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  “Then we’d better figure all of this mess out. I wouldn’t want to let the boss lady down on our very first assignment.” He paused a moment and then continued, “I hope you aren’t rusty after the year off duty.”

  Lara’s back stiffened. He might be hot to look at, but he was definitely treading in total jerk territory. “Don’t worry about me,” she said tersely and turned her attention out the passenger window. “On my worst day I’m still a better agent than most.”

  At least that’s what she needed to believe. The Moretti case had shaken her confidence to the core and kept her from sleep on far too many nights.

  Cass had pulled up Dunst’s current address, a brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The four-story residence had been his childhood home and had been left to him when his parents had died several years prior.

  Much work had been done in Bedford-Stuyvesant to clean up the crime and decay in the neighborhoods, but there were still areas where the drug dealers and gangs ruled the streets, and people didn’t leave the relative safety of their homes after dark.

  Unfortunately, it was on one of those streets that Dunst had lived. Dunst had died not only with an ink pad and a stamper in his pocket, but also a key ring. The key ring had been delivered to Lara and Nick by an NYPD officer just before they’d left to check out Dunst’s digs.

  Dunst’s place was located in the middle of a street of row houses, all of them showing the signs of hopeless neglect and economic hard times.

  “It’s hard to believe there are million-dollar homes and condos just a couple of blocks from here,” Nick said as they departed his car.

  “According to Cass, he lived here alone and has no family. It would be easy to keep Tina in here and nobody would ever know she was here.” She had to focus on the job and not the fact that her partner apparently already entertained some doubts about her ability.

  Lara pulled her gun from her shoulder holster as Nick got out the keys to open the door. Knowing that Dunst had been a drug dealer and criminal, there was no telling who or what they might find inside.

  “I should be the one with the gun drawn,” Nick said.

  “You have the keys. I have the gun,” Lara replied. If he thought she was going to play a secondary, submissive role to his alpha dog, then he was sadly mistaken. She wouldn’t play secondary to anyone under any circumstances.

  Nick knocked on the door first. “Hello? Anyone home?”

  Lara shifted her eyes from the door to the houses on each side. A blue curtain moved at one of the side windows on the house on the right.

  No sound drifted through Dunst’s door. “FBI. We’re coming in,” Nick yelled. He unlocked the door, and Lara stepped in front of him, the barrel of her gun her lead as she entered a dirty, cluttered living room. Newspapers and magazines nearly hid a worn chocolate-brown sofa, and beer cans and fast food wrappers spilled across the top of the wooden coffee table. An orange crate held on top of it an ancient television that had probably never seen cable service.

  “Clear,” she murmured.

  Nick moved ahead of her, his gun now filling his hand as he headed for the doorway straight ahead. Lara followed behind him into a kitchen where the small table appeared to sag under the weight of pizza boxes and opened cans. Dirty dishes overflowed from the sink, and the old, cracked linoleum floor was sticky beneath her feet.

  “Quite the neat-freak,” Nick said sarcastically.

  They continued to clear the entire house. Dunst’s bedroom was easily identifiable. The double bed was unmade and sported gray sheets Lara suspected had at one time been white.

  Drug paraphernalia littered the top of the dresser, and the faint scent of marijuana still lingered in the air. They checked drawers and closets, seeking some connection he might have had with Lara or with the Moretti ring at the time it had been operational.

  “When I was undercover I met a lot of men who worked for Moretti, but I don’t remember ever seeing Dunst,” Lara said, unable to hide her frustration. “Why did he ask for me to go out on that ledge? Why me specifically?”

  “We’ve only just started investigating. Maybe more digging will give us the answers.”

  The next bedroom held a single bed and a small chest of drawers. The bedspread was pink, and a doll sat on the pillows, staring at them with big blue unseeing glass eyes. There was also a coloring book and a small box of crayons on a nightstand.

  Despite her need to maintain an emotional distance, Lara’s heart cringed as she thought of little Tina locked up in this room for two long weeks before her death. Had she been terrified? How long and how hard had she cried for her mommy and daddy?

  “Why did he have to kill her?” She spoke more to herself than to her new partner. “And why didn’t he stamp her?”

  “Maybe he thought he could sell her to members of the Moretti syndicate, but found out that he had no takers, that nobody from the organization was working anymore. He couldn’t just let her go. She could have identified him, so he had to kill her,” Nick suggested.

  “Maybe, but after Moretti and some of his crew were arrested, several violent gangs tried to take over Moretti’s territory both here and in Chicago. But they all wound up dead or arrested. So, who did Dunst think he could sell her to?”

  “Maybe just a local pedophile willing to pay a good price?”

  “Then why the Moretti symbol stamp?” Lara asked.

  “I don’t know. Let’s check out the rest of the house, and then we can interview some of the neighbors,” Nick replied.

  The upper two floors of the brownstone were completely empty except for cobwebs and mouse droppings. “He must have sold or pawned anything of value for his drug habit,” Nick said. They searched everyplace in the house to try to find something that might provide a clue as to Dunst’s reason for asking for Lara or any connection to the supposedly defunct Moretti syndicate. They found nothing.

  Hopefully they would learn more by talking to some of the neighbors and people out on the streets. Since it was Friday night, the lowlifes would soon take over the area.

  * * *

  It was twilight when Nick knocked on the door to the right of Dunst’s place where Lara had earlier seen the curtain move. A middle-aged woman answered the door, and they identified themselves as FBI agents.

  “I assume you’re here because of what happened to Sean,” she said as she led them into a spotlessly clean living room where two young boys were playing a video game.

  “Gary and Greg, upstairs to the playroom,” she said as she gestured Nick and Lara to a beige-and-brown plaid sofa. After a bit of grumbling, the two kids turned off the video game and headed up the stairs.

  “Your name, ma’am?” Nick asked and pulled a small notepad and pen from his shirt pocket.

  “Rhoda Watson, and I just have to say that I know it isn’t nice, but I’m not sorry he’s dead,” she said with a raise of her pointed chin. Her cheeks flushed slightly with color. “I’m sorry, but he was a creep and a braggart, always talking about the good old days when he worked for some big crime boss.”

  “Moretti?” Lara asked.

  Rhoda frowned and nodded her head. “Yeah, I think that’s the one. I don’t know what he was into in his past, but he was nothing but a scuzzy dope dealer, and then there were all those rumors when little Tina Cole was found dead.”

  “Rumors?” Lara leaned forward.

  “Just word out on the streets that maybe he and his girlfriend had something to do with her kidnapping and death. I’ve got kids of my own, and it was bad enough knowing he lived right next door before the Cole girl was found.”

  “Do you know of anyone who might have wanted him dead? Did he ever mention any specific threats against him?” Nick asked.

  She frowned thoughtfully once again. “No, but he ran with a rough crowd and bragged about what a big man he was. Who knows who he might have double-crossed in the dope business or in one of the gangs that are in this neighborhood?”

  “You mentioned a girlfriend?�
�� Nick asked.

  Rhoda nodded. “Sheila Currothers. She’s been dating Sean for a little over a year.”

  “She doesn’t live with him?” Lara asked.

  “No, but she spent plenty of time next door. She would have known that little girl was there. She lives in the Applegate Apartments a block over. I’m not sure what apartment number, but if you can’t find her there, she strips most evenings at Nasty Nate’s, a dive off Macon Street.”

  Lara exchanged glances with Nick. Nick stood and pulled out a business card. “If you think of anything else that might help us find the person responsible for Sean’s death, please, give me a call.”

  Rhoda nodded, but there was a dark fear in her eyes, the fear of potential reprisal, of payback to her or her family. Lara knew they wouldn’t hear anything more from her even if she did learn something worthwhile.

  “I’m hoping we can catch Sheila at her apartment instead of having to enter a place called Nasty Nate’s,” Nick said as they left the Watson brownstone.

  “Great minds think alike,” Lara agreed.

  It took them only minutes to arrive at the Applegate Apartments where, thankfully, a manager was on site to give them Sheila’s apartment number.

  It was obvious by the condition of the building that Sheila’s standard of living wasn’t much better than Dunst’s. The three-story brick structure looked as if it hadn’t been updated or cleaned since the early Fifties.

  Weeds and overgrown bushes plagued the unkempt yard area, and two rusted benches just outside the front door didn’t welcome anyone to sit and relax.

  Worn gold shag carpeting lined the hallway that took them to the stairs. It was a walk-up with no elevator, and of course Sheila lived on the third floor.

  A mixture of smells assaulted Lara’s nose as they climbed upward. Urine, weed, a strong scent of sauerkraut and utter hopelessness all mingled together to form a sickening odor.

  Lara knocked on the door of apartment 312, and her knock was answered by a thin tall blonde woman with large breast implants and red-rimmed blue eyes. She was clad in a red-and-yellow silk dressing robe, and she pulled the belt more tightly around her waist as she ushered them inside.

  The living room was furnished minimally, but was fairly tidy if one ignored the colorful handful of G-strings that hung from the doorknob on the door that presumably led to the bedroom.

  “You’re here about my Dunstie.” She motioned them to the sofa and then sank down into a chair facing them and grabbed a tissue from the box on the end table next to her.

  “I just can’t believe he’s gone.” She blinked her big blue eyes. “I mean, he is really gone, right? What I saw on television was real, not some silly joke he played on me or a crazy reality show.”

  Okay, not the brightest bulb in the room, Lara thought with an inward sigh. On a good day Lara didn’t possess a lot of patience, and she had a feeling Sheila Currothers was quickly going to get on her last nerve.

  “Yes, what you saw on television was very real. Sean is dead,” Nick replied, his deep voice without emotion.

  Sheila balled up the tissue in her hand. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without him. He was so good to me. Oh, I know he didn’t do everything right. He wasn’t a perfect man. I know about him selling drugs and some other things...but at heart he wasn’t a bad man. In the last month or so he’d cleaned up his act. He wasn’t using or selling drugs anymore. And at least he never hit or beat me.”

  “Tell us about Tina,” Lara said, cutting to the chase.

  “Tina?” Sheila feigned innocence but couldn’t quite play it off. Lara saw the tells, the tightening of her slender fingers around the tissue, the tension that pulled her overly plumped lips tighter and one...two...three quick blinks of her eyes, eyes that now had a sharp, hard gleam. Maybe she wasn’t as stupid as she wanted them to believe.

  “Yeah, you know, the nine-year-old little girl Dunst kidnapped and then murdered.” Nick leaned forward, his dark eyes radiating a dangerous glint. “Did you know he was into abusing and killing little girls?”

  “That’s not true. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Sheila crossed her arms over her ample chest with her chin lifted in a show of belligerent defensiveness. “I don’t know anything about a kid.”

  “I think you do,” Lara countered. “Sheila, I was up on that ledge with Dunst this morning for hours. I was the last person he spoke to before his death, and he told me all about Tina.” Of course, Dunst hadn’t mentioned anything about his girlfriend, but Sheila couldn’t know that.

  “And right now you’re looking at potential kidnapping and murder charges,” Nick said.

  Sheila uncrossed her arms and leaned forward. “You can’t pin any of that on me. I had nothing to do with it. I don’t know why he took her. She was just there at his house one day, and he told me he had to keep her for a while.”

  “Tell us about the stamp,” Nick said.

  Sheila frowned. “Stamp? I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about. What kind of a stamp?”

  Lara drew in a deep breath, her emotions shooting back and forth between anger and a small sense of compassion for the woman who now found herself at the center of a horrendous crime. “He was found with an ink box and a stamper on his body,” she replied.

  Sheila shook her head. “I don’t know anything about that. I never saw an ink box or stamper.”

  “Sheila, it’s in your own best interest to work with us and tell us everything you know,” Nick said.

  She looked from Nick to Lara, as if weighing her options. The feigned innocence was gone, replaced by a weary resignation as she held Lara’s gaze. “You’ll tell the cops that I cooperated?”

  Lara nodded, and Sheila released a deep sigh. “He finally told me that he was supposed to sell her, but in the end he just couldn’t do it. He said she’d be abused and broken, and so he killed her instead. He said that if he did as he was told it would be a fate worse than death for her. He killed her to save her.” Once again her eyes moved between them, as if seeking understanding and possible absolution.

  Nick looked at Sheila as if she were speaking a foreign language, but it was a language Lara knew very well, and it sent cold chills racing up her spine.

  Was the Moretti syndicate back in business? Why would they contact such a low-level criminal as Sean Dunst to carry out such orders? And if they were back in business, then how close were they to Lara?

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was nearly eleven o’clock when Nick and Lara finally headed back to 26 Federal Plaza. Two NYPD detectives working the Tina Cole murder case had been summoned to take Sheila into custody, and Nick and Lara had spent a couple of hours out on the streets around Dunst’s house, asking questions and reconfirming impressions they had already received.

  Dunst was known in the neighborhood as a blowhard, a wannabe. He was a loser whose only claim to fame was that he’d supposedly once had ties to the Moretti crime syndicate. But according to Cass and people they talked to on the streets, there was absolutely no evidence to support that Sean had ever been anything but a petty criminal and dope dealer.

  “I’d like to know who orchestrated Tina’s kidnapping and set up her potential sale. Aside from the fact that somebody killed him, I don’t believe Dunst had the brains to pull something like that off on his own,” Lara said as they crossed back over the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “He obviously didn’t have the stomach for it, either,” Nick replied. “Guilt apparently drove him to that ledge this morning.”

  “And a highly skilled sniper made sure he wouldn’t give us any real information once he got off that ledge,” Lara replied in frustration. “If I’d known about the stamp while I was up on the ledge with him, I would have definitely asked him a lot more questions.”

  Although fear simmered deep inside her, she refused to give into it until they had more concrete information. She’d learned to live with fear the entire year she’d worked deep undercover. In many ways the fee
ling, coupled with a hard edge of anger, had become a familiar, almost comforting emotion.

  “Who kills a kid to save her?” Nick asked incredulously. “And what kind of a woman thinks something like that is okay?” His deep voice was rife with judgment.

  Lara had once had a black-and-white sense of judgment, too. But, during her year undercover she’d met too many people who were not necessarily evil, but rather lost souls whose backgrounds had never given them a chance to do much of anything other than make bad choices. She’d learned how easy it was to fall off the straight and narrow.

  “Maybe a woman who is already living a fate worse than death,” she replied thoughtfully. “We know Sheila is a stripper. I would guess that she probably also prostitutes on the side. Who knows what her childhood might have been like? It’s obvious she lost her self-respect and any sense of worth she might have had a long time ago.”

  “Are you defending her actions?”

  “Not at all.” She felt his eyes on her, but she remained staring straight ahead. Still, she felt the need to say something more. “I just saw a lot of bad things when I was undercover. I can’t begin to explain the depravity, the utter soullessness of some human beings.”

  “That’s why I love what I do, getting the evil off the streets and into prisons. Isn’t that why you do it? Or is it because of your father? I heard somewhere that he was a highly decorated New York detective?”

  “He was.” The last thing she wanted to talk about, the very last person she wanted to think about was her father, who had passed away several months ago, four years after he’d been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease.

  “Then I guess crime fighting runs in the family,” Nick replied.

  “That’s about all that runs in the family. At least Dunst didn’t stamp her,” Lara said, not so subtly letting Nick know that she had no interest in a conversation about her personal life and wanted to stick strictly to the facts of the case.

  “We need to dig deeper into Dunst’s life,” Nick replied, obviously getting the message.