Since she didn’t plan to study the files on caffeine alone, Laramie had taken some advice proffered by Sid during their meeting at the diner and called room service to get a meal sent up. She found the room’s ice bucket on the bathroom counter, headed down the hall to fill it, and came back to her room and kicked off her shoes. It was only another couple of minutes before a second suited-up young fellow arrived to deposit a Cobb salad, bereft, by Laramie’s request, of eggs and cheese, dressing on the side, packaged in a clear plastic enclosure with accompanying Saran-wrapped plastic utensils. She jammed into her ice bucket three of the six-pack of Diet Cokes she’d added to the tab, and popped a fourth.
Then she came over and sat at the room’s lone, circular table to confront the binders.
As Laramie understood it, investigations of international terrorist acts played out pretty much the same as ordinary homicide cases, only with more people, more organizations, and-ostensibly-greater secrecy. The investigators assigned to either sort of case did mostly the same things, primarily because they were looking for the same things-evidence, suspects, motive-and, by definition, acts of terror typically involved homicide anyway. This meant, among other things, that a terrorism-incident version of the homicide detective’s “murder book” was usually created by antiterror investigators.
From what Laramie had heard, even following the intelligence reform enacted by Congress in 2004, rarely was the “terror book” held in its entirety in one place, and whichever agency housed it rarely shared its contents with other agencies. This, however, did not appear to be true for the Emerald Lakes incident. By Laramie’s count, there were 3,697 pages in the three binders combined, and if there were pages missing, or kept somewhere else, she had some difficulty determining what the content of those pages might have involved.
The task force, she found, had been thorough. Every cubic inch of the Emerald Lakes blast site had been scoured, accounted for, studied. The entire curriculum of any number of graduate forensics programs could have been taught from the work performed on the casualties; the page count on the binder packed with interview transcripts-emergency room doctors, friends of the Achar family, Achar’s widow, in-laws, eyewitnesses to the explosion, local law enforcement and civic officials-tripped the meter at just over one thousand sheets of single-spaced printouts, give or take a few interrogations.
Laramie read all of them. In the area where it seemed the task force had focused their investigation-the forensics piece-Laramie concluded these guys had watched too many reruns of CSI. She skimmed her way through these voluminous sections. The last 124 victims of the outbreak died the same way the first had, so how many different photographs of orifice hemorrhaged corpses did she need to see? The pages provided by Sadie, the Centers for Disease Control’s designate, made it pretty clear that all 125 had died from the same pathogen-the “filo,” as task force investigators seemed to relish calling it.
It took her a few hours, but Laramie got through all three binders before dawn, spending at least some time on every page. Salad long gone, Diet Coke supply dwindling, she took a restroom break-splashed some water on her face, mashed her cheeks into one of the barely absorbent towels on the rack-then came back to the table for a second read.
This time she took aim on two specific parts of the terror book. She plucked pages from the binders and set them out on the bed, the floor, the laminated cabinetry holding the television. She set them out in order of what she cared about, what occurred to her, what she couldn’t figure out. Most of her selections focused on Benny Achar-everything she could find that the task force had gotten on him, from interview transcripts to cell phone and credit card statements, all the way through to his career-long UPS delivery schedule, tracking number by tracking number. She also pulled the pages on the conspiracy theory stuff: the doomsday scenarios, the extrapolations and forecasts on what could have happened had Achar’s complete stash been disseminated-what could still happen if there were other Benny Achars, living in other suburban housing developments around the country under false identities stolen from Mobile, Alabama’s town hall, or wherever else one stole identities.
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.