Officer Dianthea was riding solo when she got an intriguing radio call in her section. Leander was riding a desk, and he would have wanted to be the first on the scene, or second after his partner rolled up and put down stakes, but Dianthea hesitated.

Her fingers drummed on the steering wheel, and she exhaled, wondering if she could get away with just skipping out on this shift and heading home to a fridge full of takeout leftovers and six-packs.

Probably not. Not without Prince to cover for her.

And as the dispatcher repeated a second time the location of gunfire reported by neighbors, it was starting to sound like no one was closer than Dianthea to respond.

Fine, then, if it had to be her, she would go all out. As she had been cruising slowly without paying attention to exactly where she was or where she was going to turn, it took a moment to orient herself. She had to figure out what street she was on — Prince usually drove, and navigated, plus she had only patrolled this beat six or seven times so far. She didn't hesitate to turn her sirens on and put the pedal down as cars all around parted out of the way as if pushed aside by Moses' hands.

She passed Taylor Street, Mason, and Powell on Broadway before she started to think that maybe Jones Street was back the other way. Because of the late afternoon lunch break beers she'd had, she didn't gun it as fast as she would have otherwise when she was in this "Fuck it, I guess I'll do my job" mood, but she arrived safe and in one piece and without causing anyone else to not be safe and in one piece at Local bar on Jones Street.

Someone had beaten her there, after all, she saw from the flashing red, white and blue lights. By this point, she had taken on the part of an actress playing a cop on TV with such enthusiasm that she stormed into the residential building next to the bar anyways (the outer gate of the building was propped open with a compost bin, and the door that would automatically lock was propped open with a recycling bin) and showed her badge to gawkers near the entrance — who didn't ask to see it — even though she was dressed in uniform, complete with peaked cap.

Up the stairs she followed the commotion, and on the third floor entered an apartment which was furnished as more of a conference office — and which was soaked in blood.

The only other occupant was the plainclothes officer who had been first on the scene. The gentleman nodded to Dianthea, and she nodded back.

"What do we have, Inspector?" she asked. She could see cheap fold-out tables and six folding chairs, some of the chairs knocked over, and at a glance something like six bullet holes in the champaign striped wallpaper. No bodies. "Did they disappear?" she asked.

The inspector came over and offered his hand to shake. "Gregory Roussos." Dianthea concentrated every ounce of her sobriety into meeting the web between his thumb and forefinger with the web between her thumb and forefinger before sliding into a perfect, firm grasp. Maybe a little too firm; he sort of winced before she let go.

"I don't think they disappeared, at least not in the sense you're talking about. I arrived about three minutes after the dispatcher radioed the 911 call reporting the sound of shots fired. Typically these bodies that are disappearing, they're supposed to last something like fifty minutes from the time of death. At least that's what the memo said.

"Witnesses said two of the parties involved limped away brandishing weapons; my partner is on their trail. I'd guess there were at least six, if not many more, involved in this shootout, so where the rest of the combatants are is a question maybe you and I can come up with some sort of reasonable answer to." He shrugged. "Or maybe not."

Dianthea nodded with a thoughtful frown and continued to look around. She knelt next to a fallen chair and started to turn it over to investigate it like a pro when Roussos sort of cleared his throat and said, "Why don't we take some photos before we start taking apart the crime scene? I'll go get my camera from the squad car." He patted his holstered weapon. "Would've brought it with me, saved myself a trip, had I known the firefight was over."

He left Dianthea alone, and she rebelliously turned the chair right over the second his tar-black brogues clicked down the stairs. There was nothing to be gleaned from the upended folding chair. She didn't put it back the way it was.

Instead, she got back up and started sleuthing around for clues, checking out the footprints in blood on the scratched and scuffed pine flooring. Someone had lost his or her hat in the shootout. Another person had very foolishly left a firearm behind. It had to be registered to someone, right?

Dianthea picked up the .22 pistol and decided it looked like a Remington High Standard. She put it down on the upright folding table and continued to creep around, looking for clues. The hat she left where it was. It would have DNA evidence they could use from the hair follicles left in it.

Roussos came back a minute later. He raised an eyebrow at the .22 and immediately pulled his SDLR up to begin to photograph the scene. Dianthea appreciated that he didn't ask her to move out of the shot because she was on a mission, completely in the zone. She continued her search for evidence. The rest was mostly blood and shell casings and footprints. It told a story, that much was clear.

"This was a blowout between gang members over a drug deal," she told Roussos. "Somebody wasn't happy with their cut and decided to ask for a raise with a little extra persuasion — that is, firepower. But the higher-ups weren't going to take that without a fight. The fact that there are no bodies left behind in a shootout in such close quarters suggests that the bodies themselves would have been incriminating evidence as to which gang can't keep its people under control; maybe the identities of the bodies would even lead us right to the killers.

"So the bodies were carried out by the survivors, which suggests that one side of the altercation was completely eliminated since there was a ceasefire to allow the collection of bodies. I'm going to say that there were probably ten gang members in the room, three underbosses negotiating a new cut with two low-level drug dealers, who brought five soldiers with them to turn this parlay into a bloodbath.

"The three underbosses were killed, but they managed to take two soldiers and one of the dealers with them. So six bodies, which the four survivors had to carry out of here. Now, that's two bodies too many to take very far. We should canvass this building and the surrounding alleys; we'll find at least two of those bodies immediately, and the identities of the fallen will take us directly to the survivors. So we can put them in handcuffs."

Respectfully, with his hands clasped behind his back and the camera put down on the table now that he was done photographing the scene, Roussos launched into a different story.

After the drive-by shooting in the streets at 3:41 p.m. in North Beach, the Andreou family requested a meeting with the Sigler mafia. Since the mafia had fired first, the meeting would take place on Andreou territory, at the established conference office in the building next to Local Bar. David Andreou would attend the meeting if Hugo Zane were there. The Andreous controlled security cameras in the building and wouldn't open the apartment door until they saw Hugo Zane accompanied by a single bodyguard.

David Andreou took a selfie with his single bodyguard and texted it to Hugo Zane to show that it was only the two of them in the room. Hugo Zane could hear the cell phone camera snap on the other side of the door.

The second the door opened, Hugo Zane's bodyguard opened fire on David Andreou and his bodyguard, killing both of them immediately. Zane and his bodyguard would have a few minutes before a 911 call could be made and a police responder could arrive, so they dragged the bodies around the room, shooting additional rounds into the bodies and into the walls to complicate the scene, splattering blood with their hands, the weapons, and the hat that fell off the body guard's head. By the time they were done, the room was red.

The blood from two men, when spread out with vigor and purpose, was so much that it looked like it could have belonged to a dozen. David Andreou's gun fell out of its holster onto the ground, and Hugo Zane's bodyguard left it where it was, better to not get his fingerprints on it.

When they were done spreading blood over the crime scene, they made the bodies disappear. They didn't give the bodies fifty minutes to vanish; it was best if the police didn't see these ones. They simply vanished, and Hugo Zane and his bodyguard fled the scene. Soaking in blood, they disappeared down an alleyway next to the building, flew into a getaway car that picked them up, and made it home to wash up.

Inspector Roussos was able to infer most of these details from the crime scene and the fact that he had been the officer who responded to the drive-by in North Beach this afternoon. He had anticipated the kind of fallout that might occur, and he had run the serial number on the gun found at the scene when he returned to his car to get the camera. It was registered to David Andreou, who would have had a registered weapon on his left hip and an unregistered one on his right, choosing which to shoot with depending on his needs and whether he could get away with the crime.

Or perhaps he would carry the registered weapon in the holster where it could be seen and a small compact gun that wasn't registered in his overcoat, and he'd be unlikely to be caught with it.

In any case, it was a registered weapon that had been left behind, which suggested David Andreou had been the fallen in this situation. Otherwise, he would have taken his gun with him, which made Hugo Zane the survivor. Roussos didn't have any way of knowing who the bodyguards were. Andreou's bodyguard might have left prints in this room, but Zane's would not.

There would also be no way to prove that Hugo Zane was ever anywhere near the scene of the crime.

Unless they could get the cellphone that had texted the picture of Andreou and his bodyguard. Of course, that had been a hunch, and it could have been a video call, and it was too late to recover that on a wiretap. The picture could be deleted if Zane had taken the phone with him.

The hat would certainly belong to Andreou or Andreou's bodyguard.

This story and these considerations related to Officer Dianthea, Inspector Roussos looked to her for feedback, for anything helpful that might put the survivors behind bars.

Dianthea looked at him as if he were an alien.

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," she said. "You can't possibly pretend to know all that. You can't possibly think that's the most likely scenario. This wasn't a mob war, this was some minor gang altercation. All this blood didn't come from just two bodies, come on. And the bad guys didn't get away with the bodies. The bodies are here somewhere, in this building or a nearby dumpster. I'm going to start looking around."

She left the inspector where he was, looking crestfallen and dumbstruck at the same time.

A/N: Thank you for reading Detective Fog. It's just one story in the Constellations series. Why not check out Stars Rise, another novel in the Constellations universe? The series can be read in any order. This book does not need any knowledge from the rest of the series in order to follow the story. Yet a few fun easter eggs will come out in the next few weeks, and it will be fun if you read even just the first few chapters of Stars Rise :)

And drop a star for me on your way out, won't you?