Max hugged me tight, and I thought of how lucky Q was to have someone wonderful like Max in his life, someone who wouldn’t steal thirty million of your boss’s money and hit the road.

Grady came in and patted me on the back.

“Please step into the church,” we heard a voice say behind us.

I turned and saw it was Annette, Forester’s housekeeper who’d been with him for nearly as long as I’d been alive. She was one of those women who appeared bland at first glance-she wore her silver hair in a plain bob; her ears adorned with small pearls; she was always in a simple dress-wool in the winter, linen in the summer. If you looked closer, though, you saw that her eyes were clear and shrewd and missed nothing. You noticed that beneath the unpretentious dresses, she had a thin, womanly body that must have taken time to care for.

“Oh, hello, Izzy,” she said when I turned.

“Annette, how are you?”

I made the bold gesture of squeezing her wrist. I’d never touched the woman before, and she always gave the impression that personal contact was not encouraged. But I knew she adored Forester and it must have been awful for her to have found him dead.

“Things are moving well,” she said in a brisk tone. “It seems we’ll start on time.”

“Great.”

I wasn’t surprised that she was brusque. It was her usual MO, and I wondered if she’d heard about Sam and the bearer shares. I knew she and Forester were close, but I had no idea whether that meant close in a housekeeper sort of way, or close in a more personal way.

“The Baltimore & Brown section seems to be forming.” Annette gently pulled her wrist from my hand and gestured toward a few pews filled with our law-firm personnel. Tanner sat on the aisle next to his secretary.

Annette led us to a pew a few rows behind Tanner, then she quickly made her way back down the aisle toward other guests.

I watched her back for a moment, wondering what she would do now that Forester was gone. This was the last big hurrah she would handle for him.

As Grady, Max, Q and I moved into the pew, organ music boomed from the back of the church, and grief flooded in.

But then a familiar feeling-I was being watched. I turned and scanned the congregants. There were lots of people I didn’t recognize. Forester’s friends, family and business associates were a vast group.

I felt a poke on my side, and I jumped.

“Oh, hi, Erin,” I said to the woman sliding into the pew next to me. Erin Mayer was an associate in B & B’s estate-planning section.

“Did you hear how much she got?” Erin whispered as she sat.

“Who?”

“Annette. She got a big chunk of change in his will.” Erin’s brown eyes flashed.

I debated whether to continue the conversation. In theory, attorneys in the same firm shouldn’t talk to each other about a client when one attorney wasn’t working on the file or being consulted about it. But theory doesn’t always worm its way into practice, and some lawyers were pretty loose-lipped. They not only talked to everyone at their firm about what their clients did and said, they talked to other attorneys at court about it, and when the five o’clock bell rang and the beer started flowing at Petterino’s (the bar next to the courthouse) they talked to just about anybody about it.

When some piece of information, like the one Erin was about to impart, came my way, I usually tried to divert the conversation, even if I was interested in the topic. But now I found it impossible to take the higher ground. “How much is she getting?”

“Two mil.” Erin smoothed down her short black hair and angled herself closer to me so she could talk low in my ear. “That’s a nice take-home for someone who used to make fifty grand a year, huh?”

I glanced over my shoulder and saw Annette greeting Walt Tenning, the CFO of Pickett Enterprises. “Does she know?”

“Oh, she knows. Everyone in Forester’s life knew what they were going to get, roughly at least. We told him not to say a word, but you know how Forester was. He spelled it out for everyone after he had the first heart attack. He didn’t want anyone to worry about their future.”

I crossed my hands and looked down. Forester was exactly that way-always taking care of everyone, never wanting anyone to worry about a thing. Even in death, he would tend to his loved ones.

Yet it made me wonder about Annette. Had that two million been tantalizing to her? A way to escape being someone’s servant? And yet it couldn’t have been her who sent Forester the letters about stepping down from the company. What good would that have done her? She would simply have had to deal with Forester being around the house all the time.

But what about the others who had benefited from Forester’s death?

My curiosity grabbed me. “What about Shane?” I asked Erin.

“Well, he’s supposed to get a large portion of the estate and control of Pickett Enterprises.”

Forester told me that he intended for Shane to take over the company, but he’d envisioned that there would be years and years to teach him the business. And now Shane was on top. Had that been what Shane wanted all along? Had he wanted it enough to threaten his father? But Shane was such a mild-mannered person, such a shadow of his dad, it was hard to imagine.

“I say, ‘large portion of the estate,’” Erin said, as if correcting herself. “Except…”

“Except what?”

The salacious tint to her eyes died away, and she looked almost sheepish. “Well, no one is getting that real estate in Panama.”

I could feel my insides tightening and a blush creeping over me.

“Those shares were supposed to be an easily liquidated portion of the estate,” she continued. “Until they’re recovered, and especially if they’re liquidated by someone else, the rest of the estate can’t be administered, which means we can’t disperse anything from the estate or make any official moves until those shares are accounted for. There are some very unhappy people, I guess.”

“Like who?”

“I don’t know for sure. That’s just what Joel said.” Joel Hersh was Erin’s boss and the head of B & B’s estate-planning section.

Erin watched me with interest. Sometimes I hated that about lawyers-how we were trained to study people like specimens under glass.

Meanwhile, I needed to come up with a party line about Sam and the bearer shares. Word was spreading like a virulent virus.

“I don’t know anything about the shares,” I said, because a good party line was not yet forming itself.

One side of Erin’s mouth lifted in a smirk. “C’mon.”

“I’m serious.” Why did no one believe me? I had a feeling that Jane and her producer, C.J., hadn’t bought it either, which was unbelievably frustrating.

The organ player finished, sending the church into momentary silence. I watched as Annette walked Walt Tenning toward the front of the church.

Walt was a tall, reed-thin man, probably fifty-six years old, with a high forehead and a monk’s cap of gray hair. He was very patrician, both in his impeccable appearance and also in his reserved demeanor, yet I knew he and Forester had butted heads along the way, as any CEO and CFO might. Walt, along with Chaz Graydon, the chief operating officer, had thought Forester too kind when it came to bonuses, medical leave and things like that. They thought Forester was bleeding money away from the company. But Forester cared more about the contentedness of his employees, asserting that their happiness would make them more money in the long run. It was a debate they’d never finish.

But now with Shane at the helm of Pickett Enterprises, Walt and Chaz could probably twist him any which way they wanted. Shane was not known for his confidence or resolve.

And yet, fifteen minutes later, Shane was at the lectern of the church, looking emotional but confident.

He was wearing a dark charcoal suit and a navy blue tie. His normally pale skin looked even more so today, almost bordering on translucent, which only made his blue eyes sharper and brighter under his glasses.