When Janine declined to return to Florida of her own volition, a pair of federal agents had been dispatched to her mother’s home, only to learn that Janine and Carter Achar had fled. Laramie knew that this had initially cast a cloud of suspicion on Mrs. Achar, but the task force later learned that Janine had surfed the Internet immediately following her second call from the FBI agent, learned in a news story that her husband had been one of the victims in a “gas main explosion,” and supposedly panicked. She used cash, Janine told Laramie, to get a room in a motel in Tukwila, near Kent but closer to the airport. They stayed there for ten days-until the cash she’d traveled with ran out-and then Janine had used her ATM card at a nearby Key Bank. Not the most savvy move by somebody on the lam, and certainly, the task force judged, not the move of a deep cover sleeper: following her use of the ATM, an FBI canvas of the neighborhood where she’d made the withdrawal netted Carter and Janine that morning, during their daily breakfast stop at the McDonald’s across from the motel.
They were taken into federal custody and held in Seattle for seven days, primarily because issues with the filo outbreak didn’t warrant a return to LaBelle. Once the quarantine contained the spread of the M-2, the feds had flown Janine to Fort Myers and taken her and Carter here-to the holding cell facility in the Hendry County sheriff’s offices.
Mother’s tale complete yet again, Carter poked his head up from his meal and asked if he could go to the bathroom. Laramie used the phone on the wall to summon a deputy and told Janine they’d resume as soon as Laramie could get her hands on a cup of coffee.
“I think you’re lying.”
“Excuse me?”
“After reading up on you, and now, hearing you out in person, I’m prepared to recommend that the task force reconsider their assessment,” Laramie said. “To tell them they got you wrong. Completely. I don’t know if they’ve told you this, but they were ready to clear you. Did you know that? But I’m going to recommend they hold you indefinitely.”
Janine glared silently at Laramie over the cigarette in her hand. Laramie didn’t wait for further reaction or response.
“It’s the motel room, Mrs. Achar. You took enough cash with you to pay for ten nights-at least fifteen hundred bucks based on the rate of the hotel you chose-and you had that much on you before you received the call from the FBI. Ten nights-long enough for the small amount of pathogen dispersed by your husband to run its course and be all but contained. You’ve been lying. He told you something, warned you, gave you instructions, who knows, and you knew enough to travel with sufficient cash in your purse to spend a week or two in a motel-anonymously.”
Janine violently snuffed out her cigarette.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said. “You think I knew? Who the hell are you, coming in here offering me your condolences-the first interrogator to do that, so I thought you might be somebody decent. Then trying to tell me I knew something more about my husband? Something that isn’t true anyway? Goddamn you-goddamn all you people. Fuck you. You can’t imagine what I’m going through-what we’re going through. Or maybe you do, since it’s all lies anyway, and you’re the people making up the lies. First the papers call it a gas main explosion. Then your people tell me that wasn’t it at all-that he blew himself up! And now he’s a terrorist-a terrorist? Benny? A suicide bomber? Do you know how ridiculous that is? And then you tell me he wasn’t Benny at all and that I’m not even Mrs. Benjamin Achar-that Benny wasn’t even real? Let me ask you something. Do you know why I have my son with me?”
As she said this, Janine reached over and touched her son’s shoulder in a way that made Laramie think suddenly that she was a very good mother.
“You know why? I knew you’d ask the same horrible questions that everybody else asked me, and that I’d be making him hear it by bringing him with me, but you know what? I don’t believe you people, and I don’t trust you either. You lie about one thing, then another, you lie to the media, to the public, you lie to me, I don’t even know who you’re lying to on any given day, who can keep track? Maybe you’re lying to everybody. It can’t be a gas main explosion and a suicide bombing, can it? It can’t be the flu and a terrible disease bomb, can it? I don’t believe you that Benny isn’t Benny, and I don’t believe you that he did this. You know what I think? I think you did it. I think somebody ran a test. They made a bomb. The CIA. FBI. Whoever. They wanted to try out their bomb, and they decided to blame Benny. Did he say something you didn’t like, something about the government? Or was he just convenient, you sons of bitches-oh my God, he’s gone…I don’t trust you people! You get it now? For all I know, you’re planning to take my son next. You’ll tell me he isn’t Carter after all, I bet. But you’ll fucking take him over my dead body.”
She suddenly reached over with her other arm and grabbed her son in a bear-hug embrace.
“Fuck you people, it’s not true! None of it! Get out!”
Laramie sat still while this played out, Janine sobbing into Carter’s shoulder for a few minutes running. She felt the urge to join in on the hug, to comfort them in some way, but there wasn’t exactly anything for her to do, particularly anything like joining the hug, so she thought things through instead.
The motel thing had bothered her from the minute she’d read about it. It had bothered the other investigators too, to the point where they’d suspected her of being in on it, until her background check came out clear, and then interrogator after interrogator sat and listened to Janine say the same things she’d just told Laramie, in almost exactly the same way. This bolstered the case for her innocence-had she been lying, it seemed impossible she wouldn’t have got caught up in even the smallest inconsistency given the multiple repeats of her tale.
But the motel bothered Laramie in a different way: it made something register in her analyst’s mind, something that didn’t quite fit the rest of the puzzle. It was the timing. She couldn’t pin down exactly why or where the timing was off initially, but she knew it was.
When the sobs died down, Laramie decided to come at it a little differently.
“Listen,” she said, “if it were true that all this-”
“ARE YOU STILL HERE?”
Laramie let Janine’s shrill bellow hang out there for a moment.
When the noise of the outburst felt to her as though it had faded, Laramie said, “Janine, listen to me. I don’t trust our government any more than you do. In fact I know not to trust it-them-by experience. But just in case it were true-in case it isn’t all one gigantic lie-there’s something I’d like to hear from you.”
“Why should I tell you anything? I told everybody everything already anyway.”
Laramie heard it in the speed of the woman’s second sentence and knew immediately she’d been right about what she was about to ask.
“Mrs. Achar,” she said. “You’re lying.”
“Go to hell. I’m sure that fits your conspiracy just like everything else-”
“You’re lying because you’re trying to protect him.”
This seemed to quiet her down, if only temporarily.
“I think that despite all the evidence-the identity theft, the timing of your trip, all of it-I think that you know, deep inside, that he wasn’t honest with you. And that he did something terrible here.”
“Don’t you tell me what I know or don’t know.”
“Let me finish. You had your say, now I’ll have mine.” Laramie felt like a bully, running an interrogation with a distraught widow and her eight-year-old son by yelling in their faces. Too bad. “In reading everything you said in all the interviews, and in hearing you now, I think you will never believe he did what the government says he did. That your husband would not have tried to kill thousands of people, or a million people, or whatever it was the government is saying he was trying to do. It bothers you, because you think he was lying to you, but you know he wouldn’t have been trying to do what they’ve accused him of. So you’re protecting him.”