Tough Justice Series Box Set: Parts 1-8

“I’ve been jogging along these trails for the past five years, and I’ve never seen anything like that poor woman,” he said. “I’ve seen drunks and druggies and homeless people scurrying away as the sun came up, but nothing that even comes close to this.”

“Have you noticed her on the trail when you’ve run here before?” Lara eyed Carlson from the top of his short brown hair to the tip of his light gray running shoes.

The person who found and reported a murdered body was always the first suspect, but she didn’t see a speck of blood or any sign to indicate that he’d had anything to do with the killing.

It would have been difficult to stab the victim and then lean over her to stamp her cheek without getting some blood transference. He also couldn’t fake the ashen color of his face or the utter horror that emanated from his pale gray eyes.

“No, I’ve never seen her before this morning, but I started out a little later than usual today,” he replied. “Just my luck to decide to have an extra cup of coffee and be here a half an hour later than normal.”

“Did you see anyone else on the trail?”

He shook his head. “No, it was just me...and her.” His face took on a new paleness and he looked as if he might puke. “I’ve never seen a dead body before. God, I don’t think I’ll ever get this out of my head.”

She spoke to him a few minutes longer, and then, after getting his contact information, she let him go. She didn’t believe he was the perp. Her gut told her he was just some luckless guy who had happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

By that time the medical examiner had arrived, and she joined Nick who stood several feet away to let Dr. Herman Boze do his job.

“You okay?” Nick asked her.

Lara looked at him in surprise. “I’m fine. Why do you ask?”

“You keep rubbing your arm. Did you bump it or something?”

Lara realized she was rubbing her arm. Over and over again...obsessively...compulsively. She quickly stopped and stared at the stamp on the victim’s cheek. She could just blow Nick off, tell him she’d bumped it and leave it at that, but instead she opted for a little bit of honesty.

“When I was undercover I was tattooed with that same insignia on my arm. The actual tattooing wasn’t so bad, but getting it removed was a long, extremely painful process.”

“I’m sorry you had to go through that,” Nick said softly. There was genuine empathy in his voice and in his dark eyes.

“Yeah, well that was then and this is now,” she replied with a forced toughness in her tone. The last thing she wanted to do was reveal any weakness to anyone, especially her new partner. She didn’t want or need empathy from anyone. What she needed was answers.

It was close to noon by the time the body had been removed and the area had been thoroughly searched by the officers on scene. Dr. Boze’s initial assessment was that she had been stabbed twice in the heart, and her body temperature indicated that her time of death was around six-thirty or so that morning. He’d have more information for them after he conducted a complete autopsy.

“Did you drive here?” Lara asked Nick as everyone began to disperse from the area.

“Yeah, why?”

“I took a cab. Can I catch a ride with you back to headquarters?” Lara asked.

“Sure,” he agreed.

Minutes later they were in his car and headed back to check in on what the team had found out about the new victim. Lara was quiet, still haunted by the vision of the stamp on the young woman’s face.

* * *

When they arrived, only Mei and Ty were at their cubicles working on their computers. Victoria was probably in her office. Cass would be in her tech room where dozens of computer monitors lined the walls.

The area was set up like a pod, with the large open center area holding cubicles that were the agents’ work spaces, and Cass’s room, Victoria’s office, several conference rooms and a break room shooting out like arms from an octopus.

Xander came out of the break room, a coffee cup in his hand. “What’s up?”

“We need a meeting,” Lara said.

Nick knocked on Victoria’s door, and when she answered he requested the team get together in the conference room to discuss the morning activity and share information that everyone had dug up on the latest murder.

It didn’t take long for everyone to be seated at the conference table. Nick and Lara filled them in on what they had discovered.

“What were you able to find out about the victim?” Lara asked Cass.

“She was twenty-three, a grad student at Columbia and lived in an apartment nearby. No criminal record of any kind, and according to the social media I checked, she was a vegan and had a long-term relationship with a boyfriend named William Goldman who works as an investment banker.” Cass looked up from her laptop. “So far she’s clean as a whistle, and it’s hard to believe she’d have anything to do with that scumbag Dunst or any of his creep acquaintances.”

“Mei and I have already interviewed William Goldman,” Ty said. “We met him at his office at the Winthrop Investment Group. He told us that they had been dating for four years, and he appeared genuinely devastated by her murder, said he’d told her time and time again that she shouldn’t run alone in the park at that time of the morning. But she thought he was just being a ‘worrywart’—his phrase.”

“He told us he left his apartment building at around six-forty-five this morning to go to work. Apparently he’s hungry and driven and even works on Saturdays. The doorman at his place confirmed his time of leaving the apartment,” Mei added.

Lara frowned thoughtfully. “There’s no way he could have gone to Central Park, killed his girlfriend at six-thirty and then gotten back to his apartment, cleaned up and dressed for a day of work by six-forty-five.”

“And the doorman was on duty all evening the night before and swears William didn’t leave the building at all until he left for work this morning,” Mei replied.

“Apparently William is a creature of habit. He works six days a week, spends most of his evenings with his girlfriend in his apartment and then on the weekends they go out to dinner on Saturday nights. We went over his whereabouts for the last two weeks, and nothing unusual jumped out at us. We’ll continue to work to confirm his movements in the days and weeks before the murder, but I’d say he’s pretty well cleared off the suspect list,” Ty said.

“I not only didn’t find anything to connect her to Dunst. I also didn’t find any connection to the Moretti organization on any level,” Cass added.

“Then why was her face marked with the same stamp that was found in Dunst’s pocket?” Nick asked and looked around the table.

“And who murdered her? She has to have some sort of connection to Dunst or Moretti. Otherwise none of this makes any sense,” Ty added.

“Nothing has made sense since I went out on that ledge to talk Dunst down yesterday morning,” Lara replied. Had it only been yesterday? It felt like a lifetime ago that she’d been talking to Sean Dunst while an unusually cold September breeze blew through her to chill her bones.

Xander had been silent throughout the conversation, occasionally sipping coffee from a black-and-gold ceramic mug. He set his mug down and leaned forward.

“Why are we all wasting our time digging into the vic’s background and chasing down alibis for her boyfriend or anyone else? We all know why she was killed. It was because her name was Lara. Moretti now knows that Lara is FBI and busted him, and now he’s playing with her. He’s having some fun at her expense.” Xander leaned back in his chair and took another sip from his cup.

Lara shot a quick glance at Nick, who was sending a death glare at Xander. “Yeah, right, that’s hilarious,” Nick said, his deep voice sounding oddly strained.

“I don’t understand,” Lara said, her eyes still on Nick. “I thought her name was L-A-U-R-A.” She hadn’t seen the vic’s ID, only Nick had looked at it.

Xander shook his head. “Her name was L-A-R-A. Just like yours.”

“I didn’t want that information to cloud your mind while we did the initial investigation,” Nick replied, his gaze not quite meeting Lara’s.

Wrong answer. Lara averted her gaze from him as a fiery anger lit inside her. How could she trust a partner who kept things from her? He’d just committed his first sin against her—withholding information. If he thought she would tolerate crap like that, then he was sadly mistaken.

“But Dunst was killed before Lara’s face was splashed all over the news,” Mei exclaimed. “Dunst had to have known Lara was in New York before that.”

Xander frowned. “You’re right.”

“I’d say right now we’re still in the dark,” Ty replied.

Lara was horrified at the thought that the poor young woman on the jogging trail might have been murdered...stabbed in the heart, simply because she had the misfortune of having the same spelling of Lara’s name.

Was the knife through the heart a special message just for Lara? Was Moretti reaching out despite his prison bars to taunt her, to torment her?

“Lara, I’m sorry,” Nick said.

“Bite me,” she replied vehemently without looking at him.

Victoria spoke for the first time. “Everyone calm down and play nice.” Lara knew the words were meant specifically for her. She stared down at the table as Victoria continued. “Maybe it’s time for Mei and Ty to go to Long Island and feel out some ofMoretti’s crew incarcerated there and see if they might know something about what’s going on now.”

“If Moretti knows about what’s happened, if he’s somehow responsible for it, then he is probably expecting a visit from somebody from the FBI,” Lara said and looked up at Victoria.

“He’s probably expecting a visit from you,” Xander replied.

The thought of facing Moretti again was like a fist punch to Lara’s stomach. She’d thought she was done with all of this. She’d hoped to never have to talk to or see any of the members of the syndicate again...especially Moretti.

“If he’s hoping for a visit from Lara, do we really want to give him what he wants?” Nick asked. “Or is it better to leave him twisting in the wind and frustrated for a while?”

“I think Mei and Ty talking to his operatives is a good place to start, but if Moretti wants to talk to or see me, then I think maybe it’s better to just let him wait a bit,” Lara said.

She wasn’t sure if her decision was what was best for the team or because of her reluctance to have anything to do with the man who had done so much damage to so many people, the man who was a master manipulator and the face of evil.

“Then for now we wait on having any contact with Moretti,” Victoria replied.

“Let’s just hope there’s not another victim while you’re waiting,” Xander said to Lara.

Jerk. She glared at him.

Still, she could only hope for the same thing. If indeed this was all tied to Moretti, she definitely didn’t want anyone else getting killed or hurt if his ultimate intended victim was her.

She successfully fought against the shiver that threatened to waltz up her back at the very real possibility that Moretti was pulling strings and playing sadistic games to make sure that she was utterly and completely destroyed.

CHAPTER FIVE

“You should have told me.” Lara glared at Nick as the others left the conference room. “You should have immediately filled me in that her name was spelled the same as mine. You shouldn’t have waited for me to find out in front of everyone else.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I probably should have told you immediately, but I didn’t want to have your brain go off in the weeds somewhere while we were conducting the initial investigation. If it was a bad call, then I really am sorry.”

His apology sounded sincere, as it had the first time he’d told her he was sorry, but Lara was still pissed. It was information she’d needed to know. It cast the murder in an entirely different light.

“It was a bad call,” she replied tersely. “Just don’t let it happen again. Don’t try to protect me, Nick. I don’t need it and I don’t want it.”

“Got it,” he replied. He left the conference room, and Lara remained behind, alone for a moment. Get it together. Keep it together. They still didn’t know for sure that Moretti was behind everything. They had too many questions and far too few answers to know for certain just what had begun and where it might go. The one thing she was sure of was that the dead jogger that morning wasn’t the end of things. She feared it was just the beginning.

She left the conference room, but instead of heading to her own cubicle to write up the necessary reports on the morning murder investigation, she headed toward the tech room to check in with Cass. As difficult as the past two days had been on Lara, they had to be doing a major number on Cass, as well. Cass’s younger sister, a troubled nineteen-year-old named Allie, had been missing for a year until her body had been found in a Chicago dumpster three years ago with the MM tattoo on her hip.

It was believed that she’d been trafficked, controlled by a drug addiction and put out to prostitute for the syndicate and then was killed because she’d tried to escape.

The discovery of her body and the obvious ties to Moretti had come as Lara was undergoing her training to infiltrate the syndicate. Lara had vowed to Cass that she’d do everything she could to bring down Moretti and get justice for Allie.

Cass was a tough cookie, but her baby sister, Allie, had been her weakness. She’d been relentless in her search for her sister for the year that Allie had been missing and nearly destroyed when her body had finally been found. Lara knew those had been the darkest hours of Cass’s life.

Lara entered the room that was a teenage video-game-playing boy’s wet dream. Computer monitors filled one entire wall, with Cass behind a large desk operating all of them with lightning fast-moving fingers on several keyboards.

“Hey,” Cass said as she looked up when Lara entered the room and closed the door behind her. Cass pulled off a set of bright pink earbuds, and they landed on her upper shoulders like a colorful half-necklace around her neck.

“Hey back,” Lara replied. “I just thought I’d check in with you and see if you were doing okay. How are you holding up?”

Cass took off her bright purple-rimmed glasses, rubbed her eyes and then put her glasses back on. “I’m sure I’m as okay as you are right now. It’s just a bitch being pulled back into the muck of this crap. I thought we’d both put Moretti and all of that behind us. I never dreamed we’d be dealing with it all once again.”

“We still don’t know for sure that we’re dealing with Moretti again,” Lara said. The words rang discordantly in the small room.

A framed photo on the desk caught her attention. It was a picture of Allie. In the photo Allie’s long flame-colored hair was in charming disarray. She wore not only heavy black eyeliner but also sported several eyebrow piercings, a small lip ring and a Marilyn Monroe stud in her lower right cheek.

She’d been an achingly young, beautiful and confused girl who had gotten mixed up in the wrong crowd and was now dead. She’d been murdered and then dumped like common trash.

Cass noticed Lara looking at the framed photo, and she picked it up, her features softening as she looked at it. “Next week would have been her twenty-third birthday,” she said, her voice thick with suppressed emotion. “But, this is who she will always be to me, frozen in time at just nineteen years old. I’ll never get the chance to see who she might have become, what she might have accomplished if she’d lived longer.”

Cass closed her eyes for a long moment, and her features radiated a flash of pain that resonated deep inside of Lara. Cass’s eyelids snapped back open, and she set the photo back on the desk. Any softness that had momentarily swept over her features was gone, replaced by a sharp hardness in her eyes and a firm set of her jaw.

“I’m sorry, Cass. I wish we would have found her sooner. I wish we could have saved her. But we got Moretti once, and if he’s in any way responsible for what’s happening now, we’ll find the people working for him and get them, too.” Lara’s gut tightened. “I swear to you we’ll get them all this time.”

Cass nodded curtly, and then turned her attention to the computers in front of her. It was an obvious dismissal, and Lara left the room to the sound of fingernails clicking away at the keys.

* * *

Nick knew he’d screwed up. Lara sat next to him at her cubicle, and he could feel the simmering tension that indicated she was still angry at him.

Initially when he’d seen the identification of the dead jogger, he’d tried to write off the spelling of her name as a strange coincidence, but his gut had told him it was probably much more than that.

He hadn’t wanted to muddy the investigation by being specific about the victim’s name at the scene. He hadn’t wanted Lara to jump to conclusions until they’d conducted the on-scene investigation. But, if truth be told, he’d also not mentioned the spelling in an effort to protect his partner for as long as he possibly could. It had been a bad call, and he should have known better.

The problem was he didn’t know better even after spending most of the day yesterday with her. In fact, he had serious doubts as to whether they could work together effectively or not.

His first reaction upon meeting her was that she was hot as hell. She had a taut body, tall and lean, and her green eyes had held a keen intelligence.

But she definitely had sharp, brittle edges. Her lips thinned in distrust far too often, and her eyes were filled with dark secrets. She was prickly and hard to read...not exactly stellar characteristics for a new partner. After over a year in hiding, was she really ready to be back on the job? He just wished he could get into her head a little bit.

On impulse he got out of his chair and walked over to Victoria’s office. He knocked and then entered and closed the door behind him.

Victoria watched him as he sat in the chair opposite her desk. She leaned back in her chair and stared at him expectantly. “What’s on your mind, Nick?”

“My new partner.”

“What about her?”

Nick leaned forward and raked a hand through his hair. “I’m not sure if I can work with her. She’s completely closed off, and it’s obvious she doesn’t trust me at all.”

Victoria’s eyes narrowed slightly. “It’s been less than two days. Figure it out, Nick. We’ve just been handed a high profile, very public case, and I need everyone to work together as a unit. We don’t have time for this. I assigned Lara as your partner, and that isn’t going to change. You’re a smart man, Nick. Make it work.”

Nick stood, feeling slightly foolish that he’d even voiced any concerns. He should have given it more time. The last thing he wanted was for Victoria to believe he was a shit-stirrer. This wasn’t the first time in his life that he knew the best course of action was to keep his head down and deal with whatever. He tightened his jaw as inner demons attempted to raise their heads.

“Consider that this conversation never happened,” he said.

“I’ve already forgotten it,” Victoria replied and focused her attention back to her computer screen.

He left the office and returned to his cubicle, irritated with himself. Partnerships took time to build, and he’d only known Lara for a little over a day. Be a professional. Make it work, he told himself.

He thought of earlier that morning when she’d rubbed her arm as if it had ached. She’d been tattooed by the syndicate, claimed as one of their own and then had to endure the painful process of getting that tattoo removed. At least he could admire the inner strength she had to possess, a strength that had probably gotten her through the kind of horrors he couldn’t imagine. He had been in on major drug and gun deals, but human trafficking, especially children, took it to a whole other level.

He leaned over toward her. “Lara, can you give me a time line as to when you might stop being mad at me?”

She grabbed his wrist and turned it so that she could look at his watch. “Give me another five minutes or so, and we should be good.” She dropped his wrist and returned to her computer work.

“Got it,” he replied and returned to his own computer where he was typing in a report from the morning activities. His report would be added to Lara’s and go into an official file of the murder of Lara Bowman.

Nick had been to a lot of murder scenes in his career, but there had been something particularly tragic about a pretty young woman with her chest covered with blood and the morning sun shimmering off her blond hair and delicate features.

Was it possible that somehow Moretti was orchestrating death and destruction from his jail cell? Had Lara Bowman been a hit to shake up his partner? That’s exactly what he hadn’t wanted in her head as they had processed the scene.

Now he couldn’t get it out of his head. What connection could Dunst have had with Lara Bowman? On the surface they lived in totally different worlds. Who’d had Dunst under their control? Who was giving the orders and who had killed the man with a single shot between the eyes?

Had that same person killed Lara Bowman, and was it really possible she’d been killed only because she had the misfortune of spelling her name the same as his partner?

The team had their work cut out for them. But that’s why they’d all been chosen, to work the difficult cases. With his own personal dark family history he needed this job to work out, and once again he regretted his impulse to speak to Victoria about Lara. It had been a stupid move, and Nick didn’t consider himself a stupid man.

Hopefully Mei and Ty could get some answers when they went to the federal maximum security prison located in Selden, Long Island.

Moretti and his crew had been in prison for well over a year now. Maybe one of the low-level creeps would be willing to trade a little information about what was going on for a bit more time in the yard or extra phone time or whatever. There was always a snitch somewhere in the crowd; it was just a matter of finding them and offering the right price to get them to talk.

If any of them had information...if Moretti was really behind these latest crimes, then hopefully they could tap into a rat to find out what they needed. There was no question that Dunst hadn’t been acting on his own. The sniper bullet between his eyes said otherwise.

The murder of an innocent young girl, a sniper shot to the forehead of a low-level drug dealer and a stabbing of a beautiful young woman on a jogging trail...how were they possibly connected?

His stomach growled, reminding him that it was well past lunchtime, and he hadn’t had a chance to eat breakfast that morning. He glanced at his watch. Seven minutes had passed since he’d last spoken to Lara.

He pushed his chair away from his desk and leaned toward her once again. “I have an idea.”

“That’s novel.” She didn’t bother to look at him.

“Very funny. I was thinking maybe we’d grab something to eat and then head back over to the hotel where Dunst died.”

“And why would we do that?” She turned in her chair, and her green eyes stared at him without emotion.

“Because I’m starving and I’ve been reading over the initial reports that NYPD sent us when Dunst was killed, and I can’t find any interview with the doorman. And how did Dunst afford to stay in a place with a doorman? He used cash, but from where? The police interviewed the manager who was on duty at the time and several hotel patrons and other staff, but not the doorman.”

“And doormen usually know more about people than anyone else in a building.” She frowned thoughtfully. “Okay, we can grab a hot dog off the street truck at the corner and then head back over to the hotel and see if any information was missed.”

“You eat dirty water dogs off street trucks?” He looked at her incredulously.