only didn’t find anything to connect her to Dunst. I also didn’t find any connection to the Moretti organization on any level,” Cass added.
“Then why was her face marked with the same stamp that was found in Dunst’s pocket?” Nick asked and looked around the table.
“And who murdered her? She has to have some sort of connection to Dunst or Moretti. Otherwise none of this makes any sense,” Ty added.
“Nothing has made sense since I went out on that ledge to talk Dunst down yesterday morning,” Lara replied. Had it only been yesterday? It felt like a lifetime ago that she’d been talking to Sean Dunst while an unusually cold September breeze blew through her to chill her bones.
Xander had been silent throughout the conversation, occasionally sipping coffee from a black-and-gold ceramic mug. He set his mug down and leaned forward.
“Why are we all wasting our time digging into the vic’s background and chasing down alibis for her boyfriend or anyone else? We all know why she was killed. It was because her name was Lara. Moretti now knows that Lara is FBI and busted him, and now he’s playing with her. He’s having some fun at her expense.” Xander leaned back in his chair and took another sip from his cup.
Lara shot a quick glance at Nick, who was sending a death glare at Xander. “Yeah, right, that’s hilarious,” Nick said, his deep voice sounding oddly strained.
“I don’t understand,” Lara said, her eyes still on Nick. “I thought her name was L-A-U-R-A.” She hadn’t seen the vic’s ID, only Nick had looked at it.
Xander shook his head. “Her name was L-A-R-A. Just like yours.”
“I didn’t want that information to cloud your mind while we did the initial investigation,” Nick replied, his gaze not quite meeting Lara’s.
Wrong answer. Lara averted her gaze from him as a fiery anger lit inside her. How could she trust a partner who kept things from her? He’d just committed his first sin against her—withholding information. If he thought she would tolerate crap like that, then he was sadly mistaken.
“But Dunst was killed before Lara’s face was splashed all over the news,” Mei exclaimed. “Dunst had to have known Lara was in New York before that.”
Xander frowned. “You’re right.”
“I’d say right now we’re still in the dark,” Ty replied.
Lara was horrified at the thought 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.
“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
