“Oh, please. What’s a little cake going to do to your low profile?”

“You told him it was my birthday. What do you think he was going to do with that information?”

“Stick a candle in your cake?”

“And he would light that candle, and people in this room would turn and watch where that cake goes, and then you clap again and maybe sing, and people at the next table say, ‘Happy Birthday!’ and I don’t know what part of that sounds like a ‘low profile’ to you.”

I sat back. “Understood.”

“And, by the way, ‘low profile’ also means that you aren’t going to be telling anyone that you’re working for me.”

“No one?”

“No one. If you’re really going to be of any help to me, I can’t have word getting around that you’re a part-time P.I.”

“But I could tell my friend Maggie, or my assistant, Q?”

He shook his head. “No one. You’ll swear them to secrecy, but they might let it slip to one person and that person slips and then another. The whole reason I need you is because you’re a typical, normal Northside Chicago woman. If there’s any inkling that you’re not, it won’t work. That’s how it’s got to be if you’re on this team.”

“Are there any other team members?”

He laughed. “No.”

“All right then, so we’re the team?”

He nodded, and held out his hand.

I shook it, and I felt a flowering of something inside of me, something I hadn’t felt for the last few days. Hope.

25

I gave my name to the front-desk clerk at WNDY, a television station owned by Pickett Enterprises.

“Jane Augustine is expecting me,” I said.

The clerk looked at his computer screen, then glanced at his watch. “You’d better get up there fast.” It was fifteen minutes before five, and Jane was the star of the five o’clock news.

I pushed through the double doors behind the desk and stepped onto the cavernous television set. On the far side, raised on a platform and bathed in bright klieg lights, was the anchor’s desk. Jane’s coanchor was already seated there, being dotted with powder by the makeup artist. All around the set, people moved quickly, wearing headphones and clutching clipboards, none of them seeming to notice what the others were doing.

I stopped a tall woman with short black hair and dark-rimmed eyeglasses. C. J. Lyons. Jane’s producer.

“Izzy!” She patted me on the shoulder. “How are you? Doing okay?” She wasn’t usually so friendly. But she’d obviously heard about Forester.

“I’m hanging in there.”

“Yeah, God. Can’t believe all this.”

I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by “all this,” but I didn’t feel like talking with her about it. I was here to see Jane about her contract. She’d called today and left a message with Q, saying she was ready to sign and asking if she could talk to me about one thing. All I really wanted to do after my lunch with Mayburn was go home and decompress, but if I had any kind of an “in” with Jane, I was going to take it. I wouldn’t let Forester down by letting Pickett Enterprises grind to a halt.

“Jane’s waiting for you in the dressing room,” C.J. said.

I walked in front of the anchor desk, waved at Jane’s coanchor and made my way down a short hallway to the dressing room. Jane was sitting on a high swivel chair, her shiny black hair hanging in a sheet down her back, her eyes heavenward while a makeup artist added a little more mascara to her well-known mauve-blue eyes.

“Izzy!” She leaned forward from her stool and gave me an air kiss. The tissue they’d stuck around the collar of her suit brushed against my neck. “Sit down.”

“You heard about Forester?” I took a seat on a matching chair.

Jane glanced at her makeup person. “Give me a minute?”

“You’re done anyway,” the woman said. “See you out there.”

Jane turned back to me. “I’m sick about Forester. I cannot believe it.”

“I can’t either.”

“I feel stupid now.” She shook her black hair over her shoulder, a patented Jane move that was both sexy and elegant.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been drawing out this contract stuff.”

“I noticed.”

She smiled. “Sorry. I just wanted to make sure I’m getting the best deal possible. This is my career, you know? And my agent plays hardball. He gets off on that stuff. I should have stepped in and stopped him, but that’s what he’s paid for, and…Well, now with Forester gone, it seems pointless to have been fighting.”

“We weren’t fighting. We were negotiating.”

“Well, I’m ready to sign it. Just finalize everything, will you?”

I nodded.

Jane went silent. It seemed she was studying me. “I heard about Sam.”

The hair on my arms rose. “You heard what about Sam?”

Jane and Sam had met only once, at a benefit at Café Brauer, where Forester was being honored for his charity work.

“I heard about those shares of Forester’s,” she said, “and I heard Sam is gone.”

“Who told you that?” A cold lick of premonition swept over me like something bad was looming.

She pressed her lips together for a moment. “I can’t reveal a source.”

“A source?” It sounded so official. They’d had Forester’s death on the news, but so far there had been nothing about Sam or the shares.

“Yeah. C.J. is all over it.”

Just then someone made a short rap on the door. It opened and C.J. poked her head in. “How’s it going?”

It hit me. I looked at Jane. “You didn’t have me here to talk about your contract, did you?”

A flash of sympathy from her mauve eyes.

C.J. stepped into the room. “We’ve already covered Forester’s death. And now we’ve learned about the shares that were stolen. C’mon, it’s good stuff. We can’t ignore this story.”

“So you had me here to interview me about it?”

“We’re just getting started. But we’d like to put something together for the ten o’clock.”

The lights over Jane’s makeup counter seemed glaringly bright and hot suddenly. How strange that I was always here in an official capacity-as Forester’s lawyer, someone distinctly behind the scenes-and now this.

“I don’t know anything.” I was getting sick of saying that. Sick of it being true.

“You must.”

“I don’t!” I couldn’t help it, but my voice boomed loud into the small room. “And if you know anything-anything-you guys have to tell me.”

C.J. and Jane exchanged looks.

C.J. shrugged. “On the same night Forester died, Sam took off with some kind of corporate shares that give him control of millions of dollars of real estate in Panama.”

I bit the inside of my cheek to stop myself from talking. They had it right, but I didn’t want to go on the record as having said anything. I wanted her to keep talking.

“That’s the gist of it,” C.J. said. “The assumption is that Sam will try to unload the property by selling the shares, and he’ll end up with a lot of money.”

“Whose assumption is that?”

“We did some research on these Panamanian shares,” C.J. said. “From what we can tell, Panama is about the last place you can still get an anonymous corporation with no loopholes or tax returns to file when you sell. And apparently, the assets are generally nonsequesterable which means nonfreezable, so there isn’t a whole lot anyone can do to stop it. At least not in the short term.”

C.J.’s eyes gleamed from behind her dark-rimmed glasses. This was exciting for her, a challenging story. “So, right now, Sam is the owner of that corporation,” she continued, “as well as the real estate that the corporation owns. He can sell it whenever he wants.”

“Who told you that Sam took off?”

She said nothing.

“Who the hell told you guys any of this?”

“We got an anonymous tip,” Jane said.

In my brain, I scribbled a list of everyone who knew about this-me, Q, Tanner, Mark Carrington, Shane. But then I realized that anyone who worked for Baltimore & Brown knew about it, and anyone who worked for Mark Carrington’s office knew, and most likely a number of people at Pickett Enterprises knew. Then there were the cops and the FBI. Probably, at this point, hundreds of people knew the story, or what little there was to know.