever guessed that a man like Spencer Harding would commit the kind of crimes he committed. He was a monster with a perfect mask.”
“And Danill Chertov? What happened to him?”
“Mr. Chertov disappeared the same night Spencer Harding died. He left on a flight to Belarus the next morning.”
“So the two men responsible for these horrible crimes both escaped justice.”
“In this world, maybe. I believe they’ll be paying for their crimes in the next.”
“Well,” Harriett said after Nessa turned off the television in disgust. “Now we have proof Rocca’s one of the bad guys.”
“We know he’s a liar, for sure,” Nessa said.
“No, it’s more than that. He was involved in the murders somehow.”
“How do you know he wasn’t lying so he wouldn’t look completely incompetent?” Jo asked.
“Because Rocca said he arrested Danill Chertov on the night of June eighth. He claims they kept him in custody until Chertov informed on his boss. Rocca said he used Chertov’s intel to get an arrest warrant for Harding. But I know for a fact that none of that ever happened.”
“How?” Nessa asked.
Harriett grinned. “Chertov broke into my house on June seventh. He’s been in my compost pile ever since.”
The room fell silent.
“So we’re fucked,” Jo finally said.
“Why?” Nessa asked.
“Don’t you see? We can’t prove Rocca lied without revealing that Harriett killed someone.”
“Do you two believe that Rocca was involved?” Harriett asked her friends.
“Of course,” Jo said.
“Then who else do we need to convince?”