“Iz!” She jumped and picked her way over the piles of documents on her floor. “What’s up? Any news?”

“No.”

She shut her door while I excavated one of the chairs. “Did you come from work?” she asked.

“Yeah. It’s bleak. I can’t get anything done.”

“I can’t believe you’re still going to work.”

“What else am I going to do?”

She sank back into her chair and stared at me. “I don’t know.”

“Actually, I’ve got an idea.” I lifted my bag from the floor and took out my checkbook. I wrote a check to Martin Bristol & Associates for a thousand dollars. It was money we had earmarked for the honeymoon, but who knew whether I’d need it now.

I stood and put the check in front of her. “I’m hiring you on behalf of myself and Sam Hollings. This is a retainer.”

Here’s the thing about lawyers-everyone assumes that if you’ve graduated law school and passed the bar, you’re a mini-expert on every area of the law that exists. The truth is that while law school indoctrinates and introduces, it doesn’t truly educate. It can’t. The legal world is simply too vast. Real education happens on the job. And so, if we lawyers haven’t worked in criminal law (or patent law or real-estate law), we know as much about it as a CTA bus driver. I knew nothing about criminal law, and I’d realized that I’d better have someone on my side-on Sam’s side-who did.

Maggie looked at the check, then at me. “You’re my best friend. You and your fiancé get free legal advice. If you need it.”

“Nope. I don’t want you being half friend, half lawyer here. I want you, Maggie Bristol, tough-girl attorney, woman who pulls no punches. I want you to tell it to me straight. Just like Sam or I were any other client.”

“Why do you think Sam needs a lawyer? I mean, right now?”

“I got a call from the FBI. I’m going to see them at eleven-thirty.” I told her about my conversation with Andi Lippman. “Do you know her?” I asked Maggie.

“No. But I do know you’re not going to that meeting.”

I sighed. “Mags-”

She shook her head. “Never let yourself be questioned without a subpoena or an arrest.”

“I know, I know, but that’s the advice you give someone who has something to hide. Someone who might be arrested for something. That is not me.”

She shrugged. “You never know what kind of story these people can cook up. The feds are no better than the cops.”

“Right. Well…the cops seemed nice.”

Maggie’s eyebrows rose to the ceiling. “You didn’t.”

“They came to my office yesterday.”

She briefly dipped her face into her hands. “Have you learned nothing from me?”

“I needed to know what they knew. And that’s the same reason I’m going to see the FBI. This time I’m taking a lawyer.” I gave her a pointed look.

She nodded slowly, then her nodding picked up pace. “All right then.” She looked at her watch. “It’s time for a client-prep meeting.”

With the facts as we knew them, Maggie told me, Sam could be charged with embezzlement, which was essentially stealing property owned by someone else but which had been entrusted to his care.

“Like the Enron guys,” Maggie said. “They rightly possessed all that money due to their positions in the company, but when they started using it for their own personal benefit, then it became embezzlement.”

“Didn’t one of them get a twenty-four-year prison sentence?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, her voice getting a little louder, a little excited. “The judges smack those guys hard. I mean hard. There’s no mercy anymore for white-collar criminals.”

I flinched.

“What?” She raised her eyebrows. “I thought you wanted a tough-girl attorney? The woman who pulls no punches?”

“I do.”

“Okay, well, look, there are a lot of positives. I mean, number one, they haven’t found him.”

“Precisely how is the fact that Sam is missing a ‘positive’?”

“I’m just looking at it from the perspective of a defense attorney, okay? And the truth is, if I get a retainer and I work the case as hard as I can and then one of my clients disappears, I’m not too upset. I get paid, and I don’t have to deal with sentencing. Also, I get a soft spot for my clients, even if they sold thirty kilos of coke to an undercover cop. When they’re gone, I can imagine a better life for them.”

This always fascinated me about Maggie-she was part tough cookie, part legal scholar and part plain old softy. Scholar wasn’t even the right word, but there was no appropriate term for someone who simply loved the law like Maggie did. I was surprised to find out after graduation that most attorneys didn’t adore the law. Sadly, I didn’t adore the law.

“With Sam,” Maggie continued, “it’s possible the feds will lose interest if he stays gone. They’re human, too, and everyone wants to close cases.”

She caught my look. “Okay, obviously not finding Sam wouldn’t be the best result for you.”

“Moving on. Other positives?”

“Well, Forester may have given Sam the right to take those bearer shares. If he did, then it’s not embezzlement.”

“How would we know if that’s true? Forester is gone.” I felt a vacancy in my heart, right in the warm spot where I used to hold Forester.

“I know. That makes it tricky. But if we can find some evidence that Sam had the right to take the shares, he’s in the clear.”

“Sam handled Forester’s investments under Mark Carrington’s supervision. According to Mark, there was no reason for Sam to take those shares.”

We sat in silence, thinking.

“Forester died the night Sam took those shares,” I said finally. “That doesn’t look good, right?”

“At this point, there’s no reason to think the two are related.” Maggie dipped her head to one side. “But it’s not great.”

“They can’t be related. I mean, to say they’re related would be to say that Sam had something to do with his death. Plus, the autopsy said Forester died of a heart attack.”

Maggie stared at me. I could see the friend, not the attorney. I could see she felt sorry for me. “You told me about the threats Forester was getting,” she said. “Do we know anything more about those?”

“No. But Sam just isn’t that guy. He had no reason to want Forester to give up the reins of his company. Forester was Sam’s biggest client, same as me.”

Maggie was quiet. She blew a strand of hair away from her face.

“What?” I said. “I’m listening.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem like Sam had anything to do with Forester dying.” She paused. “But if I’m a federal prosecutor looking to pin him for embezzlement, I’m sure as hell going to make it sound like he did.”

Instead of being located in the midst of the jostling and crowded Loop, Chicago ’s FBI office was housed on bland Roosevelt Road, in a characterless steel-girded building, as if to give the distinct impression that the agency was separate from the city and would tell you nothing about its secrets.

Maggie and I went through a revolving door marked One Way and stepped into a glassed-in booth with three armed guards.

“Bulletproof,” Maggie said, pointing to the glass. “The whole place is made of it.”

The cold looks of the guards put fear in my belly. Sam, I thought, what have you gotten us into?

“Appointment?” one guard said.

“Andi Lippman,” Maggie answered. She gave both our names.

The guard studied a printout, then stared at Maggie. “You’re not on the list.”

“I’m her lawyer.”

“You’re not on the list,” he repeated. He was a thick man, all muscle, with an expression that was absolutely flat. He reminded me of a dog that was none too smart, although something told me I was wrong about that.

“Well, let’s get me on the list,” Maggie said, “because if I’m not on the list, neither is she.”

Silence from the guards. Irrationally, I felt trapped, nervous.