On a foggier day at the deli, Athena had ordered a sandwich this time and wished one could order a "small" pastrami sandwich, or half sandwiches, or quarter sandwiches. She resolved to save at least half of the meaty monstrosity and walk up and down Third until she found a panhandler to give it to. Her conversation with Detective Fog took a much different route today.

She had asked the question that derailed everything. "What I'm stuck on is the sealing of the bullet wounds. Why would the Mob bother to do that?"

"You mean you haven't figured it out?" asked Detective Fog. She was eating daintily today and dabbed her mouth with a napkin.

It was Athena's guess that she had been better paid and thus better fed the past couple of weeks, but felt guilty for not taking the woman's rent into consideration when offering her hourly rate. It had been accepted hastily, suggesting the woman was accustomed to earning less.

"I haven't had much time to think about it," said Athena. "Until last night, I continued to discredit the officers who described the wounds as being closed up, and even the pictures — I thought it was nonsense a medical examiner would be able to disprove and explain in thirty seconds. But — well, I sent you the video. You can see pretty clearly there are no bullet holes. It's a good thing I demanded Commissioner Calazans to tell his people to take video. It could be worse.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Hanlon's law. I'm reasonably sure he's not a mafia puppet, he's just an incompetent idiot. It almost seems possible someone within the Mob orchestrated his climb through the ranks just to have someone clean but a complete imbecile in the driver's seat.

"Anyways, no, I haven't figured out why they seal the bullet wounds."

"We should still get a medical examiner in there to look at the body, see what they can determine," said Detective Fog, dodgily.

"Are you avoiding the question?" Athena asked.

"It's the sort of thing that if you don't work it out yourself, you won't believe it. We can go that route, but I hate when a conversation goes exactly the way I imagined it going. You know, with you repeating everything I say in question form and refusing to believe me, insulting my intelligence? And then you'll turn up here two days later and say you've thought about it and you agree with me completely."

"Let's just skip all of that, and now that you've told me what not to do, I'll listen in silence and thank you for trusting me enough to tell me your theory." She reached out with a greasy hand and took Detective Fog's in her own, pressing reassuringly with her fingers.

Detective Fog raised both eyebrows high, extracted her hand, and started to wipe it with a napkin. Though eaten delicately, her sandwich was now nothing but a few crumbs, mustard smears, and dropped sauerkraut.

"Well, as I said, we'll need a medical examiner to get close to a body and make this determination before it disappears, but it's my hunch that it's not just that the bullet hole the mobsters seal up. I think the body is being completely restored. Skin, flesh, organs regenerated, lost blood replenished, leaving a perfect corpse, in such good health it shouldn't even be dead. Then the body goes somewhere — we don't know where. Put the pieces together. Why go to all that trouble?"

"Forensics countermeasure," Athena insisted. "It completely obscures the evidence, and it's baffled the investigators, including the two of us. Maybe the bodies themselves are incriminating, and if the M.E. got a good enough look, they'd be able to pinpoint someone to charge in these cases."

She was not sure why she felt a strong desire to convince Detective Fog she was right, whether she wanted to seem smart instead of like an idiot who didn't see what the detective saw, or because she didn't like where this was going. Something felt wrong.

"Why leave them for the fifty minutes, then? Why leave them for the police to see before they're snatched away?"

"So far, we've determined that's done to send a message to the police, make sure they know there's been a body, and we're never going to see said body again. It's frustrating."

"But if the body itself is incriminating, and there's even a shred of chance evidence on the body could be used to catch the killer, it wouldn't be worth the risk just to send that message. I don't think the bodies would tell us anything. The cause of death is two bullets, one to the head, one to the chest. I'm sure the weapons they use are unregistered. And a better reason occurs to me to restore the bodies to perfect health than as a simple forensics countermeasure; restoring them to a whole and healthy body, I might add, and then moving that body somewhere.

"Maybe the point isn't to dispose of the body; maybe the point is to keep it."

"I can't think of any reason for the Mob to be keeping corpses somewhere."

"Let's get to the incredulous part then, shall we?" said Detective Fog. "Say we catch the murderer of Mayor Banikas. Say we have a good, solid case. Let's go one step further and say this murderer gives us every one of the mafia bosses. The whole chain of command. Imagine this murderer talks and gives us Sigler, Zane, Ioana, and anyone and everyone else connected to the Banikas murder. Because let's face it, if this murderer wants to walk, the more of the Mob he or she puts behind bars before he or she walks out through the barred gate, the better this murderer's chance of survival.

"So we put all of the important people behind bars and save San Francisco from its wave of criminal syndication. What would our lovely, evolved, first-world criminal justice system do with the case if, on the morning of the big trial, the man himself, Mayor John J. Banikas, walks through the courthouse doors in perfect health, no worse for wear, asking the secretary what day is this?"

There was a funny quiet in the deli when Detective Fog finished her hypothetical. It was almost as if everyone had overheard her story and fallen quiet, even though she hadn't been talking loudly, and a minute before, there had been radio music playing and a roaring buzz of munching, chatting, and typing on laptops.

In the pause between songs, somehow all sound stopped at the same time. Then Here Comes Your Man by The Pixies started up with cheery distorted guitar chords, and the restaurant clattered back to life all at once, conversations continuing like normal, kitchen sounds including the explosive shattering of something glass and the low swearing that came along with such an incident, and Athena was left with objections clattering through her brain and her jaw hanging open.

"If Mayor Banikas turned up alive?" she breathed.

"What did I say about repeating it back to me as a question?" said Detective Fog.

Athena swallowed. "Sorry. It's just, you're right, incredible. You think somewhere in the city, the mafia is storing dozens of bodies as an insurance policy so that if there's ever a murder rap, they can beat it by having the victim turn up alive?"

"You're still doing it," said Detective Fog.

"Right, but I've also voiced the obvious objection. Isn't it more incriminating to store the bodies?"

Detective Fog shrugged. "As if disposing of bodies is such a foolproof course of action. They turn up in the bay all the time. Or in someone's dumpster or the landfill. If they have a foolproof place to keep just a couple of bodies . . . Next?"

Athena shook her head. "I liked the idea you had earlier where I take a couple of days to work this out. I'm not saying I'll come back in a couple of days and believe you, but I'll bring you my objections then, once I've had time to get them . . . bulletproof."

Leaning back on the plastic bench behind her, Detective Fog yawned, then looked back at the senator and said, "It really would be better if we skipped that part. Because if you accept my theory, you can start working on the next problem, Senator. If they have a get-out-of-jail-free card for these murders, then we're barking up the wrong tree even trying to get an indictment.

"We can't put away anybody of importance on these disappearing body crimes. What we need to do is determine is who committed these crimes and then find something else to pin on them. So the sooner you come around to my way of thinking, the sooner we can get cooking."

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