“What’s up, Cal?”
“I found your keys on my floor,” she said. “I thought you might want them back.”
Hutton reached over the desk and Callie dropped the keys into his outstretched palm. “Thank you,” he said. “They must have fallen out of my bag. You didn’t have to come out here. I could have met you on my way home.”
“I’m actually going to Newark. I got an audition for a music video in Nashville and a new girl took my shifts for me.” She pointed to the rolling suitcase next to her in the hallway. Hutton watched three of his colleagues stop behind Callie to stare at her backside, their hand gestures and facial expressions crude.
“I’ll be back on Monday. Wanna hang out?” she asked. The trio spontaneously grew into a group of five. One of them held up a cellphone and took her photo. Annoyed, he stood up and motioned her into his office, wheeling her suitcase through the doorway. One of his colleagues flashed him a thumbs-up. Hutton closed the door in reply.
“I can’t Monday.”
“Tuesday?”
“Can’t.”
“Wednesday?”
“Can’t. I’m in it, Cal. I think this case is big.”
She stared at him for a second, then nodded and grabbed the handle of her suitcase. “See you on the other side,” she replied. Callie opened the door to his office and walked through it without looking back, blowing through the cadre of leering officers down the hall like they were seeds on a dandelion.
Hutton stayed at the office until his warrant to search the Cormorant storage facility was approved. He picked up a pizza and a six-pack of beer, then spent the rest of his Wednesday going through Hillary Whitney’s belongings until he found what he was looking for.
Chapter Seven
When Cat walked into the ladies’ room before her Thursday morning production meeting, she turned on the tap and left it running as she walked to the handicapped toilet on the end.
Managing editor Constance Onderveet was attempting to vomit discreetly in the first stall. After a few awkward run-ins and knocks during her first month on the job (“Are you sure you’re okay?”), Cat had learned to take her coffee mug into the restroom and stick it under the tap to “rinse” in order to drown out the noise while she peed. Hearing other people throw up inspired the same in Cat, but unlike Constance, she truly despised vomiting.
When she returned to her office, coffee mug in hand, Molly and Bess were waiting. The three women sat down around Cat’s desk, which was littered with index cards, agate paperweights, a brick she’d spray-painted gold, and a half-dozen rose-tinted college-ruled legal pads.
“I can get you a clean coffee mug, you know,” Molly said. “You don’t have to keep rinsing the same one.”
Bess laughed. “Cat rinses the coffee mug because she hates the sound of people doing…bathroom things.”
“Who are you, Monk?” asked Molly. “What do you do in public, just hold it ’til you get home?”
“It’s mostly the barfing,” Cat admitted.
“Uh, you guys went to prep school, too,” Molly replied. “How did you not get used to that?”
“Yeah, but we went to Miss Sawyer’s,” Bess explained. “We didn’t have the performative additive of men on campus. We ate real food, played sports, spent a lot of time outside.”
Molly looked confused. “That sounds like lesbian summer camp.”
“I think it was healthy,” Cat said.
“But how did you get into college?” Molly asked. “Didn’t you need to be, you know, the best or whatever? I’m not saying bulimia makes you ‘the best’; it’s just, you know…a real type A thing to do. Like…being organized.”
Neither Bess nor Cat had an answer for that. Lou knocked on the door and popped her head in.
“Are we set?”
The three ladies nodded, gathering up their notebooks and folios before walking into the conference room to meet with the production staff. They spent a few hours coordinating details for photo shoots in the upcoming weeks before heading as a group down to the cafeteria.
Bess and Cat both loaded up on salad and bread. Molly got a half-serving of sushi. Lou pulled her lunch out of her purse, grabbing just a coffee from the barista. After they swiped their cards to pay and sat down, Cat pointed to Lou’s Tupperware.
“I didn’t know you liked to cook, Lou.”
“Oh! I don’t, really. I did have cooking classes at school in Switzerland. It’s all very Victorian over there—I can draw and play and sing and make soufflé. ‘Don’t worry: Britain’s women can always entertain,’” she said in her poshest baritone. “I didn’t cook this. I have a service that delivers all my meals. It’s pure bliss. This is some superfood with eight kinds of seeds and so forth.”
She dug her fork into what looked to Cat like plain brown rice with red onion and carrot mixed in.
“Very practical,” Bess commented. “I should be so organized.”
Cat spread butter on her two baguette slices. “I can’t bring my lunch. Every time I’ve tried, the Tupperware winds up rotting for months in the bottom of my desk drawer. I just had to commit to buying it every day.”
When they’d finished eating, Cat collected all of their empty plates and containers, positioned them in a quadrant, and snapped a picture for her Photogram account, captioning it no food just plates #garfield #lasagna #cleanplateclub @loch_ness_bess @mollybeans @lou_lucas and tagging the Cooper House building.
Molly looked at her quizzically.
“It’s my Photogram rebellion,” Cat explained. “I want to remind everyone on the Cooper feed to go eat lunch. I’m daring them to consume carbohydrates.”
“Even though we didn’t eat lasagna.”
“I ate bread. It’s basically lasagna.”
The women cleared their table and filed back up to the office. Bess and Molly started racking the clothes Cat had selected for the following week’s shoot of Dotty for It, the Sylvia Plath–themed spread for October. Cat retreated into her office and set out a fresh legal pad; she still hadn’t planned out all the shots.
Although her Tuesday afternoon adventure had taken her off the rails and completely embarrassed her, Cat was now feeling gratitude for the accidental trip. Her mind was loose; she kept noticing groups of colors where she hadn’t seen them before, like a yellow car parked in front of a yellow bicycle chained next to a yellow rosebush; three red baseball caps in the crowd; the explosive green of the city’s summer trees. Maybe the world really is big and wide and open, she thought.
She put on her headphones, turned her white noise generator to “Thunderstorm,” and logged into the Dotty for It shoot’s badge board. As she clicked through the clothes, moving and sorting the scans, Polaroids, and screencaps that made up the possible inventory, she had a moment of inspiration.