Hutton’s only real problem was Cat and Bess, who were still in Brooklyn.
At 6:12 p.m. on Friday, Cat, Bess, Mary, and Patricia had been standing near the parlor door on the third floor of 400 South Bedford with overflowing bags of product, all of it lovingly wrapped in blue ribbon and brown butcher paper by Kate the assistant while they had received their hour-long consultation with Vittoria. Their faces were flushed and glowing, their eyes sparkling, when five DEA agents barreled through the door with guns drawn.
At first they’d all feigned ignorance, protesting when their bags were snatched from their hands and the product on the shelves around them was shoveled unceremoniously into duffels. Vittoria had sighed and waited calmly behind the desk while Cat and Bess tried to convince the agents to let them leave, saying, “Excuse me, but we really need to get going,” as though they were being detained by a waiter who was too distracted to bring the check.
Mary and Patricia followed their cues, acting slightly more wide-eyed and afraid when Vittoria and her assistant, Kate, were handcuffed. Cat and Bess transitioned from disbelief and irritation into full-on entitled outrage, screaming that their rights were being abused and they’d be suing the DEA for every penny the government had. Cat had to be dragged downstairs by force. When the agent struggling to get her into a Crown Vic bound for Midtown pulled her hair, Cat—high from her special facial—responded by spitting in his face.
That’s when their luck changed. A rookie officer from the Ninetieth Precinct—who happened to be eating a bagel down the block at the time—had watched the entire arrest from the driver’s seat of his car before stepping in and offering to transport the two women. “Cadet Lewis reporting for duty,” he’d said to the DEA agent. “I can take those two off your hands.” The agent, busy cleaning Cat’s saliva off his face, nodded with exasperation before uttering the unfortunate words “They’re not my goddamn problem.” Cat and Bess incorrectly assumed that Cadet Lewis was their ride back to Hutton and allowed themselves to be shoved into the backseat of his car.
Zealous Cadet Lewis ran their licenses and turned up two outstanding warrants for Catherine Celia Ono and Elizabeth Folsom Bonner. He took them to Brooklyn Central Holding and processed them into the detention center with such remarkable speed and efficiency that by the time Hutton got there at 8:30 p.m. it was too late; they’d been shuffled into the thick stack of trespassers, drunks, vagrants, and loiterers whose triplicate paperwork was still filled out on old-school carbon-copy forms. Hutton was helpless to even locate them within the building, much less get them out before Monday without seeing a judge, the holding facility’s only requirement for egress.
He prayed they’d be smart enough not to make any friends or tell anyone why they were there. He’d spent two hours trying to talk his way into the facility to retrieve them, but the bureaucrats running their borough’s detention center had no interest in helping a second-year detective from a tony Manhattan precinct violate their only rule. Finally, so distressed that he could feel himself skirting the boundaries of unprofessional behavior, he gave up and drove back to Midtown South, where he attempted to convince his superiors to step in and interfere with the detention center on Cat’s and Bess’s behalf, but Roth was unwilling to make any moves that would indicate their cooperation.
“They’ll have to sit it out,” Roth said with absolute certainty. “You can’t risk interfering—it doesn’t look good—but they’ll be fine in there. Don’t act like they’re special, and they won’t be.”
Roth inclined his head toward Vittoria Cardoso’s attorney. Donal Windsor, a senior partner at the white-shoe British firm Cavendish Crane, waited in the hallway with the patience of a man who made $2,500 an hour.
“You see that guy? He’s a shark. I’ve met him a dozen times. He’s never rude, never impatient, nothing. These people are so calm…I can taste the blood in the air, kid. We’ve got something big.”
Mary and Patricia had been dragged back to the station in a car following Vittoria Cardoso and Kate, and Roth made sure they were seen getting thrown into an interrogation room down the hall from where Windsor sat with his beatific, compensated smile. They had sobbed dramatically, making a scene in the hallway, while Hutton watched Windsor give Mary’s handbag an approving glance. Cat and Bess had dressed these women well; never in the history of the precinct had there been such perfectly attired undercover officers. The FBI’s online cloning would ensure that their phony identities remain unquestioned until the trial, and possibly through it, depending on how liberally they might apply the Patriot Act. Cardoso’s status as a foreign national gave them considerable prosecutorial leeway.
Prosecute. The very word made his dick hard.
Hutton spent the next five hours watching through one-way glass as various FBI and DEA agents tried to crack Cardoso, each without success. Around 1:00 a.m. her attorney finally entered the interrogation room and the team took a break. Roth told Hutton to head home for the night. “You did good, kid. Go home, get some sleep. Tomorrow we have a shitload of work to do.”
Hutton practically sprinted out of the building, sticking the portable flashing siren on top of his Volvo to speed through traffic. He was exhausted. He’d been on pins and needles since the labs had come back on Cat’s original samples, feeling jumpy, focused, terrified, full of anticipation, and neurotic all at once for days.
But this evening’s denouement, when the woman he’d been naked with this morning was arrested at gunpoint at the exact moment his career soared, had pushed him in so many emotional directions that he was almost delirious. Nothing positive would come from returning to Brooklyn holding, so Hutton went straight home, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and crawled into bed, trying to repress how bad he felt for Cat and Bess.
Six hours later, he woke up to the sound of someone banging on his door repeatedly, a noise he tried to ignore until he was awake enough to wonder if the building was on fire. He quickly wrapped a towel around himself and ran to the front door, flinging it open only to find Sigrid Gunderson standing there in leggings and a hoodie, accompanied by a tall, clean-shaven young man in a spotless suit. She shoved past Hutton into the apartment. “This is Grant,” she barked. “He’s Bess’s brother, and their lawyer.”
“Grant Bonner,” the young man said politely, introducing himself with the easy confidence of inborn privilege, his handshake held out at a side angle, a manipulative fraternity gesture.