Public Enemy

Janine told her story again, Laramie staring into the woman’s glazed, angry eyes while she told it.

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One day before Janine and Carter’s flight, Achar made multiple trips to The Home Depot and an additional stop at a liquor store. Janine noted, as she had in prior interviews, that her husband acted strangely most of the evening, speaking little, head drooping, mood uncharacteristically sullen. After di

According to Janine Achar in both her prior interviews and here in the interrogation room now, that was all Be

This testimony, Laramie knew, among other factors, had led the task force theorists to conclude-logically-that Be

Laramie listened as Janine told her the rest: Be

Janine had maintained in each of her interviews that she hadn’t found it odd that Be

Word of her husband’s act of destruction had come just after six o’clock that night, Pacific time, in the form of a cryptic call placed by an FBI agent to Janine’s mother’s home. The agent had asked Janine a number of pointed questions, but hadn’t given her much in return. Janine had not been able to determine what was going on. Two hours later, she received another, less cryptic call from the FBI man, in which he asked another set of questions, then informed her the FBI required she return immediately to Florida. She learned later that the bomb had been detonated while she and Carter were in the air on the way to Seattle.

When Janine declined to return to Florida of her own volition, a pair of federal agents had been dispatched to her mother’s home, only to learn that Janine and Carter Achar had fled. Laramie knew that this had initially cast a cloud of suspicion on Mrs. Achar, but the task force later learned that Janine had surfed the Internet immediately following her second call from the FBI agent, learned in a news story that her husband had been one of the victims in a “gas main explosion,” and supposedly panicked. She used cash, Janine told Laramie, to get a room in a motel in Tukwila, near Kent but closer to the airport. They stayed there for ten days-until the cash she’d traveled with ran out-and then Janine had used her ATM card at a nearby Key Bank. Not the most savvy move by somebody on the lam, and certainly, the task force judged, not the move of a deep cover sleeper: following her use of the ATM, an FBI canvas of the neighborhood where she’d made the withdrawal netted Carter and Janine that morning, during their daily breakfast stop at the McDonald’s across from the motel.

They were taken into federal custody and held in Seattle for seven days, primarily because issues with the filo outbreak didn’t warrant a return to LaBelle. Once the quarantine contained the spread of the M-2, the feds had flown Janine to Fort Myers and taken her and Carter here-to the holding cell facility in the Hendry County sheriff’s offices.

Mother’s tale complete yet again, Carter poked his head up from his meal and asked if he could go to the bathroom. Laramie used the phone on the wall to summon a deputy and told Janine they’d resume as soon as Laramie could get her hands on a cup of coffee.

“I think you’re lying.”

“Excuse me?”

“After reading up on you, and now, hearing you out in person, I’m prepared to recommend that the task force reconsider their assessment,” Laramie said. “To tell them they got you wrong. Completely. I don’t know if they’ve told you this, but they were ready to clear you. Did you know that? But I’m going to recommend they hold you indefinitely.”

Janine glared silently at Laramie over the cigarette in her hand. Laramie didn’t wait for further reaction or response.

“It’s the motel room, Mrs. Achar. You took enough cash with you to pay for ten nights-at least fifteen hundred bucks based on the rate of the hotel you chose-and you had that much on you before you received the call from the FBI. Ten nights-long enough for the small amount of pathogen dispersed by your husband to run its course and be all but contained. You’ve been lying. He told you something, warned you, gave you instructions, who knows, and you knew enough to travel with sufficient cash in your purse to spend a week or two in a motel-anonymously.”

Janine violently snuffed out her cigarette.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said. “You think I knew? Who the hell are you, coming in here offering me your condolences-the first interrogator to do that, so I thought you might be somebody decent. Then trying to tell me I knew something more about my husband? Something that isn’t true anyway? Goddamn you-goddamn all you people. Fuck you. You can’t imagine what I’m going through-what we’re going through. Or maybe you do, since it’s all lies anyway, and you’re the people making up the lies. First the papers call it a gas main explosion. Then your people tell me that wasn’t it at all-that he blew himself up! And now he’s a terrorist-a terrorist? Be

As she said this, Janine reached over and touched her son’s shoulder in a way that made Laramie think suddenly that she was a very good mother.

“You know why? I knew you’d ask the same horrible questions that everybody else asked me, and that I’d be making him hear it by bringing him with me, but you know what? I don’t believe you people, and I don’t trust you either. You lie about one thing, then another, you lie to the media, to the public, you lie to me, I don’t even know who you’re lying to on any given day, who can keep track? Maybe you’re lying to everybody. It can’t be a gas main explosion and a suicide bombing, can it? It can’t be the flu and a terrible disease bomb, can it? I don’t believe you that Be