“You can do whatever you want, Catherine,” Paula said simply. “Know your cards.”
“I want…” Cat let the silence hang in the air. “I want that story gone,” Cat demanded. “I want a hundred grand more than I made at RAGE, and I want the same for Bess. And I want my green card sponsored. No more of this H-1B bullshit.” The sentences had come out of her mouth so quickly, and so sharply, that she could hardly believe she’d said them—but looking at Hutton’s astonished face, it was clear that she had. His thick eyebrows were hovering an inch above his eyeglasses in shock.
“Agreed,” Paula replied, smiling. She held out her hand, and Cat shook it.
“I want it done now,” Cat said.
“Do you have a computer?” Paula asked.
Bess dropped her laptop on the table in front of her. Paula logged into the Cooper network with Margot’s credentials, pulled up the November file slated to be sent out to the printers, then handed it to Cat—who deleted every single line of text that had originally accompanied the photos of Callie.
“Don’t delete the photos,” Bess said. “Her family receives payment in full if they run.”
Cat left the images and handed the computer back to Paula, who saved and sent the file out to the printers.
“Done,” Paula reported. “I feel good about that.”
“I want my deal in writing.”
Paula turned back to the laptop, where she updated the Mania contracts with Cat’s requirements. When she finished, Cat picked up the lobster phone and called down to the front desk. “I’m emailing you a document,” she snapped in rapid-fire French. “I want four copies printed and brought to the ballroom. And pens. Bring pens.” She slammed the phone down and rose from her chair.
“Ballroom?” Paula asked.
“He’s not here for us,” Cat said simply. Paula nodded, and a corner of her mouth pulled back in a kind of smile, but she said nothing. Cat wondered how much she already knew. They gathered their things and headed for the door.
“Can I ask you something?” Hutton asked Paula, taking advantage of the moment as they waited for the elevator.
“Possibly,” Paula agreed warily.
Hutton pulled Hillary Whitney’s note out of his pocket:
the ribbon is the key to everything
“Can you tell me what this means?” he asked.
Paula read it, then passed it to Cat. “It’s about the shoot that Catherine is working on today. Hillary sourced a synthetic, nontoxic fabric that can be 3-D-printed up to thirteen yards wide; in the manufacturer’s parlance, thirteen yards is a ribbon. That’s a huge leap for the garment industry—to have safe, cheap, easy manufacturing on such a large scale. Margot rejected the proposal the morning Hillary died. She was, at the time, afraid of running up RAGE’s resource bill any further. I think that rejection…well, it pushed Hillary over the edge.”
“Why’d she mail it?”
“That, I don’t know.”
“I do,” Cat said. “It’s something we did in boarding school. We sent postcards with inside jokes, quotes, things like that, to each other’s houses so we could read them at the end of the year. To remember what mattered.”
The elevator’s golden doors opened, and they walked out into the lobby.
Hutton trailed behind Cat and Paula as they strode toward the ballroom. The two women were opposites: one of them was tall, young, and nearly bald; the other, sixty, with her white hair in a conservative bun, but they had the same look in their eyes—determination. They were well matched, he thought, whether Cat knew it or not.
He’d been appalled when he first walked into the suite. Though he’d always thought of Cat as slender, in the last two and a half months her body had faded away, dissolved. She looked like she belonged in hospice somewhere as she stared at him, holding her coffee in her twiggy little hands, her clothes baggy on her bony frame. Still: he wanted her. Fat, thin, didn’t matter. Her attitude was endlessly appealing.
The odd part, as they walked through and around a fresh horde of overpainted young women—though it could have been the same horde from earlier, Hutton realized, he could hardly distinguish one girl from the next—was that nobody else looked at Cat like she was sick. Instead they looked at her with obvious approval, at the pointed bones of her shoulder blades and hips with plain, unvarnished envy. He felt it wash over the both of them, the glow of approval, of worship.
She marched them to an opulent ballroom. There were models everywhere, wearing wedding dresses and hanging from scaffolding all around the room, and a passel of pointy-faced older women stood in the corner drinking coffee. A teenage girl dressed like a mechanic ran over to them. “Cat, heyyyy,” she said anxiously. Cat held a finger to her lips. They walked past, to Hutton’s surprise, several large posters from Callie’s Valentino campaign.
Lou Lucas stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by RAGE employees, models, assistants, and photographers. Sausaged into a weird plastic dress, she was anxiously rubbing her hands together like an insect cleaning its antennae. As the group—Hutton, Cat, Bess, Paula, and Molly—descended upon her, Lou’s face went dark. The RAGE staffers, sensing the discomfort of one of their own, fell silent and turned to watch. A mixture of delight and confusion appeared on their faces as the tall, handsome police officer held up his badge and showed it to Lou Lucas.
“Hello, I’m Detective Mark Hutton, NYPD,” he said pleasantly, looming over her.
She looked up with shock. “Hello,” she replied uncertainly.
“I know about Lilac Futures,” he said. “I found the money.”
She moved quickly, trying to slip past him, and he grabbed her arm. Cat and Bess stepped around him, blocking access to the lobby.
“I’m going to take you back to New York,” Hutton announced to Lou, “and you’re going to turn yourself in.”
Lou snorted. “Why would I do that?” she asked.
“You will,” he said plainly before taking out his phone to show a picture of her daughter, Jane Lucas, walking into school on the Upper East Side, her face cheerfully oblivious to the undercover NYPD officer taking her photograph from across the street. “You registered Lilac Futures in Jane’s name. We can arrest and charge her. It’s…unusual to have a six-year-old in juvenile detention, but it does happen.”
“You’re not going to jail a child,” Lou replied flatly, though she was clearly panicking. Her skin was turning bright red beneath the plastic dress.
“We can and we will,” he said, as honestly as he knew how. “If you don’t come back to New York, we have the ability to keep her in juvenile detention for up to three weeks. The facilities are…brutal. Whatever happens to her will absolutely, one hundred percent be your fault.”