Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,9
ride.
Nora focused on breathing. This was exactly why she didn’t sleep with people in the Twin Cities. Her cardinal rule, since the day Jim Parrish hired her and gave her a new path, was to never mix the personal and professional. It hadn’t mattered that she’d done the right thing with Sam White; she’d still lost everything—her job, her family, even her childhood had somehow been taken away, the memories fractured and shadowed by the knowledge of how it had all ended. How she had ended it. But Nora wasn’t stupid. She didn’t make the same mistake twice.
When the elevator reached the skyway level, she and Gregg exited. The lunchtime crowd had thinned. Groups of chattering coworkers had given way to suits on their phones, either going to meetings or starting their weekend early. Nora headed west toward Strike’s building with Gregg at her shoulder. He was shorter than Corbett. Whenever she walked through the skyway with her partner, they always looked like the odd couple, but she and Gregg moved smoothly together. Their pace was quick, in sync, and noticing that fact made Nora distinctly uncomfortable.
“Would you have any qualms if I headed this engagement?”
“None at all.” His answer was immediate. “Why do you think I came to you?”
“Do you believe me to be impartial?”
She looked over to see his eyes scanning her face, her hair, as if searching for the right answer, but there was no hesitation in his reply. “Yes.”
A heat rose between them and Nora looked away to find Rose, her homeless romantic, nodding and grinning as they approached. Nora glared at her and shook her head. Rose cackled as they passed.
“If Parrish accepts this assignment, we’ll be investigating you. We’ll be investigating your wife. We’ll turn your company and your lives inside out. Is there anything you want to tell me now? What are we going to find?”
They stopped outside the entrance to Strike. The lunch class she’d missed was just getting out and Nora spotted familiar faces—red, sweaty, and triumphant—leaving the gym. She should have been among them.
“You’re going to find twenty million dollars.”
“In one week? I might catch the thief, but if the money was stolen it could be anywhere in the world by now. Finding the money is impossible.”
“Not for you.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
He moved a few feet down the hall, out of sight of the gym members and staff. “I checked on your company this morning. Your partner Rajesh wasn’t bragging back there. For a small firm, you carry a big stick.” His voice lowered. “And I personally know you are thorough, creative, and attentive to every detail.”
She swallowed and found her mouth had gone dry.
“I need you, Nora.” He reached out and shook her hand—his grip warm yet professional—before leaving to go inside.
Nora walked back into the skyway between their buildings, leaned against the glass as traffic rushed underneath, and put her face in her hands.
What the hell had she done?
* * *
Most people didn’t realize accounting wasn’t about numbers. Anyone could learn the basics of a balance sheet, but an investor wouldn’t buy stock in a company just because some numbers guy said it looked all right. Maybe the numbers guy was a major stockholder who wanted his share price to go up. Maybe he was married to the CFO. Maybe he was an anarchist who liked setting things on fire. Numbers were meaningless without integrity. Stockholders relied on the ethics of accountants, on the work of men and women who counted inventory and visited property holdings to make sure they actually existed, who checked that sales were genuine and invoices weren’t stuffed in a drawer, and to do all that an accountant had to be absolutely neutral, without bias or even the appearance of bias.
Forensic accounting had even more rigorous standards because every testimony became an invitation for attack. Defense attorneys checked Nora’s background on a daily basis. Her identity theft protection software pinged like a heart monitor during big cases, when entire teams of legal interns tried to find even a hint of shade in order to convince the jury that Nora’s testimony was unreliable. They found nothing. Her cardinal rule to dissociate all personal and professional interests had made her into a model investigator. For fifteen years, Nora had thrived on the basis of her integrity, her independence.
But when it came to Strike, she was anything but neutral. And it had nothing to do with Gregg Abbott.
Pushing away from the skyway glass, Nora turned