by Radclyffe
Synopsis
While Detective Lt. Rebecca Frye’s elite unit attempts to uncover the connection between the local organized crime syndicate and a human trafficking ring, she and her team, and those they love, unwittingly become targets.
As part of the operation, Dellon Mitchell goes undercover with a young woman posing as her lover—a woman with a secret agenda who puts Mitchell's personal and professional life at risk. Before long, the hunters and the hunted are caught in a complex web of double-crosses and desire where the lines between good and evil blur, and justice may be the ultimate victim.
Fifth in Radclyffe’s Justice Series
Justice for All
Brought to you by
eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.
Please respect the rights of the author and do not file share.
Justice For All
© 2009 By Radclyffe. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-267-2
This Electronic Book is published by
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
PO Box 249
Valley Falls, New York 12185
First Edition: April 2009
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editors: Jennifer Knight, Ruth Sternglantz and Stacia Seaman
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])
By the Author
Romances
Innocent Hearts
Love’s Melody Lost
Love’s Tender Warriors
Tomorrow’s Promise
Love’s Masquerade
shadowland
Fated Love
Turn Back Time
Promising Hearts
When Dreams Tremble
The Lonely Hearts Club
Night Call
Secrets in the Stone
The Provincetown Tales
Safe Harbor
Beyond the Breakwater
Distant Shores, Silent Thunder
Storms of Change
Winds of Fortune
Honor Series
Above All, Honor
Honor Bound
Love & Honor
Honor Guards
Honor Reclaimed
Honor Under Siege
Word of Honor
Justice Series
A Matter of Trust (prequel)
Shield of Justice
In Pursuit of Justice
Justice in the Shadows
Justice Served
Justice For All
Erotic Interludes: Change of Pace
(A Short Story Collection)
Radical Encounters
(A Erotic Short Story Collection)
Stacia Seaman and Radclyffe, eds.
Erotic Interludes 2: Stolen Moments
Erotic Interludes 3: Lessons in Love
Erotic Interludes 4: Extreme Passions
Erotic Interludes 5: Road Games
Romantic Interludes 1: Discovery
Acknowledgments
This book belongs to all the readers who asked for this series to continue and who have supported and encouraged me in its creation. My deepest gratitude.
Many thanks to first readers Connie, Diane, Eva, Paula, RB, and Tina, and to Jennifer Knight, Ruth Sternglantz, and Stacia Seaman for outstanding editorial guidance. Congratulations to Sheri for reading my mind on cover design yet again.
And to Lee, for always wanting another story. Amo te.
Radclyffe 2009
Dedication
For Lee
All Ways
Prologue
“Tell me again, Vincent, how it is that in six months I’ve lost a third of my income.”
Before the visibly sweating man standing in front of his desk could reply, Kratos Zamora swiveled his leather desk chair to face the floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows. His office on the twenty-fifth floor of the high-rise he owned in Center City commanded a view from downtown Philadelphia across the Delaware River into southern New Jersey. The panorama was book-ended by the Benjamin Franklin Bridge to the north and the Walt Whitman to the south. The Port of Philadelphia stretched off to his right and, as the silent seconds passed, he contemplated a cargo ship lumbering up to the pier loaded with twenty-by-forty-foot containers stacked ten high. Some of those carried his legitimate products, and others should have carried his far more lucrative merchandise. And there was his problem.
Squinting slightly in the late afternoon sun, he continued in a conversational tone as if reading from a grocery list. “Seventy-five percent of the online entertainment revenues and over half of the escort service’s have dried up. And now,” he paused to spin back around, “you’re telling me our direct line to City Hall has disappeared. Did I hear that right?”
“Not exactly disappeared,” the big man in the ill-fitting suit answered diffidently. “More like…dead.”
Kratos winced inwardly, because even though his offices were routinely swept for surveillance devices at the start of every eight-hour shift, he still avoided discussing business indoors. He’d rather take his chances outside where traffic noise and physical obstacles made long-range audio surveillance problematic. However, most of his men had grown up in a different era and were slow to retrain. He had inherited the business from his father only five years before, at the age of thirty-two, even though his older brother Gregor was the first son. Gregor had his talents, but they tended to be of the physical variety. Kratos had earned his MBA at Wharton and their father, in a break with tradition, had named him heir to Zamora Enterprises. Surprisingly, Gregor hadn’t objected and now served as Kratos’s security chief. Many people assumed Gregor headed the family and Kratos was content to let the fallacy go unchallenged. There were advantages to being seen as a legitimate businessman. In fact, he considered himself a modern entrepreneur, even if on occasion he employed methods that were never covered in his curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania. A flexible approach was necessary in order to secure his goals.
“You didn’t answer my original question,” he prodded gently. He knew the answer, of course, but in lieu of killing the messenger, he would merely make him suffer. Crossing his knees and casually flicking a nonexistent wrinkle out of the leg of his charcoal gray blended-silk trousers, he regarded Vincent Costa with a bland expression.
Vincent, one of his more trusted captains, folded his hands over his crotch and stared into space. “There’s this new unit…the High Profile—”
“Yes, I’m aware of it.” Kratos glanced at the single sheet of paper in the center of his desk.
A list of names and nothing else was typed down the left-hand side: Detective Lieut. Rebecca Frye, Detective First William Watts, Detective Third Dellon Mitchell, JT Sloan, and Jason McBride. The High Profile Crimes Unit. An odd assortment of local law enforcement and civilian consultants first formed to break an Internet pornography ring that used underage models. That online entertainment operation just happened to be neatly folded into one of Zamora Enterprise’s subsidiary corporations, and its loss had been costly. Only days ago, this crime unit had intercepted a delivery of young girls destined to become stars in high-demand pornography films as well as call girls for an exclusive escort service also run by Zamora Enterprises.
“What I don’t understand is how the
y’ve managed to do in a few months what an entire police force hasn’t been capable of in two decades.”
“I don’t know, boss.”
“Guess, Vincent.” Kratos needed men like Vincent, men who were close to the street, far closer to the blood and the grime than he had ever been. While he was welcome at $10,000-a-plate benefit dinners and luncheoned frequently with the mayor, he had never personally pulled the trigger on an enemy. He’d never walked the mean streets except as a boy under his father’s protection. He wasn’t bothered by the fact there were things his men could do better than he, as long as he was certain that they never knew it.
“It’s the computers,” Vincent said, blinking as a trickle of sweat settled in the corner of his eye.
Interested, Kratos sat forward and clasped his hands in the center of his desk on top of the offending list. The sunlight glinted off the heavy gold signet ring he wore on the small finger of his right hand. The edge of his pristine white cuff covered a portion of the list, so all he could see was the name Rebecca. “What do you mean?”
“It’s not like the old days, you know? Used to be cops were out on the streets, listening to the chatter and squeezing their snitches to find out what was going on. Hell, now they can follow you with that little chip thing in your cell phone. They don’t even have to get out of their car.”
“Are you saying our electronic security is a problem?”
Vincent lowered his gaze to meet Kratos’s. “Couldn’t hurt beefing it up, but that’s not gonna stop them. They fingered our inside man at City Hall pretty fast, and they pulled in all the midlevel porn distributors by tracking them through their computers. They’re good, boss.”
“We’ve got some muscle in that area too,” Kratos said, thinking of the leggy redhead who had set up the spyware that had ultimately given him access to confidential records at City Hall and One Police Plaza. She was good, very good. But one of the first things he’d learned from his father was never to go into a fight with only one plan of attack. “What happens if we break up this unit?”
“Buys us time. Maybe permanently.” Vincent’s eyes glinted. “You want me to arrange some accidents?”
Kratos sighed, bothered less by the indiscreet question than the option itself. Assassination was not his preferred approach, not because it concerned him to neutralize his adversaries, but because murder was usually sloppy and always drew unwanted attention. He’d been opposed to eliminating the undercover officers who’d gotten close to exposing the kiddie porn operation but had finally consented in order to assuage his new Russian business partners. The compromise seemed necessary to gain a greater percentage of the profits, but as a result, he and his businesses were coming under far more scrutiny than the Russians. He didn’t want to invite even more.
“Perhaps there’s another way,” he said, recalling another of his father’s lessons. Where there was an obstacle, there was usually an opportunity also. “After all, we need a new representative at One Police Plaza.”
“Turn one of those cops?” Vincent laughed, then quickly smothered his smile. “From what I hear, they’re all a bunch of Boy Scouts.”
Kratos leaned back and tapped the list with one finger. Five people—three women, two men. “Find me the weak link.”
“I heard some of them are queers.”
“If you heard it, then it’s common knowledge and blackmail would be pointless. No,” Kratos mused. “It won’t be greed that provides the lever we need, and it won’t be power. It won’t even be fear of death.” He smiled, enjoying the challenge. “It will be love.”
“Boss?” Vincent frowned.
“Bring me everything you can find about their families.”
Chapter One
Rebecca Frye studied her face in the mirror over the tiny sink in her hospital room’s bathroom. The harsh institutional light mercilessly highlighted the purple-and-green bruise that extended from her left temple down her cheek to the angle of her jaw. Her upper eyelid was so swollen she could barely make out the ice blue rim of her iris. At least the blood in her hair was gone. She’d finally gotten a shower after two days of insisting to the nurses that she was perfectly capable of standing upright. Actually, the first time she’d tried to get out of bed, the room or her head—or possibly both—had spun so badly she’d nearly vomited. Thank Christ Catherine hadn’t been there to witness the episode.
Rebecca wasn’t bothered by the mess the gunshot had made of her face. To her way of thinking, if she was standing up and able to see the damage, she was way ahead of the game. What bothered her was that every time her lover, Dr. Catherine Rawlings, looked at her, she would be reminded how close Rebecca had come to being a casualty. Catherine tried to hide her worry and her fear, but the shadows flickering just below the surface of her green eyes gave her away. For Rebecca, the pain of being shot was nothing compared to the pain of knowing Catherine was suffering because of her.
She opened and closed her jaw carefully. Stiff and sore, but in working order. For a few seconds she contemplated trying to cover the bruises with makeup, but that would only call more attention to the injury. And no attempt at camouflage was going to diminish the reality of what had happened. She turned away from the mirror, flicked off the overhead lights, and padded barefoot back into her room.
Catherine stood by the windows, her arms folded beneath her breasts, her back to Rebecca. She wore a sage green silk suit, the slim skirt coming to just above her knees, the jacket cinched at the waist. Her auburn hair fell in waves to her shoulders, and for the first time, Rebecca noticed the silver at her temples. She was elegant and beautiful and tender and wise. She was also strong and intuitive. She was all the things that Rebecca was not, and Rebecca could still not understand what it was Catherine needed from her.
She stopped by the end of the bed, feeling disadvantaged in nothing more than a hospital gown and a pair of gym shorts. “Aren’t you supposed to be in clinic?”
“I’m playing hooky.” Catherine turned from the window, her gaze going immediately to the bruise. She quickly smiled, but not fast enough to cover her flinch of distress. “It’s good to see you out of bed.”
“I’m clean, too.”
“Even better.” Catherine crossed to Rebecca and kissed her on the cheek. “How are you feeling?”
“Not bad. I don’t suppose you know when I’m getting out of here?”
“As a matter of fact, I do.” Catherine tried to keep her tone light. “Since I expected that would be your first question, I made some calls on my way over.”
She appraised the damage to Rebecca’s face. Even though she knew, rationally, that Rebecca would heal, she couldn’t prevent the sinking feeling she got in the pit of her stomach at the sight of the injury. The bullet had glanced off Rebecca’s skull just above her temple. The impact had been enough to flay open her scalp and give her a hairline fracture, but the neurosurgeons assured Catherine once the concussion resolved there would be no permanent damage. Still, it was impossible to erase the image of Rebecca lying so still and pale on a stretcher, her blond hair matted with congealing blood. Catherine tried to tell herself it was because Rebecca was so skilled, so good at what she did, that she’d managed to avoid serious injury. If she pondered the possibility that it was only luck that had kept the bullet from striking Rebecca a half-inch lower or a half an inch farther to the right and killing her instantly, she’d never be able to sleep again when Rebecca was out on the streets. Luck was far too fickle a lady to be the guardian of her lover’s life.
“Ali said she’ll stop by as soon as she’s finished in the OR, and if you promise to behave, she’ll let you go.”
“I’ll promise her anything she wants,” Rebecca said.
Catherine raised an eyebrow. “It’s a good thing I trust Ali Torveau, then.”
“You can trust me.” Rebecca slipped her arm around Catherine’s waist and kissed her. When she felt Catherine’s resistance, she loosened her hold and eased back. She looked away, fearing what sh
e might see in Catherine’s eyes. “I should get dressed.”
“Let me get your clothes.”
“I can do it.” Rebecca walked to the tall narrow closet next to the door. “I know you have patients waiting.”
“I want to drive you home.”
“That’s okay,” Rebecca said briskly. “I’ll call one of the team.”
She opened the closet. A shirt and clean pair of jeans hung on hooks where Catherine had placed them when she’d brought them from home. They weren’t officially living together, but they might as well be. Rebecca still had her small, spare apartment above a mom-and-pop grocery store in South Philadelphia, but she spent almost every night in Catherine’s Victorian near University Hospital where Catherine was the assistant chief of psychiatry. They’d been talking about living together, but that was before the shooting—the second time Rebecca had been shot in the line of duty since she and Catherine had been together. She wouldn’t be surprised if Catherine wanted to reconsider. Every other woman Rebecca had ever been with had eventually decided that the demands and risks of her job were too much to deal with.
“You should get back to work,” she told Catherine without turning around.
A pair of hands slid over her shoulders and Catherine leaned ever so gently against her back. With her mouth very close to Rebecca’s ear, she whispered, “I’m not going anywhere and you can’t chase me away.”
“Is that what you think I’m doing?” Rebecca stared into the closet. She hadn’t realized she was cold until the heat of Catherine’s body warmed her. She never realized what she needed until Catherine gave it to her without being asked. She covered one of Catherine’s hands. “I’m sorry.”
