May 30, 2015

Detective Malyssa Fog had been hoping that she would be called on to solve the murder of Mayor Banikas by someone or other. Preferably someone who could pay, but alternatively, someone who could get her name in the papers would be just fine. The thing was, she was in a pretty good position to get to the bottom of the case.

It was possible that within an hour of Athena hiring her in the best remaining delicatessen in the city that she already knew who had done it. She just needed evidence. Evidence to prove that she was right, and evidence to convince herself.

She sat at a dumpster-dived, scratched old wooden desk facing plate glass windows and a decent view, with a million tabs open on a giant monitor that had cost more than all the furniture in the double office combined. Her pictures from surveillance on the day of the murder were in the background.

Why had she been surveilling Daedalus Bar on the afternoon of the murder? The same reason she surveilled it on random afternoons, evenings, early mornings, and noons throughout the year. Some hours just weren't billable to anybody and in this city, the best way to spend your spare hours was to be on top of mobster movements. Then when someone did want to pay you to put a murderer behind bars, you were in a position to do so.

It had only worked to Detective Fog's benefit once so far, but the formula continued to make sense to her. Plus, there was a very underrated (thus having no lineups) bakery and tea shop across the street from Daedalus Bar. There she enjoyed cream cheese croissants, cronuts, and freshly baked loaves of bread (the bulk of which would probably constitute her supper if it hadn't been a particularly profitable week). It served an array of tea offerings beyond which she had previously known existed.

There wasn't much use to the pictures, however. They showed several people leaving the bar. Some were suspected mobsters, some were known mobsters, one had since come to an extremely bloody end, and some were regular citizens who didn't know this bar was the Sigler Mafia headquarters.

She remembered, however, that on that particular day, Jason Nakos did frown at her for once, as if he didn't want her to be there. The fellow had noticed her sometimes, which meant her spying was not in any way unobserved or unknown by the mob. They hadn't changed their behavior in any way as a result, and she didn't plan to change hers.

The frown had made her slightly suspicious something was happening on the peaceful, warm afternoon. Not letting Nakos know her suspicions were piqued, she wiggled her fingers at him in a wave and took a dozen pictures of his receding back as he reentered Daedalus Bar.

Then, forty minutes later, when Paul Aniston came out, she had snapped a picture of him, of Jack Costas and Jennifer Makris, and a few other mobsters or regular citizens she didn't know. The stream of unimportant patrons leaving started to make her nervous that she would lose the trail. Jason Nakos came back out and, thirty seconds later, was followed by Nick Minardos.

She snapped a photo, counted to five after Minardos was out of sight of the bakery window, and raced to get her legs under her and gather her bags and camera. Once through the glass door, she streaked after him like a sparrow.

Something told her somehow that at least five mobsters were heading somewhere together.

At the time, she hadn't known that the building Nick was leading her to was the building that would become famous for the next six months for being the location of the murder of Mayor Banikas. In fact, she hadn't even been that careful to make sure she wasn't seen, which was foolish in retrospect. It tempted her to give Nick a cocky wave as well, or maybe flip him the birdie. She had no way of knowing that had Nick seen her following him, he probably would have ducked around the entryway door to the building and slit her throat as soon as she came in. Not really worth it just to give him the finger.

Once there, she had to get inside the apartment building, which had security, like every residence within the core. One locked gate against the street was the first door into the building, and a second heavy wood door beyond which, if it was anything like Detective Fog's shared housing in Tenderloin, was probably also locked. That meant when someone came outside, she had to get through the locked gate they would politely hold open for her, but she also had to get inside a heavy locked door a couple of feet further in beyond the apartment's mailboxes.

There was no real way to be smooth about it. Except maybe to pretend to be delivering food, but she didn't have time to get takeout, and she didn't want to miss the first opportunity to get inside. So when a couple came out of the locked gate, Malyssa smiled at them and said, "Thank you," with the confidence of someone coming home and having the door held for them by neighbors. She had a flyer in her hand, litter from the street, and as soon as she slickly slipped around the gate, she launched forward, and just as the inner door was closing, she slid the flyer in to catch the lock at the last second, springing like an Olympian athlete.

Exulting in her victory, she ignored the couple asking, "Excuse me, do you live in the building?" and rushed through the door, directly up the stairs in the hope they would be too lazy to pursue what was probably not a robbery or anything anyway.

The first flight came to a landing after a single turn, and she had to stop quickly in case Nick or anyone else was there. There wasn't much visibility of the hall that went off in two directions. One option was to act casual and keep up the front that she lived in this building, but Paul knew her well, and if he or Nakos were here, they would identify her; Nick had probably seen her face a dozen times as well.

Instead, she waited, listening, watching, and after thirty seconds, decided that the first floor was clear. Climbing up, with ears perked for sound, she found no one in the hallway and four closed doors, two on each side, all closed. She didn't try any doorknobs, just started up to the second floor.

Here she heard something. The vague, indecipherable sounds of movement, of human presence, not from the landing but from back inside one of the units. Suddenly afraid, she drew her gun. She was a terrible shot, but surely some of the mobsters didn't know that yet and might not risk a shootout. There wasn't much to follow except her gut and the sounds that weren't real hints of anything. Creeping towards the hallway, she put her ear against the door behind which the sound was coming. Her mind filled in the gaps of what she was hearing but couldn't see, even if it was likely to be completely inaccurate. In her imagination, she could see half a dozen people inside a small shoebox of a flat. They were rustling around a fair amount, so probably planning something, bent over a table covered in paperwork in a barebones, empty apartment. Probably standing. Hushed voices could be heard but not words, nothing decipherable.

After about a minute, she noticed that most of the work was done in silence, the room's occupants only whispering, only when they needed to. There were no conversations, no back and forth, just the occasional one-sentence monologue.

Ten minutes of this didn't get Detective Fog very far, and then the shuffling of feet and the occasional hushed voice started to gravitate closer to the door, closer to her, and she started to not dare stand there much longer. She would have loved to hear words, to make out voices, but the door could open at any second with her standing with her ear up against it.

Still, she dared a moment too long.

Detective Fog hadn't made it all the way safely to the third story landing before she heard the door opening. For a second, her brain sent a signal of horror to her guts, she felt like she could feel her adrenal gland squirting epinephrine, although that probably wasn't how it worked, but she felt something writhe and squeeze somewhere near her kidney, had she been seen? Had her footsteps running up the stairs been heard? Could her breathing be heard now? She crept backward, silent now, she was sure of it, and her gun was out in case someone emerged from the top of the stairs.

Moonwalking until she came up against the emergency stairwell door, she kept her eyes on the top of the main staircase because she was somewhat unlikely to hit any intentional target with the six bullets in her revolver. She pushed on the bar with her back and slowly, quietly got back into the stairwell, holding the door with one hand until it closed without a whisper.

The crazy thing was she didn't know for sure whether it had been mobsters on the other side of the door or a gathering of old ladies whispering over tea; maybe one of them was hungover and had asked everyone to talk soft.

She wanted to know what had been going on in that room, though, so she started down the emergency stairwell back to the second floor.

Two steps down and the fire escape door the landing below her opened, gently, almost silently, she almost missed it. Detective Fog almost paused but then, with extraordinary lithe abilities, hopped back up the two steps and landed silently back at the top so that her feet wouldn't be visible to anyone below through the gap in the stairs. All this athleticism, and she still didn't even know any mobsters were involved. If she didn't see the hint of a machine gun within the next five minutes, she was going to feel awful silly.

Footsteps went downstairs, quiet but not silent. On the first floor, the door opened and swung shut, closing with a click. Right away, Detective Fog moved down to the second story, peeped through the glass door and saw that no one was in the hall, went through it back to Apartment Six, and listened at the door again.

It was unmistakably quiet now, but that didn't mean there wasn't anyone in there waiting with a machine gun.

But maybe it was worth her life to prove she hadn't been running around playing world-class spy in extreme stealth mode over nothing.

When she tried the doorknob, she was astonished to find that it turned. Somehow that in itself filled her with discomfort. She opened the door quickly and went in with gun drawn, the way she had been trained as well as the way she had seen it on TV.

There was no one in the room, however. Or at least no one alive.

Detective Fog had found Mayor Banikas's body. She took pictures of the body. She called 911 and said, "Hello, good evening. Mayor John Banikas has been murdered," gave the address, and hung up. Then she got the hell out of there.

The door being unlocked suggested the murderers wanted the body to be found. It also didn't look good for the detective with no evidence to be snooping around Apartment Six to have been able to enter the building and the apartment, with no real credible lead to be there in the first place. It wouldn't have exactly looked innocent.

In her office facing Embarcadero, sitting at the desk and intermittently gazing out the window, Detective Fog now flipped back to the photos she had taken of the scene.

Senator Athena didn't need to see those photos, she didn't think. They weren't so different from the ones the first responders had taken, not that she had been provided those.

The only thing her shots proved was that Detective Malyssa Fog had been the first to see the body of Mayor Banikas after he had been assassinated and that she had reported it anonymously.

It didn't look innocent at all.

A/N: Thank you for reading Detective Fog. Drop a star for me on your way through, won't you?