In a matter of minutes, Mary and Patricia had an entirely new internet history that went on for dozens of pages.
“Cat? It’s time,” Hutton said. “I’m supposed to walk you all to the subway.”
“We need our phones,” she demanded. He handed them back, saying, “Don’t do anything stupid with these, okay?” while Cat grabbed a pair of square black Prada sunglasses and ignored him. Patricia, Mary, and Bess were lined up next to the door. Not bad, Cat thought. Nobody will mistake them for anything but party girls.
On their way to the subway they walked past a mural of a robot sodomizing a pickup truck. Cat gave Hutton her phone and ordered the girls to line up. Patricia grabbed Cat’s phone from Hutton and substituted her own.
“I’ll post the original,” Patricia insisted. “You can regram it. It’ll look more real.”
Cat smiled and felt her energy returning. “Okay. Let’s make this look fun.” She backed up and leaned against the mural, putting her hand on the robot’s butt in an obscene gesture. The other three posed dramatically.
Hutton snapped a few images. Cat inspected them quickly. Hmm. Fun, but uninspired. She looked around for a prop. A plastic bag caught on the razor wire above their heads, errant medical waste from the clinic around the corner, read “speculum: extra large.” She got back into her pose and pointed it out to the group, asking, “Did anyone misplace their bag of extra-large speculums, or is Brooklyn just an actual toilet?” right before Hutton hit the capture button again; the resulting photo had all four women laughing out loud, their bodies twisted toward the plastic bag flying above their heads. It was genuine, spontaneous, and actually funny.
Cat wrote the caption and posted it to Patricia’s account, @patt_the_bunni:
plastic bag reading “speculum xl” begging for us to play with it under this #throatneck mural. bk weekend with my @cooperny girls from @ragebeauty @loch_ness_bess @catono @mar_bear_stare #badgirlsgoeverywhere
“‘Patt the bunny,’” Cat said to Patricia. “Is that supposed to sound perverted?”
“Yes,” Patricia and Mary replied in unison.
“It’s the FBI. You think Roth is bad, wait until you add an Ivy League education.” Patricia rolled her eyes. “The smarter they are, the more disgusting they are. But whatever—the FBI’s not in charge until they can prove this is organized crime. Right now they’re just an amazing resource that’s extremely annoying.”
“You know what,” Mary said, “fuck them. At the end of the day, I have my health, it’s nice outside, and there’s a gun in my purse. Let’s go arrest some criminals.”
At the L train entrance, Cat hung back for a moment and grabbed Hutton’s arm. Bess, absorbed in her phone, ambled down the steps without looking up.
“Can we get a drink after this drug bust?” she asked as soon as the other women were out of view. Hutton leaned her against the wall and wrapped his body around hers.
“Let’s go back to your apartment first,” he said before kissing her. “See you later.”
“That’s good enough for me.” Cat grinned and turned away, dancing down the stairs.
Chapter Ten
Three hours later, Cat and Bess found themselves handcuffed in the back of a police car that was driving the wrong direction down the BQE.
“You’re supposed to take us back to Midtown South,” Bess said politely through the screen. “The Williamsburg Bridge is much faster than taking the Manhattan this time of day. You can turn around at the Wythe exit.”
The freckle-faced officer driving the car ignored her.
Cat looked at Bess and shrugged. “So much for fuel efficiency,” Cat said, loud enough for the officer to hear. “I guess he just wants to sit in traffic.”
“Would it be possible to get the keys for these handcuffs?” Bess tried. “We’re not super comfortable back here.”
The officer continued to ignore them, raising the volume on the radio and turning on the siren as he sped toward downtown Brooklyn. The only time he spoke was when a squirming Cat tried to dig Bess’s phone out of her pocket.
“Sit down and stop moving,” he’d growled. “Now!”
“Jesus,” Cat said, turning to face forward before she could get Bess’s phone out. “Give up the ghost, dude. We’re not the enemy.”
It wasn’t until he skipped the exits for the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges that Cat started to get nervous. When he turned onto Atlantic Avenue, she tried attitude.
“We don’t want to go with you to Fairway,” she said, referring to the Red Hook grocery store famous for its aisles of olive oil. “Take us to Midtown, or you’re going to get in huge trouble.”
“Ladies,” he finally snapped, “I don’t know what your deal is. But in this city, when you have an outstanding warrant in Brooklyn, you go to detention in Brooklyn.”
The officer pulled up in front of Brooklyn Central Holding, threw the car in park, and escorted them inside.
Hutton couldn’t believe his luck.
The DEA had seized over five hundred sample-and full-size bottles loaded with illegal ingredients matching the samples already in evidence. They’d also seized an additional thousand twenty-four-ounce bottles of overpriced full-size creams, lotions, and potions that contained no illegal drugs and would be distributed to every officer in the precinct—bottles smelling like flowers, fruits, mint, essentially every kind of perfume imaginable. Rupert Whitney agreed to follow through on his donation to the policemen’s union. In a single week, he’d gained not only a career-making case, but the gratitude of every single person at Midtown South.
The case was deeper than he’d thought possible. Vittoria Cardoso owned just thirty-five percent of the shares in Bedford Organics, LLC, a New York State entity that also purchased the building three years earlier—a process requiring an attorney, whom they’d subpoenaed immediately. The company’s visible assets totaled more than $10 million, including the entire property at 400 South Bedford. Once the NYPD discovered the names of the remaining shareholders, they’d have a money trail running a mile wide.
Bedford Organics, LLC wasn’t just a legitimate business; it was a healthy, thriving direct-sale beauty manufacturer and retailer whose products had a relatively transparent production process, save for the final—and most profitable—“special blends” brought in on limited import from Brazil. Cosmetic products and ingredients, not subject to FDA approval, were given only a cursory and occasional inspection in customs to ensure that a box of moisturizer wasn’t really a plastic bag of cocaine. An established business like Bedford Organics would have no trouble smuggling drugs in their own sealed and branded boxes of product.