Клео Коул - Espresso Shot

“Yeah, but...” Matt shook his head, “it’s no big secret how Knox wants to hurt Breanne. He wants to publicly humiliate her, catch her or me in some kind of embarrassing scenario before the wedding to boost his own career. Knox’s assigned stalkers have cameras, not guns.”

“Is there anyone else you can think of who might be angry with her? Someone who’s threatened her lately?”

“ Yes. I can...”

Matt opened his laptop and struck a button to bring the computer out of hibernation.

“What are you doing?”

“I want you to see a Web site.” He logged on to the Internet via the Blend’s wireless connection and began typing into his browser. “Not long ago, Breanne’s magazine did an exposé on a restaurant, and the chef and owner of the place has been posting some pretty disturbing things about Breanne on his blog.”

“What sort of things?”

Matt slid his computer toward me and pointed at its screen. A maroon banner across the top of the Web page read, “The Prodigal Chef.” Standing next to the letters was the caricature of a man with a dark brown goatee on an exaggerated chin. A tall chef’s hat half covered his spiky platinum blond hair. He wore a white chef’s jacket and a ridiculously broad smile. In his left hand was an open bottle of wine, in his right a meat cleaver.

Below the banner was the headline of the blog’s latest entry:

“Serve Breanne,” I murmured. With a headline like that, I expected the article that followed would be about tastemaker Breanne’s favorite cocktails or finger food, something along the lines of how to make the powerful Trend editor-in-chief happy when she visited your nightclub or restaurant.

But that’s not what the Prodigal Chef meant by serving Breanne.

The first clue was the large picture below the headline. The chef had cut Breanne’s face out of another picture and plastered it to the body of a plucked chicken. Recipes were posted below it, which included methods of frying, broiling, and roasting “the Breanne” over red-hot coals, among other things. Finally, there were instructions for cutting her up so her parts could be used when other tasty recipes called for something especially bitter. “And, don’t forget,” the rambling blog entry finished, “Breanne Summour makes the perfect tart.”

I turned to Matt. “Who is this guy? Sweeney Todd?”

“His name’s Neville Perry. Look...”

Matt clicked on a link that read, “About the Prodigal Chef.” A brief bio popped up. “Two years ago, this guy had some sort of short-lived reality show attached to his restaurant. The place was extremely popular. Then Trend did an exposé. The World Wide Web spread the word, and Perry’s business never recovered.”

I knew—from my own daughter’s recent experience—how cutthroat the New York restaurant industry could be. Still, I doubted a chef who’d publicly expressed hatred for Breanne would hire a sharpshooter to off her. How dim a bulb would you have to be to do that?

“Look, Matt, if the man was savvy enough to open a New York restaurant, I can’t see him stupid enough to advertise himself as a murder suspect—”

Matt opened his mouth to argue, but I quickly added: “On the other hand, I do think we need to tell Soles and Bass about your suspicions. This is pretty disturbing, and we should definitely see what they think.”

“Clare, I’m really freaked about this.”

“I know you are, but listen , even if this killer was after Breanne, this person’s not going to know who was shot for a while. I mean, the shooter’s going to stay low for fear of being caught. And the authorities aren’t going to release Hazel Boggs’s name to the press until her family’s been notified. That gives you a few days to work with Soles and Bass. They can pursue leads, see what turns up. And before you know it, your wedding day will be here, and you’ll be getting Bree out of town. You’re flying off to Barcelona for the honeymoon, right?”

“Yeah, but...” Matt sighed, hung his head. “I’m still freaked.”

I nodded, tried to look supportive. Despite his strong feelings, however, I really doubted he was right. Matt was stressed—and paranoia was never a long trip from that state. After a good night’s sleep, he was bound to see things differently.

By tomorrow, the detectives from the Sixth would probably have Hazel Boggs’s shooter in custody, a murder weapon impounded, and an assistant district attorney drooling over an open-and-shut felony case. Then maybe Matt could rest easy, realize he was wrong, and finally start enjoying his last few days of bachelorhood.

In the hearth across the room, the feverish crackling had slowed. The flames that had been burning so strongly when I’d first come upstairs were now slowly dying. Rising, I gently suggested to Matt that we table this discussion and head downstairs. Then he could help Gardner behind the counter, and Dante and I could begin taking free coffees out to the New York police and fire personnel.

The long night was about to get even longer and—like I’d told my overworked baristas—morning came too early around here.

Ninety minutes later my body had exhausted every last molecule of caffeine, and I was ready to drop. With the lights finally out downstairs and Matt tucked into his old guest room down the hall, I pulled my chestnut hair free of its barista ponytail and changed into the softest garment I owned—no, not a pashmina nightie—an oversized Steelers football jersey.

When I was a little girl, growing up in Western Pennsylvania, my father ran an illegal sports book in back of my grandmother’s grocery. Naturally, the Pittsburgh teams were his bread and butter. But that wasn’t the reason I wore the shirt. My grandmother believed in signs, and she’d become convinced that Franco Harris’s Immaculate Reception during the Steelers playoff with the Oakland Raiders was some kind of miracle. So she gave me the football jersey with Harris’s 32 on it and said if I slept in it, I would be protected.

Yeah, I know. To the typical modern-thinking urbanite, this notion would be waved away as ridiculous, a joke, some kind of psychosis. But Nana grew up in a remote Italian village where curses were more common than slip-and-fall lawyers, and things not seen carried at least as much validity as earth and sky. To her, the malocchio wasn’t some quaint old-world notion. The evil eye was very real, something to be actively warded off.

Growing up in an American suburb, I didn’t have nearly the same level of imagination as my grandmother, but I wore the jersey to humor her—until I grew out of it. When I was seventeen, preparing for my freshman year of fine arts studies, she bought me a brand-new one. It was the last one she gave me before leaving this life, and it’s the one I still wear. Its edges are frayed now, its logo massively faded, but I wouldn’t trade the threadbare talisman for a truckload of Himalayan cashmere.

Yawning like a sleepwalker, I swung my legs beneath the covers of the mahogany four-poster, but I didn’t turn off the bedside lamp. Not yet. Despite the fact that my eyes were practically closed, I couldn’t shut them completely until I heard one last voice.

I grabbed my cell phone off the nightstand and speed-dialed the second number on my list (the first was my daughter’s). Holding my breath, I listened as the electronic pulses made the connection I’d been aching for all evening: one ring, two—

“Hi, Clare.”

“Hi, Mike.”

“Nice to hear from you, sweetheart...”

I closed my eyes and smiled. Mike and I had been friends for well over a year before we’d become lovers. Now his deep voice felt as familiar and protective as my timeworn night-shirt.