Tough Justice Series Box Set: Parts 1-8. Carla Cassidy

that the poor young woman on the jogging trail might have been murdered...stabbed in the heart, simply because she had the misfortune of having the same spelling of Lara’s name.

      Was the knife through the heart a special message just for Lara? Was Moretti reaching out despite his prison bars to taunt her, to torment her?

      “Lara, I’m sorry,” Nick said.

      “Bite me,” she replied vehemently without looking at him.

      Victoria spoke for the first time. “Everyone calm down and play nice.” Lara knew the words were meant specifically for her. She stared down at the table as Victoria continued. “Maybe it’s time for Mei and Ty to go to Long Island and feel out some ofMoretti’s crew incarcerated there and see if they might know something about what’s going on now.”

      “If Moretti knows about what’s happened, if he’s somehow responsible for it, then he is probably expecting a visit from somebody from the FBI,” Lara said and looked up at Victoria.

      “He’s probably expecting a visit from you,” Xander replied.

      The thought of facing Moretti again was like a fist punch to Lara’s stomach. She’d thought she was done with all of this. She’d hoped to never have to talk to or see any of the members of the syndicate again...especially Moretti.

      “If he’s hoping for a visit from Lara, do we really want to give him what he wants?” Nick asked. “Or is it better to leave him twisting in the wind and frustrated for a while?”

      “I think Mei and Ty talking to his operatives is a good place to start, but if Moretti wants to talk to or see me, then I think maybe it’s better to just let him wait a bit,” Lara said.

      She wasn’t sure if her decision was what was best for the team or because of her reluctance to have anything to do with the man who had done so much damage to so many people, the man who was a master manipulator and the face of evil.

      “Then for now we wait on having any contact with Moretti,” Victoria replied.

      “Let’s just hope there’s not another victim while you’re waiting,” Xander said to Lara.

      Jerk. She glared at him.

      Still, she could only hope for the same thing. If indeed this was all tied to Moretti, she definitely didn’t want anyone else getting killed or hurt if his ultimate intended victim was her.

      She successfully fought against the shiver that threatened to waltz up her back at the very real possibility that Moretti was pulling strings and playing sadistic games to make sure that she was utterly and completely destroyed.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      “You should have told me.” Lara glared at Nick as the others left the conference room. “You should have immediately filled me in that her name was spelled the same as mine. You shouldn’t have waited for me to find out in front of everyone else.”

      “Yeah, you’re right. I probably should have told you immediately, but I didn’t want to have your brain go off in the weeds somewhere while we were conducting the initial investigation. If it was a bad call, then I really am sorry.”

      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.

      *