a minefield. I still had my shoes on, though, and strode over the shards as I shouted for her, straining to keep the rage from leaking into my voice. I checked the bedroom first, the master bath and closet, then back downstairs to the workout room. She wasn’t anywhere.
When I came back to the great room, the other officer was leaning over an area next to the balcony door, his hands gloved, a plastic bag in one hand. Detective Li straightened up and approached me.
“Are you saying you had no idea your house was in this state?”
“I’ve been at the tournament and the office.”
“You haven’t even been home to sleep?” He raised an eyebrow. Sidestepping the crouched officer, I opened the broken door to the terrace. “Logan?”
She wasn’t outside and the ash from this morning, the firework debris, had been blown into unreadable patterns by the wind. I stood for a moment at the edge of the balcony, facing the mill ruins and breathing deep, trying to clear my mind. Where the hell was she?
“Mr. Abbott, can you explain this?”
Forcing my hands not to fist, my face to remain smooth, I turned. The kneeling officer held up the plastic bag, now filled with brown-stained shards. In front of him stretched the trail of Logan’s blood from five days ago, when she’d walked barefoot across glass after threatening me against this exact railing.
I explained it. Not all of it. Not the entire fight word for word, but the more I said, the more I saw how it all looked through their eyes. The broken glass. The bloodstains.
“Where is your wife now?” they asked. They kept asking the same question with different words.
I didn’t know. I had no idea where Logan was. Just like I had no idea where she’d hidden twenty million dollars. Or what she’d done to Corbett MacDermott. The hour was almost up. I had to get back to the stadium.
“She did this,” I repeated over and over, but the truth sounded like a lie, even in my own ears.
NORA
AS NORA confirmed the Nassau account had been emptied and closed, she watched Gregg’s face drain of all color. The possibility that the money might be irretrievably gone obviously hadn’t occurred to him until that moment. He was a salesman, perpetually focused on achieving the endgame, regardless of the odds or cost. Losing was never an option for a salesman.
For an accountant, though, losses were where things got interesting. Nora kept her expression impassive as she asked the Nassau bank to send her records of the outgoing transfers. She needed evidence of the routing information to track the money to the next account, the next shadowy island. As soon as she hung up she got a message from Mike.
Corbett awake. Wants to see you.
Good. She wanted to see him, too.
She fired off a quick reply and told Gregg it was time to look at alternate scenarios to raise cash, but the co-owner of Strike had more problems at the moment than missing money. He rushed out of the stadium to look for Logan, leaving a wake of increasingly upset Strike employees murmuring to themselves.
“She’s not at their house. I already went there and no one answered the buzzer.”
“Has anyone seen her since the meeting yesterday when the police came?”
“She went down for a meet and greet, and then she posted that crazy revolution blog, I guess, but after that …”
Nora wove her way unnoticed around their fringes and slipped out of the room, knowing she was the only person capable of adding the last sighting, the final point on the Logan Russo timeline. It still burned in her mind, sparkler bright, with only the trees and the dying sun for witnesses. It hadn’t been in a ring. No virtual or magnified reality. The end of her Logan fantasy had come differently than she’d expected, if one could assign expectations to these things. Two women had gone into the woods. One came out.
Henry had been waiting for her like a good son, hovering at the edge of their neighborhood with concern squeezing his face.
“Mom, where were you? We’re going to miss the fireworks.”
“I must have lost track of time.”
He drew a breath, the next complaint already bubbling up his throat, then stopped when she reached him and lost the benefit of shadows. “You’re all dirty. What happened?”
“I fell on one of the trails. I’m fine.” Nora didn’t glance down, didn’t stop walking. If she paused to think about what happened in