Justice for All

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

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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])

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

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.

Radcly
f
fe 2009

For Lee

All Ways

“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 they’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.