Detective Fog and the Mission Pigeon

Chapter 33. Leander's Investigation

​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.