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Georgie.”
    She’d been thinking about that for hours, and she still had no idea what Jake could have been tangled up in. Or why she was a part of it.
    Sam had driven off the base and headed east, eventually rolling over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and onto the Eastern Shore. Another hour of driving and they’d ended up here, at this small cottage tucked away on a tributary of the bay.
    Now Georgeanne shook her head and swallowed the lump in her throat. “I don’t understand why Jake’s dead. Or what it has to do with me.”
    Sam ran a hand through his hair and let out a breath. “Jake was involved in things he shouldn’t have been involved in. And it looks like he had a crush on you, G. He had pictures of you in his apartment, poems he’d written. Whoever killed him thinks you know something about what he was doing.”
    Georgeanne wanted to howl. Instead, she shuddered. It was creepy to think Jake had had a crush on her and now he was dead. “But I don’t know anything. I didn’t even know Jake that well. He took three classes from me, that’s it. We had coffee a few times, but it was during my office hours. It wasn’t a date or anything.”
    “He seemed to think it was. Others did too, if what this guy said to you was any indication.”
    She shook her head, wanting to deny everything Sam was saying. “But Jake was a good guy. Harmless. I can’t believe he was mixed up in something bad.”
    “You aren’t that naïve, Georgie. Just because someone is nice doesn’t mean they haven’t done something wrong. I’m sorry when anyone dies so senselessly, but trust me when I tell you he wasn’t minding his own business when it happened.”
    Georgeanne swallowed the lump in her throat. “So now you get to say when someone deserves the bad things that happen to them? I think that’s rather cynical, don’t you?”
    Sam’s expression was stark. “I’ve seen too much in this life not to be cynical. Jake Hamilton was doing things he shouldn’t have been doing. And while I’m sorry you’re hurt over this, I’m more pissed that he managed to drag you into it. You’re lucky they didn’t succeed with the train last night.”
    She closed her eyes, feeling the ache in her hip anew. “I know. And I’m sorry. But I liked Jake. Or at least the Jake I knew. It’s not easy to start believing he was a bad person.”
    “I didn’t say he was bad. But he did bad things. Or stupid things, at least. And that cost him his life.”
    She looked up at him. “And I’m mixed up in it.”
    Sam nodded. “We don’t know precisely how. It could just be that they think you were his girlfriend and know something about what he was doing. He might have said something to them, might have implicated you in some way. Did he ever give you anything?”
    She shook her head. “Tests and papers. Nothing else.” She chewed on her bottom lip. “The last time I saw him, he was with a man in the Metro. It was late, and I was waiting for the train home. Jake said he was going to Crystal City with a friend. Then a man showed up and they started talking.”
    Sam’s gaze had sharpened. “And what was unusual in that?”
    She blinked. “I don’t know that anything was.”
    “You mentioned it. I think you wouldn’t have done that if it didn’t bother you somehow.”
    Her heart beat a little faster as she thought back to that night. “The man seemed angry. And I didn’t like the way he looked at me.” She shrugged. “It was nothing else, really. Just a bad feeling he gave me.”
    “Did you talk to him?”
    “No.”
    “What did he look like?”
    “Dark. Middle-Eastern, maybe, and that pains me to say because it shouldn’t mean a damn thing.”
    “No, it shouldn’t. But sometimes it does.” He didn’t have to remind her that she’d described the man from the coffee shop as vaguely foreign, too.
    “He had a goatee, closely cropped. He looked… very manicured. Well-dressed and well-groomed. There was nothing unusual in that,