Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,57

herself, and flagged it as a glaring anomaly.

Thank you for confirming. The new address is correct.

Nora stared at the signatures. Logan Russo. Aaden Warsame.

At the beginning of the week, if Nora had been told Logan embezzled money with someone’s help, she would have bet on Darryl Nolan. Darryl was the financial expert, the one with the required knowledge to commit fraud, who understood all the ways cash could be diverted, funneled, and hidden. But they’d checked the IP addresses of the emails. Both messages were sent from Strike headquarters while Darryl had been sunning himself on a beach in Florida. The controller, it seemed, was off the suspect list.

But Aaden? Aaden Warsame hadn’t even seemed like a possibility. How had a young fighter, with no business background outside of his mother’s grocery store, written this email?

It was the details, the tiny details that bothered her most.

Box 0010.

It was an apartment building. The appropriate address would be Apt. 10, Unit 10, or even just #10. “Box 0010” skirted the razor-thin line between accurate and misleading. It was close enough to the truth that the postal carrier would know where to deliver the letters, yet presented as infinitely more professional than what the tarnished yellow boxes in the building’s entryway deserved. It carried the tone of a P.O. Box or even a bank lockbox.

He’d also known not to specify the address was for refunds only, which could have raised red flags. He’d left that clarification for Logan to deliver, a substantiated and trusted business owner whose instructions would be taken by a vendor without question.

The whole email was too smooth, and at the same time too blatant. This was a giant middle finger of a scheme, a fraud that begged to be found. No one in their right mind would think they could get away with this.

Nora’s team hadn’t been disturbed by any of these points this morning. They were too busy celebrating.

“Oh my gosh, you were completely right about the Aaden connection.” The lead analyst went on to apologize profusely for questioning Nora’s judgment the day before.

“I’m not sure,” Nora hedged, but no one was listening to her, not when they had a lead.

“The money in his checking account makes sense now.” The analyst jotted each one on the whiteboard, making notes as she went.

$5,000. January. Sweetener. Introducing scheme.

$9,500. February. 50% down payment for agreement to help commit fraud.

$9,500. March. Final payment for services rendered.

“The computers never found any matching withdrawals from Strike’s books. They must have come from a personal account.” The analyst wrote on the side of the board,

LR Account?

“Speculation. There could be a dozen alternate explanations for that money.” Nora argued, even though the analyst’s logic was compelling. The timeline matched. The last deposit had credited to his account just days before he killed himself. And if Aaden had been an honest person, a hard worker and dedicated fighter, the guilt from something like this might have put him over the edge. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d seen it happen.

When Nora reached downtown, she walked into the closest building and made her way through the maze of hallways and bridges connecting the skyscrapers. The skyway lunch counters weren’t even open yet, their day still waiting to begin.

Nora tucked the email away, suspicious of the evidence staring right at her. If Logan Russo had organized this fraud, why had she taken Nora to Aaden’s cubicle yesterday? Why would she ask Nora to look through the dead fighter’s things? Maybe that had all been a distraction and Nora was just too infatuated with Logan, too busy kissing her husband, to see it.

Her phone buzzed and Nora pulled it blindly out of her briefcase, still wrapped up in the two simple emails that had stolen almost the entire tournament prize, the lure of a few well-placed words.

“Hello?”

“Nora!”

She checked the caller ID quickly to confirm the voice on the other end of the line. There was crying in the background, a child’s belligerent wail, but more than that—the hitching lungs and wheezing of someone truly panicked.

“What is it, Katie? What happened?”

“It’s Corbett,” his wife sobbed into the phone. “Oh god, I think he’s dead.”

NORA

NORA RACED to Hennepin County Medical Center, a hospital located only a few blocks from Strike Down and the alley where she thought she’d seen Corbett last night.

Katie fell into her arms as soon as she arrived in the flag-festooned intensive care waiting room.

“Was he mugged? Or hit by a car?” Nora had gotten only garbled information