Tough Justice Series Box Set: Parts 1-8

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.”