Stranded

caught. She scrambled awkwardly off Creed and off the bed. The map beneath them crackled in an explosion of noise and her feet hit the floor with a thump. She was embarrassed and flushed—even more flushed when she saw that Creed’s towel had come loose.
    “Creed, you there?”
    She tiptoed toward Tully’s voice.
    “Hold on. I just got out of the shower,” Creed called out to Tully.
    Maggie was across the room and almost out the adjoining room’s doorway when she stopped and glanced back at him. He met her eyes and gestured for her to continue. But there was no playful smile. No signal of regret or cocky swagger. Just an intensity. She could still feel it between them, so much so that when she stepped into her room, she closed the door that connected the two rooms and locked it.

CHAPTER 48

    WASHINGTON, D.C.
    Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea for Gwen to host a meeting about a serial killer in her home. Agent Alonzo had managed to turn her warm and friendly dinner into a grotesque slide show. Her mind still reeled from her doctor’s phone call, making it difficult to concentrate. Several times when she looked across her huge mahogany dining room table she caught Julia Racine watching her. Thankfully the detective had the good sense to look away, even appearing a bit embarrassed at getting caught.
    Once again, despite the wireless electronic gadgetry that Agent Alonzo had brought, he now focused on the paper map of the United States attached to a poster board. He had set it up at the end of the room on a very thin and sleek easel. It had reminded Gwen of a magician’s wand when Agent Alonzo unfolded it from a small bundle of foot-long rods that he had pulled out of a cute satchel. When she first saw that satchel she had smiled, thinking it looked like the agent had brought a toiletry kit for an overnight stay. That’s the way her mind was working tonight, ever since the phone call. She could take the simplest of things and turn them into the absurd. Perhaps that’s what cancer did to one’s mind.
    When he took out pins and stuck them into the map, she wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier to keep track on a computer? And almost as soon as the thought came to her, she noticed a look exchanged between Assistant Director Kunze and Agent Alonzo, and she realized it was Kunze who insisted on the dinosaur equipment. And for a brief moment she found herself liking Kunze a little more.
    We dinosaurs need to stick together
.
    Alonzo wore another purple button-down with khakis and Sperry Top-Siders. He had traded his wireless glasses for thick black-framed ones.
    When had glasses become a revolving fashion accessory?
    Her mind was all over the place. The others were discussing trace evidence and motives of murder while Gwen was evaluating the psychology of everyone’s fashion statements.
    She didn’t think she had ever seen Keith Ganza without a white lab coat. His long gray ponytail actually went better with the T-shirt and suede vest he was wearing now, making him look hip instead of lab-coat nerd. Even Kunze had relaxed a little and wore a long-sleeved polo shirt, light blue, tucked neatly into the waistband of charcoal-colored trousers and nicely finished off with tasseled leather loafers.
    Murder didn’t much interest Gwen at the moment. But shoes did and she knew shoes, men’s or women’s. It didn’t matter. Maggie teased her constantly about her shoe fetish. She’d never been able to get Tully to appreciate fine leather shoes, though she had bought him some sexy Italian leather loafers. And suddenly she missed them both terribly.
    In the middle of her home, in the middle of this group of colleagues, she felt completely alone. The two people she loved and trusted and confided in were twelve hundred miles away. She feltlike she was losing her mind, and it didn’t seem like a topic to cover sufficiently over the phone.
    That’s when she noticed everyone in the room had stopped talking. What was worse, they were staring at her. Waiting. Had she missed something?
    “I’m sorry, what was that?”
    “Are you okay, Dr. Patterson?” Agent Alonzo asked.
    “I’m fine. Just fine.”
    “Before we get to Otis P. Dodd,” Kunze interrupted and she realized he was giving her a pass, “let’s go over the victims, the chronology, and what we know.”
    “Sure,” Alonzo said, still eyeing Gwen with concern.
    He replaced the poster-board map with a three-by-five whiteboard. Definitely Kunze’s idea,