Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,54

frowned. She didn’t want to tell me.

“Nora.” I fought to keep my voice calm. “You knew this was Logan’s old apartment when you came to my office this morning. You knew she … that it was her, before you even brought me here.” It came out sounding like an accusation, then I repeated it to myself, forcing the words into the air, feeling for the truth in them. “It was her, wasn’t it?”

Nora typed a few final things on her computer before closing it. “The investigation isn’t done yet. We have more work to do before I can confirm that. Do you know where Logan is?”

No. I had no idea where Logan was anymore. I shook my head, fists balling.

“I’ll need to speak with her … about a few things … but my immediate priority is to start tracking the funds. At least we can see where they initially went.”

“What do you mean? The money’s right here.”

“These are only deposit verifications.”

“So you find the account and you find the money. Done.”

Nora gave me a look she probably saved for her son, patient and unbearably patronizing. “I told you, Gregg, that if this was a case of fraud we might catch the thief, but the money itself could be anywhere in the world, hidden in jurisdictions we can’t even touch. This slip,” she lifted the top grease-stained paper, “is just the starting line. Cash moves at the speed of data, again and again. We have no idea where this chase will lead.”

I backed away from the table, and the possibility that twenty million dollars could be lost. Nora had found this much; she would find the money, too. I couldn’t entertain any other scenarios, not now, with the end of the tournament only two days away.

Nora tracked my reaction with an expression I couldn’t name. “You’ve said that Logan had a close relationship with Aaden Warsame.”

“She did.”

“Do you think Aaden would have done anything questionable for her? If she’d asked him to?”

Without intending to, my eyes found the spot on the living room floor, the circle bleached forever lighter than the dirty rust-colored carpet surrounding it. Eighteen years later I could still see, with absolute clarity, that rat-faced intruder who’d broken into this apartment, and his expression when Logan knocked him to the ground. It was all he’d wanted in life, to feel her wrath. And then he’d tried to end it, before her attention wavered. The knife itself was mostly hidden in his hand, the dark seep of blood through his shirt strangely unaffecting, but his face—I understood that look.

“A man Logan never met before tried to kill himself,” I forced myself to move away from the spot, nodding behind me, “right there. At her feet. For her.

“I’ve had to file restraining orders against fans who wanted to be too close, who deluded themselves that they knew Logan, and tried to become whatever might earn her attention. She gets tweeted at a thousand times a day and they all say the same thing: look at me.”

I walked to the area where a normal person would put a couch or a coffee table and glanced at the hooks in the ceiling where the punching bag used to hang, always covered in duct tape because she’d broken it so many times.

“I know how they feel. In or out of the ring, there’s a burning in Logan’s gaze, an intensity. When you have her attention, you have every shred of it. You feel yourself come alive. No one in my life ever looked at me like that before.

“I used to train with her right here. I’d strap on the pads and step into her sights, waiting for her to knock me down.” Slowly, I made the same circuit around an invisible punching bag, hearing the thump of Logan’s gloves, driving and incessant.

“When she hit me, I became someone else, someone more than just another suit hawking products and chasing sales. I became someone worth beating.”

I stopped circling and looked at Nora. She wanted to know if Aaden Warsame would have done something questionable for Logan. Like enter a tournament he wasn’t qualified for, or train sixty hours a week to prove himself? What wouldn’t he have done if she’d asked?

“Aaden had been a fan of Logan’s since the day he walked into the after-school program, and he had her attention. I’m sure he would’ve wanted to keep it.”

I tried to breathe, to steady myself and get control of the situation, but my mind