The guard nodded slowly.

“Great.” Maggie gave the guard her attorney ID and driver’s license. She pointed at me to do the same.

We both signed our names on a login sheet, then we were asked to remove every item from our bags and pockets and place them on the conveyor belt. There lay our lipsticks and wallets and mints and cell phones and errant tampons. The guards studied each of them like aliens discovering objects in a new world. We were patted down and wanded. We were walked through a metal detector, then through a machine that puffed out massive breaths of air and sucked it back in, apparently in an effort to detect gunpowder. As the machine roared and my blouse billowed around me, I felt illogically guilty again, as if I might have accidentally hidden a bomb in the underwire of my bra.

Once we were cleared, we were led through a hallway covered in slate-blue carpet that resembled Astroturf.

In the reception area, a woman hidden behind a massive pane of bulletproof glass asked for our names again. She consulted a printout, similar to the one the guards had, then typed something into her computer.

A minute later, she passed us badges through a steel drawer. On them, our names were printed and below that, in orange letters, Visitor, Not To Be Unescorted.

We took a seat on steel chairs, the cushions made with the kind of tough, ugly fabric that covers seats in a cheap car. And there we sat, and sat, and sat. We leafed through periodicals that were outdated by a good eight months. We looked at each other. With each passing minute, my anxiety grew like a steel ball in my chest that was taking up more and more room.

“Relax,” Maggie said in a low voice. “They’re just icing us.”

“Seriously?”

She nodded and fired a murderous glance at the impervious receptionist.

“But why would they want to make me nervous? I’m just here as a witness.” I stopped, realizing that being a “witness” made it sound as if a crime had been committed.

I tried to think about work, but it was impossible. I thought, instead, about Sam.

Ten minutes later, I turned to Maggie. “I have to tell you something.”

Her eyes narrowed a little. “Is it something about Sam’s case?”

“No. It’s something about Sam. And me. And the wedding.” I exhaled loudly. “This has been torturing me, but before this all happened, I was thinking of telling Sam that the wedding was too much.”

“You were thinking about calling it off?” Her eyes went big.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure what I wanted to do about it, but it was just getting so out of hand, so overwhelming, and…yeah. Yeah, I guess I was thinking, in the back of my head, of calling it off. I was going to talk to him that night. But then he disappeared. And I can’t help feeling like I caused this somehow.”

Maggie moved a strand of hair away from my face and turned so that she was looking directly in my eyes. “You did not cause any of this, Iz. Not a bit. I mean, maybe the pressure was getting to Sam, too. Maybe he took off and got a little goofy because of it. But you?” She shook her head. “You didn’t cause anything. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“The thing is, I don’t think the pressure was getting to Sam. The opposite, actually. He was excited about the wedding. He was so good-natured about planning it. He liked doing all that stuff. That’s what was making me feel bad-that I wasn’t as enthused about it as him. I wasn’t very enthused at all.”

The door of the reception area opened and a brusque brunette entered the room. “I’m Andi Lippman. Sorry I’m late.”

Maggie stood. I followed suit and shook hands with Andi. “I’m Izzy McNeil. This is my…”

I had started to say the word friend, but I saw the sharp glance Maggie gave me.

“…lawyer,” I said. “Maggie Bristol.”

Andi Lippman frowned, as if she hadn’t been advised of Maggie’s presence. “Lawyer? You don’t need a lawyer, do you?”

More irrational guilt.

Maggie held out her hand. She had to hold it up a bit, since Andi Lippman was taller than me, which meant she towered over Maggie. Still, if Maggie had any feelings of insecurity about the height difference she certainly didn’t show it. “I’m just here to listen and learn,” she said congenially.

“Sure.” Another frown.

She led us down three different hallways, all covered in the blue Astroturf carpet. She turned this way and that so that we’d never be able to find our way out on our own, which, I realized, might be the point. As we followed Andi, I noted her fitted, dove-gray suit coat, her black skirt, her stylish pumps, her long brown hair that fell past her shoulders.

Andi’s office was all government, all the time. The desk was steel with a wood-grain Formica top. Utilitarian as you could get. The windows were set high up, higher than even Andi Lippman’s head.

She caught me looking at the windows. “They place them up there,” she said, “so that if someone shoots from outside, even if they could crack the window, they wouldn’t hit anyone.”

I nodded, wondering what it was like to work every day in a job where getting shot at was a possibility.

Andi took a seat behind her desk and gestured at the chairs. We took our seats, and I noticed that there was nothing personal on Andi’s desk, not a framed photo or even a mug. The desk itself was clean, but for a stack of plain manila folders and some white legal pads. Andi sat back and picked up the top folder.

She opened it, glanced at what appeared to be a few sheets of paper, then replaced the folder on her desk and picked up a pen and a pad of paper.

“As you know,” she said, “we’re investigating the disappearance of Panamanian bearer shares from the office of Mark Carrington, along with the apparent disappearance of Sam Hollings. What is your relation to Mr. Hollings?”

“He’s my fiancé.”

“Had you set a wedding date?”

“Yes. A couple weeks before Christmas.”

Andi asked me a series of questions about when I’d last seen Sam and the day that he disappeared. I told her everything I remembered. There had been nothing remarkable, I told her, except that Sam seemed distracted when I’d seen him at the wedding coordinator’s office and he’d said there were complications at work. I told her how I’d searched for Sam-looking at his office and his apartment the next day. I told her how I’d called his friends and family.

“May I have the phone numbers of those friends and family members?” Andi asked, pen poised.

I pulled out my address book and read off the numbers.

“Did Sam have any enemies?”

“Enemies?” The word almost made me laugh. It seemed like something out of a Star Wars movie. “No, everyone loved Sam.”

Andi squinted.

“It’s true. His friends adore him. So does his family. As far as I know, everyone at work loves him…” I faltered for a moment, thinking that Sam’s boss probably didn’t love him so much right now. “And everyone in his rugby club, they think he’s the best.”

“ Rugby club?”

“The Chicago Lions.”

Andi squinted some more, as if she found this business about rugby utterly suspicious. I found myself racing forward with my words, explaining about the practices every Tuesday and Thursday, how Sam had taken some time off from the club because it was too much to handle with the wedding and work.

“And what does Sam do for work, exactly?” Andi asked.

I explained that he worked for Mark Carrington, who owned a private wealth-management firm. Forester was one of those clients, and Sam was the adviser who backed up Mark to manage Forester’s money, assets and investments.

Andi didn’t write anything down. She clearly understood already what Sam did for a living. “Did you and Sam discuss the investments he was making on Forester’s behalf?”

“Sometimes.”

She gave me a stern look.

“He hadn’t told me anything about the Panamanian shares.”