Sometime around five-thirty, she found herself nodding off. She closed the binder she’d been looking through, pushed a few of the checkerboard of papers aside, reached for the phone, requested a wakeup call for eight-fifteen, dropped the phone on its cradle, and let herself fall back onto the bed.
Eyes drooping, Laramie fell asleep under the spell of a familiar sensation. A puzzle unsolved, an itch unscratched-the sense of incompletion, of un-wholeness, that, when exposed, drove her nuts…and, when solved, made her tick.
She flipped on the coffeemaker that came with the room, took an extremely hot shower, and worked through two cups of coffee-half a packet of Equal, a thimble-size container of half-and-half in each-while she suited up like the rest of her newfound colleagues. She decided to go with the black pantsuit one of Ebbers’s people had packed for her, picking a gray tee to wear underneath.
She found Bill on the cell number he’d given her and logged her interview requests for the day. Today, she’d decided, would be agent-debriefing day: she’d meet with individual members of the task force to start with. Mainly those she thought could clarify certain questions she’d generated upon consuming the terror book.
Once he’d taken down the names, Bill asked whether she wanted them in any particular order.
“Nope,” she said. “Whatever works.”
Bill suggested a room at the Motor 8 they had used for most of their interrogations.
“Actually,” Laramie said, “I’d rather hold the interviews in my room.”
He said he’d have the first agent there in thirty minutes.
Laramie returned the papers to the binders in the order they’d arrived, stacked the binders on the table, called the number Sid had told her to use for library purposes, and handed off the documents to the agent with the tracking gun when he came to retrieve them. She switched the A/C console to MAX/COOL, put away the blow-dryer and the selection of clothes she’d decided not to wear, then headed into the parking lot with a third cup of the room’s very bad coffee. She sat on the cinder-block wall on the far side of the parking lot, leaned her head back with her eyes closed, and let her pores soak up the sun.
It must have been fifteen or twenty minutes she’d been sitting like that when she opened her eyes to observe, strolling across the hot parking slab, the first subject in the long list of interviews she’d set for the day: Mary, the profiler.
Coming across the parking lot, Mary looked to be about a head shorter than Laramie, four-eleven tops-Laramie sympathizing with the woman, considering Laramie didn’t consider herself much more than a runt to begin with. Mary shook when Laramie offered a hand and Laramie led her into the room, closing the door but leaving the curtains open. When Laramie motioned for her to do so, Mary took one of the two seats at the little round table.
“Diet Coke?”
“Why not,” Mary said.
Laramie pulled a can from the ice bucket, popped it for her, and slipped it across the table. Laramie sat on the edge of the bed near her side of the table. Mary took a delicate sort of three-gulp swig of the soda, Laramie thinking the profiler looked a little overheated, maybe from walking over from her room-where she’d probably sat in a prep meeting with Bill, Sid, or some designated interview coach.
Laramie decided to start with some small talk-see if she could loosen Mary up before getting into it.
“Where you based?” she said, thinking, Nice opener, Laramie.
Mary set the can on the table.
“Quantico.”
“You live nearby, or you commute an hour like the rest of us?”
The profiler nodded. “Manassas-around forty minutes.”
“It’s a little longer for me.” At least it was, Laramie thought.
“I’m hooked on it. Can’t stand being on these road trips.”
Laramie turned a little sideways, waiting for Mary to clarify.
“Audio books,” the profiler said, grinning a calm, pleasant, clean smile. “I’m a junkie. Mostly nonfiction.”
In the brief flash of smile, Laramie saw that Mary had maybe the whitest rack of teeth on the planet, a walking toothpaste commercial. It made her slightly self-conscious, Laramie fighting the urge to reach for her teeth and see if she’d missed anything with her toothbrush.
“Haven’t tried them,” Laramie said. “I pretty much just do the NPR thing.”
“Probably have a hundred CDs of books in my trunk-find me after and I’ll send you some when we’re out of this and back in the groove.”
Laramie stretched her arms then pushed her hands under her thighs.
“Do you find it odd he didn’t own a truck?” she said.
“Pickup truck, you mean?”
“Yes.”
Mary thought for a moment.
“I see what you’re saying,” she said.
“You live in suburban Virginia like I do,” Laramie said, “you see SUVs everywhere. But a low-income Central Florida housing development?”
“Normal guy living there, you’re right-he’d be more likely to own a truck.”
“You said yesterday his disguise was too pat,” Laramie said, “and in reading your report, I agree. It just occurred to me as I was reading your profile that you could add ‘no pickup truck’ to the list.”
Mary nodded and took a swig of Diet Coke.
Laramie said, “You think there’s any chance Achar was an American?”
Mary said, “Pulled a Timothy McVeigh under a fabricated identity?”
“Yes.”
“It’s possible. The profile I put together has mostly to do with his not being real. His disguise was a good one but, as we agree, too good in some ways, maybe missing a piece or two. But as to where he’s from-if you read my full report, you’ve seen I took a couple guesses, with my favorite being the one I mentioned yesterday-frankly, out of sheer racial profiling, or at least profiling based on his likely ancestry. Central or South American heritage, at least partially. Of course he certainly could have been from here, but he’d have been putting on a disguise that hid his background either way.”
Mary paused, thinking for a moment, during which time she tilted her head to the side a notch. “And I’m not sure somebody living here would skip the pickup truck part of the disguise,” she said.
Laramie nodded. “Tell me about the woman at UPS,” she said.
“The dispatcher, yes,” Mary said. “We’ve been over this, but it isn’t taking us anywhere. As you know, I only included in my report the one statement from one of Achar’s fellow drivers. I interviewed them all, and this was the only mention of her, the only comment on the two of them seen together. Based on the driver’s remark, I think it’s safe to say Achar and the dispatcher, whose name is Lori Hopkins, were friendly. I remember exactly what he told me: ‘The way they joked, you could tell they had a little something going.’ He didn’t elaborate, said it more or less the same way in a second interview, but he seemed to have, well, written off his own suspicion by then. This is pretty normal-you look back on a victim or suspect’s life after he’s dead, you check all the phone records and the e-mail accounts the way we did here, and you’ll usually know beyond a reasonable doubt he was sleeping with somebody, presuming he was. In fact, you’ll usually find a lot more evidence of flirting between coworkers, affair or no, than we found between Hopkins and Achar. Amazing what people say and do when they think nobody sees what they’re doing. But we found absolutely nothing between them. No e-mails, no corroborating suspicions, no flirtatious conversations on the tapes of the dispatch communications, which UPS holds for a few weeks at a time. Nothing-zilch.”