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 affair.”

“Of course that’s what you would suspect. So I hired a private investigator and had him followed.”

Ben stared at her for a moment while he tried to digest that. “You… had your husband followed?”

She frowned slightly, and Ben realized she had misunderstood the reason for his surprise. “I mean,” he said, “from what I’ve heard about your husband, hiring a PI to follow him would be like sending a twelve-year-old to beat up Mike Tyson.”

The frown eased and she chuckled. “Yes, the investigator told me he was ‘surveillance conscious,’ I think that’s the phrase he used. At first, the best he could do was learn that my husband had flown to Miami. Twice. But the next time, when I told him my husband was about to travel again, the investigator waited at the airport in Miami. This time, he saw he was flying to Costa Rica.”

Holy shit, Ben thought. This could be something. “Costa Rica.”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“The investigator hired someone local, in San Jose. Next time my husband went to Costa Rica, the local guy was supposed to follow him. Instead, he disappeared.”

“Your husband disappeared?”

She shook her head. “Not my husband. The local guy. My investigator got scared, told me he didn’t want to work on the case anymore, and gave me back my money. And my husband died after that, before I could hire someone else.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know. My husband could be a scary man.”

“Scary how?”

There was a long pause. Then she said, “He had rage inside him. I don’t know what about. Maybe it was work, things he saw or things he had to do.”

“He had a temper?”

“No. He never lost his temper. At least not with me. With me he was mostly just cold.”

“Then-”

“I can’t explain it to you. You wouldn’t understand, you didn’t live with him. There was something inside him he was struggling to keep from exploding. Maybe it finally did. I don’t know. I look back now, and I realize… he was very controlled. He only let people see what he wanted them to see. Even his wife. So I don’t have anything else I can tell you.”

They were quiet for a moment. Ben said, “Do you still have the contact information for the local investigator?”

“Sure. Harry McGlade. He operates out of Orlando. Or at least he did-we haven’t been in touch since he dropped the case.”

Ben couldn’t rule out the possibility that she was in some kind of collusion with Larison. But if so, they’d have to be in collusion with the PI, too, or at least they would have had to manipulate the hell out of him years in advance. All of which he judged highly unlikely. His gut told him she was telling the truth.

“What else?” he asked, reminding himself to use the kind of open-ended questions they’d taught him at the Farm were best for general elicitation.

She laughed. “What else were you expecting? That’s got to be more than you were hoping for right there.”

He was half impressed, half irritated by her spunk. He wondered what she’d been like as Larison’s wife. A handful, that much was clear.

He looked at her. “If you think of anything else, will you call me?”

She smiled, a faint, sad movement at the corners of her mouth. “If you learn anything else, will you do the same?”

Why not, he thought. She’s still in pain over this. You can call her, tell her anything you want, and make her feel better.

“If I learn something that would be personally helpful to you,” he said, “then yes, I’ll try to find a way to let you know. Off the record.” It felt good to say it. It wasn’t even a lie exactly.

“I just want to know about Costa Rica. You understand?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Was he seeing someone there.”

“Got it.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head. “I doubt it. That’s a very hard thing not to know about the man you were married to. If you’re decent, you won’t even put what you find in your report.”

“I don’t… I’ll try not to.”

She looked at him and nodded gravely, as though grateful for his gesture and doubtful of its worth. “Well, if you happen to come back here and want to fill me in in person, that would be fine.”

He nodded, wondering whether he’d been wrong after all about her initial interest. “I can’t promise anything,” he said. “But… I think that would be nice.” Again, he wasn’t exactly lying.

She walked him to the door. He opened it and took a quick glance through the crack-first right, then sweeping left as he opened it wider. Everything looked all right. The gardener and his truck were gone. Other than that, nothing had changed since he’d arrived.

“My husband used to do that,” she said from behind him, her voice cold.

He stepped out onto the stoop and glanced back at her. “Well, I don’t want to wind up like him.”

Even before the words were out, he realized it sounded harsher than he’d intended. As he tried to think of a way to soften it, she said, “Don’t, then,” and closed the door between them.

7. The Easy Way

Ben walked down the steps, scanning the street. The information about Costa Rica sounded promising. He would check with Horton ops in South America, and if they could eliminate business, he would assume Larison had been traveling for personal reasons instead. A lover? The wife certainly seemed to think so.

And he’d follow up with McGlade, the investigator. Guy had to have been mildly brain damaged to try to tail someone like Larison, but he’d at least had the sense to figure out at some point the job wasn’t worth the per diem.

Marcy. He had to admit, even beyond operational necessity, he was intrigued. She was a strange combination of savvy and honesty, openness and mystery. He wanted to do right by her, if he could. Not because he was interested in her. Or at least, not only because of that. It was something about the way she’d watched her son. That… sadness he’d seen in her face when the bus had pulled away. Initially it had made him think uncomfortably about Ami, but now it was summoning images of his own childhood, the breakfasts his mother would serve her three kids and her slightly absentminded engineer husband. Happy breakfasts, mostly, even though Ben had little patience for little brother Alex. Or at least they’d been happy until Katie’s accident. Happiness had fled the Treven household after that, with Ben close on its heels.

Forty yards from his car, he noticed another one parked behind it, a brown Taurus that hadn’t been there before. His heart rate kicked up a notch and his alertness level moved from orange into red. He slowed, watching the car, aware of the weight of the Glock.

Thirty yards out, the passenger-side door opened. A big white guy with close-cropped hair in a suit a lot like his started to get out. The driver-side door opened, too, and a black guy emerged, as big as his partner and also in a dark, forgettable suit. Ben slowed more, his readiness now completely at condition red, his heart pounding, his limbs suddenly suffused with adrenaline. They started walking toward him, their hands empty. He sensed, without having to consciously articulate it, that this wasn’t a hit. If it had been, they wouldn’t have moved on him while he was this far away.

Ben’s head tracked left to right and he scanned his flanks to confirm the primary threat wasn’t just a setup-a trained response burned by combat into reflex. A petite young black woman with a short afro, shapely and well-dressed in navy slacks and a matching sleeveless blouse, was walking along the sidewalk toward them. Her vibe was civilian and he sensed no connection to the two men. He judged her not part of the threat.