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irreverent wit, which distinguished her from many of the more traditional, restrained southern girls I’d grown up with. I didn’t have much money to date in those days (Carol made more as a stenographer than I did as a clerk), but we began to see each other regularly.
    In the fall of 1973 my dad began having serious back problems, so I requested a transfer from Washington to the FBI Field Office in Jacksonville, Florida, just a few miles from home. This meant being apart from Carol, and we missed each other so much that when she came down for a visit in December we got engaged. We were married in August 1974 and eventually moved in to a great little apartment near the ocean in Neptune Beach.
    In 1976, after three and a half years as a clerical employee, I received the formal letter appointing me to join the incoming class of special agents for training at the FBI academy in Quantico, Virginia. For the next seventeen weeks, I studied hard for each exam, concentrated on my shooting skills, and got in great physical condition. I scored near the top of my class in every category, and, thanks to my years running track in high school, I also won every distance-running challenge.
    After graduation in 1976, I was assigned to the fugitive squad of the FBI Field Office in Columbia, South Carolina. Many agents begin their careers doing tedious background investigations, but within two weeks I was apprehending criminals. A few weeks into the job, our office received an alert about a South Carolinian wanted for murder in California. He was on the run, and the thought was that the most likely place for him to be was back home in our area. Relying on the standard gumshoe work of contacting the fugitive’s family members and every other known associate, eventually my partner and I tracked him down to a crumbling white frame apartment building surrounded by palm trees and azalea bushes. This was late August, and when the landlord let us in the front door, it was so hot inside I nearly fainted, but I rushed on through the apartment and found the man in bed, reaching for his gun in a holster on the nightstand. Fortunately, he stopped before I had to firemy weapon in self-defense. For a young guy who’d always wanted to be a G-man, this was very exciting indeed.
    One of my training agents in South Carolina was named Jimmy Calhoon. Jimmy looked the way I’d always thought an agent should look: with dark hair and a square jaw on a rugged face, he was a dead ringer for the cartoon police detective Dick Tracy. He was a tough guy who had played football at Florida State, and he exuded a confidence and authority that I’d never seen before. One night we were looking for a fugitive, a guy who had murdered someone in another state, and we walked into the toughest bar in town, a dark smoke-filled place filled with tough guys. Jimmy moved into the room and slowly stared down each person, to see if the guy we were looking for was there. Not one of them dared to make eye contact with him.
    But Jimmy wasn’t just a tough guy. Over the next two years he would teach me his own kind of street psychology: how to speak with witnesses, victims, and criminals and gain their cooperation. When we were out trying to develop leads, he could adapt his approach for a big-city lawyer or a farmer down at the feed store in a small town. He could tell jokes, and he seemed to be able to talk to anyone about anything, whether it was crops, fishing, dove hunting, or taxes. He was as tough as anyone in the Bureau, but what he showed me was that good law enforcement wasn’t just about using a gun or a nightstick; it was also about communication.
    As much as Jimmy was a positive role model, there were others whose actions taught me what not to do. There were a couple of guys in the office who constantly took unnecessarily confrontational approaches, arrogantly asserting their authority as FBI agents. In one bank robbery case another agent and I were interviewing a guy who