He opened the passenger door, practically shoved me inside and slammed it behind me.

Lucy was in the driver’s seat, her ivory-gold sweater matching her blond hair. “Hi, Iz,” she said with a smile.

Mayburn jumped in the backseat. “Go!” he yelled.

Lucy’s face set in a determined line, and she floored the car and squealed out of the Trial TV parking lot.

“Thank you!” I said. “How did you know to get me?”

“I’ve been watching you on Trial TV around the clock,” Lucy said. “When I saw the press conference, I told Mayburn you needed help.”

“Something else, too,” Mayburn said from behind. “I tailed Carina Fariello today-that accountant who used to work for Jackson Prince? She’s at home right now. And considering the press conference about you this morning, I think we better get over there and talk to her. Now.”

As we drove, I told them Trial TV had fired me.

“What?” Lucy was outraged. “You were great on that station.”

“Thanks. They said they had to let me go because of this person of interest thing and the fact that I happened to take over Jane’s job after she died.”

Mayburn grunted. “Yeah, that doesn’t look good.”

I shivered as a chill of fear raced through my body. “I’m scared.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Lucy said.

“I know that, but the cops don’t.”

Silence in the car.

“The upside is…” I trailed off. I always could find an upside to just about any scenario, but what was the upside here? “Okay, new topic. How do we approach Carina Fariello?”

We batted around a few ways to speak with her. Although Mayburn rarely shied away from subterfuge or a little creative license with the facts, we decided that we would be up-front with her and conversational. More than anything we wanted to get her talking.

I turned around and looked at Mayburn. “Hey,” I said, “what’s going on with the Fig Leaf case?”

“I need you to get a pearl thong.”

“I already gave you a pearl thong. Maggie’s. And by the way, I want it back.”

He pulled at the collar of his brown leather jacket and shifted in the seat. “Uh, yeah, it’s kind of been dismantled.”

“Dismantled? Why?”

“I told you I had to have it analyzed. Those pearls are plastic, by the way.”

“Did you really think they were going to be real pearls?”

“Hey, I want one of those thongs.” Lucy stopped at a light and shot a sultry smile over her shoulder at Mayburn.

“Oh, trust me, I’m getting you one in every color.”

“Okay, no sex talk,” I said. “And, Mayburn, now that I’m out of a full-time job, again, I not only expect to be reimbursed for that thong, but I want another one for my friend.”

“I need the other kind of thong. One of the black boxed ones that the guy in the van delivered. From what you told me, Josie is guarding the pearl thongs. And the owner of the store says she only knew about one kind of pearl thong-the silver, like the one you gave me.”

“Why don’t you just get a key from the owner and you go in there and get it?”

“Because she’s in Palm Beach and won’t be back in town anytime soon. Plus she says she didn’t know Josie was keeping things locked up. She doesn’t have a key to that box. Only Josie does apparently.

“I’d have to either steal the lock box where she keeps them, or borrow the key from her when she’s not looking.”

“There’s got to be a way.”

More silence, all of us thinking. Compared to shaking a murder rap, getting my hands on a piece of lingerie didn’t sound that challenging. “I’ll figure it out,” I said.

“Here we are.” Lucy pulled over to the side of the street, pointing.

Carina Fariello’s house was light blue, a single-story family home in a neighborhood where there was lots of parking and moms strolled by with their kids.

We rang the doorbell. A heavyset woman with black curly hair, probably in her late forties, opened the door and peered at us through the screen. She looked at us in the same tense way that I would if three strange people showed up on my doorstep. “Yes?”

“Ms. Fariello, I’m Isabel McNeil. We wanted to see if we could talk to you about Jane Augustine.”

Her face sagged. “I can’t believe what happened to her.”

“I know. We’re trying to find anything we can about her murder. Your name was found on a piece of paper in Jane’s desk. Can we speak with you?”

“Are you the police?” She glanced at our clothing.

“Private detective,” Mayburn said.

“Private detective,” not “private investigator,” was the official term utilized in Illinois statutes, but most people still used the term investigator or P.I. Mayburn threw around the detective word when he wanted to sound more official.

It seemed to do the trick. “Yeah, sure.” Carina Fariello unlocked and opened her screened door. “I don’t have a lot of time, though. I have to get ready for work.”

“We just have a few questions.”

She led us down a narrow foyer covered in fake wood flooring to a living room that looked generally unused. The light blue of the furniture cushions probably had once matched the house paint, but had since been bleached to a light gray.

Carina Fariello pointed to the couch and took a seat on a nearby chair. As Mayburn, Lucy and I sat on the couch, she stood again. “I’m sorry. I should have asked. Can I get you something to drink?”

We all declined. “Ms. Fariello…” I said.

“Call me Carina.” She took her seat again.

“Thanks. Carina, as I mentioned, your name was on a paper in Jane Augustine’s desk. There were also about fourteen other names. All were doctors.” I lifted my purse from the floor and rooted around until I found the list. I read a few of them. “Do you know these doctors?”

Carina’s face was grim, her eyes jumping around now. “Who are you working for?”

Mayburn spoke up. “We’re working on this case for free. We-” he gestured at himself and me “-We don’t believe that the police are doing enough to find out what happened to Jane.”

I was relieved he didn’t mention the term “person of interest.”

“I don’t understand. Why would those names be related to her death?”

“We’re not sure, either,” I said. “We’re just going over some of the stories she was working on. One was about Jackson Prince. Something possibly about class action lawsuits. These names were on the back of research she had. You used to work for Prince, right?”

Somewhere during my explanation, Carina’s eyes had slipped to the floor. They stayed there, and she said nothing for a few seconds.

Then her eyes came back to mine. “I did work for him. Until he fired me. I was the one who called Jane with those names.”

A beat went by. “That’s great,” Mayburn said. His face was bland, almost bored, but I could see an excited glimmer in his eyes. “What kind of work did you do for him?”

Carina’s jaw moved into a firm line. “I was his office manager and bookkeeper. I’m a CPA. I worked for him for years, but he fired me five months ago.” Her eyes grew a little wet. “I have a job out at O’Hare now.”

“Why did Mr. Prince fire you?” I asked.

“He said it was because he had to lay off some staff. He did have a bad couple of years recently-only a few big verdicts or settlements-but no one else got fired, and the firm was starting to do great again. Especially with the Ladera cases.”

“What’s Prince’s role with those cases?”

“He’s liaison-counsel. He oversees the entire lawsuit and the other lawyers working on it. If the plaintiffs get any settlements or judgments, he’ll get about a third of everything.”

“Did the doctors on the list have anything to do with Ladera?”

“Well, that’s what Prince said, but I don’t know…Do you know anything about class action suits or how they work with the experts?”

“They pool their experts,” I said, remembering what Grady had told me. “Usually, they just have a few for the whole class.”