​With Detective Fog's pictures of Athena Rex's crime scene open on his large screen monitor, Inspector Prince had no idea where to move on to with the senator's murder case.

Mena Sigler, head of the crime syndicate, kept texting him on the daily to say it wasn't her. It wasn't her people. Someone needed to go down for this, and it better not be anyone affiliated with the Siglers. Or it was his head.

He went over line by line the evidence and witness statements that were his only lead. Reading through every inch of the Athena Rex folder could be completed in thirty-six minutes if he read slowly. He could skim it in fifteen, ignoring those bits he had memorized.

The only DNA at the scene belonged to Athena and the detectives who roamed the office all day. The only blood was Athena's. Footprints on Detective Fog's carpet and easily visible on the security footage showed perfectly average-sized Salvatore Ferragamo​ oxfords you could get at Macy's.

From the bullet casings, the murder weapon was a Glock 19 — not exactly original, not at all distinguishing. It could also be easily seen in the video.

The statements from Jimmy Lambetti and Cassandra Aniston were boring. Jimmy hadn't even arrived until after the murder was discovered and could thus hardly be considered a witness.

Dianthea provided her sister's alibi, and Detective Fog had given a statement of her own when she was brought to the station under arrest for the murder of Paul Aniston and Nick Minardos.

It, too, was boring.

The security footage didn't answer any questions, but it begged a few. Why hadn't the killer said a word to Athena before shooting her? Did the killer know where the security camera was hidden?

Leander flipped through crime scene photos taken by the inspectors on the scene and found a picture of the hat stand where Jimmy Lambetti said the security camera had been hidden that day. He didn't see anything in the picture except a wooden stand with a couple of fedoras hanging on it, but the angle was perfect for the security footage, which he had since transferred to his own computer.

He had yet to return Jimmy's desktop.

All he had was an office perfectly in order except for the out of place corpse with its brain matter smashed into the carpet and a shooter who kept everything distinguishable about himself well hidden — the only thing distinguishable about him was that he knew to face away from the camera and not to speak. Was that a lead? Leander had already asked who knew about the security cameras, where could he go from there?

Leo Markopoulos​'s statement was the most compelling exhibit. Although Leander had typed it out himself, he had since highlighted, annotated, and doodled all over his printed copy and read it a dozen times as if he hadn't been in the room listening to the man deliver the story. The husband, Adoni Rex, didn't have an alibi. He had been drinking alone, apparently at his place of residence, for several hours previous to and following the murder. Not so much as the downstairs neighbor could place his movements during those hours, whether he had come and gone or been home the entire time. Adoni's own statement at the time of his arrest — once his lawyer, a wolf-eyed man named Tom Dimon, made himself present in the middle of the night — was that he hadn't left home all day and had had several beers with his dinner.

The interviewing officer, George Cotsakos, had asked many times what Adoni had meant when he had repeated over and over, "I'll kill him," and unsurprisingly, given the story told by Leo Markopoulos, Adoni said that whoever Athena was having an affair with would be the murderer.

It would be phenomenal if Leander could find the man Athena was having an affair with and pin her murder on him, but according to Leo Markopoulos​, such a man did not exist. Athena couldn't possibly have hidden romantic liaisons with anyone under Adoni's nose, not when the private investigator had been asked to follow her, install cameras without her knowledge, and increasingly violate her privacy.

Officer Maroulis​ came in around lunchtime. She was a middle-aged officer with the proportions of a short male football player, who had been on the force seemingly forever, not exactly climbing the promotion ladder, but good to have your back on a case. Not much to look at, she compensated with stylish weekly cuts or dye jobs, today's ruby red and sheer angle cut that came to a triangular point as sharp as some of the intersections off Market Street hinted to an artsy side Leander had never seen any other evidence of and somehow didn't look bad with her uniform. Add false eyelashes and lipstick, and she looked like she'd just come off the fashion runway of some kind of charity event.

"I want Athena Rex's husband's heart on a platter, Inspector," said Maroulis.

"Any evidence turn up while my back was turned?" Leander asked, "or are we just talking hunches here?"

"Nothing at the scene, the DNA's going to take a few more days. But I've been asking around, interviews back to back all morning. Dexter Mars wouldn't open his door to me more than a crack, but I managed to find a coworker who thinks he did it, just like Leo Markopoulos​. So this friend and coworker says Adoni Rex has been having an affair the whole time he's had his wife stalked for evidence of one. Unfortunately, he didn't have any contact details, didn't know much about her, but I gotta tell you, I'm on Adoni Rex like a hound now, and nothing's going to stop me from getting my man."

Leander shifted in his seat, wiggling his swiveling rolling chair back and forth while he thought. Finally, he caught her eye and chose his words carefully. "So you're not concerned about mafia involvement?"

"The only thing that suggests such a thing is the disappearance of the body. And who's to say the mafia have copyright on that? Maybe Adoni possesses such powers, Inspector." The Sigler mafia would be happy to hear about the lack of suspicion. "If we could get him on magic alone, I'd be happy to see him behind bars to stay. I'm going to stick on the trail of the mistress, maybe she knows something. She's certainly kept her head down the past couple of days. What's she got to hide? Now that I have some real questions, maybe Dexter Mars will talk to me, make an attempt to control the conversation even if he ends up giving me everything I need to arrest that son of a bitch."

"Talk to Roussos about this," said Leander. "He likes the mafia angle, but you might be able to persuade him."

"Roussos?" said Maroulis. "Isn't this your case?"

"He's more interested in it than I am, so I've passed him some of my leads. Or some of my legwork, at least. Guy's a golden boy and won't stop at anything to get the real killer, it seems. I'm more interested in wrapping the Paul Aniston/Nick Minardos murder into a tidy package to hand back to the DA. Explain to me how Ms. Alafoggianis walked out of here the other day, Maroulis?"

"That's on you — you do the explaining, Inspector. It was my day off. Aren't you the one who unlocked her cuffs?"

"At the orders of Judge Condon. Sure. But I think I'd like the 'detective' back here. It's fine with me if Roussos gets all the fame and glory of finding the murderer of a State Senator. I'm working on a personal vendetta, too busy for such things." He threw the Athena Rex file down on the desk.

The Aniston/Minardos murder was much more interesting. All kinds of loose ends and investigative strings, although a clear picture was becoming visible to him. He was considering whether it would be possible to take Detective Fog and put her behind bars where she wouldn't be able to cause any more trouble.

​Detective Fog had been released from police custody with no charges filed based on two flaws in the case. First, the cops on the scene were close enough when she fired the shots that killed Nick Minardos to be reasonably sure in their statements that the killing had been self-defense. Second, the rigged gun and the absence of Nick Minardos's vocal cords suggested an elaborate frame-up. Judge Candon didn't want to go to trial with such holes in the story. But Leander was already working on ways to fill in those holes.

Fog claimed that someone else was in the warehouse, the person who had killed Paul Aniston and led her to the self-firing weapon that caused her to shoot Nick Minardos to death. She placed a second person there herself, in her statement. But what if the second person had been not an assailant but an accomplice? An accomplice could have shot Paul Aniston with the murder weapon, which had yet to turn up, and could perhaps have possessed certain surgical skills that Detective Fog did not. The counter-argument to a frame-up, Detective Fog had provided herself: the crime looked so much like a frame-up it was as good as a get out of jail free card.

With the presumption of innocence, however, such suspicions were useless without proof. He needed evidence.

If he could find evidence to defend those claims, it left only Officer Amalia's​ and Officer Savalas's statement​. The two women had found Fog just moments after she had killed Nick Minardos, and they didn't believe she had planned the killing. Both claimed the detective had been as in the dark as any of them before the lights came on and they discovered Minardos's fresh corpse.

Those statements wouldn't play well in court. Even with every other hole filled, the officers' accounts could be enough to get Detective Fog off with a self defence defence.

That was the prosecutor's problem, though. Leander could focus only on gathering his evidence. For the next two days, he brainstormed at all hours. Twice he returned to the scene of the crime in search of evidence that would characterize the second person on the scene as an accomplice to Detective Fog and not "the real killer."

When DNA came back from the labs, that could be what gave Leander his much-needed lead and point him toward who on earth the accomplice was, but he needed every bit of evidence he could get, so he combed the place. The first inspectors on the scene had already scoured it, but that hadn't given Leander enough to point at a specific person, and so he returned, and he brainstormed. On his laptop, he worked on other casework. He typed up reports sitting on top of machinery, a flat surface of metal that he'd come to think of as a steel piano because he had no idea what it did, but sitting cross-legged on top of it, he could imagine he was sitting on a grand piano.

It couldn't have been Jimmy Lambetti because the smartass had thought to spend the night among solid alibis after being left by the police, including Leander himself. Cassandra Aniston had accompanied him to a card game at a friend's house. Someone had walked her home. Jimmy stayed in the company of six witnesses until 3 a.m. Leander himself had been in the same room with Jimmy just hours before the crime had been committed and couldn't believe the guy would dare try to pull one over on him after their little chat.

But it would make Leander furious if that ended up being the case.

With nothing to point him to a specific person as an accomplice, Leander went back to constructing his version of what happened. Someone had kidnapped Paul Aniston and Nick Minardos while Detective Fog was thick with alibis, spending a day out in public, even joining Officer Dianthea for dinner, and even more publicly returning to her office to find Senator Athena Rex dead inside.

The missing piece of the puzzle for Leander's story was the warehouse door, which had been ripped off its hinges and left twenty feet away from its frame. If he could prove Detective Fog had torn it off, he'd have her in cuffs for illegal magic use before you could say Mobiliarbus​. And that was well and good, but if she were the killer, he couldn't think of a reason for her to have to remove the door in a way that would secure her future behind bars. It would be careless planning. Her story was that she had found it like that, denying the whole thing, but if she were innocent, it would make sense that she would have done so to get to Paul's rescue. That was a picture he couldn't get out of his mind every time he tried to imagine what had caused the destruction.

Why would the killers have blown the door off its hinges, and how could he use the answer to that question to catch them?

It was starting to look as if someone had framed Detective Fog after all, and wanted her out of the way, whether on murder charges or magic charges. Yet even with their efforts, Leander was having a hard time seeing how to make any charges stick.

That was when Stink found him in his favorite burger joint across the street, eating a cheeseburger and drinking a milkshake, a habit he enjoyed as fuel to run a few miles after work every day.

"She's looking for you," Stink said, sitting across from Leander in the diner-style booth only after he had ordered a burger combo. "She's looking for the kind of officer who would do the bidding of the likes of people like me." His speech was cryptic, but Leander understood; in other words, Fog was looking for a crooked cop who takes orders from Mena Sigler.

"Good thing I have three murders she might be guilty of," said Leander.

Thank you for reading Detective Fog. I am very grateful for all your support and the stars you leave behind. It helps to fuel my writing and my magic world. Let's give this new book a little lift-off!