Steamed

existed only on school grounds and had no business materializing in places where they had no reality. Similarly, Josh’s sous chef had corporeal form only at Magellan and could have appeared at Home Depot only because of some sort of cosmic accident.
    “Chloe,” Brian said with surprise. “Hey, what’re you doing here?”
    “I come here all the time. I have so many cans of Oops paint at home you wouldn’t believe it.” I paused. It felt uncanny to talk to Brian outside Magellan. “I can’t believe you have the time to work here, too.”
    “Well, I just work a couple days a week to make a little extra money. This is my section, the paint department. Being a sous chef pays the bills and not much else, so...” As his voice trailed off, he shifted from side to side, clearly uncomfortable talking to his chef’s girlfriend except at the restaurant. He looked down at my can of paint. “So, um, I gotta go. I have a couple more hours here, and then I might go in to the restaurant to help Josh. I’ll see you later, Chloe.”
    I watched him walk away, staring dumbly at Josh’s protégé as he made his way awkwardly to the back of the store. I flinched with embarrassment for him as he tripped over his own feet and bumped into a woman pulling rollers off a shelf.
    I pushed my cart with its gallon of paint to the front of the store. Skipping the self-checkout, I went to a human cashier to pay. I was disconcerted and confused and couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something off about Brian. He certainly was clumsy; no wonder he’d had so many accidents in the kitchen. I handed over a five-dollar bill, took my receipt, and picked up the can—the can with the neon orange splotch of paint on its lid.
    The can marked with the same color as the traces of paint found on Eric’s body.
    In all that Josh had said about Brian, he’d never mentioned a second job. I wondered whether the police knew about it. And Josh. Did Josh know? Clutching the gallon of paint, I ran to my car, got in, and tried Josh’s cell phone, which he still refused to answer. Damn! Smelly or not, I had to see Josh.
    Next I dialed Detective Hurley’s number. As I listened to the ring, something else hit me. Last night at Magellan, after Brian had told me about Josh’s fits of temper and the jobs he’d lost, Brian had been sharpening the kitchen knives. I now realized that Brian’s technique had been the reverse of Josh’s. When Josh sharpened a knife, he held it with the blade facing away from him. Brian had done the opposite: instead of safely drawing the sharp blade away from his body, he’d drawn it toward himself. For any chef, even a young sous chef like Brian, it was second nature to sharpen knives all the time. When Josh had made that wonderful dinner for me at my house, he’d brought his own sharp knives, but before using them, what had he done? He’d sharpened them. The practice was ingrained in any chef. If Brian had used Josh’s cimiter, there was good chance that he’d sharpened it, not in the men’s room at Essence, of course, but at Magellan, when he’d first picked it up. The police had the cimiter, which had undoubtedly undergone close forensic examination. A forensics expert would certainly be able to determine whether the blade had been honed by someone who pulled it toward him along a sharpening steel, as Brian did, or by someone who moved the blade away from his body, as Josh did. But had the experts looked for that difference? What did forensics experts and police detectives know about chefs ? And about chefs’ all-but-instinctive habit of putting razor edges on the blades of all the knives they touched?
    I finally got the detective’s voice mail and, speaking more quickly than clearly, said that I was on my way to Magellan, that Brian worked in the paint department at Home Depot, that chefs sharpen knives all the time without even thinking about it, and that different chefs sharpen their knives differently! I hung up only to have Detective Hurley call me right back.
    “I couldn’t understand anything you said on the message,” he said with annoying calm.
    I explained my theory as best I could while peeling around corners and beeping at cars to get out of my way. I simply had to warn Josh about his murderous colleague! I told Detective Hurley about the orange paint used to mark Oops paint cans and informed him that Brian worked in the department that sold Oops paint. I asked the detective to find out