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

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?

      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

      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