November 3, 2015

The first thing Detective Fog had done the day after Paul and Nick got whacked — well, the second thing after consuming every bite of a whole-egg omelette at a cafe on the same block as the police department — was to return to the scene to snap pictures.

Today, Tuesday, Fog and Jimmy returned once again to the warehouse where Nick and Paul were killed. Surely that meant she was innocent, right? The real killer would never return to the scene of the crime — let alone twice.

She met Jimmy outside. Sunrise in the Dog Patch began at 6:37 a.m. Right on the water, the neighborhood was the first in San Francisco to light up. The detective and her partner got to the warehouse by pier 67 just before 7. Even in the pale, insufficient dawn, it was readily apparent coming by during daylight that she had illegally blown the door off the warehouse with a magic spell.

Detective Fog limboed under yellow police tape blocking it off, impressively keeping her hat on — she was limber from a pre-dawn run and stretch. Jimmy was considerably less warmed up so he lifted the tape and bowed under it. The two kept mum, footfalls quiet, heading down the corridor toward the entry to what Fog had begun to think of, morbidly, as the "killing floor." Where she had almost died but lived to look as if she had blood on her hands instead.

No one had yet removed the numbered evidence pylons next to Paul's blood spatters. The flecks surrounded where his body had lain in a kind of outline — in the center, the headshot pool where his noggin had fallen. Stepping inside, Fog said, "Hey, protege," when it became clear the crime scene, though still under investigation, was vacant. "Do you know why they don't draw chalk outlines anymore?"

"Several reasons." He stepped wide around all of the forensic evidence. Hands behind his back, Jimmy strode past the first site of gore, taking in the warehouse he was seeing for the first time only now. Daylight permeated the space, lighting the cement floors and corrugated iron walls. High ceilings, a perimeter of high windows, crates to hide behind. It was like a level out of a sharpshooter game. "Chalk outlines were never of much use for investigations. Though drawn by investigators, they were mostly done for the sake of press photography. For the media. It risked forensic contamination just to put the shocking carnage on the front page. They couldn't go so far as to include the body, but blood, guts, brains, and a chalk outline was enough to inflame the imagination. Risking the investigation to make a little coin."

"Why'd it stop though?" asked Fog, sweeping toward him in a posture mirroring his. Her voice had a tone that said I know something you don't know.

Jimmy shrugged within his overcoat. "I guess a crackdown on contaminating evidence for the sake of a story."

"You think the press was going to give a good payday up easy? I don't. Capitalism don't work that way — and the media knows how to put pressure on an institution such as that which serves and protects the people. The press only moved on from their gory crime scene pictures and shock value when there was no longer money in it. And that happened because of just one thing.

"The internet. The big shift in accessibility of information led to a change in audience preferences. Back in the day, you bought your paper when that headline about a violent homicide grabbed your attention. But today, the internet is everywhere, and clicking that headline over your breakfast muffin isn't the same thing. Folks might wanna read the shocking details, but do they want to scroll down and see the unappetizing frailty of the human body? Do they want to scroll down on their work computers to gruesome images, or stumble into bloody scenes on their phone when they're waiting for the bus? Advertisers putting their banners in a column down the side — do they want 'em next to a nauseating crime photo? The answer used to be yes. And TV broadcasters could throw those images at you, without you having no say but to look or look away — like choosing whether to rubberneck a deadly pileup on the highway."

As they spoke, Detective Fog and her partner stepped around the corner formed by the giant metal crates — the kind stacked up in video games. She went on, "The internet, though, is ubiquitous, and it's interactive. It's everywhere, and at your fingertips, you have a million choices — you don't have to run for the remote. It can be pulled up any time of the day, and sometimes it pulls you in — but news sites saw more and more that when readers have infinite options of what to click into and click away from, with shocking content all over the place, some hacked up guy's insides is not what people wanna see on their screens. Metrics from gruesome pieces with graphic images went down, the press stopped bothering to print 'em, stopped bothering to snap the shot of the scene — and police officers stopped drawing chalk outlines.

"Today, anyone caught trying to outline a body is called a "chalk fairy" and tormented for potentially screwing up the investigation."

"Interesting," said Jimmy. "But it's not like the cops were getting a piece. Were they?"

"Not usually," admitted Fog.

Getting her point, Jimmy moralized, "It's amazing the pressure media can put on to get what they want. It permeates so many aspects of life. Many things you wouldn't even think about."

They had come to the place where Nick had been strung up, his vocal cords removed but still alive. "Clearly the plan required that he be alive but silent," said Fog. "In a crime premeditated and carefully plotted, staged, and executed, here's the confusing flaw: the fact that I don't have the surgical skills to remove a man's vocal cords while keeping him alive clears me of blame."

Nodding, Jimmy crouched to look closely at the chair Nick had been strapped to. "It would take a surgeon to keep someone alive through that. I wouldn't even know the vocal cords from the trachea or the . . . epiglottis. That's in the throat, right? If it was so staged it even looked staged, what's the point?"

"The overnight in a holding cell was mildly uncomfortable." Still, whether that was the best the SF mafia could do went unasked.

"They did manage to lock you up the night they killed Athena Rex, preventing you from working that case while the trail was hot." At this moment, Jimmy didn't bring up that Fog hadn't made much progress down the cooling trail either, but it was a point he had made many times in the past twenty-four hours.

Lifting her prized SDLR camera, on a strap around her neck, she began to snap pictures of the crime scene. The police weren't about to send her crime scene photos as long as she remained a suspect. Or as long as she was up for involuntary manslaughter since she had, in fact, shot Nick Minardos to death.

To her astonishment, Jimmy pulled from his backpack the vintage 40s flashbulb camera she got him for a holiday gift slash bonus. Crouching again, he set to framing a shot. From where he was he couldn't see Fog's raised eyebrows, so she had to actually ask, out loud, "You're documenting with that thing?"

"Yes?" came out a little defensive. "Yes and no," Jimmy amended. "I . . . it's for artwork. Or stock photos. Whatever I can sell. You didn't think I made a living off what this job pays, did you? I sell my photography whenever I can. I also write . . . a crime and investigation beat. For the Chronicle mostly. Not press, more like slice in the life stuff to entertain hobbyists."

"Hey, that's no problem. Go into our closed case files, there oughta be some picture good enough for Shutterstock in there."

Raising his shoulders apologetically, Jimmy said, "I don't wanna take what's not mine."

Fog waved him off, literally waving her hands dismissively. "Consider it a raise. What was mine is now yours to sell and profit from online because we do not make enough on this business for two people trying to make rent in San Francisco."

Jimmy smiled and tipped his hat and went back to snapping appealing sepia-toned shots of crates and anachronistic contraptions, such as the printing press that had mysteriously printed a modern newspaper front page the night of the killings.

The authorities had taken the slung-up gun for evidence, as well as the machinery to make it fire and the ropes that had restrained Nick.

Not much remained to tell a story except more blood on the cement and steel. In the final section of the "killing floor," where Fog had hidden as the shots from the rigged-up weapon fired at her, moving into the corner, she confirmed her suspicion: no way did the real perpetrator escape out the windows. They were like eight feet up and hadn't been open. Maybe they couldn't open. They looked heavy.

"Someone shot Paul, though," she said in a murmur perhaps too quiet for Jimmy to hear. Someone shot Paul. A person, not a futuristic machine out of a steampunk novel. If the mob could make dead bodies disappear, what about living ones?

None of this made sense. But something had occurred to Fog while strolling through with Jimmy during the calm after the storm. Out loud, she said, "This crime, same as the Mayor Banakis murder, could not have been committed without the help of a police officer."

Trailing behind her slowly, Jimmy looked up from the picture he was about to snap. She had no problem with him working a second freelance job on the clock — the point of coming back here was to let their minds relax and see what came. Clearly, his head was in the game, because he replied, agreeing, "I see that. Only someone with a badge could have scouted this location. It needed to be close enough to the police station to have an almost instant response time. You needed to be caught red-handed. Yet being so close to the Public Safety Building, it would have been hard for suspected members of a crime syndicate to crawl around in here without attracting notice." It was a good sign that he saw what she saw.

"The motive is surprisingly opaque," said Fog.

"The only way I can figure it was that they set a two-pronged trap: Either the rigged gun kills you, or, if you live, you killed Nick and go to jail. Proximity to the police station was undoubtedly intentional. Maybe the bad guys hoped if the gun machine didn't kill you, one of the cops would.

"In all honesty, though, it's convoluted as fuck."

It surprised him that when Fog turned around, she was smiling. "There's good news, though. Once you have an idea there might be a mole among a certain department, it's reasonably simple to test. Simple, but time-consuming, and with the small chance of a false negative — but no chance of a false positive."

"The cops have their ears perked like dogs for criminals trying to congregate or, like back in the good old days, dispose of bodies in the Dog Patch. The mob would want a police officer on their payroll to scout out the place. They could also have police on the scene to obfuscate the evidence. Tamper with and destroy anything left behind, rub out footprints and fingerprints. Why don't we have a look around to see if anything was hidden but not removed?"

It was a good suggestion, so he and Detective Fog began to search the nooks and crannies for anything the good cops could have missed while a bad cop swept it under a rug. Maybe something like a hat, for example.

After two minutes of searching, Jimmy did turn up a crumpled fedora swept under some machinery.

"Clumsy," said Detective Fog, as Jimmy placed the hat down on a flat surface — the top of a crate, of course — and began photographing it — with the hobby flashbulb camera, of course. "Let's hope this hat belongs to whoever shot Paul and strung up Nick for me to slaughter him. Now, had the cops found it last night, they could have collected some hair follicles, run the DNA."

Jimmy weighed in, "There's no knowing for sure, but this suggests to me that a cop investigating the scene that night didn't want to take any chances. He or she tried to shove this hat somewhere it would never see the light of day. And he or she hasn't had the opportunity to come back and get the hat."

"Now it's too late for us to turn it over as evidence," said Fog. "No chain of custody. Plus, I'm a suspect. But it's a hint for us if we can uncover whose hat it is."

Jimmy was nodding along. "You mean this gives us diddly squat all."

"Hey now," said Detective Fog. "You forget we have a pro Google Image Search Specialists on our team. This hat ain't nothing."

"But how do we get the cop who's working for the mafia?"

"We knew cops were working for the mafia. Now we have it narrowed down to one of the officers who visited this scene. Much better odds to catch him or her. Now we apply the foolproof mole test; it works wonders when you have a small pool to test from. All we need is a cop who wasn't on the scene last night, who we can trust, and who will hear us out and participate."

"Got anyone in mind, Fog?"

"Unfortunately," said Detective Fog, "No."

Thank you for reading Detective Fog. What do you think so far? Mind sparing a star for me if you like the book? Thanks a million!