Detective Fog and the Mission Pigeon

Chapter 20. Inspector Leander's Office

With much persuasion, Leander got Dianthea to leave the Saloon and come into work at the station today.

It might have been a waste of time in terms of solving the case, but it made her less likely to be fired.

At two p.m. on Saturday, he escorted Dianthea through the doors of the Public Safety building. The detective had a glass-walled office through which any of the patrollers could see everything going on inside, unlike Detective Sitilides' office one past his and Police Commissioner Eric Calazans's office on the other side.

In a rush to get started, he sat down at his desk chair and rolled up his sleeve, ready to begin on a new lead. Dianthea fell onto a visitor's chair rump first and then slumped forward. "Can you get me some coffee?" she asked. She leaned back and sank into the seat.

Leander looked up and glared. "Of the two of us, the one who is working and the one who is completely useless, who should be getting the coffee?" he asked.

She groaned, slumped back, and sank more into the seat. Her head was to the side as if she were trying to use the uncomfortable plastic seat back to rest it on. "Don't you have a secretary?" she groaned. Leander had no sympathy, so after a minute, she got up to get herself a cup of coffee. There was no calculating the odds of whether she would bring Leander a cup.

The morning had brought more evidence on the Athena Rex murder case than could be found at the murder scene. It came in the form of a private investigator called Leo Markopoulos. A pale-faced guy, Leo was easy to dislike on top of the fact that he was a hack who never would have made it in the force but could take people's money to follow their husbands and wives around taking pictures.

A few years ago, Leo Markopoulos had solved a murder case that had stumped the police, no doubt because his obscenely wealthy client had provided information to Markopoulos that she would never tell the cops. He had been living large on the fortunes of the rich and dirty ever since.

A patrol officer kindly led Leo Markopoulos to Leander's office and said to Leander, "This guy wants to make a statement about Adoni Rex."

The inspector looked up and impatiently waved Leo Markopoulos into the office, his face gray and unwelcoming. As Leo Markopoulos tried to get comfortable in the plastic seat across from him, Leander reveled in the man's discomfort. It took him a minute to finish typing up the report he was working on. During that time, he didn't look up at Leo Markopoulos, and at one point, Leo Markopoulos began to speak, saying, "I've felt obligated to—" and Leander had shushed him and gone on typing.

When he was good and ready, Leander looked back up. "What's your statement?" he asked — all business, no pleasantries, and certainly no encouragement.

The man painted an ugly picture of Adoni Rex. Adoni had hired him to follow Athena Rex and photograph her, suspicious that she was having a ... dalliance. Markopoulos had followed Athena for a few weeks, found no evidence of the fling, and turned in his pictures along with billable hours.

"Adoni flew into a rage," said Markopoulos. "You wouldn't believe the anger. Never had I seen a client so furious to find out that his or her spouse had not been having an affair. I mean, it was only a couple of weeks, but often in these matters, that's enough time to establish for sure. Asshole trashed my office in a temper tantrum, swept everything off my desk, laptop included, don't get me started on that. I'm so OCD about my devices. I've never dropped my phone, not even once. I still can't believe he threw my laptop off the desk along with the stacks of papers and framed photos. Fuck the family photos, I can't believe he threw the computer. This was two months ago, and I still can't believe it.

"Anyway, when he calmed down, he offered to pay for the damages, and he had no problem paying for the hours and the work product I had produced thus far. Only he was dissatisfied, he said, with my product. I took the pictures too far away, he says. Always from outside, coming out of their shared apartment, going into work, leaving work, and the occasional coffee shop or bar night with girlfriends. On the bar nights, I followed her inside and took shots of perfectly innocent girl behavior.

"You understand, as I'm sure Mr. Rex must have understood, that if I catch her up to anything the least bit smutty, I snap a picture; it may make my clients dislike me, but they pay me. It increases the likelihood of a bonus. Scratch that, there's always a bonus when I catch them up to something good. The smuttier, the better.

"This logic wasn't enough for Mr. Rex. He wanted surveillance in their shared apartment, which I guess isn't that shady; families all over the country keep security cameras in their living rooms, even their bedrooms. It gets a little bit dodgy when one spouse monitors the residence without the other spouse knowing. I want to clarify that this isn't my usual process; it crosses a line for me.

"I told him to call a surveillance company to install cameras for him. That's not what I do. I feel like that was pretty brave of me, considering he had just trashed my valuables, and there were expensive vases on the remaining surface he hadn't got to yet.

"He took it all right, but he still wanted me to get closer, to follow her into the cafes, the bars, any building she entered — her office? And he wanted cameras in her office, which the surveillance company couldn't do without her knowledge."

"You, of course, refused that last," said Leander.

Markopoulos's eyes went shiny, and he said, "Of course, but this pattern of behavior continued, and it made me uncomfortable. A few weeks after that, he was again dissatisfied with my work. Very angry. Nothing else got broken, but I started to get this feeling.

"Sure, he was looking for evidence of an affair that he believed, against all the evidence, was taking place, but that wasn't his main purpose anymore. He was stalking his wife. He got off on having eyes on her at all times. That made me nervous. Then she turns up dead. I gotta say I normally think before I respond to anything that happens related to my clients and my cases, but I didn't even think twice before I came down here. That guy is one creepy goof, and he murdered her. So you needed to be told what I know."

He went on to outline all kinds of suspicious behavior that made him nervous. Markopoulos did not like Mr. Rex at all, hadn't liked him from the first minute he saw him, long before the bully was rampaging around his office throwing his laptop around. Didn't like the way he talked without making eye contact, the way sometimes he responded without acknowledging what you said like he hadn't heard you. And he did not like how after Mr. Rex had thrown his temper tantrum when he was done raging, the son of a gun turned into a simpering baby and apologized. Markopoulos didn't approve of those kinds of emotional swings.

Leander started to get an odd sense from Markopoulos. Even though he was slimy and made every move calculated to what would bring him the biggest payout, there was a sincerity to his story.

Maybe he was a great faker, but Leander usually had a radar for such a phony. There wasn't any angle to get more cash by helping the police investigation, as far as Leander could figure. By the end of the interview, he was curiously inclined to believe Markopoulos was here out of the genuine concern that Adoni Rex had murdered his wife.

This he narrated to Dianthea as he filled in the report this morning.

"Perfect," said Dianthea. "I've said it before, and I'll say it again: You aren't going to catch the real murderer. Pin it on Adoni Rex."

With affection she didn't merit, Leander looked over his flatscreen monitor at her and said, "At least you're thinking like real police."

Thank you for reading Detective Fog. The story will continue soon. Tune back in on Friday! Please leave a star behind on your way out.