Agents from our New York office were all over the murder scene on Long Island. Photographs of the two victims had been shown to the high school students who’d seen the Connolly abduction and to Audrey Meek’s children. They had identified the couple as the kidnappers. I wondered why the bodies had been left there. As examples? For whom?

Monnie Donnelley and I regularly met at seven before I had to attend orientation classes for the day. We were analyzing the Long Island murders. Monnie pulled together everything she could find on the husband and wife, as well as other Russian criminals working in the U.S., the so-called Red Mafiya. She was hot-wired into the Organized Crime Section over at the Hoover Building and also the Red Mafiya squad in the Bureau’s New York office.

“I brought ‘everything’ bagels from D.C.,” I said as I entered her cube at ten minutes past seven Monday. “Best in the city. According to Zagat, anyway. You don’t seem too excited.”

“You’re late,” Monnie said, without looking up from her computer screen. She’d mastered the droll, deadpan delivery style favored by hackers.

“These bagels are worth it,” I said. “Trust me.”

“I don’t trust anybody,” Monnie replied.

She finally glanced up at me and smiled. Nice smile, worth the wait. “You know that I’m kidding, right? It’s just a tough-girl act, Alex. Give with the bagels.”

I laughed. “I’m used to cop humor.”

“Oh, I’m honored,” she muttered, deadpan again, as she looked back at the glowing computer screen. “He thinks I’m a cop, not just a desk jockey. You know, they started me in fingerprinting. The absolute bottom.”

I liked Monnie, but I had the sense that she needed a lot of support. I knew she’d been divorced for about two years. She’d majored in criminology at Maryland for undergrad, where she had also pursued another interesting passion—studio arts. Monnie still took classes in drawing and painting, and, of course, there was the collage in her cube.

She yawned. “Sorry. I watched Alias with the boys last night. That will be Grandma’s problem when she has to get them up this morning.”

Monnie’s home life was another thing we had in common. She was a single parent, with two young kids and a doting grandmother who lived less than a block away. The grandmother was her ex-husband’s mother, which told the story of the marriage. Jack Donnelley had played basketball at Maryland, where he and Monnie met. He was a big drinker in college, and it got worse once he graduated. Monnie said he’d never recovered from being all-everything in high school and then just another guard for the Maryland Terrapins. Monnie was five-foot even, and joked that she hadn’t played any kind of ball at Maryland. She told me her nickname in high school was Spaz.