Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,82
Sara. Still no sign of Logan at the tournament.
“You don’t seem worried about your wife’s whereabouts, Mr. Abbott.”
“Logan’s not missing, not like that.”
“Then where is she?”
She’s rolling in a pile of money somewhere, laughing her ass off.
I made a snap decision. If things progressed the way they were going, I’d have to involve the authorities at some point. It wasn’t the time and place I would choose, but you can’t always control these things. “We’ve had some … theft … at the company. This is highly confidential. I can’t have it leaking onto any social media. But they—the accountants we’ve hired to find the stolen money—they’ve tracked it to Logan.”
The interview took a sharp turn after that. I explained the events of the last week, Nora’s findings, the diverted refunds and empty accounts, while Detective Li and his partner exchanged increasingly meaningful glances.
“So, you believe your wife stole twenty million dollars from her own company—”
“Our company.”
“—jeopardizing this tournament of yours and then just took off into the sunset?”
Pivot. “She’s punishing me. It’s about me, not the company.”
He asked why and I told him “marital problems.” I wasn’t bringing Aaden Warsame into this conversation.
Detective Li picked up the evidence bag lying on the counter, the blood-crusted shards of glass.
“Where are you planning to be tonight, Mr. Abbott?”
“At the tournament, obviously. I should have been there twenty minutes ago.” To clean up Logan’s messes, for—I hoped to God—the last time.
“Contact us if you hear from your wife”—he handed me a card—“and I’m going to ask you to stick around the city until this matter is resolved.”
* * *
I raced back through the Mill District and arrived in time to see the lights dim and hear the cheers rip through the crowd. Logan was supposed to be onstage with the emcee, who instead took the mic alone and moved through opening announcements, doing his best to work the crowd into a fever pitch.
Poor Sara was losing her mind. While the police had been questioning me and poring through my home, she’d seized upon every Strike employee in her path and grilled them about Logan’s whereabouts, leaving hysteria in her wake. By the time I arrived and reined her in, the damage was already done. I was met with questions and stricken faces, trainers who dogged me through the concession and vStrike crowds to recount in mind-numbing detail the last moment they’d spotted Logan.
“It’s fine. Don’t worry.” I methodically soothed and dismissed. “She wanted to hand off the company anyway, remember? We’re just getting a little preview. We’ll get through this.”
But I didn’t know how. None of us did. As the emcee handed things over to the commentators and people flooded the rings, preparing their fighters for the bell, suspicions began landing like dark uppercuts to my gut. I’d wondered why she’d been so visible this week, why she’d planted herself in front of every camera and phone, given a hundred interviews and hugged a thousand fans. Her giant presence chiseled a place into this tournament we couldn’t fill without her, and then it wasn’t enough for her to disappear quietly with twenty million dollars. She’d called the authorities to broadcast her absence. It had to be deliberate. Nothing about Logan happened by chance. She’d never intended to talk to them, to give any information about Aaden or Corbett MacDermott; she’d wanted them to discover she was missing, and incriminate me.
She’d taken the prize. She’d taken the whole goddamn show. She held all the cards and, wherever she was at this moment, she knew it.
The lack of sleep, the frustration and fury threatened to undo me, and I latched on to the one positive voice in my head, the whisper that propelled me through every back-patting, bolstering conversation. Merritt.
I hadn’t known if I could convince Logan to pick Merritt Osborne as the next face of Strike. Aaden’s death, rather than clearing Logan’s tunnel vision, had shut her down completely. Whenever I’d tried to bring Merritt into the conversation, she’d refused to respond. On my last attempt she’d just lifted a single eyebrow and said, “A silver fucking medalist?”
As though being the second best in the world was shameful.
But now, if Logan was gone … the thought suspended, unfinished. I didn’t know how to navigate this night, how to spin what we were going to have to spin, but maybe there was hope. Nora mentioned raising capital. She would get us through this, patch the twenty-million-dollar hole, while Merritt smiled and waved from out front.