Triple Cross (Alex Cross #30)(10)

The case had been brought in Raleigh, North Carolina, by two women and a man she’d never heard of against a defendant whose name was instantly recognizable. It shocked her.

“Frances Duchaine,” she whispered. “The Frances Duchaine? Really?”

Bree read the first few sentences of the dismissed suit and her free hand traveled to her mouth. By the time she was halfway through the document, she was not only thoroughly engrossed but also angry. When she finished, she was furious and wanted to throw the file away. But then she went back to the start of the complaint and that stamped word dismissed and wondered how much, if anything, she’d read was true.

Bree forced herself to withhold judgment, calm down, and be open-minded. She set that file to one side and chose another from the box.

Before Bree opened it, though, she thought: What if it is true? But how could it be? Wouldn’t someone have known? Duchaine is not exactly a secretive billionaire. A billionaire, yes, but not some secretive financier. She’s a marketer at heart. She’s her own brand. In the public eye all the time. Someone should have known. But again, why would a woman as successful as Frances Duchaine take the risks alleged in the suit?

Bree looked back at the first suit and the date of its dismissal, then wrote down the name of the plaintiffs’ attorney—Nora Jessup—and her address. She also noted the superior court judge’s name—Eloise Carmichael. Only then did she open the second file.

It contained a stapled sheaf of photocopied press clippings about Frances Duchaine and her meteoric rise and sustained position in the world of high fashion. Bree knew some of her history, but she spent the next hour studying the woman in greater depth.

Duchaine had suddenly appeared twenty-five years earlier, plucked from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology by no less an icon than Tess Jackson.

At that time, Tess Jackson’s eponymous brand was growing so fast, she couldn’t keep up with design demands. Jackson had graduated from FIT herself and was a generous alum. She’d called the president of the school and asked to see the portfolios of the three senior students the faculty believed showed the most promise.

Jackson was scheduled to give a lecture at FIT a few days later. Of course, word of the three chosen students got out. Duchaine, at that time a sophomore, was not among them. But she heard Jackson was looking for a young designer and ambushed her near her car when she arrived at the school.

“Frances looked like a model then too,” Jackson told New York magazine ten years later. “In fact, that’s what I thought she had in her portfolio, headshots and such. And when she told me she was a sophomore in the design program, I said I was interested only in the most experienced students. Frances would not take no for an answer and said I should at least look at her drawings. So I did. Right there in the parking lot.”

Jackson was floored by what she saw, and on the spot, she offered Duchaine a job as her personal assistant to learn the business while she coached her on her designs. Not long after that, Duchaine’s fashion started to appear under Jackson’s label.

And not long after that, Duchaine became Jackson’s sometime lover.

It worked until it didn’t. For almost seven years, Jackson’s brand and its subsidiaries grew and prospered. At age twenty-seven, however, and with Jackson in her late forties, Duchaine left the company and the relationship and started her own brand.

“It was inevitable, but it still broke my heart,” Jackson said in the article. “Now we are friends and I know it was the right choice for Frances. She is not the kind of woman who likes to be contained by any sort of convention. That’s what I loved and still love about her.”

Duchaine’s brand exploded because she aimed at the finer ready-to-wear market before going wide.

On the notepad, Bree wrote, She followed Jackson’s business model. Worked even better for her than it did for Jackson. When Duchaine sold part of her company to a hedge fund, it made her a legit billionaire. Why would she do the things the women allege in the lawsuit? Why jeopardize the empire?

Bree kept turning the pages in the press packet and saw pictures of Duchaine with one handsome man or beautiful woman after another. Now forty-eight, Duchaine had been romantically linked to a number of people of both sexes over the years.

But she had never married, never even gotten engaged. Whenever Duchaine was asked about that, she laughed and said she was simply one of those people not meant to settle down for long.

“I work hard, and I want to satisfy my whims when I like,” she said in an interview with the New York Times. “Go to my ski house in British Columbia when the powder’s deep or my island in Fiji when I long for solitude. Whatever. Whenever. A marriage, a family, kids—they’re not conducive to the lifestyle of a female knight that I cherish.”

Bree thought about that last statement—the lifestyle of a female knight that I cherish—and realized Duchaine was revealing a deep inner truth about herself.

She wrote, Frances is a queen any way you look at her. But she views herself as a female knight. Not a queen. Not a princess. A female knight.

Tapping her pen on the legal pad, Bree reread her note and thought about that. She was about to push on when it all clicked in her mind.

Bree scribbled, What does a female knight do? What all knights do. She goes out and slays dragons. When she’s back at the castle, she’s wooing fair maidens or handsome men. Think of all the fair maidens and handsome men in her business. They’re everywhere.