Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,71
long and unfamiliar, his sneakers gliding like chunky boats on his feet. He ran with ease, darting into the growing shadows. As he turned off on a lesser used path that led deeper into the woods, he paused, crouching inward, and then a ball of light crackled to life in his hand.
“Henry, no!” She sprinted toward him, her heart rate accelerating, but he took off before she could catch up. The artificial fire of the sparkler sizzled and hissed, dodging in and out of the shadows of the trees ahead of her. The forest still stood lush with spring rain, green in every direction, but it only took one stray spark. One dead tree.
Laughing, he trailed the sparkler behind him, an unmoored child on holiday.
Offshore. Holiday. The words pounded in her head. It was still the Fourth of July. Corbett still lay unconscious in the hospital, caught somewhere between dead and alive, between friend and foe. And while she chased her son into the trees, her team was chasing twenty million dollars across the Caribbean.
She couldn’t believe she hadn’t made the connection before. It wasn’t until pacing outside U.S. Bank Stadium while Logan was being questioned by the police that the memory came into focus.
“Where are you going?” her analyst had yelled after her, but Nora had no patience for explanations. She needed action. She needed to be moving forward.
“Stay there!” she shouted before disappearing into the skyway. “Call me when you have Logan!”
Nora had subscribed to the Strike blog when she’d first signed up at the gym for the same reason she subscribed to everything else—as a potential conversation starter for reluctant witnesses. She might have to interview a weight-lifting junior accountant or a finance intern who happened to be a black belt. She hadn’t expected to enjoy the blogs and she certainly didn’t anticipate she’d be checking her inbox the moment she woke up every day.
Logan’s voice became her companion in the predawn mornings when the house was quiet, Mike and Henry still flushed with sleep and oblivious in their beds. She read them over breakfast, in the bathroom, and while letting her car warm up in the wood-shrouded cul-de-sac. Seeing Logan Russo’s name in her unread mail sent a surge of excitement bubbling in her throat, anticipating Logan’s energy, Logan’s anecdotes and humor. The emails were the antithesis of Nora’s day, a brazen blast before she moved on to hours of case files, financials, and court documents. On Nora’s business trips, Logan’s blog was the voice of home. And when Logan traveled, Nora felt like she was with her—even when she went on holiday, like for her fiftieth birthday.
Nora had known, even as her team tried to get confirmation about the online account where Magers Construction had transferred the refunds, that the prize was already gone. She’d thought the only way to follow the money trail was through that online platform, but maybe she didn’t need it at all. Maybe she could already guess where the millions had been sent.
“Did you find it?” Nora had called ahead to the rest of the team still at the Strike office, and burst into the conference room after having run the last few blocks from the stadium. One analyst was scanning two different monitors, while another had pulled up a giant map on a wall screen. All of them seemed distracted, a few red-eyed, and it took Nora a moment to realize they were upset about Corbett. No one knew what she did about her partner.
“ ‘I woke up a few days ago as a fifty-year-old woman in a villa in paradise. That’s not a metaphor. I thought fifty deserved a holiday.’ ” The analyst wiped her face with a Kleenex as she read Logan’s blog entry from January, then frowned at her computer. “Where was she?”
“The Bahamas.” Nora leaned over her shoulder, pointing out the next few lines. “See? ‘Bahama Mamas.’ ‘Pastel tributes to colonialism.’ ”
“That could be virtually any Caribbean island. How do we know we’re not dealing with Nevis?”
“Bite your tongue.” Nora walked over to the map on the smart board. The team had zoomed in to the Caribbean region, the southern hot spots of offshore banking from the United States, far past U.S. jurisdiction. Each island had their own laws and regulations. Some were respectably transparent. Others dwelled in the shadows. Nevis, the country that was barely more than a dot next to the island of St. Kitts, was a bottom feeder in the shadow banking world. They’d have