by Nora Kane
“She’s been getting death threats.”
“I can see how that might happen.”
“Someone took a shot at her.”
“Forty caliber slug was dug out of the wall,” Cranston added, “the same caliber as the gun you’ve got registered.”
“You think I took a shot at Cassandra Cole?”
“That’s what we want to talk about. You coming nicely or…” Anderson said as he took out his handcuffs and let them dangle by his index finger.
“Why does the organized crime taskforce care about someone shooting at a YouTube reporter?” Radcliff asked.
“Well, when one of the suspects is the feared and famed cartel hitwoman Viuda Negra, it sure sounds like organized crime to me,” Anderson said.
“Or you’re just harassing her because she’s talking to me,” Harry replied.
“Either way, she’s coming with us.”
Margot could think of all sorts of arguments as to why she wasn’t the one who took a shot at Cassandra but knew that at best, they’d fall on deaf ears and at worst, they’d twist them around so she sounded guilty. So instead, she said, “Whatever, I’m coming.”
“Bummer, I was kind of hoping to do it the other way,” Anderson said as he put the handcuffs away.
Margot turned to Radcliff. “Do you want to call my lawyer?”
“Already on it.”
Anderson looked at Harry Lee. “I’m guessing we’ll be seeing you again soon.”
“I certainly hope not.”
“I don’t see how it would be avoidable since we caught the Lucas Lau case.”
“You two got that?” Margot asked. “I thought Barnes and Cartwright got that one…”
“They had The Masterson Hot Tub Massacre; Lucas is a whole different case. Since he worked for a known organized crime figure, he falls under our jurisdiction. You were working that hot tub case too, weren’t you?”
Margot thought discovering the identity of the killer was a bit more than just ‘working it,’ but she just said, “Yeah.”
Cranston shook his head. “I don’t know how Barnes and Cartwright put up with it. Having some snoop second-guessing them. That kind of shit would drive me crazy.”
Margot turned to Harry Lee. “I think I’ve changed my mind. I’ll take the case.”
Chapter 2
Anderson set a tape recorder the department had been using since sometime before Margot was born on the table and said, “Would you please say ‘I hear my name coming out your mouth one more time, bitch and I’m putting a cap in your pretty face.’”
Anderson pressed record.
Margot said nothing.
Cranston turned off the recorder and said to her, “You need to say it like you’re pretending you’re a man.”
He turned it back on and set it back down on the table.
Margot still said nothing.
After a couple of minutes of silence, Anderson turned off the recorder.
“Do I need to repeat the phrase? I can write it down.”
“Is this for some sort of voice line up?” Margot asked him.
“Yeah. If it’s not you, then we can check you off the list.”
Margot shook her head. “You do know I was a cop? A detective, in fact. Did you really think I’d do this?”
“Of course I knew you were a cop. We were in the academy together.”
“Plus,” Cranston added, “the dirty ones always stick in my memory.”
“Why do you think I’m trying to get you in the line-up other than to clear you so we can move on?” Anderson went on. “I’m playing it straight with you. I know better than to try and con a cop.”
“You know, the fact you think I’d fall for this shit is actually making me angry.”
Anderson put the recorder back on the table. “Come on, Margot: ‘I hear my name coming out your mouth one more time, bitch and I’m putting a cap in your pretty face.’ Just say it and you can be on your way.”
Anderson hit record.
Cranston turned it off again and once again added, “Say it like you’re trying to sound like a man.”
Cranston pressed record.
Margot shook her head and then leaned in close and said, “Hey Cassandra, this is Margot. While I do think you are a bitch, I didn’t threaten you and I certainly didn’t shoot at you. Have a nice day.”
Anderson turned off the recorder.
“The phrase was ‘I hear my name coming out your mouth one more time, bitch and I’m putting a cap in your pretty face.’”
“Said like a man,” Cranston added.
Margot motioned for them to turn back on the recorder.
When they did she said, “Go fuck yourselves.”
“You’re not helping yourself here, Margot.”
Margot shrugged. “I think I’ve said all I’ve got to say.”
Anderson changed tactics. “Where were you at eleven o’clock Thursday night?”
“At your colleague’s place. Do you want to know what we were doing?”
“I think I can guess.”
“So, can I leave now?”
“Where was your old pal Malachi Flynn?”
“I have no idea.”
“You sure? You haven’t seen him since he bolted from that crime scene up in Riverside?”
“Yeah.”
“What if I told you he’d been seen driving out of the parking lot of your apartment building as recently as last week?”
“Are you telling me that or is this a hypothetical?”
“What if I were to tell you that same vehicle was seen speeding out of Cassandra Cole’s neighborhood the night someone took a shot at her?”
“I think you have my answer on tape. Go ahead and play it back, save me the trouble of saying it again.”
“Did you send your old lover to scare that kid? Or maybe he was supposed to hit her?”
When Margot didn’t reply Anderson said, “Could be he doing it on his own? When it came to you, he was always like a lovesick puppy.”
“You going to say something?” Cranston asked.
“No, I’m not,” Margot told him. Even though Anderson's second theory made some sense to her, she didn’t want to tell him that.
“You sure you don’t know where Mal is these days? We could be asking him these questions instead of you.”
“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you. Which makes it kind of a bummer I don’t.”
“How about last Saturday around 11 a.m.? Were you doing something unmentionable with Detective Radcliff then too?”
“Why? Someone shoot at Cassie twice?”
“That’s when Lucas got shanked in the county infirmary.”
“I wasn’t there.”
“How well do you know Dennis Thorn?”
“Who’s that?” Margot asked even though the name sounded vaguely familiar.
“You tell me.”
Margot couldn’t have told him if she wanted to. Even though she felt she’d heard the name before, she couldn’t place where.
“You know, it has occurred to more than one person that if Lucas ever got to tell his story, your client would go back to being the lead suspect in a double murder. It kind of makes it convenient for you that the poor kid got stabbed,” Cranston mused.
Margot decided this was a good time to exercise her right to remain silent.
“And one of those people who was saying Lucas might be innocent and Phoebe Masterson should still be the main suspect was Cassandra. In fact, she dedicated a whole episode of Coastal Crime Alert to the subject. It was a popular episode. Did you watch it?” Anderson asked.
She hadn’t, but she was still exercising her right to remain silent. Margot examined her nails on her left hand. It had been a long time since she got a manicure.
“Maybe after Cassie shined a big old spotlight on you and your involvement in Lucas getting shanked, you thought you needed to scare her off,” Cranston added.
Margot didn’t answer him either.
“Silence isn’t helping, Margot.”
She was tempted to tell him to fuck off again, but in truth, she knew every word she said to them was too many.
After a few more minutes of uncomfortable silence, a lawyer from Browers and Associates came through the door. She wasn’t sure his name; like a lot of their litigators, he was tall, fit and nice-looking, in an aristocratic kind of way. Browers had been her client as they’d represented Phoebe Masterson when she was the prime suspect in the murder of her husband and Rita Helms.
She’d thought they might be unhappy with her. By finding another suspect, she’d robbed them of a high-profile trial. Instead, it was the opposite. It seemed they were more interested in helping their clients than getting on the news. With this in mind, they’d kept Margot on a retainer. She still took other clients, but when they called, they were the priority.
One of the perks of this business arrangement was, if she needed a lawyer, they were there for her.
“Have you charged my client with something?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Anderson told him.
“When you do, give me a call,” he said as he put his card on the table, “otherwise my client will be leaving.”
He motioned for Margot to stand up. After she got up, they walked out the door together.
“Thaddius Wolf,” he told her as they exited the station.
“I know, I saw your card.”
“I’d like to say call me Wolf because everyone does, but the sad fact is everyone calls me Thad.”
“Nice to meet you, Thad. Thanks for getting me out of there.”
“No problem. I needed to talk to you anyway and you're much more fun than our other investigators.”
“How is that?”
“They never get hauled in for questioning.”
“That was fun?”
“For me, anyway. I could see how it would be less so for you. Is this something the firm needs to know more about?”
“Not yet. They were just going fishing. Unfortunately, the way I left the department didn’t make me many friends. If you can help it, don’t make enemies of cops.”
“Are you saying I should have been nicer back there?”
“Never mind. You’re a defense attorney; if you wanted to avoid making enemies of cops, that ship sailed a while ago.”
Thad unlocked a midnight blue Porsche 911 Carrera remotely as they approached it.
“Nice ride,” Margot said.
She couldn’t help thinking about something she and Thad’s mutual client, Phoebe Masterson, said. She’d told Margot it wasn’t Radcliff’s fault the man she dumped him for drove a Ferrari. She’d also said that, if Margot ran into that guy, she’d be dumping Radcliff as well. Margot shook her head. While Thad drove a hundred thousand dollar car and he certainly wasn’t bad to look at, she wouldn’t leave Radcliff for him anytime soon.
“What is it you want to talk to me about?” she asked as she climbed inside.
“It looks like we’re not as out of the woods yet as we thought on Phoebe Masterson. There are already rumblings about filing charges again.”
“Because Lucas kicked the bucket?”
“Yeah, it helps to have somebody to prosecute, and with him getting shanked, all of a sudden his talk about being set up sounds a little more credible.”
“The person he says set him up is me—or at least, he says I planted Tim Masterson’s razor.”
“For the record, no one at Browers is buying that nonsense.”
“That’s good to hear.”
“The idea someone gave him that straight razor isn’t so crazy though. The idea it was a setup isn’t, either.”
“If that was a setup, it was a bad one.”
“How so?”
“I stumbled on him having that straight razor by accident. I certainly didn’t go to his place with the intent of having him try to cut my nose off. What I thought might be there, the actual murder weapon, wasn’t there.”
“If it was a plant, I’m guessing you weren’t meant to find it. Someone was going to make an anonymous phone call, but you beat them to it.”
“I guess it’s possible, but it sounds like a stretch.”
“No doubt, but as I said, the D.A. likes to actually prosecute somebody on high profile crimes like this one. They’re not going to give up on Phoebe yet. Before you dug up Lucas, they thought they had a solid case. It was her husband and the woman he was having an affair with floating in the hot tub. And it was still her dress with the blood all over it. Plus, the murder weapon is still out there. Without Lucas around to run his mouth and say something incriminating, she starts looking like a prime suspect again.”
“Yeah, I guess I can see that.”
“The good news is you're working with us again.”
Margot nodded. That was good news. The better part of it was she could still bill Harry Lee since the cases crossed over. If Lucas was set up and his murder was part of the cover-up, his killer and the Masterson Hot Tub Massacre killer were most likely one and the same. If she could figure out one, she would likely have the solution to the other.
The problem was, neither was easy to solve.
“You think you could swing by her place sometime, maybe tomorrow? As you might guess, she’s stressing pretty hard about all this. Knowing you’re back on the case might make her feel a little better.”
“I didn’t know I was in the make-Phoebe-feel-better business.”
“You’re not, but it might give you a chance to ask her how Lucas might have gotten her dead husband's straight razor. She hasn’t told us anything and you seem to be better at getting things out of her than we are.”
Margot nodded again. Even though Phoebe was openly hostile towards her most of the time, Margot had managed to get her to tell her where she was the night of the murder and who she was with.
Thad drove her back to her office. She was surprised to see Cassandra Cole waiting in the lobby.
“She wanted to talk to you,” Ms. Collins, Shaw’s longtime secretary said as Margot walked in the door. “I told her Mr. Shaw was available, but she insisted on you.”
“Really?” Margot looked over at Cassie. “You know, if you hadn’t sicced a couple of cops on me, I would have been here a lot sooner.”
“I didn’t tell them to pick you up,” Cassandra said.
“What do you want, Cassandra? I know I promised you an interview…”
