Tough Justice: Exposed

She stared out the passenger window. “It was a tough job, and after that I went into lockdown for a long a time. That was equally tough.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

He cut her another quick glance. “Ah, a woman of mystery.”

“No, nothing like that. It’s just a part of my past I’d rather forget. I deal in the here and now.” It was the only way she could function.

“If we’re going to work well as partners, then we need to trust each other. You can trust me, Lara.”

She turned in her seat to give him her full attention. “Those are just words, Nick. Trust is earned by action, and I don’t know you well enough yet to invest my complete trust in you.”

“I’m an open book. What you see is what you get,” he replied easily.

She eyed the scar on his temple, his sharply defined handsome features and the darkness of his eyes. “Yeah, right,” she said drily.

“Tell me about the team. Since I had to leave unexpectedly, I didn’t really get a chance to get to know them. What I do know is that we were all handpicked for this new unit, and I know both Victoria and Cass from working with them in DC. Tell me what you know about the others,” she said.

“Mei is smart and tough. She also speaks several languages. We were partners a few years back. She’s good. Ty has a ‘particular’ sense of humor, but underneath, he’s solid. He’s divorced and has no children. Xander comes from a wealthy background and has a five-year old daughter, but he’s never married and definitely isn’t afraid to speak his mind. They obviously all have specialties that brought them to Agent Russo’s attention. She handpicked us all for a reason.”

“And what’s your specialty?” Lara asked.

“That’s easy. Definitely my charisma,” he replied with a sexy grin.

She narrowed her eyes at him. She was not amused. “If you’re watching my back, you’d better bring something more than charm to the table,” she retorted.

His smile vanished. “Tell me what you know about Russo. You said you worked for her in DC. What’s her story? What kind of a boss is she?”

“She’s widowed and has a nineteen-year-old daughter. Anna is a sophomore at Columbia, and Victoria is very much a proud mother bear. She’s also very intelligent and can be one tough lady, but she’s fair. She has high standards and expects her agents to produce results.”

“Then we’d better figure all of this mess out. I wouldn’t want to let the boss lady down on our very first assignment.” He paused a moment and then continued, “I hope you aren’t rusty after the year off duty.”

Lara’s back stiffened. He might be hot to look at, but he was definitely treading in total jerk territory. “Don’t worry about me,” she said tersely and turned her attention out the passenger window. “On my worst day I’m still a better agent than most.”

At least that’s what she needed to believe. The Moretti case had shaken her confidence to the core and kept her from sleep on far too many nights.

Cass had pulled up Dunst’s current address, a brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The four-story residence had been his childhood home and had been left to him when his parents had died several years prior.

Much work had been done in Bedford-Stuyvesant to clean up the crime and decay in the neighborhoods, but there were still areas where the drug dealers and gangs ruled the streets, and people didn’t leave the relative safety of their homes after dark.

Unfortunately, it was on one of those streets that Dunst had lived. Dunst had died not only with an ink pad and a stamper in his pocket, but also a key ring. The key ring had been delivered to Lara and Nick by an NYPD officer just before they’d left to check out Dunst’s digs.

Dunst’s place was located in the middle of a street of row houses, all of them showing the signs of hopeless neglect and economic hard times.

“It’s hard to believe there are million-dollar homes and condos just a couple of blocks from here,” Nick said as they departed his car.

“According to Cass, he lived here alone and has no family. It would be easy to keep Tina in here and nobody would ever know she was here.” She had to focus on the job and not the fact that her partner apparently already entertained some doubts about her ability.

Lara pulled her gun from her shoulder holster as Nick got out the keys to open the door. Knowing that Dunst had been a drug dealer and criminal, there was no telling who or what they might find inside.

“I should be the one with the gun drawn,” Nick said.

“You have the keys. I have the gun,” Lara replied. If he thought she was going to play a secondary, submissive role to his alpha dog, then he was sadly mistaken. She wouldn’t play secondary to anyone under any circumstances.

Nick knocked on the door first. “Hello? Anyone home?”

Lara shifted her eyes from the door to the houses on each side. A blue curtain moved at one of the side windows on the house on the right.

No sound drifted through Dunst’s door. “FBI. We’re coming in,” Nick yelled. He unlocked the door, and Lara stepped in front of him, the barrel of her gun her lead as she entered a dirty, cluttered living room. Newspapers and magazines nearly hid a worn chocolate-brown sofa, and beer cans and fast food wrappers spilled across the top of the wooden coffee table. An orange crate held on top of it an ancient television that had probably never seen cable service.

“Clear,” she murmured.

Nick moved ahead of her, his gun now filling his hand as he headed for the doorway straight ahead. Lara followed behind him into a kitchen where the small table appeared to sag under the weight of pizza boxes and opened cans. Dirty dishes overflowed from the sink, and the old, cracked linoleum floor was sticky beneath her feet.

“Quite the neat-freak,” Nick said sarcastically.

They continued to clear the entire house. Dunst’s bedroom was easily identifiable. The double bed was unmade and sported gray sheets Lara suspected had at one time been white.

Drug paraphernalia littered the top of the dresser, and the faint scent of marijuana still lingered in the air. They checked drawers and closets, seeking some connection he might have had with Lara or with the Moretti ring at the time it had been operational.

“When I was undercover I met a lot of men who worked for Moretti, but I don’t remember ever seeing Dunst,” Lara said, unable to hide her frustration. “Why did he ask for me to go out on that ledge? Why me specifically?”

“We’ve only just started investigating. Maybe more digging will give us the answers.”

The next bedroom held a single bed and a small chest of drawers. The bedspread was pink, and a doll sat on the pillows, staring at them with big blue unseeing glass eyes. There was also a coloring book and a small box of crayons on a nightstand.

Despite her need to maintain an emotional distance, Lara’s heart cringed as she thought of little Tina locked up in this room for two long weeks before her death. Had she been terrified? How long and how hard had she cried for her mommy and daddy?

“Why did he have to kill her?” She spoke more to herself than to her new partner. “And why didn’t he stamp her?”

“Maybe he thought he could sell her to members of the Moretti syndicate, but found out that he had no takers, that nobody from the organization was working anymore. He couldn’t just let her go. She could have identified him, so he had to kill her,” Nick suggested.

“Maybe, but after Moretti and some of his crew were arrested, several violent gangs tried to take over Moretti’s territory both here and in Chicago. But they all wound up dead or arrested. So, who did Dunst think he could sell her to?”

“Maybe just a local pedophile willing to pay a good price?”

“Then why the Moretti symbol stamp?” Lara asked.

“I don’t know. Let’s check out the rest of the house, and then we can interview some of the neighbors,” Nick replied.

The upper two floors of the brownstone were completely empty except for cobwebs and mouse droppings. “He must have sold or pawned anything of value for his drug habit,” Nick said. They searched everyplace in the house to try to find something that might provide a clue as to Dunst’s reason for asking for Lara or any connection to the supposedly defunct Moretti syndicate. They found nothing.

Hopefully they would learn more by talking to some of the neighbors and people out on the streets. Since it was Friday night, the lowlifes would soon take over the area.

* * *

It was twilight when Nick knocked on the door to the right of Dunst’s place where Lara had earlier seen the curtain move. A middle-aged woman answered the door, and they identified themselves as FBI agents.