Tough Justice Series Box Set: Parts 1-8

CHAPTER SIX

A phone call to the night doorman had let them know that he hadn’t seen Dunst except for on the news after he’d been killed. The day doorman, Brandon Ainsley, worked from seven in the morning until seven at night. He’d not only been present when Dunst had checked in on the day before he’d climbed out on the ledge but had also been at the hotel on duty when Dunst had been killed.

He was a clean-cut middle-aged man whose red-and-gold uniform was pristine, but his eyes held a hint of concern as Lara and Nick escorted him into the manager’s office where they could question him in private.

“All I can tell you is that I probably wouldn’t have even noticed the man when he came to check in if he’d had a suitcase or some kind of luggage with him,” Brandon said.

“Do you often have people checking in without luggage?” Nick asked.

Brandon’s cheeks flushed faintly. “Not too often, but it happens. There are a few people who regularly check in without any luggage, but they’re only here for about an hour or so around noontime.”

“Hookups,” Lara said.

Brandon gave a curt nod. “They always arrive and leave separately, but there’s one couple who comes every Friday at noon and stays for about an hour or so. They’ve been meeting here for the last two years.”

Probably a married man with his mistress. If the woman was willing to settle for that kind of deal, it wasn’t Lara’s issue. Of course it could also be a married woman with a little extra on the side. She wasn’t interested in hookups, which happened at every hotel in the city.

“Back to Dunst,” she said. “You said he checked in around noon. Did he appear nervous or scared?”

“Not that I noticed,” Brandon replied. “But to be honest, I didn’t pay all that much attention to him.”

“Did he leave the hotel at all during the afternoon or evening?” She repositioned herself in one of the hard-back chairs the manager had provided for the three of them to use.

“Once,” Brandon replied. “A black SUV pulled up to the curb out by the street, and Dunst came outside and talked to the driver. I don’t know exactly what happened between them because a shuttle bus of tourists pulled up. The next thing I knew the SUV was peeling out, and Dunst came running back inside. That’s the last time I saw him until I was pulled off my post the next morning by a cop who told me to go home and that somebody would be in touch with me later.”

“Is there anything else you can tell us that might be helpful?” Lara asked. “Did you notice the license plate on the SUV? Could you tell anything about the driver?”

Brandon shook his head. “No, I’m sorry, but the vehicle was too far away for me to see the driver, and at the time I didn’t pay that much attention because I didn’t know it would be so important later. Who could know what was going to happen?” He grimaced.

Nick pulled out a business card and handed it to Brandon. “If you think of anything else, no matter how minute, that might add additional information for us, please, give me a call.”

“You might want to talk to Sally... Sally Bernard across the street. She owns the T-shirt shop that sells tourist shirts and souvenirs, and she usually knows everything that’s happening out on the streets,” Brandon said as they left the manager’s office. “There isn’t much that goes on around here that she misses.”

They spoke to several other hotel staff members without learning anything more before heading across the street to Sally’s Shop of Souvenirs.

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?

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.

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