Page 94 of I Will Ruin You

“What happened on Friday?”

“I was looking outside, from the living room window, watching for Jack to get home, and saw this man talking to Richard. I didn’t really think about it at the time, but now that you say there might be people wanting to give him a hard time, well, that brought back the memory.”

“What did you see?”

“He’d parked a pickup or something just down the street, and when Richard got home he came over and talked to him. Kind of pointing his finger at him a couple of times, and it didn’t look like a very friendly conversation.”

“What did this man look like? White? Black? Age?”

Jill tried to think back. “He was white, and in his twenties, I guess. A little overweight, dark hair. I wasn’t close enough to get a very good look at him.”

A vague description, Marta thought, that could fit any number of young men, including Billy Finster.

“How long did they talk for?”

“Five minutes? I had to go answer the phone at one point, and when I came back the man had driven off and Richard had gone inside.”

“What about the truck? Did you get a look at that? A license plate number, maybe?”

“It was a pickup truck. White. With some rust on it. It never would have occurred to me to write down the plate number.”

“Of course. Why would it?” Marta smiled. “Thanks very much, and you have a nice evening.”

She went to her car, got settled in behind the wheel, and thought about how to proceed. After hearing about the boat transaction with Jack, Marta was ready to think she’d overreacted, that her sister and brother-in-law had leveled with her.

But that follow-up story changed things. Something was going on that Bonnie and Richard were not prepared to discuss with her.

She needed to talk to her sister again.

Alone.

Forty-Three

Andrea and Gerhard opted to keep a low profile after their run-in with the cop. No more hospital visits for now. And just when they were so close to finding Billy Finster’s wife.

Andrea had wanted to ditch the Audi. What if the cop had spotted the license plate? Failing that, what if she checked CCTV footage from along that route and got it that way? Gerhard didn’t want to ditch his car, and besides, he reminded her, the car already had stolen plates on it. Anyone who ran a check would be led to some guy in New Haven with a 2018 Malibu. He’d swipe another set of plates, slap them on.

Which was what he did, unscrewing the plates off a blue Golf GTI and bolting them onto the Audi.

“Anyway,” he said, “there’s only about a thousand black Audis in this part of Connecticut.” He shot her a look. “But just one with a cigarette burn in the hood.”

“You should have run her down,” Andrea said. “If it’d been me driving, that’s what I’d’ve done.”

“Then we would have to ditch the car, her brains all over the windshield.”

Andrea, sitting in the passenger seat, shrugged. “Good thing I had her shoes. Speedy.”

It was about the only positive spin she could put on the situation. Tracking down Billy’s wife, Lucy, was now much more difficult. Not only were the cops looking for her, that detective knew they were looking for her. But they needed to find her. It made sense that she was the one who’d helped herself to the carry-on bag. This was no longer a case of someone skimming a little off the top. This was the entire weekly shipment. It was their asses on the line here. If they didn’t recover that case, there was going to be a little delegation flying up from south of the border to have a word. Followed, perhaps, by a bullet to the head.

Gerhard turned the car into a strip mall parking lot, killed the engine, turned to look at Andrea.

“Let me run something by ya,” he said.

Andrea waited.

“You got anything put aside? If you do, you might want to consider your options. I have some stashed away. We don’t find that case in the next twenty-four hours, it’s gonna get ugly. I know a guy, can fix us up with new IDs, shit like that. Passports, whatever. I’m thinking, Germany. I got people there.”

“You go where you got people, they’ll find you,” she said.