Tough Justice Series Box Set: Parts 1-8

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 (#ulink_53499bdd-b8cd-5595-bba5-fd0d2ef1b09b)

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.

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.