We didn’t. Inside the box, we found three dozen disks, each one in its own plastic sleeve and dated by hand in black marker. There were also two leather binders filled with handwritten pages of notes, lists, addresses, and ledgers.

A few minutes later, we left with all of it in our briefcases.

“God bless Tony Nicholson,” I said to the unflappable Ms. Currie.

Chapter 66

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?

Chapter 67

AFTER WORK, I picked up some Thai food on Seventh and brought it to Bree at the hospital. It wasn’t the kind of dinner date she deserved, but anything besides Swiss steak and Jell-O from the cafeteria had to be a big improvement.

It looked like she had a whole mobile-office thing going on, with her laptop and a little printer and files spread out on the counter in the back. The laptop was open to Web MD, and she was busily taking notes when I came in.