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.”

Janine just stared at the floor, holding her son.

“What did he tell you before you left?”

Janine didn’t change expression or the direction in which she was looking, but Laramie felt something shift in the room.

“You knew to be ready to disappear. I know that part. You had the kind of cash on you that nobody carries around anymore. Not unless they’re looking to book ten days at a local Holiday Inn under a false name. What I want to know is, What did he say? Was it during dinner? After he put Carter to bed? Over the drinks? Help me out here. Nobody else-”

“Help you?-my God, you are just like the rest-”

Preparing to repeat the question, Laramie suddenly realized what it was that connected the motel and the M-2, and answered her question as to the timing. The feeling was as familiar to her as the sense of un-wholeness that had greeted her that first night in the Motor 8, only this time it was a sense of completion. Of the tumblers in the keyhole racking into place.

When she asked the question, repeating it to compel Janine to focus, Laramie felt some saliva escape from her mouth and spray halfway across the interrogation table.

“What did he tell you!”

Janine said nothing at first, but in a moment, something did come.

Tears.

There were only the tears-Janine didn’t outwardly cry, and there came no sobs, only the dual streams of the silent tears coursing down her cheeks.

“He saved my life,” she said, almost inaudibly. “He saved Carter’s life.”

Laramie nodded slowly.

“I just don’t understand,” Janine said. She was talking to herself, quietly enough that Laramie caught most of it by watching the widow’s lips move as she spoke. “He would never do what they say he did. What you say he did. It just isn’t…possible. You can tell me whatever you want to tell me. Us-you can tell us anything. Show us any evidence. But it won’t matter. It won’t make any difference. I know my husband. We know him. Even if we didn’t know his real name. We know him-him-and he would never have done it. He would never have tried to kill thousands of people. Never. Ever.”

The tears continued in their twin streams down the sides of her haggard face. She was leaning back in her chair now. Her left arm remained draped around Carter’s shoulders. Carter’s chin was pressed against his chest and Laramie couldn’t see his face. With her right hand, Janine wiped away a tear, but it was like trying to divert a river with an oar.

Thinking she might have to assist Janine in connecting the tears and the widow’s thoughts to words, Laramie said, “But you said he saved your lives. How did-I know you don’t just mean Seattle, the trip to Seattle. How is it he saved your lives?”

In due course, Janine looked up at Laramie through her tears.

“He told me-” she said, then stopped, and now the sobs came, the woman taking in a big, heaving, choppy breath of air that sounded almost like a rattle-“he told me that if something happened-”-a kind of wail escaped her throat and merged with the sobbing and crying, Laramie nearly cringing at the raw outburst from this desperate, grieving widow with no source of hope or comfort-“he told me that if something happened while I was gone, I would need to hide. To go away. For as long as I could. But for no less than seven days…oh, Christ…for no less than seven days!”

The piercing wails that followed prompted Carter to burst into tears, the boy calling for her as he grabbed her around the neck and waist.

They cried into each other’s bodies for many minutes. After almost ten minutes had passed without the sobs lessening, Laramie decided she couldn’t take it any longer. She rose, came around the table, reached down, and placed a hand on the widow’s shoulder. Nothing changed-the wails continued, the sobbing cries, Carter burrowing into his mom’s bosom, his cries of “Mommy, mommy,” muted by her storm of wails-but at least, Laramie thought, she isn’t pushing my arm away.

Laramie stayed there, touching Janine Achar’s shoulder, for a while. When the pitch of the wails seemed destined never to shift or end, Laramie decided there was nothing more to be asked or done. She had learned what she needed to learn. She could do nothing more for this person-not that she had done anything for her anyway. Not that anybody could-probably ever.

Laramie opened the door and left the interview room.