Latte Trouble - By Cleo Coyle Page 0,11

counter and slammed the speaker system’s off switch. Everyone looked up as the pulsing electronica pounded its last beat and a funereal silence fell over the coffeehouse. I returned to find my staff in a tight circle. Wagon trains, I thought. Tucker was biting his thumbnail in a sudden moment of regret. “Oh, god, Clare. Did I tell that detective too much?”

“That would be a yes,” said Esther.

Moira’s eyes, already dewy, went wide. “That’s not funny, Esther. The police are going to arrest Tucker.”

Tucker went pale. “My god, I can’t go to jail. I just can’t…”

“Nobody’s going to jail,” I said.

“I didn’t poison anyone,” insisted Tuck. “And I didn’t want anything bad to happen to Ricky. I mean, after what he did to me, I wanted to kill him, sure. But I didn’t want to kill him, kill him. That latte wasn’t even meant for him. I was supposed to give it to Lottie Harmon.”

Moira put her arms around Tucker and hugged him. He buried his face in her shoulder and shook his head in despair.

I knew that latte was meant for Lottie. And other people did, too. Surely the detectives will pick up on that, I thought, after they interview the key witnesses and gather all the facts. I noticed that another plain-clothes policeman had entered the Blend, or perhaps he was some official from the Medical Examiner’s office. Since it was obvious more law enforcement people were still arriving, I scanned the room, hoping against hope that a certain tall, attractively rumpled police detective might show up in the nick of time and put everything right again. But there was no sign of Mike Quinn anywhere.

Then my gaze caught young Officer Demetrios. He was leafing through a worn notebook filled with his bold block letters. I stepped out from behind the counter to confront him. “What’s going to happen?”

He looked nervously beyond me, toward the huddle near the corpse. “I…I couldn’t say, Ms. Cosi.”

He tried to push by me, but I refused to be shaken loose so easily. “Why isn’t Mike Quinn here?”

“I heard Detective Quinn’s on leave.”

That explained why I hadn’t seen him lately. Some time ago, I’d weaned the man off the stale, bitter swill they called coffee in the average New York City bodega, so I’d been wondering where he was getting his caffeine fix.

“Is there something wrong with Detective Quinn? An emergency? Is he sick or something?” I asked.

Officer Demetrios shrugged. “He’s taking lost time, that’s all I know. Something personal, I guess.”

Most likely marital woes, I decided. Off and on over the past year, we’d spoken of his troubles, of his cheating wife, of his indecision over seeking a divorce, and of all the custody issues that would subsequently involve his two children—

But I put thoughts of Detective Quinn aside. He wasn’t here and he wasn’t going to be, so it was up to me to focus on the problem at hand. “What do you know about those two?” I asked, gesturing to slick Detective Starkey and her hapless partner Hutawa.

Demetrios’s eyes were guarded as he whispered his reply. “You heard of that good cop, bad cop thing—the one they use on television shows?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“With these two, it’s more like bad cop, worse cop. Starkey and Hut don’t cut anybody any slack.”

“Starkey and Hut? You’re joking.”

“For chrissake, not so loud, Ms. Cosi. And you didn’t hear those names from me,” he rasped, then hurried away as if I had the plague and was on fire.

I noticed the huddle by the corpse had finally broken up. Detective Starkey was heading back toward the coffee bar, her face impassive. My staff and I formed our own huddle as we watched the woman approach.

“The Medical Examiner’s early conclusions match my own. Richard Flatt was the victim of foul play,” Detective Starkey informed us. Her eyes drifted to Tucker. “And since Mr. Burton here denies your latte recipe uses Amaretto—”

“Amaretto?!” Tucker and I cried together, perplexed.

“Ms. Cosi, the M.E. and I both smelled the scent of bitter almond. The victim’s skin has a distinctive pink hue, so if it isn’t Amaretto in the latte your barista here has been serving up, then it’s prussic acid—that’s cyanide.”

Moira and Esther paled. I felt sick. Tucker stumbled and nearly fainted. Detective Starkey clutched his arm to steady him. When she spoke, her tone was calm but firm. “Mr. Burton, I’m going to have to ask you to accompany me back to the station—”

“No…I won’t go,” Tucker cried, his