Bryson stopped in his tracks. He turned slowly and shifted his camera case to the other side, then rolled his shoulders, loosening the heavy muscles that had suddenly cramped at her words, to see the magazine publisher watching him cagily.
“Meaning what?”
Katherine Bruce’s face lost its cat-and-mouse expression, and she shrugged silently.
“Are you suggesting foul play was involved?” Erik pressed.
“Well, I certainly hope not. But if there’s not a sexy answer to the question ‘what made Briony disappear?’ I hope there is a juicy scandal or a murder mystery involved.”
“So if the story’s not sexy, you hope she’s disgracing herself, or dead?”
Katherine Bruce said nothing, just stared at him unblinkingly.
Against his will Erik Bryson blinked, then shook his head.
“I’ve spoken with some cold people in my day, Ms. Bruce,” he said, his eyes boring into hers. “War lords, corporate raiders, politicians—but you can hold your ice with any one of them.”
“Thank you,” said Katherine Bruce stoically. “You may think the fashion industry is a fluffy joke, Mr. Bryson, but I can assure you, it is a deadly serious business. There is more than half a trillion dollars involved in the farthest reaches of all the economies that it touches. Briony by herself represents companies with a net annual income in the tens of billions of dollars. This is no place for lightweights; those who underestimate the seriousness of fashion do so at their own peril. There are a number of sad examples of people in the fashion industry being kidnapped or killed. The longer Briony remains unable to be found—”
Erik Bryson exhaled.
“I’m listening,” he said.
“I’ll give you one magazine cycle, about six weeks, to find Briony and, more importantly, find out why she dropped out of sight.”
“Did you ever consider that you already know the story? Maybe Briony just got sick of the life and decided to retire? What if the story’s no more interesting than that?”
“Then that’s the story we’ll tell. You may not think much of the fashion world, Mr. Bryson, but while it is a cutthroat place, it’s a reputable one—for the most part. The public hasn’t truly figured out that she’s gone yet, but when they do—the blowback may threaten both the industry and her life, depending on what has happened to her. Neither of us would want that, would we?”
Erik Bryson stared at her in silence.
Katherine Bruce leaned back in her chair.
“Six weeks, at three times your hourly, plus expenses, no matter what happens. Bring me Briony, and you can have editorial oversight of the breaking story. Two questions need to be answered in that story, and only two—where is she, and why did she drop out of sight? But if after six weeks you come up with nothing, I’ll hire a detective and kiss off the chance to tell the story without sensationalism. If there’s a skeleton in her closet, a sinful tryst, a scandal, or some other character-destroying revelation, I will not hesitate to print it—I’ll need to pay for your time, and that of the private detective, somehow.”
Erik Bryson looked at her for a long moment, then came back to his chair and took out his tablet with a sigh. “Tell me everything you know about her. Every stupid little detail. I’ll try to keep my eyes from rolling back in my head.”
The magazine maven leaned back in her ridiculously expensive chair.
“When she first showed up she was just a kid, and really rough—had never even put on a pair of high heels, had no sense of fashion or understanding of the industry. But the best of them usually don’t—those things can be easily learned. What Briony was born with, you can’t teach. Perfect biometrics, my lord—I’ve never seen a better face for makeup or perfume lines. Her management auctioned her, and Dulce Cheiro set a new record price for her exclusive cosmetics work.
“Her hair is amazing; in daylight it’s a fabulous shade of dirty blond, but in the right illumination it can look silver, or gold, or white, or even a gorgeous shade of ash, without dyeing it. It also holds color beautifully. The camera loves her, but light loves her even more—and that girl knows her light. Totally a natural. She can do print or film, runway, swimsuit, bridal, negligee, body paint, fine art, street-punk, high fashion, ready-to-wear—she’s a dream. But she’s missing in action—has been for more than a year. We need her back—‘we’ meaning the entire fashion industry.”
“Anything you can tell me about her that won’t make me gag—er, that isn’t about her work?”
“She’s a reader, a voracious one,” Katherine Bruce said after a moment’s thought. “The first day she came to this office she was fresh off the plane from wherever the hell she came from, a school backpack full of doorstop-thick history books and a copy of Paddington Bear.”
Erik’s brow wrinkled. “Paddington Bear? The kid’s book?”
“Yes.”
“How old was she?”
“Sixteen—just barely. She seemed intelligent and pleasant, though she didn’t say a word. Her manager, Brian Hanoway, is a total pain in the ass; he has both a business and a law degree, and the A-list of names for every type of industry—writers, models, actors, athletes, musicians, you name it—the people who are so famous that they can buck the major agencies and who need a shark like Hanoway to keep the problems that come with mega-celebrity at bay. It’s a small, select office; he hasn’t had a new employee in decades.”
“How do you know that?”
Katherine Bruce looked surprised. “We always try to pay off someone on a manager’s staff,” she said, looking as if what she was saying was obvious. “The easiest and best way to get inside data. But no one at Hanoway Ltd. is ever biting. The bastard pays them too well.”
“Truly, you are turning my stomach,” said Erik, not looking up from his tablet. “What else can you tell me?”
“Not much. We were given exactly zero information about her, other than her measurements. I have no idea what her last name is, if she even has one. Her management built a brick wall around her. That putz Hanoway laid the law down clearly, as he did each time she has entered into a major contract with anyone—leave the kid alone. ‘She will work full-out for you on shoot, but her personal life is off limits,’ he said. ‘If you can’t abide by the terms, we’re done talking.’ Hmmpf. That jerk had an office in the Times Square area on the 27th floor before he signed her; I can’t even imagine what his setup is now.”
“Still in Times Square,” Erik Bryson said, reading the tablet.
“She always had an extra day or two put into her contract when she was working in foreign locales so that she could visit their historic sites. The clients weren’t expected to book or pay for those days—her management handled the details, as they always do. But she wanted to take the time to see the history of the places she visited. I can’t remember any other model that ever wanted to see anything abroad but the nightlife. It was a colossal pain and meant she was unavailable for compressed bookings.”
“Good for her,” Erik said, typing on the tablet once more. “One less beautiful American acting like an Ugly American.”
“I don’t even know if she’s American,” Katherine Bruce said. “Someone suggested she might be from England, but in the few words she ever spoke in my hearing, I didn’t catch an accent. Maybe Canada.”
“Why did you think she might be British?”
The fashion editor shrugged.
“Probably because of that damned book,” she said.
“Which one—Paddington Bear?”
“Yes. I saw her in a T-shirt once with a picture of him on it, in his stupid black hat and his stupid blue coat with his stupid note pinned on it, and asked her if it was her favorite book or something. She smiled and said no, it just reminded her of home.”
Erik looked up. “Oh? That sounds promising.”
“Yes, yes it does, but it turned out to be nothing. When she first went missing, we did all kinds of looking into Paddington Bear. I’d never read the book before, but it quickly became my constant companion, if you can imagine that—me, carrying around a stupid paperback kid’s book in a Coach bag. We cross-referenced the author, tore the book apart searching for clues—I even sent a private detective to the famous address where that damned bear supposedly lives in London in the books—#32 Windsor Gardens—but all we managed to do is scare the devil out of a poor old couple who lived near there, who were used to being hounded by children, not detectives, about Paddington. There is no such place, by the way.”
The reporter suppressed a smile and continued typing on his tablet.
“When London crapped out, we even sent the private eye to ‘darkest Peru’—where the bear supposedly came from. You can imagine what he came back with.”
“Let me guess—nothing?”
“Nothing. Bupkis. Spent half a million dollars chasing an imaginary stuffed bear around the flipping world. And didn’t find a whiff of the Dulce Cheiro spokesmodel.”
“And that’s all you’ve got—a wild goose chase and a voracious reader of history books?”
“That’s all I’ve got.”
“Not much to go on.”
Katherine Bruce blinked. “Wait, what am I thinking? There is one other twist to all this.” She picked up a slate gray folder and dropped it on the desk in front of him. “This is the only contact Briony has had with the world since her final shoot, which was for Dior, in January of last year.”
Erik opened the folder. It contained a thick stack of fashion photos, all from the same basic vantage point, but from slightly different angles, of many models, men and women in fall or winter clothing, walking the same runway. His trained eye told him the shots were impressive in their photographic quality, but nothing more. He looked up at the magazine publisher and raised an eyebrow.
“So?”
“These arrived, from her manager’s office, at the end of March last year,” Katherine Bruce said. “They’re shots of the autumn/winter line at Milan’s fashion week.”
“But none of them are of Briony,” Erik said.
“No.” Katherine reached over and flipped the top photograph. “But her name is on every one of them.”
Bryson looked at the stamp on the back. It was a plain ink logo, in a simple block font, reading BRIONY.
“What does this mean?” he asked.
Katherine Bruce leaned forward. “If it follows industry protocol, it means that Briony took the photos. If she did, I don’t know how she managed to do it—she must have been in disguise or something—and I have no idea where she got press credentials. There was no request for payment, no explanation, and Hanoway Ltd. was utterly silent on the matter. I have no idea what any of this means. But it never happened again.”
“Maybe she’s decided she wants to be behind the camera instead of in front of it.”
“That would be insane. The salary she made as a model has almost three more zeroes at the end of it than what a fashion photographer makes. If she’s sick of modeling, she can write a book, get a TV or a movie deal, or pitch products on QVC—”
“Not everything is always about money, Ms. Bruce.”
“You know, I think I may have heard that once. Nonetheless, no more photos from any other fashion week ever arrived. It’s driving me mad.”
The reporter stood and stretched. “I’ll look into it, but I’m not promising you anything.”
“Bring me Briony. Earn your reputation.”
Erik’s ice-blue eyes gleamed.
“I’ve earned my reputation every day since before I graduated from college, Ms. Bruce,” he said coldly. “That reputation is for investigative journalism, which has mostly been employed ferreting out the bastards that pass intentionally bad legislation, grease the palms of drug lords and exploit powerless men, women, and children in ways that would make your blood run cold if I described them to you—well, maybe not yours, now that I think about it. I don’t have time for this nonsense. So let me be clear with you—I will bring you no one, least of all Briony. I’m not a bounty hunter.”
“Hmmm,” Katherine Bruce said, rubbing her cheek. “Hadn’t thought of that. Bounty hunter. Might be my next option if you don’t come through.”
“If I do find out what happened to her, I will bring you the story,” Bryson continued. “And I will do what I can to get you in contact with one another. But if you ever again address me in a manner that makes you sound like a torturer from the Spanish Inquisition, that day will be the last blessed day you will ever see me. Do we have an understanding?”
The fashion editor stared at him frostily. Then she smiled with the same frost on her gloriously colored lips.
“Completely.”
Erik snatched the photo of Briony’s face from the desk. “All right. If your contact info is different than the text I received inviting me to this charming meeting, send me a better number or email.” He shouldered his camera case and turned away, heading for the door. He opened it quickly.
“Goodbye, Ms. Bruce,” he said.
“Mr. Bryson?”
Erik exhaled sharply. “Yes?”
Katherine Bruce looked him up and down.
“You have a very nice look yourself. The cool blue eyes, the dark, sexy, loose curls, the cut body—you could be a model, too, and make a good living at it. If you fail in this assignment, you’ll need a new line of work anyway. Look me up if that happens.”
Bryson swallowed. Then he cupped his ear with his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said dryly. “I didn’t hear a thing you just said.”
He closed the door behind him with a decided snap.
Katherine Bruce waited until she heard the bell of the elevator closing. Then she touched the call button on her smart phone.
“Are you ready?” she said to the voice that answered. “Good. He’s on his way down now. Don’t let him out of your sight until he’s out the door. Then the pros will take it from there.”
The quiet voice posed a question, and she smiled.
“Yes—his camera case and phone were successfully tagged at security. The tracking signal was confirmed to be working before he arrived at my office. Thank you for distracting him, Zoe.”