WHEN GREGG raised his arms and told her to hit him, something inside Nora flared.
All morning, she’d been ignoring her anger, keeping herself and her team working at lightning speed to uncover everything they could find about Magers Construction—the company that had been tricked into diverting almost twenty million dollars of Strike’s money—but she couldn’t completely bury the emotions from last night. Her surreal vStrike fight had already brought up more issues than she could handle, but it paled in comparison to what she’d seen afterward.
Mike kept insisting, even as she was getting ready this morning, that it might not have been Corbett in the alley.
“It was dark. You’d had a few drinks, and you were—apparently—upset.” Her husband’s amusement at her emotional turmoil did nothing to calm her down, and Corbett’s phone was going straight to voice mail now, making it impossible to find out what had actually happened.
She left the house without a word and accelerated too fast out of the neighborhood, almost not braking in time when Henry and his friend biked over to wave goodbye. They both swerved to the sidewalk, narrowly missing her bumper as she screeched to a halt.
Adrenaline flooded her chest, but she forced a smile and a wave, trying to act normal, as though she hadn’t almost run over her own child. The boys hesitantly turned around and returned to wherever they’d been playing, Henry looking back over his shoulder like he was scared she would try to follow them.
She needed Strike. All morning, as her team dove into the company’s headquarters records, her muscles had twitched from lack of use. They’d demanded to be on the other side of the wall, in the gym, driving her fists and feet into the bag. So strange, for someone who’d spent her life running, to feel this craving for the fight.
Which was why, when Gregg raised his hands in the Northeast neighborhood apartment and said “please” in that quiet, desperate voice, her pulse leapt, her hands clenched in anticipation, and she’d let loose every bit of confusion and rage from the past twenty-four hours.
He took it, each punch, each shot of violence, and urged her for more. Her knuckles burned as his palms turned raw and red. His eyes glowed as she pushed him back, advancing.
“Faster, Nora. You can do better than that. Hit me harder. Hit me like you mean it. Hit me—”
She drew back, shifted her weight, and kicked him into the wall. His back thudded against the plaster, sending a surge of triumph through her entire body. It was almost like being Logan.
The thought stopped her cold. “I can’t. I need to …”
She was standing in Logan’s old apartment, inhabiting the space of the woman she’d been mesmerized by for months. Before she could process anything beyond that, Logan’s husband stepped in and kissed her.
He drew her up, hard and tight, inviting her to bruise him in every way possible, and for one mindless moment she did. She let herself go, slipping further into the fantasy. She breathed him in with Logan’s nose, bit him with Logan’s teeth, but when he said her name—“Nora”—the illusion ended. She broke away.
“No. It’s not me.”
Breathing heavily, Gregg ran a hand over his mouth and stepped back, leaning against the wall.
Nora went to the table and put her laptop away. She picked up the stack of deposit slips, straightening them until the edges cut into her hands.
“Do you have any evidence that Logan and Aaden had an inappropriate relationship? Or that she might have had undue influence over him?”
“Other than his suicide note?” Gregg’s voice was uneven.
Nora turned. Halfway between them was the strange circle in the carpet, bleached and blotchy, the place where a crazed fan had intruded on their lives. How many people had thrown themselves at Logan’s feet over the years, all of them delusional, yearning for some imagined connection? How close was Nora coming to that circle?
Swallowing, she said she’d be in touch with her progress, and left Gregg alone in the musty dark.
Nora walked back downtown as fast as she could, crossing the bustling Stone Arch Bridge with the case-clinching evidence of a nineteen-million-dollar fraud tucked neatly in her briefcase. She should have been skipping, fist-pumping, and texting the entire team with the good news. Instead, she wanted to vomit.
She’d just hit a client and then kissed him while imagining herself as another client. Her personal and professional lives, which she’d kept rigidly separate since the day Sam White put a bullet in his head, were careening into each other with breathless velocity. She never should have taken this investigation. Her independence, her entire career, felt on the verge of exploding.
When she reached the south bank where the flour mill graves rusted in the shadow of the bridge, she reached into her briefcase and pulled out the email Inga flagged last night, the key document that unearthed the crime. She had to focus. If she could forget everything that just happened—ignore it, bury it—maybe she could still make it through this case. There were only two days left in the tournament. Win or lose, by the end of the week it would be over.
Nora read the email again, concentrating her entire being on its content.
From: Accounts Payable, Magers Construction
To: Logan Russo
Subject: RE: RE: RE: New Instructions
Dear Ms. Russo,
Great!! We’ll make this change right away!
Regards,
Maggie Smythe
AP Supervisor
Magers Construction
“Make it a great day!”
From: Logan Russo
To: Accounts Payable, Magers Construction
Subject: RE: RE: New Instructions
Hi Maggie,
Yes, thank you for confirming. The new bank info is correct for reimbursements only. All contracts and administrative communication should continue to be routed to the 3rd Avenue address and your regular contacts.
Logan Russo
Strike
From: Accounts Payable, Magers Construction
To: Logan Russo
Subject: RE: New Instructions
Dear Ms. Russo,
We received the below email requesting a change in your remit to information. Please confirm these instructions so we can make the change to your customer profile.
Regards,
Maggie Smythe
AP Supervisor
Magers Construction
“Make it a great day!”
From: Aaden Maxamed Warsame
To: Accounts Payable, Magers Construction
Cc: Logan Russo
Subject: New Instructions
To Whom It May Concern,
Please note the new electronic transfer instructions for all future payments and refunds to be processed to Strike.
Strike Inc.
315 University Avenue SE
Box 0010
Minneapolis, MN 55414
Bank Account 058088438
Routing Number 091900533
These instructions can be confirmed with Logan Russo, General Partner of Strike Inc., copied here.
Best Regards,
Aaden Warsame
Strike
Less than a hundred words total.
A hundred words to net almost twenty million dollars.
Logan’s confirming reply was what had triggered Inga last night, but it wasn’t signs of stress or pressure that the computer had detected in the content of Logan’s email. It was the opposite. After processing hundreds of Logan’s blog posts and direct messages to trainers, Inga had learned the kickboxer’s curse-laden, abrupt, declarative sense of normal. Logan’s typical communication was exactly what Inga would flag as high-risk material in any other investigation, but not here. In this upside-down world, Inga had found the one email that sounded as cool and professional as Nora herself, and flagged it as a glaring anomaly.
Thank you for confirming. The new address is correct.
Nora stared at the signatures. Logan Russo. Aaden Warsame.
At the beginning of the week, if Nora had been told Logan embezzled money with someone’s help, she would have bet on Darryl Nolan. Darryl was the financial expert, the one with the required knowledge to commit fraud, who understood all the ways cash could be diverted, funneled, and hidden. But they’d checked the IP addresses of the emails. Both messages were sent from Strike headquarters while Darryl had been sunning himself on a beach in Florida. The controller, it seemed, was off the suspect list.
But Aaden? Aaden Warsame hadn’t even seemed like a possibility. How had a young fighter, with no business background outside of his mother’s grocery store, written this email?
It was the details, the tiny details that bothered her most.
Box 0010.
It was an apartment building. The appropriate address would be Apt. 10, Unit 10, or even just #10. “Box 0010” skirted the razor-thin line between accurate and misleading. It was close enough to the truth that the postal carrier would know where to deliver the letters, yet presented as infinitely more professional than what the tarnished yellow boxes in the building’s entryway deserved. It carried the tone of a P.O. Box or even a bank lockbox.
He’d also known not to specify the address was for refunds only, which could have raised red flags. He’d left that clarification for Logan to deliver, a substantiated and trusted business owner whose instructions would be taken by a vendor without question.
The whole email was too smooth, and at the same time too blatant. This was a giant middle finger of a scheme, a fraud that begged to be found. No one in their right mind would think they could get away with this.
Nora’s team hadn’t been disturbed by any of these points this morning. They were too busy celebrating.
“Oh my gosh, you were completely right about the Aaden connection.” The lead analyst went on to apologize profusely for questioning Nora’s judgment the day before.
“I’m not sure,” Nora hedged, but no one was listening to her, not when they had a lead.
“The money in his checking account makes sense now.” The analyst jotted each one on the whiteboard, making notes as she went.
$5,000. January. Sweetener. Introducing scheme.
$9,500. February. 50% down payment for agreement to help commit fraud.
$9,500. March. Final payment for services rendered.
“The computers never found any matching withdrawals from Strike’s books. They must have come from a personal account.” The analyst wrote on the side of the board,
LR Account?
“Speculation. There could be a dozen alternate explanations for that money.” Nora argued, even though the analyst’s logic was compelling. The timeline matched. The last deposit had credited to his account just days before he killed himself. And if Aaden had been an honest person, a hard worker and dedicated fighter, the guilt from something like this might have put him over the edge. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d seen it happen.
When Nora reached downtown, she walked into the closest building and made her way through the maze of hallways and bridges connecting the skyscrapers. The skyway lunch counters weren’t even open yet, their day still waiting to begin.
Nora tucked the email away, suspicious of the evidence staring right at her. If Logan Russo had organized this fraud, why had she taken Nora to Aaden’s cubicle yesterday? Why would she ask Nora to look through the dead fighter’s things? Maybe that had all been a distraction and Nora was just too infatuated with Logan, too busy kissing her husband, to see it.
Her phone buzzed and Nora pulled it blindly out of her briefcase, still wrapped up in the two simple emails that had stolen almost the entire tournament prize, the lure of a few well-placed words.
“Hello?”
“Nora!”
She checked the caller ID quickly to confirm the voice on the other end of the line. There was crying in the background, a child’s belligerent wail, but more than that—the hitching lungs and wheezing of someone truly panicked.
“What is it, Katie? What happened?”
“It’s Corbett,” his wife sobbed into the phone. “Oh god, I think he’s dead.”