Tough Justice Series Box Set: Parts 1-8

Sally Bernard stood just outside the door of her small shop. She sported long purple-and-green streaked hair, and a tattoo of a dragon crawled up her neck from out of the top of a T-shirt that read FBI—Ferocious Bitch Inside.

“Cute,” Lara said without humor.

“If I knew you were coming I would have chosen another one,” Sally replied, but her flippant tone said otherwise.

“You sell many of those?” Nick asked.

An irreverent grin curved her lips. “It’s one of my bestsellers.” Her grin dropped from her face as if snatched away by a quick thief. “I’m assuming you’re here to talk to me about that kid-killing creep who got himself offed. I swear the whole day was shot with all the cop presence in the area. Tourists ran like rats from a sinking ship away from here. My sales totally sucked for the day.”

“Yeah, it’s always such an inconvenience when somebody gets murdered,” Lara replied. Two minutes with Sally and she already wanted to slap the woman.

“We’ve heard that you’re the person to talk to about the goings-on in the area,” Nick said.

Sally shrugged too-thin shoulders. “I hang out here in front of the store a lot, and I like to people watch.” Her gaze slid from the top of Nick’s dark hair to the tip of his shoes, and she sidled a step closer to him. “I especially enjoy watching hot men like you.”

Lara fought a snort as Nick stepped back and glanced in her direction. “If you like man-watching, then you must have seen the man who was murdered at the hotel yesterday,” Lara said.

“Actually, I didn’t see it at the time it happened, but I watched it on the news later,” she said.

“Did you see him at any time the day before he was killed?”

“Yeah, once. It was late in the afternoon, and he nearly got run over by a black SUV. I only noticed the SUV because it pulled up along the curb in a no-parking zone. Dunst...that was his name, right?”

“Right,” Lara replied.

“Dunst came out of the hotel and talked to the driver. I’m pretty sure they were arguing. I probably wouldn’t have noticed them at all, but their voices were loud and angry, but not loud enough that I could actually hear specific words. They didn’t talk long, and when they finished, Dunst started around the front of the SUV, and the driver peeled out, straight for Dunst. If he hadn’t jumped out of the way fast enough, he would have been a hood ornament.”

Lara shot a volley of more questions. Had Sally seen the man inside the SUV? Had she noticed the license plate? Did Dunst go directly back inside the hotel? Had she seen the SUV again after that?

Sally irritated her, both with her half-assed attention to Lara and her flirtatious smiles and eyelash-fluttering toward Nick. Not that Lara was a bit jealous or anything. It was the fact that they were discussing a serious issue, and Sally didn’t appear to take any of it seriously.

“We’ve got a nine-year-old girl who was murdered, a man who was shot between his eyes and a jogger who was stabbed this morning,” Lara said irritably. “I need you to make sure that you have nothing more to add that might be helpful.”

“Wow, I thought I was being as helpful as possible, and I’ve told you everything I know.” She plucked at her T-shirt. “Maybe I need to go inside and grab one of these to give to you...on the house.”

“Honey, I don’t need to wear a T-shirt for people to know there’s one ferocious bitch inside,” Lara retorted. “Come on, Agent Hotness, I think we’re done here.”

When they were back in his car, Nick looked at her with a hint of wry amusement. “It’s the scar,” he said. “I guess it gives me a dangerous edge that some women seem to like.”

“How did you get it?” she asked.

His eyes instantly shuttered, and his smile turned into a tight-lipped frown. “That’s a long story for another day,” he said and started the car engine.

Lara fastened her seat belt and leaned back, intrigued by the fact that her partner obviously had some inner demons of his own.

By the time they got back to the agency, Mei and Ty were still gone to the prison on Long Island, Xander had gone home for the day, as had Victoria. The only person still working was Cass, who had her door closed.

“It feels like it was a week ago that we had a dead woman on a jogging trail,” Nick said with weariness.

Lara agreed and looked at the industrial round clock on the wall. It was just after seven. “I guess there’s not much else we can do tonight. Why don’t we plan on meeting back here by eight in the morning?”

“Tomorrow is Sunday, Lara. Don’t you remember that Victoria called for a noon meeting for tomorrow?” Nick replied.

No, she didn’t remember. She’d probably been too focused on how angry she was with Nick to hear what Victoria had said. “The case is hot now,” she protested. “We should get an early start in the morning.”

“And it will still be hot at noon tomorrow,” he countered evenly. “Lara, I have a feeling this is going to be a seven-day-a-week job until we solve it all. We can’t burn ourselves out in the first couple of days. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

“Okay, then I guess I’ll see you tomorrow at noon,” she agreed reluctantly. She grabbed the file folder she’d been keeping of everything that had happened since the morning before and then left the office.

* * *

Thirty minutes later she was inside her apartment and dropped the manila file on the coffee table. She then went directly to the small built-in minibar and poured herself a shot of whiskey.

She liked her whiskey neat, her men hot and uncommitted, and she hated downtime. She’d had enough downtime in the safe house to drive her half-insane. She wanted action. She wanted answers sooner rather than later. Unfortunately answers weren’t coming easily.

She swallowed the shot and then poured herself another and carried it over to the sofa. She turned on the television with the volume barely audible and leaned back in an attempt to relax.

But, there was no rest for the wicked. She leaned forward and opened the file where she had paper copies of all of the reports, beginning with her time with Dunst on the ledge. She could have pulled it all up on her laptop, but sometimes she liked to read hard copies instead.

She took small sips of her drink, enjoying the warm burn down her throat and into the pit of her stomach as she read each report word for word, seeking something, anything that might have been overlooked.

When she’d finished the second drink she got up and carried her glass to the sink, washed it out and then put it back on the glass shelf where it belonged. There had been too many nights when she’d imbibed too many drinks in an effort to numb herself and fall into a dreamless sleep. She couldn’t afford to do that now. She had to be sharp and at her best game.

As she walked back to the sofa a news story caught her eye, and she turned up the volume to learn that little Tina Cole had been laid to rest today in a private funeral attended only by family and close friends.

A shrine had sprung up in the overgrown empty lot where her body had been found. Weighted helium balloons hung above small stuffed animals and handmade signs. Lara changed the channel and swallowed again the emotion that threatened to arise.

Nine years old and Tina’s life was over, taken by a man who, according to his girlfriend, had cared for Tina too much to follow through on orders to sell her to somebody.

Lara couldn’t help the squeeze of her heart at the thought of the poor little girl who had been helpless to stop the unexpected evil that had surrounded her.

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?