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  Cat found herself in New York four days later, suitcase in hand, knocking on Sigrid’s door.

  Right away her responsibilities at RAGE felt relevant to her academic work, although her parents—a practical-minded pair who lived happily on their hobby farm in rural Belgium—rolled their eyes at the connections she insisted were obvious. You’re too smart to work at a magazine, Katteke, her mother had chided at first, and you are too old to start anew. Choose something you can excel at or you will have a crisis at thirty, and then where will you go? Yet, six years later, now thirty-three, Cat truly felt she was still practicing, on an exceptionally macro level, the theories and arguments she had made all through her master’s and doctoral research on the feminist aesthetic practices of fine art. When asked to explain to others why she’d left academia for a women’s magazine, she often referred to poet and art critic John Berger’s observation on the historic depictions of women’s bodies in photography and painting from his book Ways of Seeing:

  To be born a woman has been to be born, within an allotted and confined space, into the keeping of men. The social presence of women has developed as a result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a limited space. But this has been at the cost of a woman’s self being split into two.

  A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually…

  One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at…Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

  She’d had a short, slightly truncated quote from Ways of Seeing screenprinted over a photograph of one of Egyptian artist Ghada Amer’s embroideries of a woman pulling down her underpants. In rose-colored paint, it read: “A woman’s presence defines what can and cannot be done to her.”

  Cat had the screenprint framed in blue and hung it next to her desk, where visitors to her office could get a nice long stare at it without having to crane their necks. The opposite wall held an enormous metal bookcase filled with all of her books from graduate school lest her peers forget, even for a moment, where she’d come from.

  Still, every day at RAGE was a personal challenge for Cat to figure out how to apologize for the ads, the actual and unfortunate bulk of the magazine’s pages, the quantity of which grew every month. With a staff of seventy-five in New York, seventy in Los Angeles (though only a third were full-time with benefits), and the enormous cost of the lobbyists and attorneys they employed to ensure the accuracy of their claims that the featured apparel was, in fact, made by living-wage workers, RAGE Fashion Book was beyond expensive to publish.

  The previous decade’s watershed declines in print advertising rates meant that RAGE was profitable only when domestic newsstand sales matched domestic subscribers, a total monthly goal circulation of eight million. The international editions merely broke even, their continued existence a reflection of only Margot Villiers’s negotiating skills and the importance of the RAGE brand; it was the domestic subscriptions and sales that mattered to Cooper. But it was getting harder every day to be popular, and ethical, and profitable. Their numbers had fallen short every issue of the last twenty, and so they took on more ads for fewer dollars every single month.

  The editorials that Cat worked on for each issue served two purposes: to attract the advertisers on the opposing pages and, more to her point, to dispute them. Cat thought that fashion and beauty advertising preyed on the basest human insecurities, showing only legions of poreless, polished dolls serving as human shelves for handbags and perfume, their mouths set into dick-sucking Os and their legs splayed open, slack and lifeless. Buy this bag, the advertisements in RAGE screamed, and you’ll be someone’s princess, so wealthy you don’t need to eat, so successful you don’t need to work.

  Those advertisements paid her salary, but they haunted her dreams, too.

  She’d spent the last six years working harder than she ever had in school to ensure that the women of RAGE’s editorial pages were aspirational in their strangeness, in their danger, in outfits that very specifically said I am not a woman for sale. Cat was determined that the next generation of little girls would not want to grow up and look like a dictator’s mistress—fake tits pouring out of bandage dresses, feet shoved into bindings, literally immobilized by their roles as living, breathing decoration. She wanted them to grow up to want to look like Isabella Blow or Anna Piaggi: women who wore watermelons on their heads and carpets as skirts, women whose self-presentation was so complex that no stranger could ever presume to know what could or could not be done to them but only immediately consider what those women might be doing to the world.

  Today’s challenge: choosing the accessories for Dotty for It, the Sylvia-Plath-in-a-mental-hospital-themed spread for October shooting in three weeks. Bess had placed a tray of possibilities on her desk next to the tray for Judy and the Technicolor Housecoat, Margot’s inspired shoot for the November issue about a bored suburban housewife who decides to eat a fistful of magic mushrooms and Scarlett O’Hara some clothes out of every goddamn upholstered object in the house.

  Cat cracked open her laptop and started sorting through the Dotty for It tray, snapping pictures with her phone. Bess had chosen several large bangles covered in enamel polka dots; six pairs of clip-on earrings in solid gold, set with both paste and real gemstones; three silver collar necklaces that looked like chain-mail dickeys; a sterling rope with an enormous triangle that hung down to the belly button; and fifteen rings that sat above the knuckle in thin bands. Cat logged into the company’s private badge board, used to organize shoots across departments, and examined the clothes Margot and Paula had approved: simple shifts with barely there net-textured polka dots from Stella McCartney; tapered cigarette pants and doctor’s-coat-length felted-wool cardigans from Jil Sander; and overstarched French-striped tieback cotton dresses that looked like stiff hospital gowns from Marc Jacobs. The shoot would be on location at Scoria Vale, the venerable and picturesque rehab in Connecticut that had been treating the mental health and addictions of rich New Yorkers since the 1930s. The clothes suggested a quiet kind of mania, and Cat thought that Tilda Swinton would look amazing in all of them.

  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

  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, tu
rning 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.