Inside Outt

your presence at Wheeler’s house confirms you’ve been holding back. If you know something about her, if she’s relevant, why haven’t you told us?”
    “Well, it’s not like you told us, either.”
    “The only reason my team was staking out Wheeler’s house in the first place is because the Bureau thinks she’s a dead end. If they thought she was important, someone else would have been assigned.”
    “You mean you, Bob, and Drew aren’t the A-team?”
    She cocked an eyebrow again. “You keep up the sarcasm,” she said, her voice sweet, “you might get smacked.”
    “I don’t know. That might be nice.”
    She went to take a sip of coffee. Halfway to her mouth, she snapped the cup toward him. Hot coffee hit him in the face. He shot to his feet, spluttering and wiping his eyes.
    “What the fuck?” he said.
    He looked around. A few patrons were staring, but quickly glanced away.
    “Oh, what, did I not smack you the way you were hoping?” she said.
    He wiped his face and flung coffee droplets from his palms. “You’ve got nerve, sweetie, I’ll give you that.”
    “Sit your ass down and recover your pride. Unless you want me to school you again.”
    He sat down, his ego smarting much worse than his face. “I like when you get all ghetto-talk on me. Really, it’s sexy.”
    “Oh, a little racist patter to go with the sexist. You trying to bore me to death now? You think I haven’t heard it all before, mostly from people a lot more clever than you?”
    Goddamn it, she was right. She’d won the round. Now he was just being an asshole.
    “Well,” he said, “you were right. That’s twice I didn’t see you coming.”
    She smiled, and despite her evident amusement there was something gentle and even forgiving in her eyes. “I told you. Now listen. I like your dimples but I don’t have time to flirt with you. I’m not here to play games.”
    “Yeah? What do you have in mind instead?”
    “A little word association exercise to start with, to establish our bona fides. You ready?”
    “Sure,” he said, not knowing where she was going.
    “Detainees.”
    Ah. Now he understood.
    “Interrogations,” he said.
    She nodded. “Now we’re making progress. Videotapes.”
    “Missing.”
    “Diamonds.”
    “A hundred million U.S.”
    “Bingo.”
    They were quiet for a moment. “All right,” he said. “We’re both looking for the same thing.”
    “Exactly. And the brick wall your people are throwing up is going to make it impossible for either side to find it.”
    “Then tell me what you need,” Ben said, hoping to learn more from the questions than he was willing to provide with answers.
    “I need Larison.”
    “Larison’s dead.”
    “He’s supposed to be dead, yes.”
    “What makes you think he’s not?”
    “Look, the only thing we could get from CIA were some records, probably incomplete, on who had access to what we’re looking for. I was up for two nights straight cross-referencing the data. A black ops guy named Larison, deceased, had the access. I asked the Agency and they stonewalled me. That told me I was onto something. I told my superiors we needed to look into it. How sure are we this guy is dead? And even if he is, maybe he had an accomplice who got the tapes before Larison died. They all blew me off. They’re all looking for an analyst, trying to adapt their serial killer profiling tools to predict the kind of personality that would do something like this. And let me tell you, once an orthodoxy takes hold at the Bureau? It’s like religion, nothing’s going to shake it. So they told me fine, you want to stake out a dead guy’s widow’s house? Go right ahead. They gave me Bob and Drew, who you might have noticed aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed, and shooed me away. They were just glad to get me out of their hair.”
    Well, Hort had been wrong about another agency not getting curious about Larison. He’d read the Bureau right, it seemed, he just hadn’t known about this tenacious woman.
    “Why didn’t you interview her yourself, then?” he said.
    “I was going to. But first I wanted to watch her. See if someone like you happened to show up.”
    “Might have cost you time. Pretty big gamble.”
    “Not so big, really. Because here you are. So what did she tell you?”
    “Not much.”
    “You’re lying.”
    Well, it felt like he was lying, but technically he was afraid he might be telling the truth. “She might have told me one thing that was useful.