Tough Justice: Countdown Box Set Page 4

  Over the last year Nick had been with several other women, but none of them had intrigued him like his partner did. She’d let him into her body, but she’d refused to let him into her mind, and then a year ago she’d shut him out completely.

  It didn’t help that they were partners and spent long hours together. The sexual tension between them hadn’t dissipated with time. Rather it had only grown more intense.

  “Yo, man.” Sammy stepped around the corner of the building and into the alley with a furtive gaze over his plump shoulder.

  Sammy Clark was thirty-five years old but with his cherub face and guileless brown eyes he looked half his age. But he was no cherub. Sammy dwelled in the dirty underbelly of the city.

  Nick knew Sammy loved pasta and pizza and reruns of The Big Bang Theory. He was also deeply entrenched in the life, selling drugs, running with gangs; and Nick had evidence that a year ago he’d participated in the murder of a fellow gang member—and this was the albatross around Sammy’s neck that had turned him into a reluctant, but very valuable snitch.

  Sammy also had a wicked fascination with explosives and he usually had his ear firmly to the ground when it came to anything blowing up anywhere in the United States.

  “You’re late,” Nick said, not trying to hide his irritation. He straightened and placed his hand on the butt of his gun. He owned Sammy, but he sure as hell didn’t trust the man.

  “Hey, I’m here now.” Once again Sammy looked over his shoulder.

  Nick shot his gaze around the narrow space. The plump little bastard was making him jumpy as hell. “Are you using again, Sammy?” Nick knew the man had once had a love affair with meth, but he’d professed to having been clean for the past couple of years.

  “Nah, I’m straight as an arrow.”

  “So, what have you got for me about this latest bombing?”

  Sammy frowned. “All I can tell you is people are nervous. The word out on the street is that this is a brand-new player in town. Nobody is claiming any affiliation with him and he’s using crazy-ass hydrogen peroxide bombs. You’ve got to be fucking nuts to mess with that shit. It’s almost as strong as TNT.”

  “None of your people know anything about who is manufacturing this?”

  “Nobody,” Sammy replied, but instead of holding Nick’s gaze, he looked to the left.

  “Sammy, you aren’t telling me the truth,” Nick said.

  “I might have heard a little something about a particular house near Brooklyn University.”

  Adrenaline pumped through Nick. “What about a particular house?”

  “I might have heard that some students living there are buying up cell phones, and pressure cookers and maybe some hot guns. There might also be some other household items being bought up in bulk.”

  “You got an address on this house?”

  Sammy frowned. “You’ve got to make sure my name doesn’t come up in any kind of an investigation.”

  “You know I always protect my sources.”

  Sammy gave Nick the address.

  “None of your friends are involved in this?” Nick asked.

  “No way. Besides, what’s the angle? I mean what did the bomber get out of this except a bunch of dead bodies and injured people? The people I know only do something if it benefits them.” Sammy shrugged. “There’s no benefit here.”

  “And you can’t give me any more information about these students?” Nick pressed. “I know how much you and some of your friends like things that blow up.”

  “All I can tell you is what I’ve heard out on the streets. Nobody has asked my people for any help. I don’t know anything else about these students other than some other people on the street aren’t happy with new people coming into this territory.”

  “You get any more information about this, you contact me immediately,” Nick replied. He hesitated a moment, a knot rising in his chest. “Have you heard anything about Jason?”

  “Not recently. Your brother seems to be off the grid.”

  Nick gave a curt nod. “You call me if you get anything new.”

  He left the alley to walk the four blocks to where he’d parked his car. He knew Sammy would leave a few minutes after him and fade back into the underworld from where he’d come.

  Not only had he learned that according to Sammy’s sources it had been a hydrogen peroxide bomb, but he now had a potential lead. As he got into his car a new burst of adrenaline filled him. Questions flew around in his head as he thought about the information he’d just gotten from Sammy.

  What he didn’t want to think about was his brother. It was easier, less painful, to focus on Sammy’s information.

  A potential hoarding of cell phones...often used as the trigger device on bombs. After the attack on the Boston marathon, everyone knew the possibility of pressure cookers not just being used to cook with. They also made perfect IEDs.

  Was Sammy blowing smoke up his ass or was this the real deal? The man had once given Nick a false lead just to get Nick off his back. Nick had hunted him down and threatened to cuff him and throw him in a jail cell for murder.

  There was no way to know if this new lead was good until it was all checked out. He got into his car and headed toward headquarters, eager to share this latest news with Victoria and the rest of the team.

  During the last year the CMU had dealt with pedophiles, drug operations and human trafficking, but none of the cases before had gripped his gut quite like this one.

  So many dead and injured...and no way to know what might happen next. Why had those two particular locations been targeted? A smoothie shop in midtown and a police precinct in a hipster neighborhood in Brooklyn had nothing in common. Maybe this new lead would pan out? He couldn’t wait to share the intel with his team and get their thoughts.

  When he reached headquarters, he was told that Lara and James had brought in a person of interest who was being questioned.

  He headed to the interrogation room where James and Victoria stood just outside in the hallway and peered through the two-way mirror. Nick joined them and looked into the small room. The suspect, a young man in a red shirt, sat at the table and Lara sat across from him.

  She had her badass on. Her brown shoulder-length hair was in slight disarray, her green eyes were narrowed and her body language was dangerously tense as she gazed at the man. Nobody did intimidating quite as well as Lara Grant.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time...what is your name?” she asked.

  “And I’ve told you a dozen times already there’s no reason for you to know my name. I haven’t done anything wrong,” he replied.

  She slammed her hands down on the table to display her frustration with him. To his credit, red shirt didn’t even flinch.

  “Why don’t you have any identification on you?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I guess I forgot my wallet when I left my home this morning.”

  “And where is home?”

  “No real reason for you to know that, either,” he replied easily. Nick had to hand it to the guy, he was a cool customer.

  “What were you doing in Brooklyn?”

  “I live there.” His eyes widened and he clamped his lips firmly closed.

  Lara’s features didn’t hint at the satisfaction she must be feeling at getting him to give up that much information. “Why are you taking selfies in front of a crime scene?” she continued.

  “It isn’t against the law,” the man said.

  “Can I see the photos?”

  “No, and I should be suing you for police brutality.”

  “Police brutality? There isn’t a mark on you,” Lara scoffed.

  “Not physical brutality, but mental. You did pull your gun on me.”

  “And you refused to comply with a direct order from a law enf
orcement official,” Lara retorted.

  “I’ve got a new lead,” Nick leaned over and said to Victoria. “I’d like to tell everyone.” She nodded.

  Red shirt crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair. “Either charge me now or let me go.”

  Lara exploded out of her chair and left the interrogation room. “What a creep,” she said as she joined them in the hallway. “He’s not giving up a damned thing about himself.”

  “Did we Mirandize him?” Nick asked.

  “No. He’s a person of interest simply brought in for questioning,” Victoria replied. “He hasn’t broken any laws that we know about. We have to cut him loose, Lara.”

  “I know.” Lara released a sigh of frustration. “I want those photos.”

  “Sorry. We can’t compel him at this time. We’ve got nothing on him. We can’t even charge him with any crime. We have to let him go, Lara.” Victoria didn’t wait for any further response. “Besides, I’m calling for a briefing in twenty minutes.” She turned and left the hallway.

  “I don’t like loose ends, and that creep is definitely one,” Lara said to Nick and James.

  She returned to the interrogation room. “You’re free to go. Get out of my face.”

  “With pleasure,” he replied. He swept past her and out of the room. He nodded to Nick and James and then sauntered down the hallway toward the exit.

  Lara immediately got on her cell phone. “Lieutenant Rogers, it’s FBI Special Agent Lara Grant. I’ve got a man leaving FBI headquarters right now. He’s in a red shirt and jeans. Can you quickly get a tail on him? Thanks.”

  Nick knew Lieutenant Jim Rogers was an NYPD officer that they all used occasionally for just this sort of thing. “He’s going to try to get an officer on him,” she said as she rejoined them.

  She stalked down the hallway, her frustration palpable. She obviously took her inability to get the man to give up his name personally. It was Nick’s observation that Lara took every crime they investigated personally. He figured now wasn’t the time to mention that Victoria hadn’t given her permission to put a tail on the man.

  Nick and James followed Lara into the bull pen. “What’s the briefing about?” James asked.

  “My informant came through with some information,” he replied.

  Lara’s cell phone rang and she answered it, spoke quietly and then hung up. “Dammit.”

  “What?” Nick asked.

  “Red shirt managed to slip away before Lieutenant Rogers could get anyone on him. I really wanted to know his story. I’m going to get a cup of coffee before the briefing.”

  “You want to tell me what your informant told you?” James asked.

  Nick grinned. “You can hear it along with everyone else in about fifteen minutes.”

  It was closer to an hour later when all the agents, including Christina Ruiz, their tech specialist, and Victoria gathered around the table and looked at Nick expectantly. “First of all, my man told me it was a hydrogen peroxide bomb.”

  “Grant Taylor told me the same thing, just before I saw Selfie Guy,” Lara said.

  Nick then told them all about the information Sammy had given to him about the house near Brooklyn University where guns, cell phones and potential explosive devices might be inside.

  “If he told you a specific address, then it could be legit,” Xander said.

  “And maybe the people at that address have something to do with the two bombs,” Lara added, her eyes lit with a simmering excitement.

  “Hasn’t this informant lied to you before?” Ty, always the calm, methodical one, asked.

  “Yeah, he has,” Nick admitted. “But, my gut instinct says this wasn’t a lie.”

  “Nick’s instinct is good enough for me,” James said. “I say we go check it out.”

  “Whoa.” Victoria held up her hands. “Homeland is point on this case. I’ll take this information to them and they’ll do any follow-up on it. Christina, in the meantime it wouldn’t hurt for you to see what kind of information you can get about this house.”

  Christina nodded and wrote in the silver glitter notebook she carried everywhere. Cass McDonner, their previous tech guru, had been funky and a bit edgy. Christina, on the other hand, was obsessive-compulsive, a health nut and had admitted once that she was totally into reality television. In fact, the T-shirt she now wore read, I’m a Real Housewife in Waiting.

  “We’ll meet back here at seven this evening. In the meantime keep doing what you’ve been doing,” Victoria said.

  “You want me to take you home tonight after the seven o’clock briefing?” Nick asked Lara as they left the conference room. He knew she usually took the train to and from work. “It’s going to be a long day and I just thought you might not want to deal with public transportation tonight.”

  She turned to gaze at him, her eyes giving nothing away. “Sure, I appreciate it.”

  They settled in at their desks and Nick focused his attention on checking and rechecking interviews of witnesses and rereading crime scene reports to see if there was something, anything, they had missed so far in the investigation.

  In the back of his mind he wondered if he’d offered to take Lara home just to be a nice guy and save her the hassle of a train—or if he was secretly tempting fate where she was concerned? Was he really hoping for a hookup? He didn’t know the answer.

  The rest of the late afternoon and early evening hours whizzed by. Christina ran back and forth from her office, handing out names of people who needed to be checked out, and team members left only to return with a heavy layer of frustration clinging to them.

  At seven o’clock the whole team gathered once again in the conference room to update each other with the afternoon progress. “Surveillance video from the area businesses captured a picture of a man matching our suspect’s description,” Victoria said. “He had on a hat and sunglasses. We ran the image through the facial recognition program, but unfortunately there wasn’t a match. He’s definitely a different man from our selfie guy. We had some uniforms take pictures of both the selfie taker and the suspect to our two witnesses, but neither of them could ID either man.”

  “Then we’re back to square one,” Ty said in weary exasperation.

  Victoria nodded. She looked exhausted and Nick could only imagine all the bigwigs from various agencies she’d had to interact with throughout the long day. Too bad they didn’t have lead on this. Nick knew everyone on the team was an overachiever and wanted to get this nut off the streets, no matter who was officially in charge.

  “I had Christina run Tammy Lathrop and Kevin Manning’s names through the computers. Neither of them have a criminal record. In fact, they don’t even have a single speeding ticket between them,” Victoria said. “And she went over everything she could find on social media about the two. There’s still no connection that she could find.”

  “We’ll keep digging,” Ty said. “There has to be some sort of connecting point between the two.”

  The frustration in the room was a living, breathing entity among the agents. Everyone knew that a case was the hottest in the first forty-eight hours. After that witnesses became less reliable and memories began to fade. Interviewing any witnesses and victims in the first hours after a traumatic event always yielded the best results.

  “I gave Homeland Nick’s tip and they told me they were putting surveillance on the house. It’s a start,” Victoria said.

  “I know you’ve all put in a lot of hours between yesterday and today so go home and get some sleep. Homeland will be working through the night and I’ll have an update from them first thing in the morning. The days are only going to get longer from here on out.” She got up from the table and left the room

  “Maddy won’t be happy with me working these long hours,” Xander said.

  Madd
y was Xander’s six-year-old daughter. Her mother was an old girlfriend who Xander had never married. Everyone on the team was surprised by Xander’s utter devotion to the little girl. He could be a brash, hotheaded asshole at times, but he was a great father and seemed to have an infinite amount of patience with his daughter.

  Ty left the room without speaking a word to Jennifer, but the blond-haired, blue-eyed agent appeared to take it in stride.

  “Ready?” Nick asked Lara.

  She gave him a curt nod and together they left the conference room and headed to the parking garage. They didn’t speak until they were in Nick’s car and headed toward her Upper East Side apartment building.

  “I was really hoping to catch an early break on this,” he finally said.

  “We all were. I just hope that selfie creep who walked this afternoon wasn’t our early break,” she replied.

  He knew her well enough to recognize that she was wound tighter than a miser’s fist around a dollar. “Don’t beat yourself up, Lara. You did the best you could with him given the circumstances.”

  She snorted. “If nobody had been watching the interrogation you can bet your sweet ass I would have gotten his name, his address and the size of his bedroom slippers.”

  This was the one area where he and Lara differed at their very core. Nick walked a straight and narrow line on the right side of the law. Lara teetered on the edge of that line and occasionally slipped off.

  “How about a nightcap?” he asked as her apartment building came into view.

  He shouldn’t have asked. He knew his stepping a foot into her apartment was probably a bad idea, especially considering that they were both ratcheted up with frustrated adrenaline.

  “Okay,” she replied after a moment of hesitation.

  Just one drink, he told himself firmly as he pulled into a parking space down the street from her building. A single drink wouldn’t hurt anything.

  Lara’s apartment building was older, a tall brick located on 84th between 3rd and Lexington. Nick had only been inside a handful of times since she’d moved last year.