Doug closed his eyes. “Margot. No.”
“Her early admission to Virginia Tech suggests adequate intelligence, though I would need to review her coursework to confirm. Competitive robotics is acceptable as a hobby, though it’s worth noting that human-built robots are profoundly limited compared to?—”
“Margot.”
“I’m simply observing that your social circle is expanding, and as someone who has invested considerable resources in your development and well-being, I have a vested interest in ensuring that any new additions meet a reasonable standard.”
“She’s not an addition. She’s a person I ate ice cream with.”
“What flavor?”
Doug blinked. “What?”
“What flavor of ice cream. Studies suggest that flavor preference correlates with personality type. If she ordered vanilla, she’s likely agreeable but unimaginative. Chocolate indicates emotional depth but possible codependency. Mint chocolate chip suggests?—”
“She got strawberry,” Doug said nervously.
A pause. “Strawberry is…acceptable.”
Jack caught my eye across the table, and what passed between us was the silent conversation of two people who had accidentally become parents to a teenage genius and his jealous AI, and were navigating the situation with the only tools available to them—patience, humor, and the willingness to let the absurdity wash over them like weather.
“She sounds nice,” I said.
“She is nice.” The color was still in his cheeks, but he softened—the cautious pleasure of a kid who’d spent most of his life inside a computer screen discovering that the world outside it had things to offer too.
“Good,” Jack said. “Just keep being smart about it.”
Doug nodded, and quiet satisfaction settled in his face. He reached for another piece of steak, and for a moment the room was just the sound of rain and forks and the contentment of people who were warm and fed and together.
Then Jack pushed his plate to the side and reached for his legal pad. “Margot,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”
The screen lit up behind him like a war room coming online, and the storm pressed against the windows as if it wanted in.
Margot brought the satellite view up first. The dock district spread across the wall screen in high resolution, the Potomac a dark ribbon along its eastern edge. She highlighted the three properties she’d flagged in Stavros’s network, the ones I’d read aloud from Jack’s phone on the drive back from the bank—two warehouses and a decommissioned fish processing plant, all held through layers of shell companies that traced back to Dockside Ventures.
“The GPS coordinates from T-Bone’s shoe,” Margot said, and dropped a pin on the map. It landed squarely on the fish processing plant. “Northeast loading dock. Three meters from the front door, give or take. Now, I don’t want to say I told you so, but I did flag this property hours ago, and nobody gave me so much as a thank you.”
“Thank you, Margot,” Jack said.
“You’re welcome. That building has been listed as vacant since 2019, which is interesting, because someone has been running enough electricity through it to power a small town. Four hundred percent increase in the last six months.” She let that sit the way a good storyteller lets a punchline breathe. “Whoever’s down there isn’t sitting in the dark.”
“That’s our target,” Jack said. “Tomorrow night.”
“Now do the burner phones,” I said.
Margot shifted the display, and the room changed.
What filled the wall screen was the dock district at night, satellite black, overlaid with clusters of light that pulsed like bioluminescence in deep water. Each point a burner phone pinging a cell tower. She’d stripped away every registered device, every identifiable number, until only the ghosts remained. Seventeen prepaid phones with no names attached, moving through Stavros’s territory in patterns that pulsed with a rhythm I recognized.
Saturday nights. Fight nights.
“Seventeen little ghosts,” Margot said. “Every single one correlates with a fight date in Dre’s notebook. And I can tell you where they go when the party’s over.” The map expanded, trails fanning out across the county like veins branching from a dark heart. Some traced back to Stavros properties. Others went dark—batteries pulled by people who thought they were being clever. “But here’s the beautiful part. Every phone leaves a fingerprint, even the ones trying not to. If someone’s carrying a burner alongside their real phone, both devices ping the same towers at the same times. Same routes, same patterns. All I need to do is match the ghosts against every registered phone in the area, and I’ll find who’s holding them.”
“Someone knew we’d be at the Towne Square this morning,” Jack said quietly. “And someone knew the funeral home would be empty when they dropped T-Bone on the porch. That’s not surveillance. That’s someone with access to our movements.”
The words settled over the table like a frost. Nobody said what all of us were thinking—that the leak could be anyone. A deputy. A clerk. Someone close enough to see the board and report it back.
“Run it,” Jack said. “Everyone. Start with law enforcement and work out from there.”
