Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,90
want it touched.”
He leaned against the edge of the doorway, like a coworker who’d stopped to chat. “Unless there’s a reason you don’t want to talk to the police.”
“Did Sara do it? Did you tell her to?”
“What did you do to her, Nora? It’s okay. I’ll understand. No one could understand better than me.” His voice was casual, interested. They could be gossiping over smoothies.
Nora shifted. If she wanted to talk about Aaden, she’d have to begin with Logan. “She surprised me in the woods. I didn’t go there expecting to confront her.”
Gregg nodded, leaning in a fraction, and Nora’s entire body tensed. “You didn’t plan it.”
“No.”
“Sometimes these things just happen. All you can do is pivot, and find a way to keep moving forward. For the business.”
“You think I killed Logan.”
“I have no idea what to think anymore. I’ll be honest, Nora, I always had trouble reading you. The consummate professional. You weren’t the type I usually had to deal with when it came to Logan’s fans, but I guess Celebrity Worship Syndrome can happen to the best of us.”
“I didn’t worship Logan.”
“You felt disconnected. You felt unseen, invisible. When Logan came into your life, you saw all the things you longed to be. Being near her made you feel alive.” His eyes were shining in a way that made Nora want to reach out and shudder at the same time. They pleaded, and they bulged.
Nora backed up as far as possible, until her legs hit the desk. “Which one of us are you talking about right now?”
“What did you do to her in those woods?”
Nora didn’t reply.
“Just give me a hint. Is she above ground or below?”
She swallowed. “I’ll tell you if you answer a question of mine.”
He relaxed again, smiling, which she took for agreement.
“One thing that bothered me was how blatant the scheme was. Twenty million in six months? Someone was going to notice. Even a shitty accountant like Darryl would have caught on sooner or later. The whole thing seemed … novice.”
“Logan didn’t get any degrees in finance. And neither did Aaden.”
“Then there’s the phrase, ‘Please note,’ as in ‘Please note the new instructions for all future payments and refunds to be processed to Strike Inc.’ ” She moved her hands as naturally as possible to brace against the edge of the desk. “That phrase appears three hundred and eighty-four times in your correspondence over the last two years. It appears zero times in Logan’s profile and only once in Aaden Warsame’s. Do you want to guess which email?”
“Please note, Nora, that means nothing.” His voice was even but his jaw tightened and he pushed away from the edge of the cubicle.
“It was too obvious. You didn’t need an elite forensic accounting firm to find this money. You could’ve found it yourself, if you hadn’t been the one who stole it in the first place.”
He took a step closer. “You said it, Nora: it’s not what you know. It’s what you can prove.”
“It was a good plan. Everything in Logan’s name: the email, the accounts, an easy trail of evidence pointing to your wife as an embezzler. Accessing her email would’ve been second nature; you’ve been handling her business for decades. You could’ve forced her out of the company and reinvented your empire with a multibillion-dollar deal waiting in the wings. But you didn’t count on Logan finding a copy of the email. You didn’t know that until we went to her old apartment and saw one of the deposit slips had been balled in the trash.”
“I haven’t heard a question yet.”
“The one thing I still don’t know—the one thing Logan didn’t even know—was whether Aaden was an accomplice or another one of your victims. She tried to investigate the money in his account and got nowhere. There was no evidence either way, but tonight …” Nora looked at the outline of dust on the computer monitor.
“On the night of his death, Aaden badged into the gym, alone, but if he was really alone they would have found his security badge on him, wouldn’t they? He couldn’t have draped it over his computer and walked back into the gym. The door locks from both sides.” She leaned in, face-to-face with him. “Why didn’t you leave it with his body?”
Gregg mirrored her, leaning in until they were only an inch apart. “What did you do with Logan, alone in the woods?”
Nora swallowed. “I wanted her to know what it felt like to be invisible. I wanted her