Tough Justice Series Box Set, Parts 1-8 Page 7

  Lara had been ten years old when her life had forever changed. Her mother, Anna, had been murdered in what had eventually been deemed a home invasion, but was still a cold case without closure. Nobody charged. Nobody arrested.

  Bartholomew, Lara’s father, had been a good cop at work and a controlling, cold man at home. Still, Lara had loved her father. A feeling that had been complicated by doubt and hurt, as he’d become implicated in her mother’s death. She remembered the vicious fights that had taken place between her parents just before her mother’s murder.

  More than once Anna had threatened to take Lara and leave Bartholomew, and more than once Lara had heard her father say that he’d kill his wife before he’d ever let her go. The night before her murder there had been such a fight.

  Her father had been questioned per procedure following the murder, but ultimately had walked away from the investigation unscathed. The uncertainty of her father’s guilt ate at her, especially since his death. She just wished the case had been closed and a guilty party had been caught.

  At ten years old Lara had lost not only her loving mother, but also her innocence and her ability to trust. It struck her that at thirty-one years old Lara was now the same age her mother had been when she’d been murdered.

  The only family she had left was a half sister, Meghan, and Meghan had hated Anna and then Lara, because Lara’s father had abandoned his first wife and Meghan when Meghan had only been a year old. The two half sisters had virtually no relationship.

  Sometimes, in the darkest of her moods, Lara wished she had family. Her relationship with her father had become strained and distant before his death as she’d mentally questioned what part, if any, he might have had in her mother’s murder.

  Was it that hunger for connection that had made her make so many mistakes when it had come to the Moretti case? She had made mistakes, but ultimately she’d gotten her man. She could take some comfort in that fact.

  Still, what role, if any, did Moretti play in what was happening now? And why in the hell did she wish for her mother to be sitting next to her telling her everything was going to be fine?

  Irritated by her brain’s walk down memory lane, she got up off the sofa and went into the bathroom to shower and get ready for bed.

  She didn’t want to think about her father or Moretti anymore tonight. Her father had been a difficult man, but Moretti had been the biggest monster she’d ever known. Despite her desire to put it all out of her head, she couldn’t control her tumbling thoughts.

  She hoped Ty and Mei managed to get some answers from their time spent at the prison.

  Was it possible Moretti had somehow managed to have sleeper cells around the city, knowing it was her hometown, just waiting for Lara to eventually surface? Had the trigger for those sleeper cells to wake up and begin operating been the photo of her in the paper? No. Dunst had acted out before Lara had been photographed and identified in the news.

  A shower did nothing to wash the dark thoughts from her mind. She pulled on the sweatpants and tank top she usually slept in, but was reluctant to go to bed. She feared sleep and the bad dreams that visited her far too often.

  She jumped as her cell phone rang. She was surprised to see Nick’s number on the caller ID.

  “I’ve just been thinking,” he said after she’d answered. “Maybe it’s possible Dunst had gotten himself heavy into the drug scene and double-crossed somebody.”

  “But, his girlfriend said he’d been clean for the last month or so,” Lara replied. She sat on the edge of her bed, still vaguely surprised that he’d called her.

  “I have a feeling that half the time Sheila Currothers was too self-involved to know exactly what her Dunstie might be doing. It’s possible Dunst had started using or selling again, and she didn’t know anything about it. Or it’s equally possible that he was laying low for the last month or so because he owed somebody in a very big way.”

  “Maybe,” Lara replied dubiously.

  “And maybe he was ordered to kill himself or be killed by whoever he double-crossed,” Nick continued. “When he decided not to jump off the ledge, they followed through on their threat and shot him.”

  Lara would love to believe it was as simple as that; unfortunately, the scenario left out too many facts. “What about Tina? What about the ink pad and stamp he had in his pocket? What about the jogger this morning? I can’t believe she was into a drug culture of any kind, and her face was stamped with the Moretti insignia.”

  Nick sighed. “Yeah, I knew my basic theory was flawed and too simple. I guess I just needed to verbalize it to you. It’s all so damned confusing.”

  “Nick, I think this is just the beginning. I think things are going to get much worse.” Lara disconnected the call. She had no more to say. Only time would tell if she was right or wrong, and she prayed she was wrong. But, she knew true evil. She’d lived among it for a year. What concerned her was that her new team had no idea what they might be up against.

  What she feared the most was that her death certificate had already been filled out and was just waiting for the time of death to be added to make it official.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The team met briefly at noon the next day. The Crisis Management Unit was coordinating with NYPD, and an officer in charge had reported that they’d scoured the hotel room where Dunst had stayed, and no phone had been found.

  Hotel records had shown that no calls had come in or gone out of the room Dunst had checked into during the time of his stay, leaving the issue of a cell phone still a mystery. He had to have been contacted in some way in order to leave the hotel room to meet with whomever had been in the SUV.

  A preliminary autopsy report had come in on Lara Bowman. She’d been stabbed twice in the heart with a six-inch serrated knife that had yet to be found. Boze had also found slivers of wood to indicate that the knife had a wooden handle. They were all pieces of a puzzle that still didn’t fit anywhere.

  “Who did you talk to yesterday at the prison?” Lara asked Mei.

  “We tried to interview three members of the Moretti organization. The first was Lyle Brennen. He basically told us to get screwed, and that was it,” Mei replied.

  “He was a low-level operative. I doubt if he’d know anything about what Moretti is up to now,” Lara said.

  “The second we talked to was Brett Noland. He had more colorful language for us and told us he wouldn’t take a million dollars to turn on Moretti because a dead man couldn’t spend any money,” Ty said.

  “And the third we tried to interview, Jacob Withers, refused to even meet with us. We plan on trying to talk to a few more today.”

  “All of the guys you mentioned were definitely low on the food chain in the organization,” Lara said. “You need to talk to some of the mid-level operatives to see if they know something.”

  “Names,” Mei said with a pen in her hand and a piece of paper before her.

  Lara frowned as she thought of the men who had been a part of the madness of Moretti. After the convictions, they were broken up and sent to various federal penitentiaries. “See if Jimmy Bannister or Ramone Espinoso will talk to you. Both of them are at Long Island and were mid-level men who worked both the drug operation and the prostitution side of things.”

  “Got it,” Mei said. “And hopefully one of them will know something and be in a sharing kind of mood.”

  “Yeah, right,” Xander said sarcastically. “Maybe they’ll be all warm and fuzzy for you.”

  Lara ignored him as did everyone else at the table. She had quickly learned that Xander had no filter. He just said whatever popped into his head at the moment.

  “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.

&n
bsp; 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 fo
r 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.”