Rupert had overnighted it to Hutton, whose own business card, Hutton now realized, must have been appended to the death certificate; a phone call to Rupert had confirmed that he was officially petitioning the department to follow up. The petition consisted of a potential donation to the policemen’s union that would put new, high-def televisions in every single precinct breakroom in the city, for which Hutton could take credit.
Though he had his doubts about the value of the note, the opportunity was too good to ignore. He walked directly to the nearest newsstand and opened a copy of RAGE Fashion Book to find a list of names under the dead woman’s on the masthead. He punched those names into the precinct’s Homeland Security Database and pulled the Whitney file. This was his shot to crack the case back open and solve something on his own—maybe the only chance he’d get all year. This was his chance to move up.
He took it.
When the elevator doors finally opened onto the forty-sixth floor, Hutton found himself even more disoriented. He walked into a dark room walled in faintly glowing white marble with no apparent doors and a table hanging upside down from the ceiling. He’d read about this room before; it was variously described in cultural publications as “nightmarish,” “dreamlike,” “a luxurious tomb,” “utterly gestational,” “a Fashion Week pop-up in Bergen-Belsen as imagined by Matthew Barney,” and “a horrifying display of the aesthetic urges of a truly tin-eared 1%.” The only available seating in this now-infamous lobby was a plain, inhospitable black wooden bench set firmly in the center of the room. Visitors new to the space—i.e., tautologically without membership in fashion’s ruling class—were supposed to feel helpless, trapped, and confused. But Hutton kept calm, and after a moment, his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting and found the ghostly woman seated in front of him.
With her waist-length black hair braided into some kind of horror-film little-girl plait and a tall, angular body wrapped in black silk and leather, the woman looked like she’d been born in this room and appointed its terrible eternal guardian. She stood, uprooting herself from the hard black bench, and walked toward him, growing taller with every step. As the distance closed between them she stuck out a long, wraithlike limb with a narrow hand at the end of it.
“Hi, I’m Catherine Ono,” she said. Though her voice was soft, her handshake was strong. He noticed that her fingernails were painted navy blue and had been filed into extended points, like fangs, almost. Weird, blue finger teeth. He cleared his throat and tried to sound businesslike.
“Detective Mark Hutton, NYPD,” he said, his native New York accent peeking around the corners of his vowels. “I have some questions about Hillary Whitney. Is there somewhere we could speak privately?”
Catherine Ono looked up at him, through spiderweb-thin gold eyeglasses, with an absolutely enormous pair of brown eyes. Her skin was so pale it was nearly transparent, with some kind of dewy finish on it. She smelled like Rockaway Beach. Does she live in a cave? he wondered. Is this a real human being or an elaborate joke? He was momentarily held in an honest-to-god trance as they stared at each other. Is this woman murderer material? Maybe, he thought.
“We can sit in my office,” she said briskly, turning those huge brown eyes to the floor. “Follow me.” As she waved her phone across a brass plate set in the wall, the marble walls split open. Sunlight spilled into the lobby cave, and the spell was broken. He stood tall, lifted his shoulders, and turned to follow her, determined to regain a professional bearing.
His newfound decorum didn’t last long. Her purposeful strides pulled him through a maze of dark plastic cubicles filled with a series of beautiful young women, each one more so than the last. Their eyelashes had been transplanted from dolls. Their clothes were all so delicate that if there was a gust of wind he imagined they’d all suddenly be naked. He smelled perfumes, cupcakes, steaming hot coffee. He wanted to stop at each cube and touch their glowing faces, their soft pink lips, the floating halos of their hair, see them up close. But after the first glance, Hutton kept his eyes to the ground and used all his composure to keep moving; if he wanted this woman to cooperate, he couldn’t show vulnerability, not any variety, not for a moment.
Finally Catherine Ono opened a huge steel door, its surface engraved directly with “CATHERINE ONO // SENIOR EDITOR.” She gestured for him to follow her through. Grateful for the end of the gauntlet, he rushed to sit in the nearest available chair.
Cat’s heart was racing as she closed the door behind Detective Hutton. When he’d come out of the elevator, she’d been shocked. Cat had been expecting a barrel-chested swath of heavy blue polyester, the same type of men who came through in droves the night Hillary died. Instead, an impossibly tall, big-jawed man with brownish-blondish hair, thick glasses, and a scruffy beard stepped through the doors blinking sweetly in mild confusion. She’d taken automatic stock of his clothes: an unstructured linen-muslin sport coat, a rumpled white button-down, navy slim-fitting summer trousers over battered brown oxfords. No tie; no wedding ring. He looked like he’d just been released from an Italian library—nothing like a New York City police officer.
Now, she walked around to her own side of the desk and sat down to face him. Upon closer inspection of his nose, an oversized Roman affair, she could see a scar, and his hair had some gray in it. He was her age, maybe older, and he sat upright in his chair with his arms and legs folded up, in the awkward way tall people always seem to arrange their bodies.
He stared back at her dispassionately, with what seemed like an almost scientific curiosity, and flashed a quick smile—more professional, detached, than anything, she thought.
“I need just a second to get myself in order here,” he said. “Do you have coffee?”
She turned to her computer and summoned coffee from Molly. Detective Hutton pulled a flip-top notebook and a felt-tip pen out of his breast pocket and turned the pages, staring intently, almost as though he was deliberately refusing to look at Cat or her surroundings, so she opened her email and pretended to read something important. Irrational panic forced her into racking her brain: Is this really about Hillary, or something else? Had she messed up her taxes? Missed a credit card payment? Did they send the police for that? She’d gotten a traffic ticket on a bicycle, but it had been paid; if that was what he was here for, she’d just write a check. Don’t freak out, she told herself. You’re just mildly hung over. Get a grip.
Ninety long seconds later, Molly opened the door and placed a steaming mug of French-pressed coffee in front of Hutton on a black soapstone coaster before wordlessly exiting. Cat expected him to turn his head and check out Molly’s nearly exposed baby-blue rear end, but he kept his head down, flipping the pages for another agonizing minute. He seemed surprised when he looked up and saw the cup of coffee in front of him. Cat grabbed a fountain pen and a rose-colored legal pad from a pile next to her computer to keep her hands busy.