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“You could turn yourself in. The longer you stay out, the more they’re going to think you’re an accomplice.”
“They already do.”
“I wish I could tell you differently. Give me a number.”
Margot told her the license plate.
“I’ve got it. Look, there’s something else I heard that I thought I should pass on. If this was a trace, they’d have you already, so you might as well give me another minute.”
“What did you hear?”
“They haven’t been able to find Dean Stone to tell him about his wife. There’s some concern he met a similar fate.”
“Someone killed Dean Stone because his wife was cheating on him?”
“I don’t think that’s what this is about.”
“Then what? A rival? He piss someone off?”
“I don’t know, but when was the last time the F.B.I. gave a damn about a smuggler’s wife's infidelity?”
“Fair point. I don’t even know if she was unfaithful. Hopefully, the owner of the car I want you to run down can tell me something.”
“Or, you could turn yourself in and leave this to the cops and the lawyers.”
“I’ll think about,” Margot said, truthfully.
Everything was coming up a dead end. Maybe the fact she hadn’t done anything wrong would keep her out of prison.
She ended the call and drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 12
Margot had no idea what time it was when she opened her eyes. All she knew was it was dark when she closed them and now it was light. She checked her phone and found another call from Ames and two text messages from numbers she didn’t recognize. She opened the first one and the first thing she read was:
‘This is Doreen. I borrowed a phone’.
It looked like they still had Doreen set up to have her calls traced if Margot tried to contact her. Margot kept reading.
‘I don’t know what this means but the car belongs to the government. I can’t trace it to an individual or even a specific agency. I can tell you the agents who showed up here today were driving the same make and model.’
Margot considered this. If Katrina was meeting someone from the F.B.I., some professional hitman showing up to kill her did make sense. The logical reason for the F.B.I. to talk to the wife of a career criminal would be to get her to be an informant. And that the missing Dean Stone had also been taken care of by his business partners, worried about what Dean’s spouse already gave away? That made some sense too.
The hit man’s car showing up while they were eating could have meant somebody tipped him off, someone who knew Dean and Katrina Stone. Someone like Lefty. Margot didn’t like to think about the man who served her drinks and provided a decent conversation every once in a while making a call like that. A call he had to know would result in someone dying. Still, she couldn’t discount the possibility.
Margot wondered if this information helped. If she was right, the F.B.I. already knew someone had killed their informant. It seemed that, as far as they were concerned, that guy was Mal. Margot figuring it out wouldn’t affect their decision at all. She knew a lot more about the why, but she still needed the who if she was going to get out from under this. So, she wasn’t any closer to him than she was yesterday.
She checked the other text:
‘This is Trixie. Doc had a lot to say last night. Call me or come on by my place.’
Margot thought about it for a second and decided to try and kill two birds with one stone. She checked the time and then texted back, ‘Meet me at Lefty’s at 12.’
Margot had some time, so she took the recorder out of the hidden pocket in her purse. Normally, she’d download the recording onto her laptop, but that was still in her apartment and she wasn’t going to risk going back there yet. She considered just erasing it all since she couldn't think of anything on there that was worth saving, but she had a process that’d proven effective in the past.
Usually, she used her laptop to take notes on and then listen back. Since that wasn’t available, she scrounged around until she found some notebook paper and a pencil.
She made sure the blinds were shut and sat down at Mal’s kitchen table. She started by writing down what she thought she knew. Once that very short list was completed, she started listening.
