A few minutes later I noticed Cheryl steal back into the auditorium and take a seat off by herself. Her head was bowed. I worried that my new friend had disgraced herself.

But in the next moment I forgot her and went back to work. Because who was I kidding? We were never going to be friends.

Chapter 13

The Ma Belle virtual assistant on Barrett’s desk kept a running tally of his incoming phone calls; the names crawled across the video screen like subtitles in a foreign film. Callers were holding on all of his lines: his wife, Melanie; security chief Jack Culligan; the avocats in Paris; Graziella, the company’s premier luxury label designer; and finally, the Hollywood agent for that movie star, Luke Rafferty. Each of them was far more important than the Communications director Barrett was currently talking to. She was giving him some serious pushback about his redraft of the press release.

“I just think it’s overstating things to say that a suspect is now in police custody,” she said.

“I don’t agree,” Barrett said. “They have her, and I suspect her.”

“But this implies that the police suspect her. And that she’s been arrested, and that’s not my understanding of the facts.” She was a Sarah Lawrence English major who probably dreamed of working for a big publishing house and editing somebody like Margaret Atwood. Instead she was copyediting prospectuses and catalog text. And now a press release about the shooting death of the company’s director of human resources.

“We don’t really know the facts, do we?” he said.

“Then we shouldn’t say anything at all. Just that the investigation into the shooting continues.”

Obviously that wasn’t good enough. He thought for a minute. “Police are questioning a former employee of CDMI in connection with the shooting. There you go. It’s absolutely factual.”

“All right. I guess.” She still sounded reluctant.

“And add some stuff about how valuable Lucy was to the company and how much we all mourn her, blah blah blah. Got it?”

“Got it,” she said with a sigh.

He disconnected and punched the call from Paris. “Je te rappelle,” he told the lawyers, and disconnected that call as well. His missed calls also crawled across the Ma Belle screen, each one requesting an immediate callback: his broker, reminding him of the margin call; his banker, ditto; Ingram the Third, once known as Trey, now Tripp because it was “edgier,” no doubt pleading for another loan to start up another start-up; and daughter Chloe calling from St. Moritz to complain about daughter Courtney, currently in Cap Ferrat. Culligan had dropped off the line by then, leaving only Melanie, Graziella, and Luke Rafferty’s agent on hold. Barrett knew which call took priority.

“Darling! How are you?” He stood and routed the call to his headset, and with a cigarette in hand, he opened the door to the balcony. A cold wind pushed its way inside.

“Infuriated, that’s how,” Melanie said. “I just had to fire Lin.”