Free Inside Outt by Barry Eisler Page B

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 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