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best. If his reaction, or complete lack thereof, was anything to go on, he wasn’t involved in the printing at all. If he had been, he’d have recognized that the bill I was showing him wasn’t his work and would’ve known I was bluffing. Clearly, this guy wasn’t a major player in the operation. But I suspected he knew who was, and that was the information I was really after.
    I gave him another moment to formulate a reply. He didn’t. He just sat there looking at the bill with a dazed expression. Time to turn up the heat.
    “A few weeks ago you visited a grocery store in Maryland and attempted to use a counterfeit hundred-dollar bill to pay for a carton of milk and some eggs.” I was very careful to word my statement so as not to claim that the bill in front of me was the bill he’d used. “The clerk recognized that the bill was fake, and you left abruptly when she mentioned it to you. They pulled video surveillance of the cash-register and parking-lot areas and tracked you to your car. You were identified by your vehicle’s license plate. The store footage of you that our agents in Maryland viewed matched your Maryland driver’s license photo. There’s no doubt it was you on the tape, but, just to be sure, the cashier was shown a photo lineup. She identified your picture immediately.”
    Akbari said nothing for a very long time. His unflinching eyes merely continued to look blankly at the bill in its plastic envelope. Every now and again his hands balled up into fists, but that was his only reaction. I let him wallow in his own thoughts for a bit. As he did, I leisurely read through the papers in the folder I’d brought with me, and every once in a while, I jotted down a note.
    Eventually, I’d had enough. I glanced at my watch and noticed that we were quickly encroaching on prayer time. I cleared my throat to get Akbari’s attention. He jumped and looked up at me for the first time in several minutes.
    “Mr. Akbari, I just want to know where you got the bill.” I retrieved my prop from the table and slid it back into my folder.
    Akbari’s expression was almost pained, and indecision warred in his dark eyes. “I don’t know.”
    I raised one eyebrow and restrained the impulse to fold my arms over my chest, as most people saw that move as antagonistic. I wasn’t quite ready to take that tack with him. Yet.
    “You don’t know.” My tone was borderline questioning, though it’d taken a considerable amount of willpower to refrain from sounding sarcastic.
    He shook his head. “No. I don’t know.”
    “Do you often walk around with hundred-dollar bills in your wallet, Mr. Akbari?”
    He didn’t reply.
    “What do you do for a living?” I asked, my voice light. I regarded him steadily as I awaited his reply.
    “I am sorry?”
    I held out my hand to Meaghan, who wordlessly deposited Akbari’s driver’s license into it. I glanced at it for confirmation of his age before I handed it back to him. I’d been told he was in his mid-twenties. The date on the license verified that fact.
    “For a job,” I said. “Where do you work?”
    Akbari hesitated. “I’m a graduate student.”
    “So you have no means of income?”
    He shook his head.
    “Yet somehow you have enough hundred-dollar bills at your disposal that you can’t remember where you got the one you tried to use three weeks ago to buy milk and eggs?” Now I allowed my skepticism and disbelief to bleed into my words. I didn’t ask where he went to school. Since I was fairly confident he was lying to me, I didn’t really care. There was no need to poke more holes in his story. We both knew he was full of shit. And we both knew that I knew.
    The uncertainty was back in Akbari’s eyes. He picked at the edges of the driver’s license in his grip but didn’t seem aware he was doing it. The sweat on his brow was more pronounced, and beads of it dotted the visible skin of his neck.
    “Tell you what. I know you have to pray. I’d never stand