“Yes, ma’am,” Ben said, producing the FBI ID. “I’m Dan Froomkin, special agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’d like to ask you a few questions about your late husband, Daniel Larison. It should only take a few minutes, if you don’t mind.”
Her pupils dilated slightly, the result, no doubt, of an adrenal surge. But she seemed more surprised than afraid. “My late husband… what? Why?”
“We’re investigating a crime, ma’am. Your husband wasn’t involved, but his behavior in the time before his death might prove helpful.”
Ben waited while she absorbed that potentially ominous we. After a moment, she said, “All right, but I don’t really think I’ll be able to help, Mr. Froomkin.”
Ben gave her a friendly smile, a lower-wattage version of the one that had always made it easy for him to hook up in high school and in various port cities after. “Well, it can’t hurt to try and find out. And please, you can call me Dan if you like. Sometimes I hate having to be so official with people.”
“All right, Dan,” she said, returning the smile with a slightly nervous-looking one of her own. “Come in, I guess. Would you like a cup of coffee? I just put some on.”
Ben nodded. “I’d love one. Thanks.”
He followed her through a small foyer to an equally small kitchen. The furniture was sparse and eclectic and looked like it had been handed down. The way she took care of herself suggested Wheeler wasn’t exceptionally frugal, so from the furnishings Ben surmised Larison hadn’t carried an impressive life insurance policy and hadn’t left behind much of anything else. Again, he wasn’t sure what this might mean, but filed it away as something potentially useful.
The kitchen smelled like waffles or pancakes. Clearing a pair of plates and glasses from the table, she said, “Sorry about the mess. Here, have a seat.”
Ben noted that she made breakfast and ate it with her son. Watched him at the bus stop until he was gone. A devoted parent. He thought of Ami again, and was irritated at himself for letting the thought intrude. Ami had nothing to do with this.
He sat and considered. She was nervous, that was clear. But who wouldn’t be, when the government shows up at the door flashing ID and asking about dead relatives? The nervousness felt normal. She was wary, not scared. And regardless, she’d taken him to the kitchen. That was good. People did business in the kitchen, it was where they opened up. The living room was a façade, the place for putting people off.
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?”