Barry Eisler - Inside out

She brought him coffee in a plain white mug that looked like it came from Pottery Barn or the like. "Milk? Sugar?"

"No, black is good." He took a sip. "This is great. Thanks."

She smiled again, warmed up her own cup, and sat across from him.

He took another sip of the coffee. It really was good-nothing fancy, just strong and dark, the way he liked it. "Sorry to intrude like this," he said. "Probably not your idea of an ideal morning. I'll try to make it quick."

She shook her head. "That's okay. I just don't know what I could tell you. My husband died a long time ago."

The phrase "a long time ago" intrigued him. Not a date, not a number of years… just something vague, a reference to the indeterminate, irrelevant past. He had the sense that she had severed her memories of Larison from her life, that she now held them at a distance. Why?

"I apologize if my presence here is stirring up any sad memories. I understand your husband died in the course of service to the nation."

She smiled a tight, uncomfortable smile. "Well, he always lived for that service. Not a huge surprise he would die for it."

Ben hadn't expected her to know anything about the blackmail, if indeed Larison was the guy behind the blackmail. If he was even alive at all. And nothing about her demeanor suggested otherwise. Just the normal amount of discomfort.

He gave her a sad smile that wasn't exactly a forgery. Just being in this homey kitchen was like some silent condemnation of his own role as a father. "Well, I know a little about that. Hard not to let the job… overwhelm you."

She glanced at his left hand. "Are you married?"

He shook his head. "Divorced."

He realized this was a single mom in her mid-forties, devoted to bringing up her son. What were her dating prospects in a small Florida suburb? When was the last time she'd been with a man?

He hadn't anticipated this angle before, but sensed now it might present an opening. Maybe make her more cooperative, more talkative than would otherwise have been the case. The thought helped him push back his awareness of Ami and refocus.

"Anyway," he said, smiling and shaking his head as though the conversational detour had flustered him, which in fact it had, "there's a chance your husband was in contact with some people we need to interview. Would you happen to still have his passport? Travel receipts? Correspondence? Anything about his contacts or his movements would be helpful."

She took a sip of coffee and watched him. She seemed to be evaluating him and he couldn't tell what she might be thinking.

"No," she said, after a moment. "I'm not the sentimental type, and even if I were, I wouldn't have saved any mementos from him."

Him, this time. Before, husband.

He looked at her, pleased she was willing to talk, disappointed at his sense that she wasn't going to have anything useful to tell him.

"I'm sorry, would you mind if I asked why not?"

She shrugged. "We didn't have a happy marriage. Is that going to go in your report?"

He shook his head, wondering where this was coming from, and feeling a little bad, too. Part of him was aware of the strangeness of it: that maybe he was more comfortable shooting people than he was manipulating them.

"I don't see why it would need to," he said.

There was a pause. She said, "If I tell you what I know about his whereabouts before he died, will you tell me what you find out?"

Ben was taken aback. "Ma'am, this is a confidential investigation-"

"Marcy. After all, I'm calling you Dan, right?"

Ben was suddenly struggling to stay ahead of her, and wondering whether he'd been ahead to begin with.

"Yes, you're right. Marcy. If there's something I can tell you at some point, I'll tell you. But I can't promise you anything. You know that."

That sounded right. Like what a real FBI guy would say in similar circumstances.

She looked at him for a long time, that evaluating look again, and he thought he'd been a fool to believe she was being friendly because she was interested in him. She was interested in something, all right. But not in what he'd thought.

"If my husband was involved in some kind of crime, I guess you won't be able to tell me. But I don't care about that anyway. It's his… personal life that still bothers me. It shouldn't-he's been dead a long time and mostly I've moved on. But it would help me to know. Closure and all that."

"I… understand," Ben said, as noncommittally as he could.

She smiled at him, an odd smile Ben judged as about equal parts sympathy and condescension, and again he was struck by how badly he'd misjudged her intelligence.

"Do you?" she asked.

He set his coffee mug on the table. "Why don't you tell me and we'll see."

There was a long pause. She said, "My husband would go away for weeks, sometimes months at a time, and wouldn't tell me where or why. What was I supposed to think?"

"Well, you know his assignments were secret-"

"Please. Other than the honeymoon and a short time after, we were barely having sex. Even when he would come back from one of these long 'assignments,' he wasn't interested. When we did it at all, it felt perfunctory. Like maybe he was thinking of someone else. What would you have made of that?"

"I suppose under the circumstances I'd suspect my husband was having an affair."

"Of course that's what you would suspect. So I hired a private investigator and had him followed."

Ben stared at her for a moment while he tried to digest that. "You… had your husband followed?"

She frowned slightly, and Ben realized she had misunderstood the reason for his surprise. "I mean," he said, "from what I've heard about your husband, hiring a PI to follow him would be like sending a twelve-year-old to beat up Mike Tyson."

The frown eased and she chuckled. "Yes, the investigator told me he was 'surveillance conscious,' I think that's the phrase he used. At first, the best he could do was learn that my husband had flown to Miami. Twice. But the next time, when I told him my husband was about to travel again, the investigator waited at the airport in Miami. This time, he saw he was flying to Costa Rica."

Holy shit, Ben thought. This could be something. "Costa Rica."

"Yes."

"And then?"

"The investigator hired someone local, in San Jose. Next time my husband went to Costa Rica, the local guy was supposed to follow him. Instead, he disappeared."

"Your husband disappeared?"

She shook her head. "Not my husband. The local guy. My investigator got scared, told me he didn't want to work on the case anymore, and gave me back my money. And my husband died after that, before I could hire someone else."

"What do you think happened?"

"I don't know. I don't want to know. My husband could be a scary man."

"Scary how?"

There was a long pause. Then she said, "He had rage inside him. I don't know what about. Maybe it was work, things he saw or things he had to do."

"He had a temper?"

"No. He never lost his temper. At least not with me. With me he was mostly just cold."

"Then-"

"I can't explain it to you. You wouldn't understand, you didn't live with him. There was something inside him he was struggling to keep from exploding. Maybe it finally did. I don't know. I look back now, and I realize… he was very controlled. He only let people see what he wanted them to see. Even his wife. So I don't have anything else I can tell you."

They were quiet for a moment. Ben said, "Do you still have the contact information for the local investigator?"

"Sure. Harry McGlade. He operates out of Orlando. Or at least he did-we haven't been in touch since he dropped the case."

Ben couldn't rule out the possibility that she was in some kind of collusion with Larison. But if so, they'd have to be in collusion with the PI, too, or at least they would have had to manipulate the hell out of him years in advance. All of which he judged highly unlikely. His gut told him she was telling the truth.