The clocks had turned back the night before, and Detective Malyssa Alafoggianis had never seen San Francisco so pitch black at six-thirty in the evening.

Turning the key in the lock to her office, she pushed the door open into blackness, extinguished the dark with a flick of a switch, and found the windows opaque, black, no stars. Stubborn.

It was only six-thirty. Damn, she hated daylight savings.

"Come on in," Malyssa said to her companion, and she gestured to the peeling faux leather couch perpendicular to the mostly glass Ikea desk. Her partner Jimmy's desk. "I'll make you a drink."

The girl in the black hat seated herself while the detective made her a strong yet balanced Old Fashioned, taking a drink of Drambuie straight from the bottle herself. She replaced the bottle on the shelf over the desktop without pouring herself a glass and settled in next to her guest.

The girl in the black hat was Cassandra Aniston, and she took her ice-cold rocks glass with a tear-strained, throaty "Thank you" and sipped the cocktail. The way her mid-length black hair curled perfectly at the bottom, her makeup flawless, contested the distressed state she had been in all day — she even dared to wear mascara despite circumstances perfectly likely to provoke tears at some point or another. Cassandra didn't down her beverage in one, as might be expected, but her hard face spoke volumes and further words were not forthcoming.

Detective Fog crossed a pant-suited leg and prepared to get more out of her. "So, it's been what, twelve hours? You know, it's not actually true that you can't report a missing person for twenty-four. I understand the police are being dismissive, but worst case they'll start to take Paulie's disappearance seriously by daybreak."

"You've gotta find him now," Cassandra insisted, perching upright on the edge of the sofa, the ice in her drink tinkling in her shaky clutch. "Can't you get out there and look? I called you before seven this morning, I told you everything—"

"It's been a busy day, and I need a few more details. Five minutes, promise it'll be worth your while. What makes you so sure the mob has him?"

"It was only a matter of time, Fog."

Malyssa spun an index finger to indicate getting to the point.

"Don't give me that," said Cassandra. "You want some cold hard evidence, well you know I don't have it, and the police keep pressing me for that too. Evidence that he's actually missing, are you kidding me? He's been getting so anxious, like if the law didn't get him one day, it would be them making him disappear. I came to you because I know you'll trust my gut. You have to believe me."

"You're a friend, but this is business," said Malyssa, not unkindly. "You came to me not as a friend, but as a private investigator, and I'm going to apply the same standard of deduction I would to any other case."

Cassandra's voice was firm despite the emotional strain in it. "There's no reason he wouldn't have come home last night, no reason for him to ignore my texts, my calls, messages."

"You didn't get in a fight?"

"I woulda told you if we'd had a fight."

"And you know for sure he didn't come home last night."

"I know for sure he didn't come home. I went to sleep at midnight even though he wasn't answering his phone, but I can't sleep if I don't know where he is. I woke up two hours later. It was exactly two in the morning, and it turns out I woke up from a dream right when the clock ticked over to end daylight savings. I rolled over to check what time it was and I was staring right at my digital clock saying 1:59, and just as I was thinking I couldn't believe Paul wasn't home by 2, the minute ticked over and the big red numbers read 1:00. It's a smart clock so it knew to turn the time back to 1 a.m., but my brain was so fogged up from sleep I didn't know what was happening, how time went from 1:59 back to 1:00 just like that. I thought I had an aneurysm.

"I got up, called Paul, no answer, texted him, got onto Google, figured out that the clock thing was because of daylight savings — trippiest thing ever by the way — and I barely slept another wink. I waited until the sun came up to call the police, just in case I really was being paranoid. I waited until 6:26 a.m., which felt even longer than it was because with daylight savings ending we gained an hour, to me it was more like 7:26 a.m.

"And now the cops don't believe he's not on a bender and if they ignore me until it's been twenty-four hours from when I called it in, it'll be too late, Fog. For all I know they could've taken him a minute after the last time I saw him, leaving for work yesterday morning, and that's thirty-six hours, so you need to find him. He may still be alive, Fog."

Her eyes bulged out past her black lashes. Malyssa looked at her watch and seemed to determine that there was time for more questions, more answers. "I wrote down the names you gave me for Paul's 'coworkers.' Let's see. I know Jason Nakos. Then there's Thalia Zane, a made woman who's gotta be a relation of the underboss Hugo Zane. You said Nick Minardos is Paul's best friend, right? I'm still looking at him to pull the trigger."

Cassandra yelped and covered her mouth with a gloved hand, but Malyssa didn't show any sign of regretting the comment. "Nakos  I've seen before. Tall, lanky fellow, hiding behind shades in every picture I've ever seen or taken of him, but I've tailed him a couple of times, been confronted by him when I tailed his friends a couple of times. He takes them off in dimly lit bars and such. His eyes are pretty unremarkable if you ask me, not worth the trouble of hiding. I don't know the others. Do you have descriptions for me?"

"I can do you one better. I've got pictures on Facebook from a party we went to. A back patio barbecue at Rogue Public House for someone's birthday." A huge Samsung Galaxy screen came out of a minuscule purse and she had the Facebook album open in seconds. The phone passed to Malyssa showed a dozen or two twenty-somethings on the back patio, probably at twilight but it could be any time with the apocalyptic gray fog in the background over Rogue's back fence. All of the names were tagged but the faces were tiny and in shadow.

Since Cassandra was in it, someone else must have been responsible for the crummy photography work. Awful lighting usage.

Zooming in didn't help much, but Jason Nakos had indeed been present, one of the most senior both in age and standing within the Sigler Mafia — and so was Cassandra's husband Paul, a stout guy with a big shiny smile, and Paul's best friend Nick Minardos — whose name was tagged but whose face was caught in so much shadow it may have been behind a full-face black mask.

The detective swiped through the pictures until the next one of Nick. A quick detour to his profile showed Nick wasn't friends with Cassandra, and therefore his pictures were private except for the dark, drunken shots Cassandra was tagged in too. Finally, one group shot was slightly closer up, revealing Nick's face, smiling, not at all deadly, in contrast to the one tagged Thalia Zane, which crinkled into a glower in the candid shot, red lips puckered as if peeved at someone. That was one cranky looking gangster.

"That's it, that's everyone you know?" Malyssa asked.

"Those are the only people I've met, the only ones I know for sure are in. For all I know everyone at that barbecue was in. And then everyone knows who's at the top: Hugo Zane and Mena Sigler and Sofia Ioana."

"We're not getting Hugo Zane and Sigler and Ioana over a disappeared pusher."

"He's not a pusher."

"A pusher once removed, hun. I bet my entire fee he hasn't exactly climbed to the loftiest heights within the organization. Trust me, he's the pusher who takes the big bag of Story to the girls and boys who push the little bags of Story. And I need more, you realize. You realize it won't be enough to just Google these ladies and gents, right? I need addresses, hangouts, more names..."

"They don't talk in front of me. I'm not in. Paul used to talk about a bar, he never told me the name. Maybe once, he might have told me the name. He was pooched and slurring when he got home, not a chance in hell I could remember it now."

"Is there a chance in hell it's Daedalus Bar?" asked Malyssa.

"Sure, yeah."

"But not a chance in hell they've got him there."

"You could find someone to question there."

"Mmm," said Malyssa. "You're lucky I'm knowledgeable on this subject, Cass, because if the police find Paul before I do they're going to rescue him then pass him a go straight to jail card, right? That's why you came to me, not because I'm likely to find him before dawn."

"I'll worry about that part. You just get him back alive."

"Anything else I need to know?"

Twisting a piece of the black leather stripping from the couch, Cassandra seemed to resist pulling, which would further destroy the detective's upholstery. "I don't know if I should say anything." She twisted around in her seat. "I don't know if it would help you to know... I found a phone number written down on a legal pad by his desk — and when I Googled the number it was for the task force set up by that senator who's pulling all the stops to fight the San Francisco mob. You know the one, right? Senator Athena something or other."

"Athena Rex," supplied the detective. She looked away, a little dismissive.

"I think he might have called in. Maybe he called in a tip, maybe he was helping Senator Rex. Providing info. Talking. And if he did—"

Malyssa interrupted her. "He didn't. Don't worry about it, and don't tell anyone else about that phone number, Cass."

"But if he did—"

"He wouldn't be that stupid."

"What do you know? That's what you wanted him to do, isn't it? That's why you got close with us. Here I thought your whole business was spying on cheaters and tracking down stolen laptops, but it's so obvious now. You have ears everywhere, and you tail mobsters. Did you give him the number?"

The hard light of Detective Fog's office and that question smacked her in the face, and she turned away to say, "No," stubborn as the solid sheet of night outside, even if it was clear the answer was yes.

She stood and said, "There's no money in that," and turned away, checking her watch again.

More kindly, but still not meeting Cassandra's eyes, she said, "There's money in finding Paul. Because you're going to pay me. It's a good thing I tail mobsters and collect intel from informants. Now. I'm ready to get going. I'll find him for you. And I'll forget about those accusations you just threw, because I know you're under a lot of stress right now. You're worried about Paul."

Under the black hat, Cassandra nodded with eyes finally brimming with those long-overdue tears. The thing that might have kept them from brimming over might have been the gratitude that Fog was moving. Finally.

The detective's tweed jacket lay across her partner's desk. James Lambeti had been sent home an hour and a half ago when Detective Alafogiannis left to meet her sister for dinner. He never left before her. Placing a tweed flat cap on her head, she took the jacket by the hanging loop and made for the door. Then, like she had forgotten something, she held a finger up telling Cassandra to wait and said, "I have some paperwork for you to fill out. For example, promise of payment."

She went to the other door, the door to her adjoining inner office, instead. Cassandra didn't wait but trooped after her with a hasty, "There's time for that later, Fog, you know I'm good for it."

The door swung wide despite her begging, but the two women stopped exactly on the threshold, the detective almost mid-step and one hand out in stride as if she came up against an invisible wall, and Cassandra with a sudden shout — a surprised, involuntary guttural yelp. It wasn't very loud, not a full-out scream, because all she could see around Malyssa's desk were a pair of heeled white shoes and a woman's limp legs in black slacks lying on the carpeted floor.

"Call the police," said Malyssa, unfreezing and moving cautiously, sleuth-like, into the room.

Cassandra wanted to do that even less than she wanted to waste time signing things, so she remained statuesque as the detective made a circuit around the body on the floor. A middle-aged woman, Senator Athena Rex, was immediately recognizable with her cream fedora on the floor next to her head, brown eyes wide open, her hair in signature black victory curls.

On her forehead, a black-red circle indicated immediately the cause of death, and its identical twin in the middle of her abdomen ripped through her night-sky colored peplum suit, still buttoned.

Plenty of blood, splattered across the office, soaking in splashes into the carpet — and bubbling unnaturally out of the bullet wounds in Senator Rex's head and belly. The gelatinous clotting blood sat on top as if no bullet hole was left to pool within. As if such holes had been magically sealed up, and a trickle of red painted itself down Athena's face, not wet and fresh, yet not quite dry either.

Since Cassandra hadn't gone for the phone, Malyssa hopped across the inner office to her desk and dialed 911. The dispatcher was as orderly taking her report as she was giving it.

"One more thing," she said after giving the ID of the victim, apparent cause of death, and the address of her office. "The wounds have been healed up." She let that sink in for a second and conferred with her watch a third time in five minutes before she added, "Anytime between now and fifty-one minutes from now, the body will disappear. The blood's almost dry, so closer to now. We're going to need your best response time. I'll take pictures."

Sirens already lit up the night air outside when she had her Nikon SLR D7000 out and began snapping the scene, capturing pictures of not just the body but every corner of her inner office. She would get the outer office and Jimmy's desk later. That's when the implications of what was happening hit Cassandra, who hadn't been diminished to tears by the sight of the dead body but began to whimper and shake when she realized that Detective Fog would not be trooping out into the clear night to find her husband before the cops did, or before the mob killed him. Weak knees collapsed into a heap hardly noticed by the fixated detective and sobs joined the sirens in an ugly wail.

Satisfied with her photographs, Malyssa stepped back to think, continuing to ignore her whimpering companion. Beneath the blood on the victim's forehead was smooth, perfect skin, hard skull bone (she knew, but couldn't see, but had seen in recent autopsy reports of similar murders), completed brain tissue, and a nest of hairspray and curls soaked in a pool of blood but otherwise no worse for wear. Senator Rex was dead, but her body had been returned to better health than it had probably enjoyed before being shot point-blank in two critical locations.

The first responders tore into the outer office through the unlocked door and mercifully had just enough time to see Senator Rex's cold corpse before it vanished in front of the eyes of six witnesses.

Thank you for reading Detective Fog. The story continues! If you like it so far, please leave your thoughts and a star for me as you pass through.