The women nodded and stepped away. The older officer gestured to the other personnel around us. He pointed to the ground around the body, and the area farther out-a nearby mailbox and lamppost, some parked cars. Then he spoke some more, slightly shaking his head, which I assumed meant, No stray bullets on the ground or lodged in nearby objects.
Finally, all three stepped up to two officials who’d been examining the body: the middle-aged Asian man and the white woman in the dark nylon jackets. The group spoke for a few minutes.
Matt lightly bumped my arm. “Are you going to explain all this to me?”
“All what?”
Matt exhaled. “All this crap about directing initial queries to the professional on the scene. The last time I checked, Clare, the Specialty Coffee Association of America wasn’t on the NYPD payroll for third-party consulting.”
“Dial it down,” I whispered. “I helped the detectives with a case a few months ago, and the way the chips fell, they ended up assuming I was a professional private investigator. It’s no big deal. Now please be quiet. I’m trying to hear what they’re talking about.”
It was difficult to pick up the lowered voices, so I moved away from Matt and stepped closer to the powwow around Hazel Boggs’s corpse.
“… a single gunshot wound to the back of the head,” the Asian man in the nylon jacket was saying. “Entry wound is evident but no exit wound.”
“The witness assures us that she only heard one shot fired,” Lori Soles told the group.
“Then your only bullet is lodged right here,” the Asian man replied, “inside the victim’s skull.”
“Let’s hope it didn’t get pancaked against a bone,” Sue Ellen said.
“If there’s no exit wound-” Lori glanced down the block, “then the bullet lost velocity.”
“That’s correct.” The Asian man nodded. “The weapon couldn’t have been fired from a very close range.”
Sue Ellen pointed to the upper floors of buildings in the vicinity. “Could the gun have been fired from a window or balcony?”
“Not possible.” The man shook his head. “Look at the angle of entry on the wound. The victim was shot at street level from somewhere directly behind. We’ll know more after we get inside the skull.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Lori Soles turned to the older plainclothes officer. “I guess the guys can stop looking for bullets. There was only one, and it’s in there.” She pointed to the dead girl’s cranium.
“We’re canvassing the neighborhood now. The shooter may have dropped something…”
Just then I noticed a white panel van with a satellite antenna double-parking across the street. Emblazoned on the van’s side were three words that sent a chill though my blood: New York 1.
“Oh, God…” I muttered. Hazel Boggs’s murder was about to make the local news. As a technician jumped out and began unpacking camera equipment, I hurried back to Matt. He looked positively stricken.
“Clare,” he whispered, “I have to get out of here.”
“Wait!” I grabbed his arm before he could bolt. “These cops will detain you if you try to run. It could get loud. You’ll just end up calling attention to yourself.”
“But if Breanne sees me on the news-”
“Just give me a second.”
I rushed up to Lori Soles, who’d always been the softer touch. “Detective Soles, I’m happy to stick around, but my business partner really needs to get back to our shop. Can you talk to him another time?”
Lori frowned. “Now would be better-”
“Oh, let the guy go,” Sue Ellen broke in, surprising the heck out of me with an accommodating hand wave. “Spinelli got a statement from him already. And we can track Mr. Tight End down tomorrow. On one condition…” She shot Matt an openly flirtatious smile. “He has to give me his digits.”
With New York 1’s cable news camera approaching, Matt wasn’t about to argue. He quickly reached into his back pocket, pulled out his wallet, extracted a business card, and slapped it into Sue Ellen’s outstretched hand.
“My cell number’s on there,” he said before taking off. “Catch you later.”
The detective smiled as she pocketed my ex’s card. “Not if I catch you first…” she promised, her eyes following Matt’s posterior all the way back to our coffeehouse.
FIVE
FIFTEEN minutes later, I was back inside the Blend.
“Where’s Matt?” I asked, approaching the espresso bar.
Gardner Evans glanced up, jerked his thumb toward the ceiling, and went back to crowning a hazelnut-toffee latte with spoonfuls of frothy foam.
I looked around the Blend’s first floor and realized I was witnessing an unheard-of customer pattern for a Monday at midnight. The place was packed, and I didn’t need a beverage-service management spreadsheet to analyze why.
Sitting around our marble-topped café tables was a base of neighborhood regulars, a handful of NYU undergrads, and a sprinkling of FDNY and police personnel. All of them had come here as a result of the bad business a block away. Murder and coffee, it appeared, were a profitable mix.
“You okay here?” I asked Gardner, scanning the work area. I was unhappy to see him alone. “Where’s Dante?”
“Downstairs, getting stuff from the big fridge.” Gardner drizzled the finished latte with toffee syrup, dusted it with a fine hazelnut powder, and placed the tall glass mug on the counter for the waiting customer. Three more were still in line.
“Things were dead in here an hour ago,” he told me, “and we were going to start restocking and cleaning when we got this rush-”
“Hey, boss!” Dante walked out from the back, each tattooed arm lugging a gallon of milk product. He stashed the jugs in our espresso bar fridge and moved up to the counter. “What the heck’s going on outside?”
“Yeah, we heard the sirens,” Gardner said. “A couple of customers said someone got whacked?”
“A young woman.” I rubbed my eyes. On a good day, they were emerald green, but between the beers and the tears, I figured they were massively shot with red. “Listen, I have to go upstairs and talk to Matt right now, but I’ll be back down shortly to help.”
“Do you want to open the second floor for this mob?” Gardner asked.
The Blend’s upstairs lounge often caught the spillover on busy weekends. But my guys were already into overtime. “Morning comes too soon around here,” I told Gardner. “Let’s keep the customers on the first floor. No more dining room service, either. Give everything wings-and you can start with two doppio macchiatos for Matt and me.”
“No problem, Clare…”
Gardner pulled a pair of double espressos into paper cups then spotted each of the dark pools with a dollop of foamed milk. (That’s what macchiato basically translates to, by the way: to mark with a spot or stain. Some coffeehouses reverse this recipe, marking a cup of steamed or foamed milk with a bit of espresso instead. At the Blend, however, tradition still ruled.)
I picked up my two steaming paper cups, snapped on flat lids, and pointed to the door. “Anyone who comes in here from the police or fire departments gets free drinks tonight. And start brewing up a thermal urn of the Breakfast Blend. When I come down, I’ll bring the coffee out to them.”
“Okay, Clare.”
“Sure, boss.”
“Thanks, guys.” I left the espresso bar and began to cut a serpentine path through the crowded café tables. I’d been in a pretty big hurry to get to Matt-until I realized the conversations taking place around me were about tonight’s shooting. My pace instantly slowed.
At a table to my right, a group of NYU guys in ripped jeans, T-shirts, and day-old chin scruff were all agreeing that they hadn’t seen or heard a thing and they didn’t know the woman.
Right. I moved on.
At the next table, a twenty-something girl in vintage seventies fringe leather was speaking excitedly about seeing the New York 1 news van. Her redheaded girlfriend in a neon pink cashmere sweater confessed to a crush on Pat Kiernan, the station’s morning anchor.