November 1, 2015 

The night of Athena Rex's murder, Detective Fog tore out of the office the minute the officials arrived in a sincere effort to find Paul Aniston, dead or alive, but preferably alive. Cassandra kindly let her go first in line to provide her statement and alibi before she grabbed her tweed jacket and taking off on cognac Oxfords with low heels.

Cassandra stayed behind, telling her own account to the first responders and loitering for no real reason other than not to be at home alone in her South of Market microstudio.

Half an hour later Malyssa's partner Jimmy turned up at the office and flung his hat onto the hat stand with perfect aim, then tore into the office with perfect gravity to have a look at the body. Under a minute later he was back, shaking his head, and he knelt in front of Cassandra and took her gloved hands.

"Are you all right?" He kept talking and all she had to do was nod. "We haven't met before, have we? Malyssa called and told me what happened. I'm her partner, James Lambeti. Don't worry about Paul, darling, in my professional opinion nothing's going to happen to him the same night Senator Rex turns up murdered, right? That's common sense. You look like a smart cookie."

"And you look like a misogynistic anus tart," said Cassandra, but she didn't pull her hands back, she just smiled at him.

Jimmy nodded appreciatively at the insult and took a seat next to her on the sofa, a piece of furniture far more comfortable than anything else in the office which led Malyssa to monopolize it as her chosen seating for thirty-nine hours of the forty-hour work week (the footwork was done mostly in overtime) on her laptop.

"Want a cigarette?" he offered, and Cassandra accepted, surprised the building wasn't non-smoking, or maybe the private investigators just didn't care.

Neither did the police officers now taking their own pictures, which would be inferior to Malyssa's — not least because they didn't contain the body, which had disappeared — as Jimmy lit the two smokes.

Before he could interrogate the witness to the case he wasn't taking just for fun, the true detectives arrived. "Look what the cat drug in, it's a clone, it's a zombie, it's a San Francisco bum in the exact replica of my employer, minus thirty pounds of sheer muscle and rapunzel hair." The look Cassandra gave him before she stood to greet Officer Dianthea Alafogiannis of the San Francisco PD was enough to actually whither him, despite the previously thought impossibility of that, and the fact that it was a fairly accurate description.

Dianthea was skeletal, in comparison with her twin sister, with hair that looked like it had been cut dry with kitchen shears over her bathroom sink, and light bags under her eyes and skin that had never had the sun reach it through the fog, or through the musty window of her basement apartment during the clear hours of the day.

On the wall opposite the door to the inner office was a picture of Malyssa Alafogiannis shaking hands with the late Mayor John Banikas; she was more tanned, her eyes made up like those makeup ads with bold shadow not meant for real life and thick long princess hair you could suffocate in, but otherwise the very image of a yoga-obsessed Marina girl except that her biceps were more in line with years of Krav Maga training.

Dianthea looked like a clone of Malyssa that was half starved to death or half restored back to life from the dead. She was in a blue uniform complete with service hat and her badge on crooked.

The officer and her plainclothes partner, Inspector Prince, didn't have much patience for Jimmy Lambeti, and Dianthea didn't acknowledge having so much as heard him as her ice colored and ice temperamented eyes scanned the outer office and she moved on to the inner office, followed by her partner.

There was a bloodstained carpet on the other side of Malyssa's desk, which oddly faced away from the floor to ceiling windows with an only partially obstructed view of the traffic honking on Embarcadero. "No body?" asked Dianthea to the room full of officers in uniform.

"Nothing gets past you," said a forensics expert in a lab coat. That was Gideon Kiriazis, PhD. Red Phillips forensic lenses obscured his eyes, which seemed silly, because the lights were on, but Dianthea had never seen him without them. It was almost impossible to process any of his other features without being distracted by the newest thing in nerd goggles.

Dianthea went around to get a better vantage with the window to her back. "How long ago did it disappear?"

Gideon got low to the ground and scrutinized the blood spatter patterns with thought processes no one in the room could have divined. Or maybe his brain was empty. "A second after first responders arrived. Your sister is lucky additional witnesses arrived fast enough to catch the show. Ms. Alafogianis definitely didn't carry the body to a dump site, two officers had visuals on the body of Senator Athena Rex before it disappeared.

"Although, the official ID procedure has been negatively affected by the crop of vanishing corpses, and we're not allowed to say definitively that it was Senator Athena Rex until the body is recovered, which it never will be. None of them have ever been."

Dianthea leaned back against the glass of the floor-to-ceiling window and crouched as if sitting in a chair. "I don't suppose you'll give the cause of death without the body, either, eh?" 

"Nope," was all Dr. Gideon said.

Leander came around, fingers rubbing at the non-existent whiskers on his chin. "I haven't even seen the pictures yet," he said, "but I'm going to say one to the head and one to the sternum, doc." He gestured with the other hand the blood on the carpet from the head and the separate pool from the torso.

"Cleverest crime fighters in the history of the force, I always say."

The rest of the crime scene analysts were beginning to pack up and move on. Gideon took off his white gloves and threw them in Malyssa's trash. "There's nothing here. I don't see this as the breakthrough to the mystery of the vanishing corpses. There's less mess left behind than the previous murders; they're getting even better at covering their tracks, and there wasn't much left wanting before.

"I say we pin it on her husband. Who wants to notify said next of kin?"

"Why don't you take this one, Daia?" said Leander.

Dianthea stretched out an arm, and her partner, with an uncanny ability to read her mind when the rest of the force was constantly in a state of confusion interpreting both her words and actions, stepped back over the body, offered her a hand and let her pull herself up. "Nah, Prince," she grunted. "I don't know the first thing about next of kin notifications. I slept through the training."

On her way out the door Dianthea snatched her sister's digital camera off the desk and ejected the memory card, palming it unselfconsciously. With the same hand in which it was palmed she pointed a finger to the 40s vintage Ansco Shur-Flash with a ridiculous Agfa bulb attachment and asked the uniformed first responders just leaving, "She didn't take any pictures on that thing, did she?" Her question was met with shrugs and head shakes that looked like assumption rather than fact. To Leander she waved the drive and said, "I'll email these to her before she misses them," and wagged her head toward the door.

Jimmy Lambeti, taking the only seat at the desk, was showing Cassandra Aniston something on his computer that relaxed her enough to almost laugh.

Dianthea hesitated on the threshold. "You cats staying here for the night?" she asked as the front door opened and four uniforms and a lab coat passed through it.

"Sure, why not?" said Jimmy.

"I want to be here when the detective gets back," said Cassandra.

"You'll be her alibi, eh? And she's yours? Lucky I drove Malyssa personally to the lobby not two hours ago, and you're lucky I saw Cassandra waiting for her outside. Unless the two of you murdered Senator Rex together. Your statement says you sat out here for five minutes before my sister discovered the body?" She had her phone out and magically had the reports in front of her already.

Cassandra had been leaning over Jimmy's shoulder to see the cat video or whatever it was but she straightened up when Dianthea asked that. "Are we doing more questions?" she asked. "I thought I told the other officer enough."

"I have more questions," said Dianthea. "Why were you and the private investigator sitting out here for five minutes before the body was discovered?"

"That's none of the San Francisco Police Department's business."

Leander had gone to the window and leaned back on Jimmy's bookcase. When he talked to her she was forced to turn away from Dianthea. "Why weren't you discussing the business that's yours and Detective Alafogiannis's but not the San Francisco Police Department's in the inner office?"

"Jimmy's couch is comfortable," said Cassandra.

Dianthea jumped back in. "How would you describe Detective Alafogiannis's reaction to the body?" she asked.

Jimmy sat up straight in his office chair and Cassandra said, "You're not looking at your sister for this."

"Why not?" said Dianthea. "Best suspect we've got. It's her office. Where has she run off to?"

"I don't know," said Cassandra. Arms crossed over her chest, she didn't say anything further. One thing she had down pat was keeping her expression as unreadable as her impeccable dress and general appearance. On the other and, there was everything suspicious about her refusal to answer questions.

"I'm not looking at my sister for this," said Dianthea. The gleam in her eyes made Cassandra shiver and took all meaning out of the words.

The two police officers nodded to one another. Leander had been sitting on the desk and as if they read each other's minds they turned and walked to the door at the same time, satisfied — for now — with their interrogation of Cassandra Aniston.

A laugh like he won at poker came from Jimmy the second Dianthea's finger touched the doorknob. "You don't want to see the security footage?" Jimmy said.

Thank you for reading Detective Fog. The story continues! Please leave a star as you pass through to the next chapter. Any guesses what's on the security footage? Silly inspectors, not expecting a private eye to have a hidden camera somewhere in the office.