Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,63

it happened in a Warehouse District back alley. This is the Mill District. There are restaurants and hotels everywhere.”

“Did you see anything that night, Logan?”

I don’t know why I asked, other than the odd direction of her questions, how she was searching for information that should have only been of trivial concern. It was my first comment since discussing the missing twenty million dollars, and it made the room fall quiet. Even the music and loudspeakers from the exhibition below faded into distant, meaningless noise. Everyone at the table looked up from their screens and notes, caught between my face and Logan’s back, trying to process what exactly I was asking my wife.

The moment drew out and my pulse began pounding in my ears, the blood rush of anticipation for a reply I didn’t know if I wanted. I made myself breathe, made my face impassive.

Finally, Logan turned, and we might have been the only two people in the room. She gazed at me and the dark glint of her lips tipped neither up nor down.

“If I had, I would’ve called the police, like the notice instructed.”

“We certainly appreciate that, ma’am.”

The entire room turned to see two men standing in the doorway. The first flashed a badge, and I recognized the other. From the sudden silence across the table, I knew Logan did, too.

It was the same detective who’d investigated Aaden’s death.

NORA

NORA RARELY visited Cedar-Riverside. What she remembered from her undergraduate days was a transitional neighborhood of thrift shops and storefront restaurants crowded into the shadow of the University’s west bank campus, but that was twenty years ago and long before the streets were rebranded as Little Mogadishu. Immigrants had dominated this part of Minneapolis since the Scandinavians in the late 1800s, and it was currently home to the largest Somali population in North America.

On the morning of the country’s birthday, the sidewalks of Little Mogadishu were bustling. The summer sun magnified the bright colors of women’s hijabs, kids chased each other around with U.S. flags, and men stood chatting and laughing outside coffee shops. Feeling absolutely none of their relaxation, Nora took a deep breath, straightened her blazer, and walked into Halal Grocery.

The store was housed in an old brick building. A woman at the cash register, wearing a black hijab, nodded at her while she helped a customer bag their purchases. To occupy herself, Nora counted inventory and found that the store carried everything from cuts of meat to souvenir Minnesota postcards.

“Do you need help finding anything?”

Nora startled; she hadn’t heard the woman approach, but saw they were now alone in the store.

“Bilan Warsame?”

“Yes?” The woman did a quick scan of Nora from head to toe, probably guessing—accurately—that she was some kind of auditor.

Nora introduced herself and told Bilan she was conducting an investigation, using the fewest and vaguest words possible.

“What are you investigating?”

“I need to ask you a few questions.” Nora pulled out her phone and held it up, showing Bilan the stock photo of Corbett from the Parrish website. “Do you know this man?”

Bilan shook her head as she moved back to the counter. “Are you the police?”

“No, it’s a private matter. I’m trying to understand—”

More customers came in, filling the store with noise, and Nora backed off to let Bilan assist them. She had no idea if she was ready for the answer to her next question.

Last night, when she’d seen the name “Warsame” written on the inside of the MacDermotts’ duffel bag in the hospital waiting room, she’d gone immediately to Katie.

“That?” Corbett’s wife shook her head at the bag like it was a fly buzzing near her face. “I don’t know. It was in the closet one day. I gave it to the kids to put their car trip things in, because”—she started to well up again—“we were supposed to be driving to the North Shore this weekend.”

Mike gave Nora a look that told her she wasn’t helping, but she wasn’t interested in Katie’s emotional well-being at the moment. She moved to the kids and asked a few of the oldest ones. None of them knew where the duffel bag had come from. It wasn’t one of theirs.

Warsame, she’d briefly hoped, might be a more common word than she thought. When she Googled it, though, the only hit was the one she already knew—Warsame was a Somali surname, meaning “good news.”

Good news was in short supply this morning. No one had been able to corner Logan at the tournament last night; the online