told them I’d come back on. Do you think you could pitch in, too?”
Matt nodded. “I’ll help.”
Two simple words, an oasis in the desert. “Great.”
The father of my child stared at me for a long moment after that, his jaw working silently; then he peered out the window again. Obviously, the man was agitated. But I got the distinct impression it had nothing to do with the amount of caffeine he’d just consumed.
“Is something wrong? I mean other than the obvious-” I gestured in the general direction of the crime scene, where emergency lights were still flashing red against the century-old town houses.
“Yes, Clare. I think something’s very wrong, but I don’t know how to go about…” As Matt’s voice trailed off, he shook his head. “Can I talk to you?”
“Of course.”
He walked back to the table, but he didn’t sit down. Instead, he began to pace to the window and back again. “I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve got some ideas about tonight’s murder.”
“What do you mean
“I mean…” Matt stopped pacing and faced me, his chiseled features half in shadow. “I’m not so sure the killer was that motorcycle-jacketed asshole back at the White Horse Tavern.”
“I agree with you.”
“You do?”
I told Matt what I’d just learned from Barry downstairs.
“The man’s apartment faces Hudson,” I said, “and he swears he heard the shot from right below his window, which means the weapon was fired a block and a half away from the victim.”
“Yes, but…” Matt scratched his head. “I’m sorry,
“It’s important because the jerk you threatened at the tavern was
Matt stared at me for a good ten seconds. The half of his face I could see had gone completely pale.
“Matt? Are you okay? Maybe you better sit down…”
My ex-husband nodded and took a seat at the table. “You’re right, Clare… You’re absolutely right. And it backs up my own ideas.”
“
“I don’t think that bullet was meant for the stripper. I think that bullet was meant for Breanne.”
“Breanne?” Now I needed to sit down. “You want to explain your theory?”
As I sank, he rose and went right back to pacing.
“Think about it, Clare. My engagement to Breanne is public knowledge. She’s picked me up here in the evenings countless times. I started my evening here earlier, and when we came back from the White Horse, Breanne’s look-alike was on my arm. If someone had been waiting in the night, staking out the Blend to get to Breanne, they would have seen this girl. Do you follow?”
“Yes, but-”
“Hazel Boggs was a dead ringer for my fiancee. From a distance, she fooled both of us. I think she fooled the shooter, too. I think Breanne was the target, not this poor girl from West Virginia. In fact, I don’t think it. I know it!”
Matt’s face was flushed, his eyes bright. A vein throbbed visibly in his neck. Despite the guy’s physical-fitness level, I was starting to worry he might have a stroke.
“Okay, Matt, okay. I hear you. Just please calm down.” I pulled a chair out from the table and shook it. “Now would you sit already.”
For a long moment, my ex-husband stared at me (glared, really, since he could obviously tell I was skeptical of his sudden Breanne-in-peril theory). But then with a grunt he sank down beside me again, put his elbows on the table, and dropped his head in his hands.
“I think you’re overwrought,” I told him carefully. “You’ve had a lot of alcohol, then a terrible shock, then enough caffeine to jump-start a Hummer. Forget about helping me and the guys downstairs tonight, okay? You need to go upstairs and get some rest-”
“Don’t talk to me like a psych patient, Clare. I’m not crazy.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“Just hear me out. This theory of mine didn’t come out of nowhere. Something happened last Friday morning that you don’t know about.”
“Oh?”
“An SUV hopped the sidewalk and nearly ran Breanne down. Then it fled the scene.”
“What?!”
“It happened just down the street from her apartment building.”
“You were with her?”
“No.” He massaged his eyes. “I’d finished my workout early, so I’d been walking toward her from the health club up the street. Bree was on her cell phone, totally distracted. But I saw the vehicle jump the curb behind her and come right for her. If I hadn’t lunged for her, slammed her into a doorway, she could have been flattened.”
“Did you tell the police?”
“Of course! But nothing came of it. There are thousands of black SUVs in Manhattan, and this one had mud splattered across its license plate, so I couldn’t give the cops anything more than a pathetically general description. The whole thing happened in seconds, the side windows were darkly tinted, and there was a sunscreen blocking most of the front windshield. I couldn’t even see whether it was a man or woman driving.”
“Weren’t there any other witnesses?”
Matt nodded. “An elderly couple saw the whole thing, but neither could ID the vehicle any better than I could.”
“Mud on the license, huh? That does sound a bit suspicious, like someone planned it.”
“Why do you think I’m bringing it up?! At the time, I thought it was a freak accident, easily forgotten, no actual harm done, you know? Just a scare. But after tonight’s shooting…”
I got up from the table and walked to the window, out of the shadows and into them again. Thinking it over, I had plenty of doubts. But for Matt’s sake, I was willing to take his theory for a test drive.
“Do you know anyone who might want to hurt Breanne? What about this Randall Knox character you mentioned earlier? Didn’t you tell me he had a history with her?”
“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?”
“
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 expose 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
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
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
