Tough Justice Series Box Set: Parts 1-8

“Why don’t we have a complete update at seven in the morning?” Victoria said. “Of course, if anything comes up in the meantime, let me know.” With that the meeting ended. Mei and Ty left to go back to the prison to finish up interviews. Xander was going to check with more friends and relatives of Lara Bowman to see if anything connected her to Dunst.

Cass planned to stay in her tech room and monitor crimes around the surrounding areas to see if anything that might be tied to what they were dealing with popped up in any other part of the city or back in Chicago.

Nick and Lara agreed it was time to talk with Tina’s parents. They headed back to Brooklyn, neither of them speaking on the ride.

Lara spent the time steeling herself for talking to grieving parents who had just laid their only child to rest the day before.

She didn’t deal well with emotions, her own or other people’s, and she knew there was no way this wasn’t going to be an intense, emotional interview.

She pulled the collar of her suede coat closer around her neck despite the fact that the temperature in the car was just fine. It was that damned inner chill that she’d been unable to shake since the moment she’d heard about the ink pad and stamp in Dunst’s pocket.

She glanced over at Nick. His taut jaw and the faint throb of a vein at his temple let her know that this was an interview he’d like to skip, as well.

There was no skillful way to interrogate grieving parents. There were no words to fix their world that had exploded apart with the untimely death of their child, in this case an only child.

They hadn’t called ahead. They’d been afraid that John and Heather Cole might refuse to meet with them. The last thing they’d want to do was relive the nightmare, but no stone left unturned, Lara reminded herself. No matter how difficult it might be for everyone involved, they all would have to sit through questioning.

Although the Cole brownstone was only a couple of blocks away from Dunst’s, the difference in the neighborhoods was like night and day. The street where the Coles lived was clean, the houses neatly painted, with many of them sporting the last of late fading summer flowers in window boxes or along the walkways.

Dunst’s street was for criminals and lowlifes; this area was for families and people who shared a pride of ownership and communal bonds.

They found a parking space two houses down from the Coles’ place and got out. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon; the autumn air was warm enough that several people sat outside on their stoops, and one woman was pulling weeds in what was left of a flower garden.

They all eyed Nick and Lara with suspicion as they climbed the steps to the Cole house. “Are you ready for this?” Nick asked.

“No.” Lara knocked on the door.

The woman who answered wore grief like a heavy shroud. Her shoulder-length brown hair was lank, her blue eyes swollen and red. Lara flashed her badge, and immediately Heather Cole backed away from the door.

“John,” she called, her voice on the edge of hysteria as her entire body began to shake. “John!”

John Cole was a big man, his grief less on display until you looked into the torturous depths of his hazel eyes. He instantly placed a supporting arm around Heather’s shoulders, as if to shield her from whatever might come.

“Everyone wants to talk to us now, but where was everyone when we first reported Tina missing?” His voice was gruff and filled with a barely suppressed anger.

“We’re very sorry for your loss, and we know how difficult this all has been for you, but we need to ask you some questions,” Nick said with a softness that surprised Lara and made her immediately decide that he would definitely take lead on this particular interview.

John heaved a deep sigh and then motioned them to follow him and his wife into the living room. John and Heather sat side by side on a floral sofa. Nick sat in a matching chair across from them, and Lara found herself drawn to a large bookcase that took up one wall in the room.

She was vaguely aware of Nick asking questions while she stared at the array of photos that surrounded the television on the shelves.

An ornate silver frame held a picture of John and Heather on their wedding day, both looking painfully young and blissfully happy. There was a picture of Tina getting on a school bus. She’d been brown-haired and blue-eyed just like her mother and had a beautiful smile that would light up any room.

The photos were the chronicles of the life of a beloved child. First day of school, first missing tooth, a romp at the beach...each picture was like a small dagger plunged into Lara’s heart.

There would be no more photos to add to this particular collection. There would be no first date or prom, no first day at college or any other momentous occasions frozen in time by a camera.

Her gaze fell on a photo of Heather holding a newborn Tina wrapped in a pink blanket. Lara stiffened, drinking in the picture and easily imagining the softness of the blanket, the sweet scent and the soft coos of a baby held in loving arms.

She reeled away from the pictures, unable to stand looking at another one. Nick was showing John and Heather a photo of Lara Bowman. “Has either one of you ever seen this woman before?” he asked.

They both looked at the picture and then shook their heads. “Did she have something to do with Tina’s kidnapping?” Heather asked in a faint, trembling voice as she swiped a tear from her cheek. “I mean, we know now that Sean Dunst actually took Tina, but did this woman have a hand in it, too?”

“No, nothing like that. She’s another victim. She was found murdered yesterday morning on a jogging trail in Central Park,” Nick explained.

John frowned. “Then what does she have to do with what happened to Tina?”

“We’re trying to tie together several cases but can’t really tell you any more than that,” Nick replied.

“Nobody can tell us anything,” John said, his anger back in his voice. “Nobody can tell us why this Dunst person chose Tina or why he held her for a two whole weeks before killing her. Was she specifically chosen, or was she just so cute he couldn’t resist her when he saw her?”

“She was such a good girl.” Heather began to rock back and forth, tears oozing from her eyes. “She never gave us any trouble. Before she’d leave for school each morning she’d tell me she loved me much much. ‘I love you much much, Mommy.’ That’s what she’d say every day. Now I’ll never hear her sweet little voice again.”

Out. Lara needed out.

No matter how thick she’d believed her defenses to be, this house, this very room held too much raw grief. It was strangling her, and she couldn’t draw enough air. She shot Nick a quick glance and then left by the front door. She stood on the stoop and drew in deep breaths in order to get hold of herself.

Loss pierced through her like a jagged dagger. Her chest ached as if she’d received the stabbing knife wounds that had stolen the life from Lara Bowman.

Was Lara at the center of all this? Were these deaths happening because of her? No, she couldn’t think that way; otherwise she’d lose her mind. They’d figure this out. They’d catch the people responsible. Failure simply wasn’t an option.

She took another deep breath and drew on the place inside of her that held no emotion, the place of toughness that was her strength. While undercover she’d seen plenty of young victims, and she’d had to stuff her feelings away in a place where they couldn’t be accessed. It had been the only way for her to survive.

By the time Nick finally joined her on the stoop she had managed to get herself under tight control again.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she snapped sharply and hurried down the stoop to his car. His simple question had managed to twist emotions and feelings she didn’t want to possess all out of whack again.

She’d believed her emotions had died first in the year undercover and then in the time that she’d spent in the safe house. After all she had done, after everything she had seen while undercover, she’d needed to numb herself in an effort to stay sane. It was still a coping mechanism that usually served her well.

They got into the car, and thankfully Nick remained silent. Lara had gone to the dark side of her mind, and at the moment she didn’t want any intrusion. Images from the past ripped at her soul as she lost a battle to clear her mind.

By the time they’d driven for a few minutes, she looked out of the window and frowned. “Where are we going?” They were headed toward the East Village, not back to the agency.

“Just trust me,” he replied.

She looked at him warily and sat forward, the seat belt cutting into her chest. At the moment she was too fragile to trust anyone. “Nick, you’d better tell me right now where you’re taking me before I open the door and bail.”

“Take it easy, Lara,” he said with a touch of irritation. “I’m taking you someplace where we can have a beer or two and kick back and relax for a little while. I think we’ve both earned it after this last interview.”

She leaned back and drew in a deep breath. God, she’d stab somebody in the eye right now for a cold beer and a chance to clear her mind.

He parked along the street in front of a small pub named O’Toole’s. “My apartment building is on the next block. I come here often just to unwind,” he said as they walked toward the front door.

Inside the place was relatively small. The booths had red leather seats that matched the stools in front of the long dark wooden bar. It was one of those neighborhood joints where everyone knew your name, and on this Sunday afternoon there were only two men seated at the bar watching a muted television showing a football game.

U2 played softly overhead as Nick led her to a booth where he slid into one side, and she slid into the other. Immediately a saucy red-haired young woman with a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of her nose appeared at the side of their booth.

“Hey, Nick,” she said and then offered Lara a friendly smile. “What can I get for you two?”

Within minutes they each had a frosty mug of beer in front of them. Tension still knotted in the pit of Lara’s stomach from the visit to the Coles. She wasn’t sure if having a beer with Nick was a good idea or not. But, she definitely wasn’t ready to go home to her apartment and be alone with her thoughts.

“Tough interview,” he said and took a drink of his beer.

“The worst,” she agreed. “Thanks for doing it. I hate having to talk to people who have lost their children.” She took a long draw of the beer. “One of the horrible things of working undercover in the Moretti organization was knowing that he was trafficking children and not being able to do a damn thing about it without blowing my cover.”

“How did you manage to hook up with the organization in the first place?” His dark eyes gazed at her curiously.

Lara leaned back in the booth and took another drink of the beer before replying. Memories of that time rose up to form a lump in the back of her throat. She coughed and swallowed hard against it.

“The FBI did a great job creating an alias for me, complete with a background as a minor arms runner in Chicago. I spent a couple of weeks hanging out in a bar that I knew several members of the Moretti syndicate frequented, and it was there I connected with the organization and was taken in, running guns for them.”

She paused to take another drink and then continued. “I’m sure I was thoroughly checked out before being brought onboard. The FBI created a life for me that included an arrest for illegal gun sales. According to the fake records, the charges were dropped due to lack of evidence, but it was enough to get me into the organization. Then it was just a matter of time, and slowly gaining everyone’s trust. I ended up working for the most reprehensible people who were doing terrible things, and I also discovered some of them had dualities to their personalities.” She finished her beer in two deep swallows. Don’t think about Andrew. Not here, not now. Not ever.

“Yeah, but it’s not like a trained, professional agent like you would be taken in by some stupid sob story from drug dealers and human traffickers.” Nick gestured the waitress for another round of beers.

“I never lost sight of the ultimate goal, but I’ll admit that a few of the people got a little bit under my skin with their stories. Like there was one drug courier who got into the business because his son needed expensive cancer treatments, and he needed cash to pay the medical bills.”

She stopped talking as the waitress delivered their drinks. When the woman had left their booth Lara took a sip of the fresh beer and then shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about all of this anymore. We’ve got enough to deal with in the here and now.”

For a long moment she was mired in the events of the past couple of days. Little Tina’s murder, Dunst’s execution and Lara Bowman sprawled dead on a jogging trail...an upward spiral of anger filled her.

“I’ll tell you what will really piss me off,” she finally said aloud. “If we find out that Lara Bowman was killed only because she shared the same spelling of her name as mine.”

A grad student, working to stay healthy, a woman with a bright future ahead of her and a man who had loved her...her life snuffed out by a knife in the heart because she had the misfortune to be named Lara. A heavy weight sat in Lara’s stomach.

Again she was plagued by doubts. Was she smart enough to handle what might be coming her way? Was she really competent to do the job?

She sighed and fought against an encroaching darkness from the past that threatened to consume her.

Nick was silent for several long minutes and then finally spoke. “Five years ago my partner was killed because I wanted a sandwich.” His deep voice held a hollowness that rang a like chord inside her.

“Jimbo, that’s what everyone called him,” Nick continued. “He was a big man, with an even bigger heart. Everyone loved Jimbo. He was constantly dieting, and on that particular night the last place he wanted to stop was at a deli shop, but I insisted. It was stupid and selfish, but I told him just to wait in the car, and I’d run in and grab my sandwich. I’d just paid for my order when I heard the gunshot.”

He stopped talking for a long moment and then finally continued, his eyes focused into his mug. “Some bastard had crept up on the car and shot him through the head. He never had a fighting chance. We didn’t catch the shooter. We believed it was probably somebody we’d arrested at some point or another. Jimbo was dead because I wanted a damned pastrami on rye.” He looked up at her with haunted eyes.

She didn’t speak. There was nothing she could say. Lara knew all about guilt, and there was never anything anyone could say to make it go away. Something like that was a mark on your heart forever.

If his story was even true. Maybe he’d just concocted it in an effort to create a bond with her. Maybe it was an attempt to manipulate her into sharing her own deepest, darkest secrets.

“Loss is always tough,” she said.

He eyed her with open speculation. “I guess you learned that when you were young, with your mother’s murder.”

His words ripped off the scab that was over the old wound in her heart. Lara stared down into her own mug as memories of her mother played through her mind.

“She was an amazing person. She was beautiful and loving, and nothing was the same when she was gone.” She picked up her mug and took a drink in an effort to dislodge the lump that had once again risen in the back of her throat.

She rarely accessed memories of her mom because it hurt too much, and she had so many questions about the senseless crime. “What about your parents?” she asked in an effort to take her mind off her own pain.

Nick’s features tightened. “I’m not close with my father, and my mother is in hospice battling cancer.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

He shrugged, his dark eyes unreadable. “It’s life, right. You don’t have to like it. You just have to deal with it.”

The problem was that deep in her heart Lara wasn’t sure she was dealing appropriately with anything. Although she sensed she and Nick had more in common than she’d initially believed, she still was afraid to trust him.

She took another drink of her beer and then scooted out of the booth. “I need to go.”

“But it’s still early,” he protested.

“I’ve got some things to do...personal things,” she replied. Just as she’d needed to escape the Cole house earlier, a driving desire to get away from Nick filled her.

He got up, as well. “Then I’ll drive you home.”

She waved him back down into the seat. “Don’t worry about it. Finish your beer and relax. I’ll just get a cab.”

The minute she stepped out of the pub a new overwhelming desire struck her. It was just after four in the afternoon, and if she hurried she could manage to get there before darkness fell.

Don’t do it, a little voice whispered inside her head. But she rarely listened to the voice that held good sense, and she knew better than to try to stanch what had suddenly become an obsessive need.

All she had to do was get home, grab her blond wig and fake identification, and she would be on her way to a place she wasn’t supposed to go, to a place that called to her with a primal need she couldn’t ignore.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The long blond wig and heavy makeup transformed Lara. She stared in her bathroom mirror and tried to talk herself out of going, but it was no use.

She needed to go, even though she knew it was dangerous, even forbidden. “Just be careful,” she whispered to her reflection. She whirled away and left the bathroom, eager to get on with it despite any misgivings.

With a fake identification and matching credit card in her pocket and an empty briefcase in hand, she left her apartment. Jerry, the doorman, didn’t blink an eye. He knew she was an FBI agent, and he never asked questions. They did have an agreement that if anything strange happened concerning her apartment, then he was to contact her immediately.

She headed toward the nearest subway and descended the stairs, her mind carefully schooled not to think. She didn’t even want to try to talk herself out of what she was going to do.

She rode the subway until the second stop and then exited and went up to the street. From there she caught a bus, always vigilant for anyone who might be following her. She made no eye contact with anyone and had changed into a white blouse, a brown pair of slacks and a tweed coat. She looked like any other city businesswoman just trying to get ahead by working on the weekends.

It had been speaking to Tina’s parents, seeing the photos of the child they had lost that had amped Lara for this secretive trip. She had to check...she had to make sure everything was okay.

It was a drive she’d only made three times before, and nobody knew about her trips. As far as she was concerned, nobody ever had to know. She rode the bus for twenty minutes and then departed it and hailed a cab to LaGuardia Airport.

Each time she’d made this trip she always varied her mode of transportation, either coming to LaGuardia or to Kennedy airport to rent a car. She hoped to make it virtually impossible for anyone to tail her.

Once inside the airport it only took minutes for Ramona Wendall to rent a sedan and head out for the hour and a half drive to the small upstate town of Maywood, New York.

These covert trips always balled a fist of anxiety in her stomach, and this afternoon the knot was particular tight as her head continued to fill with visions of Tina and thoughts of the conversation she’d shared with Nick.

Nobody except for Victoria knew the true hell that she had gone through while undercover. The things she had seen, the things she had done, would haunt her for the rest of her life.

Even though she had done the right thing, there was a piece of her that had been sacrificed in the process.

She glanced in her rearview mirror often, but was certain that she hadn’t been followed. The farther she got from the city, the prettier the drive became. The road narrowed to two lanes, and dense stands of trees glowed red and gold and brilliant orange, their leaves dancing in a light breeze.

Under different circumstances she might have found the drive relaxing, but there were few things or places in her life where she ever found true peace.

Since the time of her mother’s murder her life had pretty much sucked. Not that she was the type to wallow in self-pity. Rather, the loss of her mother and the unsettling thoughts of wondering why she’d been murdered had created a burning anger inside Lara and had shaped the person she’d become.

She’d taken her anger and transformed it into drive and ambition, into the desire to be the kind of FBI agent people respected. Lara’s mission was to get as many murderers and other criminals as possible locked away for as long as possible.

Ultimately it had been the Moretti case that had really changed her. It had hardened her, and she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to fully trust anyone again. She was positive that the experience had made it impossible to go back to whoever she had been before going undercover.

Her thoughts turned to Nick. She’d have to stay on her toes where he was concerned. She’d already told him far more about her life and about being undercover than she’d ever intended.

He was way too easy to talk to, and he’d shared a piece of his own past tragedy with her in an obvious attempt to bond. She would only allow him to get so close, and then she’d shut it down. She had secrets that, if revealed, would not only destroy her professionally and personally, but would also endanger others. She simply couldn’t risk it.

As she saw the sign indicating that she was about to enter the small town of Maywood, her fingers tightened around the steering wheel, and a new burst of anxiety again bubbled up inside her.

With everything that had happened over the past couple of days, she just needed to assure herself that everything was still okay in Maywood.

She took a right off Main Street and then traveled several blocks and took another right that placed her on a beautiful tree-lined street where the homes were modest but well-kept. The lowering sun cast the houses in warm golden shades.

Her heart drummed a frantic rhythm as she drove down the first block and then halfway down the second. She pulled up to park across from a cheerful yellow house and expelled a pent-up shuddery sigh she hadn’t realized she was holding in. She unclenched her tightened fingers from the steering wheel and dropped them into her lap.

They were outside. Lara could see that they were okay. Relief fluttered in her heart. The three of them sat on the porch swing, apparently enjoying the last minutes of the unusually warm fall day.

David Minnow, an accountant, was dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans. His wife Faye’s short bobbed blond hair sparkled in the last of the sunshine, and in front of her in a Bjorn was seven-months-old little Emily.

Faye was a stay-at-home mom who loved to make beaded jewelry and dote on both David and Emily. Together they all made a picture of the perfect family. They were the perfect family; both David and Faye were good people who loved little Emily...thank God they were all safe.

Emily wiggled and danced in her confinement, and both David and Faye were laughing. Lara hit the button to lower her passenger window just enough that she could hear their laughter.

The sweet, joyful sound welled emotions so overwhelming that Lara’s eyes momentarily misted with tears. She stabbed the button to raise the window and put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb before she might draw any unwanted attention.

Why did she put herself through this? Why did she torture herself? She swiped angrily at an errant tear that had the audacity to escape her eye. She never cried. She never allowed herself the release.