Something was not right. That was her lipstick color, alright, around the sippy-hole of the coffee cup’s lid. It was her name, too, written on the side of the disposable cup. Or at least the name she used to order coffee. “Cleo.” But beyond that, things began to fall apart. For one thing, the cup was marked, just below her name, as a meddio double-shot macchiato, whole milk, no whip. She’d never drunk such a thing before in her life. And she had never, never, passed up a dollop of whipped cream.

And there was something else, too, far more obvious than the half-crumpled cup, and far more disturbing. For that cup, empty but for a thin brownish rim of cold liquid that occupied less than a third of its curved inside bottom seam, was clutched in the soft, still-warm hand of Millicent Carlin, whose dead, crumpled form lay concealed by an ambulance sheet behind the yellow police tape that had been strung across the sidewalk in front of what had been, until about fifteen minutes earlier, her favorite coffee house.