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their passenger manifest. After years of Gwen lecturing her about playing by the rules, Maggie waited for an admission of guilt. Now that she thought about it, Gwen had managed to get a lot of information that wasn’t usually handed out freely.
    “Maggie, there’s more to it.” The urgency returned to Gwen’s voice, dismissing any confession to rule breaking. “She said she was meeting someone…a man. That was the message and she was calling me to talk her out of it. She has this…this tendency…” She paused. “Look, Maggie, I can’t share the intimacies of her case. Let’s just say that in the past she’s made some bad choices when it comes to men.”
    Maggie glanced across the table to find Tully watching her, listening. He looked away quickly as if caught. She had noticed recently—although he tried to disguise it—that he seemed interested in anything related to Gwen Patterson. Or was it simply her imagination?
    “What are you saying, Gwen? That you think this man may have done something to her?”
    Silence again. Maggie waited. Was Gwen finally realizing that perhaps she was overreacting? And why was she being so overprotective with this particular woman? Maggie had never known Gwen to baby-sit her patients. Her friends, yes, but not her patients.
    “Maggie, is there some way you could check on her? Someone you might be able to call?”
    Maggie looked at Tully again. He had finished his lunch and now pretended to be watching out the window, another group of recruits down below in sweaty T-shirts and jogging shorts snaking through the woods.
    Maggie picked at her own lunch. Why had Gwen suddenly decided to become this patient’s caretaker? It seemed like a simple case of a grieving woman shutting herself away from her world for a while, perhaps even finding solace in a friendly stranger. Why didn’t Gwen see that?
    “Maggie?”
    “I’ll do what I can. Where was she staying?”
    “The funeral was in Wallingford, Connecticut, but she was staying at the Ramada Plaza Hotel next door in Meriden. I have the phone numbers and addresses right here. I can fax over some other information later. All I know about the man she was meeting was that she called him Sonny.”
    Maggie’s stomach gave a sudden flip while she took down the information. All the while she kept thinking, “Not Connecticut.”

CHAPTER 3
    The FBI Academy
Quantico, Virginia
    M aggie O’Dell reached for the last doughnut, a chocolate-frosted number with bright pink and white sprinkles, and already she heard a “tsk-tsk” sound scolding her. She glanced over her shoulder at her partner, Special Agent R. J. Tully.
    “That’s what you’re having for lunch?” he asked.
    “Dessert.” She added a cellophane-wrapped platter of one of the cafeteria’s daily specials. Something listed on the chalkboard as a “tacorito” supreme. Maggie couldn’t help thinking even the FBI couldn’t screw up something as good as Mexican food.
    “Doughnuts are not dessert,” Tully insisted.
    “You’re just jealous because it’s the last one.”
    “I beg to differ. Doughnuts are breakfast. Not dessert,” he told her as he held up the line, waiting for Arlene’s attention behind the counter, waiting for her to put down the steaming hot-out-of-the-oven pot of creamed corn, before he pointed to the roast beef. “Let’s ask the expert. Doughnuts are breakfast. Wouldn’t you agree, Arlene?”
    “Sweetie, if I had Agent O’Dell’s figure you’d see me eating doughnuts at every meal.”
    “Thank you, Arlene.” Maggie added a Diet Pepsi, then indicated to the cashier, a little mole-faced woman she didn’t recognize, that she’d pay for the tray coming behind her, too.
    “Wow!” Tully said when he noticed her generosity. “What’s the special occasion?”
    “Are you saying I never buy unless there’s a special occasion?”
    “Well, there’s that…that and the doughnut.”
    “Couldn’t it be that I’m having a great day?” she said