Detective Fog and the Mission Pigeon

Chapter 14. November 2, Technically

It started to rain again as Cassandra left the police station alone, on foot, in the dark.

One of the officers, Officer Alexa Savalas, had offered her a ride home, but she slipped out into the downpour when Savalas's head was turned the other way. The blue hat had been ruined in seconds, the kind of thing that shouldn't be at all important, her husband was dead, how could it be, but life had to be kept together somehow, so the ruined hat was what finally brought her to tears. She pulled it off and let her black hair get soaked to the skull as if she'd jumped into a pool in a matter of seconds.

The hat clutched to her chest like a lost child, she sobbed standing up, the water cascading down her face mixing with tears as if she were crying torrential rain. The drops that got between her lips hardly tasted salty from the tears, more like fresh showers—the kind everyone loves, even if rain's supposed to be sad.

Barely audible over the raindrops, the rush of wind and the wet tires of cars driving by even in this neighborhood even at this hour, a generic ringtone began, its melody drowned out by the thick wool of her peacoat as well.

Not the least interested in who was calling or what they wanted, she ignored the call with the full intention of continuing to stand suffering in the cold storm, only half pretending she was even trying to flag a taxi. The relief of arriving at her warm apartment with the heater primed by the thermostat app on her phone tied to her GPS coordinates, of dropping wet clothes and the dead hat on the floor in exchange for flannel, a towel for her hair, and finally the warmth of the comforter and quilt on the bed, of sleep, oblivion from loss, she rejected all to suffer in the cold as long as she could stand it.

When the ringtone died out the first time, she ceased pretending to be waiting for a cab and fell onto the puddle in front of her on the cement sidewalk, knees first, bruising the skin and ripping her tights, and then the tone rang out again, somehow louder now in the sad night air. She sobbed into her hands.

The phone didn't ring a third time, but thirty seconds later, there was the ding of a text. No Millenial would be able to resist that sound. Cassandra had nothing better to do anyway. And the last semblance of sense in her mind also urged her to call a cab and go home; life had to be kept together somehow.

That repeated thought couldn't bring her to the point of caring that her phone might as well have been dropped in the toilet the second she held it out in front of her, the water plopping down onto the screen and invading every seam cutting the life expectancy of the device to a minute tops.

She swiped to unlock it and half-ignored the notification after all, the ding no Millenial could resist serving only really as a Pavlovian response to be on the phone in general, not to specifically check what the notification was. A dozen notifications from apps other than the received text desensitized her from any sense of urgency. Her thought now was to Google cab companies and then call one. But the next text ding changed her course, and an automatic response now the phone was in her hand was to tap the notification that came in and bring up the message.

She read.

Fingers more numb than they had been from the rain, she tapped to go back, to see the first text. It was a picture. A picture of Paul, and below that one of her. She considered the message in the first text.

Seconds later, she was striding back into the police department with the phone left on the pavement outside in the rain where she had dropped it. The glass doors swung out of her way before she got to them — they weren't automatic doors. Vaguely she noted the gray-haired and bearded officer behind the front desk drew his gun immediately and pointed it at her. One more sign of magic, and he would fire. Cassandra raised her hands above her head even though she couldn't be disarmed. "Stop right there," said the officer. "Don't move another inch."

"Arrest me," said Cassandra. "I murdered Paul Aniston. My husband."

The nervous cop was within his rights to shoot her before she did anything else magical, but her eyes begged him to arrest her, and he was a brave old veteran. He held her eye contact as if fighting a battle of wills with a wild animal as he came around to slap the cuffs on her.

"Thank you," she sobbed as the brave cop led her into the precinct to an interview room, with no reason to believe she wasn't armed and dangerous just because there was no gun on her person, and he had her in handcuffs.

Cassandra continued to cry senselessly and repeated over and over for the rest of the night, "Thank you. Thank you," but she provided no more details to her confession.

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