As she was adding shots of the big silver triangle necklace to the board, her desk phone rang. The caller ID read lobby security.
“Catherine Ono,” she said automatically; her friends often stopped by unannounced, eager to peruse the magazine’s free table, where unsolicited items lay out for the taking.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Ono,” said the deep voice on the other end of the line. “There’s a detective here from the NYPD. He’d like to speak with you as soon as possible. May we send him up?”
Cat was startled but didn’t protest. A sinking feeling lodged in her chest as she prayed she hadn’t somehow jeopardized her work visa. “Of course, absolutely,” she said quickly. “I’ll meet him in the lobby on 46.” She hung up the phone and felt her entire body break out in a nervous sweat.
Chapter Two
After being escorted through a vertical greenhouse to the Cooper House elevator bank by two teenage mutes in navy tuxedos, Detective Mark Hutton formed the professional opinion that he might be in an elaborate theatrical production of Gattaca. There was no one else in the mirrored elevator—it was lit only by some kind of handwritten neon sculpture that read “Cunt Love”—yet he was sure he was being watched closely. Seriously? Well, he thought, I’m watching you, too.
Getting into the building had been easy, so far. Catherine Ono’s status in the Homeland Security Database had indicated that she was likely to comply with his requests unless the company explicitly asked him to leave, but he suspected she wouldn’t tell HR he was here; foreigners on work visas almost always cooperated without hesitation.
Hillary Whitney’s death over two months prior, after suffering a heart attack on the forty-sixth floor of this building in a locked and windowless room, had been suspicious from the very beginning. Hutton had been at another crime scene when the body was found, but he’d been assigned to review and eventually close the case. He knew the 911 call was made at 11:30 p.m. on the fifteenth of May, a weeknight, by a hapless intern named Molly Beale. The girl reported that she’d tried to access the room much earlier in the day, found it locked, knew Hillary was inside and had been “for a while.” After waiting six hours for a reply to her knocks and emails, Molly had finally called 911 from the office’s landline.
By the time the paramedics had been waved through security and the door was knocked down, Hillary had been dead for at least eight hours, and Cooper’s attorneys had swarmed the room where her body lay sprawled on the floor in an expensive-looking dress. A single bloodred fingernail was curled as if to beckon for help, and a very large box of ribbon was overturned behind her. She had no laptop or cellphone, only the stack of index cards and a felt-tip pen.
She must have begun to smell toward the end of the day, Hutton was sure of it, yet RAGE employees had simply gone about their business on the other side of the door, later insisting they’d been none the wiser to the grotesque scene within. As the corpse lay still, Hillary’s blood had settled into the bottom half of her body, changing the left half of her ivory face into a bloated, rotten raspberry, though her green eyes remained open, looking toward the door.
Molly told the officers who handled the initial investigation that Hillary Whitney’s behavior—locking herself in a windowless closet with her work and refusing to reply to any form of attempted contact—was “normal,” and that the only reason Molly became concerned was because the deceased hadn’t opened the door even once to go to the toilet, apparently surprising because she was on a “juice cleanse.”
It had reminded Hutton of a start-up case he’d worked on a year earlier. A twenty-four-year-old man had died in a nap pod after a seventy-two-hour coding marathon for an app that was being pitched as GrubHub meets Tindog. No one had noticed the body was cold until the following day. What kinds of workplaces let employees lock themselves in closets for half-days and routinely kept interns until near midnight, so paralyzed by the fear of being fired that they wouldn’t disturb their coworkers for a perceived emergency?
The only clue had been the overturned box of ribbon. Still, Hutton couldn’t buy the idea that a box of thirteen yards of “luxury” ribbon would be a sufficient cause of stress to kill anyone, no matter how trivial or oppressive the workplace.
How high, honestly, could the stakes really be at a fashion magazine? At least in the start-up case, there was money on the table; but magazine employees made practically nothing, and in any case, she’d come from money. It had all seemed odd, he’d thought—right from the very beginning.
But it hadn’t really mattered what he thought—not back in May. After the coroner’s report, the department ruled her death a fatality by natural causes and removed the case from the investigative queue. There were several reasons for this: One, Hillary’s boyfriend—the married owner of a popular cocktail bar in Carroll Gardens—was on a pickup basketball team with Detective Sergeant Peter Roth, Hutton’s superior, and pressured them to stop the investigation, lest any more details emerge that might derail a reunion with his wife. Two, Hillary’s next of kin, a brother in San Francisco, expressed absolutely no surprise that she’d stressed and dieted herself into a coffin, and Cooper’s reputation as a stressful workplace seconded that theory. Three—and this had been the most substantial reason—in New York City, the department had bigger fish to fry, fish that flopped on the precinct’s doorstep, bleeding in suspicious places, or fish weighted to the bottom of the river. The biggest fish embezzled hundreds of millions of dollars, and the angriest fish murdered their girlfriends in broad daylight at Soho House. An upper-middle-class single woman who had probably dieted herself to death was not an NYPD priority.
So back in May, Hutton had done his job as required. He reviewed the notes from the reporting officers, appended the coroner’s ruling, transcribed the verbal testimony of the next of kin, and closed the case. He’d moved on, until yesterday, when a bike messenger had shoved an envelope into his hand.
Earlier that week, Rupert Whitney, Hillary’s brother in San Francisco, had traveled out to the family’s cabin in Idaho, closed up since the end of ski season in April. In the stack of mail he found a postcard addressed to Hillary, postmarked May 15, from the same zip code as Cooper House’s offices. In Hillary’s own spidery cursive, the postcard—actually a college-ruled white index card—read:
the ribbon is the key to everything