Skin Deep (24 page)

I
sabella took
the steps to the Thirty-Third precinct two at a time, her arms overloaded with case files and her chest chock-full of determination. Okay, so it was a little early by intelligence standards. After all, big and bad tended to favor the middle of the night over eight o’clock on a Monday morning. But she still had a metric ton of case details to catch up on from the day and a half she’d missed, an update to grab from the crime scene techs who were processing her apartment, security footage to review, reports from the fire marshal to check on, and damn, she needed to find a cup of—

“Chamomile?” Hollister asked, lifting a to-go cup with a tea tag dangling over the edge from the blotter on his desk.

Isabella blinked past all the
whoa
bouncing around in her chest. “What are you doing here?” she asked, hearing the sheer gracelessness of the question only after it had crossed her lips.

But her partner just broke into a knowing grin. “Good morning to you, too.” He crossed the otherwise empty office space, trading the cup of tea for half the files in her grasp.

“Sorry. And thanks.” Her cheeks prickled with the full force of her chagrin, and yeah, time for take two. “I guess what I meant was, you’re here awfully early all things considered.” He’d been at her apartment until ten last night, talking to her landlord and helping Maxwell and Hale canvas the building.

A fact which didn’t seem to faze him in the least. “Eh.” He lifted a shoulder and let it fall beneath his holster and gray Henley shirt. “Sleep is overrated. You okay?”

The stare that accompanied the question said Hollister wasn’t asking as a pleasantry. “Yeah,” Isabella said, making sure her return expression backed up the sentiment. “Eager to nail this guy, but otherwise I’m fine.”

One corner of Hollister’s mouth lifted. “Good to see your short time off hasn’t affected that bulletproof work ethic of yours.”

Ah, busted. Still, a girl had to save face. “I’m behind the rest of you guys by a day and a half, so I wanted to catch up. Especially since the Feds are letting us take lead.”

“Letting us? Please.” Hollister huffed out a sound that was half laughter, all sarcasm. “Sinclair all but told Peterson that if he didn’t let intelligence break this case, he’d never get a willing assist from anyone in this precinct again.”

Isabella’s lips fell open in shock. “He did?”

“Yeah,” Hollister said, as if she’d just asked for clarification that two plus two did indeed equal four. “You said you were sure, so Sinclair went to bat for you. Plus, this guy broke into your apartment, Moreno. We take care of our own.”

She lowered the stack of file folders from her hip to her desktop, letting his words sink in. Hollister had always been a solid partner, one she’d been proud to work with. Just because she’d always thought so didn’t mean he knew so, and Sinclair was right. Her unit had to know she trusted them.

“Listen,” she said, waiting for him to look up from the desk across from hers before she continued. “I know I’m not really a share-all kind of person, but this job is important to me. This
team
is important to me.”

Hollister’s brows lifted in what had to be surprise, although he had a better poker face than most people when he decided to trot it out. “The team is important to me too.”

“I’m probably not the easiest partner to work with,” Isabella continued, and at that, he let go of a soft laugh.

“You’re a little bit of a puzzle,” he agreed. “But you’re not a bad person. And you’re definitely a good cop. I figure you’ve got your reasons for liking the outskirts.”

The thought of Marisol, of the one damned phone call that had kicked so many horrible, irreversible things into motion, punched through her gut. “Yeah.”

Hollister sat back in his desk chair, and even though she was certain he hadn’t missed a thing—her poker face wasn’t nearly as high-quality as his, and the guy was a fucking detective, for God’s sake—he also didn’t push. “If it makes you feel any better, we all have things we don’t advertise. You ever feel like talking about yours, I’m not a bad listener. I don’t just have your back on the job, you know?”

“Thanks. I…” Isabella paused for a breath. “Thanks.”

“Sure.” Hollister cleared his throat, tapping the stack of case files on the desk in front of him. “So I take it the rest of your night was quiet after you left your apartment?”

Isabella nodded, taking a long sip of tea as she kicked back into work mode. “Yup.”

For as trashed as her apartment had been, Kellan’s had remained untouched. At this point, she’d take whatever silver linings she could get.

“Good,” Hollister said. “I took a trip out to North Point to check on Carmen after I left your place last night. I know she never worked for DuPree, but since she’s the one who gave up the intel on Danny Marcus, I figured a knock and talk couldn’t hurt.”

Oh. God
. Isabella’s mouth went as dry as sand despite the tea she’d just thrown back. “She’s okay, right? She’s safe?”

Hollister made a rude noise and a face to match. “She’s a righteous pain in the ass, is what she is. But yeah. Carmen’s fine.”

Relief skated through her, followed by a hard shot of curiosity. One day, she’d have to ask what the deal was between the two of them, but since Carmen was safe and the girls at DuPree’s parties weren’t, today wasn’t going to be that day.

“Okay, good.” Isabella dropped her eyes to the pile of gray folders on her desk, each one stamped with the RPD crest, then shot a glance at the matching stack of paperwork in front of her partner. “So you want to catch me up, here? I’d like to be useful by the time Sinclair gets in.”

Hollister grinned. “Sure. Let’s get to work.”

They spent the next forty minutes going over what the intelligence unit had turned up in her absence. It was still too soon to have much of anything from last night yet, and the rest of what they did have was disappointingly thin. But the fact that the FBI had given them jurisdiction to investigate meant Isabella could dive into this case even harder than she’d hoped. There might be a lot of maybes, and even more what-ifs. But even if she couldn’t prove it yet, she knew the truth.

Julian DuPree was hurting women in the worst ways imaginable, and she wasn’t going to stop until
he’d
been stopped. All she had to do now was get him to make one wrong move.

“Well look who’s back in action.” Maxwell’s voice sounded off from the front of the office, snagging Isabella’s attention. “You okay, Hardball?”

She laughed at the unexpected nickname. “Yeah. I wish I could say the same for my furniture, but I’m good.”

“Glad to hear it. And good to see you back.” Although Maxwell was about as far from clean-cut as possible, with his shaved head and multiple piercings and dark eyes that seemed to have seen far too much for a guy who had way more of his life ahead of him than behind, his smile still curved around the welcome enough to tell her she’d been missed.

“Yeah, looks like you guys are stuck with me after all,” Isabella said, sending her grin from Maxwell to Hale and Capelli, who had walked into the intelligence office alongside him.

“Oh thank
God
,” Hale said in her usual all-in manner. “I know it was only a couple of days, but I missed the crap out of you.” She twirled her finger in an imaginary circle to encompass the rest of their unit. “These three chuckleheads tried to gang up on me in a guys versus girls pool tournament down at the Crooked Angel on Saturday night. Thankfully Shae McCullough from Seventeen was cool enough to help me out.”

Capelli frowned, moving past Hale to park himself at an L-shaped desk with three state-of-the-art computer monitors on each branch. “McCullough’s scores shouldn’t count. That woman is an anomaly.”

“You’re just mad because she managed to defy all those probability statistics you used to try and calculate whether or not she’d be any good at shooting pool,” Hale said, and Hollister added a laugh.

“Welcome to my world, Capelli. I’ve never been able to figure out women, either.”

“I didn’t say I couldn’t figure out women,” Capelli grumbled. “Only that
this
particular woman is an anomaly.”

Hale snorted. “Whatever. You still can’t figure her out. And even though you didn’t put any money on the game, as usual, that’s got to be driving your boy-genius brain bat-shit crazy.”

Isabella opened her mouth to agree with Hale—Capelli was very rarely wrong, even less so when fact-based predictions were concerned, and it probably was making him nuts on toast. But instead she was interrupted by the very familiar, very serious sound of a throat being cleared.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” Sinclair walked across the linoleum, pausing to hit each one of them with a stare that meant business, and
damn
, she loved this job. “Now that Moreno’s clearly gotten the welcome back she deserves, where are we on this DuPree case? Peterson might’ve kicked this investigation over to us, but he’s going to want leads to go with the bright, shiny indictment we promised, and I’m not inclined to tell him we don’t have any.”

It took less than thirty seconds for all five of them to find both their desks and their work ethics, although not necessarily in that order, and Maxwell was the first to chime in with a reply.

“Right. Well, starting with last night’s break-in, we got a whole lot of nothing from canvassing Moreno’s building. No one heard or saw a damned thing, which means this guy knew exactly what he was doing. Low profile all the way.”

Ugh. Isabella had figured as much. DuPree hadn’t gotten this far by throwing down bad-guy calling cards everywhere he went. But if they could put him in the building some other way, that would be a huge step forward in the concrete evidence department. “What about the surveillance video?”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Capelli said, leaning in to examine one of his six monitors. “Looks like our guy was actually three guys. The only people on yesterday’s feed who didn’t check out as residents, guests, or delivery people are three males who entered the building at ten forty-six yesterday morning. A closer look at the entry log shows their key card as a fake.”

Isabella’s pulse perked to life. “That’s a good sign.”

But Capelli adjusted his glasses, pausing to grimace at the image he’d pulled up. “Not as good as it sounds. The video shows these men entering the building and going up to the third floor on the elevator, but that’s
all
it shows. There are no security cams on the third floor, and all three men kept their heads down. No facials to ID. No distinguishing features. Just dark clothes and baseball hats with no logos, and no definitive proof that they did anything other than sneak in and ride the elevator.”

“Strike two,” Sinclair said, his frown growing deeper. “What about forensics in the apartment?”

“Still being processed.” Maxwell looked up from his desk across the open office space. “First glance though? No prints, nothing unusual left behind. Although it’s going to take them a while to go through everything because the place was so trashed.”

Great. Isabella didn’t know if that should make her feel hopeful or even more hacked off. “Okay, so let’s work backward. How about the fire? Anything new since yesterday?”

“Ah.” Hale leaned in, phone in hand. “Yes, actually. Autopsies just came back on both Angel and Danny Marcus.” She scrolled down, her eyes widening with interest and surprise as she continued. “Check this out. They both died of asphyxiation, and time of death is consistent with the approximate time of the fire. But neither one of them had any trace of smoke or soot in their lungs. Which means…”

Isabella’s heart slammed against her sternum as Hale’s words connected. “They were dead before the fire even started.”

“Exactly,” Hale said. “Tox screen shows high levels of heroin in both victims. Not enough to kill either of them, but—”

“Enough to make them drowsy and non-combative,” Isabella finished.
Oh, Angel
.

Hale nodded, sliding a sympathetic look in her direction before continuing. “Yes. No ligature marks on the bodies to suggest strangulation, but the ME did find small cuts and some bruising on the inside of both victims’ mouths that are telltale signs of suffocation. She’s officially ruling both as homicides.”

“That’s a step in the right direction, isn’t it?” Hollister asked, but Sinclair shook his head, punctuating the sadness twisting deep between Isabella’s ribs.

“Not a very big one if we can’t link DuPree to the crime,” he said. “Talk to me about the scene.”

“The house is”—Isabella paused. Scraped in a shaky breath. Reset her determination—“
was
vacant and empty, just like that first fire scene where Kellan found the photos. This one was a foreclosure, supposed to go up for auction in about two weeks.”

Sinclair crossed his arms, shooting her a glance from the spot where he stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window in front of his office. “I’m sure it’s too much to ask that there’s a paper trail connecting DuPree to either property?”

Oh, if only
. “Sadly, it is,” Isabella confirmed. “There’s no connection between DuPree and any of the previous owners or tenants, and he never owned or rented either house. He makes most of his on-the-books money in real estate, though, so it follows that he’d have a line on vacant properties.” She’d looked into his business dealings at length last week. They were clean enough to squeak from every angle. Unfortunately. “It’s possible he scouted empty houses and had Franco and the big guy, Rampage, keep the girls in these places.”

“It would explain the extra locks on the doors in both locations,” Maxwell said, and the idea gained momentum in Isabella’s brain.

“It would also keep DuPree’s name off any leases. If he paid other people to squat in these houses and do his dirty work for him, there wouldn’t be any way to put him or any of his associates there without witnesses.”

“In North Point?” Hollister let out an exhale tinged heavily with doubt. “Good luck. Nobody talks to the cops down there.”

Which DuPree had almost certainly counted on. Christ, he was as slippery as he was smart.

“Okay.” Isabella dipped her chin in thought, ordering and re-ordering the facts like the pieces to a puzzle as she tried to line up the edges and curves. “So we’ve got Franco and Rampage who are clearly on DuPree’s payroll. Any ID on the guy who called my cell phone? His voice wasn’t familiar.”