Skin Deep (4 page)

Unease tightened his muscles, speeding his heartbeat by just a notch. “I have a sister. What do you think?”

“I think those photos are evidence of a crime being committed against the women in them, and I think you wouldn’t have had your captain call them in unless you do, too.”

She’s kind of got you there, dude
. Kellan exhaled, mashing down on his inner voice. “So how come your sergeant doesn’t agree?”

“I never said he didn’t,” Moreno pointed out. Her expression matched the utterly noncommittal tone of her words, but come on. He hadn’t just fallen off the turnip truck, for Chrissake. She wouldn’t ask him to bring her back to the scene of this fire unless it was her last resort.

Kellan hit her with a high-level frown. “If you want me to consider helping you out here, the least you can do is not bullshit me before I’m caffeinated.”

“Fine.” She pressed her lips together, a swath of light brown hair serving as cover for her eyes as she lasered her gaze toward the sidewalk beneath her feet. “
Hypothetically
, on occasion we catch cases that don’t have quite enough evidence to pursue in an official capacity.”

Seriously? “You have pictures,” he said. What better evidence was there?

“Yeah, and that’s all I have. Pictures of women I can’t identify, who might be of legal age and participating in consensual acts.”

Kellan’s stomach knotted. He was hardly vanilla when it came to sex, but the girls in those photos had looked terrified, not to mention dangerously young. Role play was in a whole different universe than rape. “You don’t really think what’s going on in those photos is consensual, do you?”

“You don’t really think I’d ask you to take me back to the spot where you found them to look for more evidence if I did, do you?” Moreno asked archly, and
damn
, she was tough.

Too bad for her, so was he. “Let me get this straight. You want me to take you back to a house the fire marshal has almost certainly condemned, without the permission or knowledge of your sergeant or my captain, just because you have a gut feeling that can’t be substantiated by any evidence found at the scene?”

“Give the firefighter a gold star. That’s exactly what I want.”

Kellan took it back. Jupiter wasn’t big enough for the stones on this woman. “Give me one good reason why I should put my ass on the line for you.”

Before he could move or blink or even breathe, Isabella had stepped toward him, so up close and personal that he could feel the warmth of her breath on his face as she said, “Because I don’t want you to put your ass on the line for
me
at all. I want you to do it for those women. You and I seem to be the only people who think this case is worth pursuing right now, and I can’t change that without more evidence, which I can’t get if you don’t help me. So are you in or not?”

Fuck
. Rock. Hard place. Rock. Hard place. Rock…

“Fine,” Kellan said, hearing his acquiescence only after his mouth had let it loose. “One quick look, and that’s it. But I’m stopping on the way for coffee.”

“Already done. No cream, two sugars.” Moreno passed over the cardboard cup in her hand, and he realized just a beat too late that she hadn’t taken a sip from the thing the entire time they’d been standing there.

Kellan stared at her. Tried to keep his surprise in check. Failed spectacularly. “You remember how I take my coffee?”

She pointed to the front of the navy blue sweater peeking out from behind her jacket. “Detective, remember?”

A bitter taste filled his mouth. Yeah, he remembered. “Right. I’ll drive.”

“Sounds great.”

Flipping his keys in his free hand, he unlocked the passenger door, popping the thing open so Moreno could get in. A few more minutes had him buckled into the driver’s seat beside her, Station Seventeen firmly in the Camaro’s rearview as he angled the car toward North Point.

“So freelancing on a case like this is a little ballsy, isn’t it?” Kellan asked. As a firefighter, bucking the chain of command was a surefire ticket to censure. Not to mention stupidly dangerous.

Isabella’s expression said she disagreed. “I’d hardly call this freelancing,” she said, twirling her index finger to connect the two of them in an imaginary circle. “We’re just going for a ride.”

“A ride your sergeant and your partner know nothing about.” He couldn’t even imagine trying to pull something like that off with Bridges, Gamble, Shae, or even Slater, and the kid had been a firefighter for all of five minutes. But they were still a team, a unit. They trusted each other for backup, even on the small stuff.

“I just want to give the place another look to see if I can find enough evidence to make an official case. That’s all,” Moreno said, and God, he should’ve known she’d be fine with breaking the rules.

“If you say so. But this little tour is a one-time deal, so whatever you need, you’d better get it while you can.”

“Believe me, I don’t like this any more than you do. After today, I’ll be out of your hair.”

After a minute of silence that lasted for roughly a decade, Moreno took out her cell phone, bringing the screen to life with a flick of her thumb. “So was there anything unusual about the nine-one-one call for this house fire?”

“No,” Kellan said, focusing his gaze through the windshield. If something had been sideways about the call-in, he’d have mentioned it to her sergeant days ago.

Her lips pressed into a flat line. “Okay. Did you notice anything out of the ordinary when you arrived at the scene?”

“No.”

“Any onlookers acting suspicious or anyone who might not have belonged?”

“No and no.” Little wonder she didn’t have much of a case. He’d already answered every last one of these questions, for fuck’s sake.

Isabella let out a sharp exhale, and whoa, how come she was mad at
him
? “Look, you hate me for what happened with your sister, and I get that, okay? I trusted Collins without vetting his team, and one of his guys was dirty. But
you
found the pictures of those girls, and you’re the only link I have to this scene, so how about you set your dick aside for just a couple minutes so I can do my job and get somewhere with this case, huh?”

For a split second, Kellan sat completely stunned in the driver’s seat, but his irritation didn’t leave him speechless for long. “I might be a little more willing to help if you’d do your job without wasting both of our time. I already told you this stuff the other day.”

“Right. And I’m sure you think I’m incompetent enough to have no idea that these questions are repeats, and that there’s absolutely no good reason to ask them twice.”

Her brows arched at the whaaaa? that had to be plastered all over his kisser, and wait… “You didn’t just forget?”

“Walker, please.” She laughed, although the sound wasn’t completely sarcastic. “I remember how you take your coffee, for God’s sake. I’m not going to blank on the details of a case I’m trying to break.”

Her words sank in good and hard, and hell if she didn’t have a point. Kellan turned off of Washington Boulevard, his curiosity doubling with every stoplight and side street, and screw it. “So why ask the same questions again if you already know the answers?”

“Because you’d be surprised how many details get swallowed by the adrenaline of a moment,” Moreno said, her shoulders softening ever so slightly against the black leather seatback behind her. “Sometimes witnesses remember particulars from an event after they’ve had a little time to process, so repeating interview questions after a few days can yield new information from time to time.”

Something hot and without a name tempted Kellan to tell her he knew exactly what a person could remember if given enough time to dwell on certain events, and damn it, he needed to lock up his emotions and get this little cloak and dagger mission over with.

“Sorry.” He forced his focus out the window to the dingy streets and crowded, weed-choked yards marking the outskirts of Remington’s North Point. “I really didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, and there were barely any onlookers when we got to the scene. I remember thinking it was a good thing. Less people who might get hurt.”

“That is a good thing,” she said, dipping her chin in a small nod. “Your captain said he suspected the fire was electrical. Can you tell me why?”

Okay, yeah. Facts. This he could do. “The fire spread pretty fast, and there was a lot of heat in the walls. That’s pretty consistent with an electrical fire in an older structure, where the building materials might be out of date. Polystyrene insulation, stuff like that.”

Moreno let out a soft
huh
. “So chances are slim that this fire was set intentionally.”

“Arson’s actually a lot less common than most people think,” Kellan said. He’d only heard of a handful of arson cases in his two years with the RFD, all of which had been either wickedly obvious or notoriously difficult to nail down with proof.

“Is that a yes?” Although the question carried all of her trademark sass, her tone didn’t, and his answer popped out, matter-of-fact.

“That’s a yes. For calls like this, the fire marshal looks at the reports from the responding fire companies, then does a walk-through to determine whether or not a building is salvageable, but actual investigations are pretty uncommon. Anyway, there are only three reasons a person would torch a place on purpose, and none of them really makes sense for this scenario.”

“You’ve got my attention,” Isabella said, the spark in her eyes backing up her words and sending a bolt of unexpected heat right through Kellan’s bloodstream. “Hit me.”

He cleared his throat, collecting the energy to send a sternly worded back-the-hell-up message to his cock.
Focus on what’s in front of you, jackass
.

Right. Arson. “So, ah, the first is insurance fraud, which doesn’t seem to play in here unless I’m missing a pretty big puzzle piece.”

She nodded in agreement. “The house is owned by a rental company, but it’s been vacant for about six months. The last tenant was an eighty-year-old retired librarian with no known family, and the rental company had barely enough coverage to rebuild the place. They won’t gain much more than heartache from the place burning down. What’s the next reason?”

“To set the fire simply to watch it burn,” Kellan said, pausing to make a full stop on red before turning onto Glendale Avenue. “But true fire bugs are pretty rare, unless you’re binge watching action movies.”

“It doesn’t seem to fit the circumstances,” Moreno agreed. “So what’s the last reason?”

He exhaled, long and low. “To cover up a crime. Although if that were the case here, your guy would’ve attracted a whole lot less attention by burning the photos rather than the whole house. Since the pictures are pretty much the only thing to survive the fire…”

“It looks like this house burning down was not only accidental, but a lucky break.”

“You have a very weird definition of lucky,” Kellan said, pulling up in front of the house in question. But rather than get snippy or serious the way he expected, Moreno hit him with the full force of her grin.

“You have no idea, Walker. Now let’s go catch a bad guy.”

T
he optimism
in Isabella’s chest flamed out about six seconds after she got her boots on the pavement. Okay, so maybe she shouldn’t have gotten ahead of herself, thinking that between the evidence she might find at the scene and the fact that she’d convinced Kellan to walk her through this off-the-books recon mission in the first place, she might actually catch the break she needed to take this back to the FBI.

But karma was clearly not waving its pom poms in her corner after all, because the scene in front of her was nothing shy of a total nightmare.

While the street and the surroundings were much like Isabella had remembered, the house itself had sustained an absolute landslide of damage. Sheets of plywood had been slapped over more than half the first-floor windows, all of which bore thick black scorch marks around the casings and the brick beyond. Most of the second floor—and the roof along with it—had burned down to the building’s frame, the charred, warped boards completely discordant with the deep blue sky and the glittering, golden sunlight coloring the backdrop above them.

Her stomach clenched before dropping to her shins. How was she supposed to find enough evidence to help these women in a house that was barely standing?

Isabella let go of a heavy breath. “God. This place looks like a war zone.”

A flicker of something odd hardened the angles of Walker’s jawline, gone before she could tag the expression with a name. “Yeah,” he said, flipping the latch on the chain link fence’s swinging door. “I guess.”

A thought stuck into her, as cold and sharp as a three-inch pin. “The house isn’t going to collapse on us or anything, is it?”

Walker paused, his ocean-blue eyes taking a tour of the structure from the top down, but his hesitation didn’t last long. “Nah. The foundation and the first floor are still structurally intact, and at this point, everything that was gonna fall in from upstairs already did. We’re lucky the house is brick on three sides. It should keep everything from caving in on us.”

“Who’s got a weird definition of lucky now?” she asked, and hey, how about that? Walker remembered how to smile.

“Yeah, yeah. So how do you want to do this?”

Isabella ran a hand through her hair, sweeping her gaze from one end of the street to the other. Funny, Walker had just given their surroundings the same sort of spot check. “From the outside in. I know you said there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary when you got here, but walk me through it anyway. Step by step.”

Kellan dialed back his smile, although one corner of his mouth still kicked up against the dark stubble of his goatee. Crossing his arms over the front of his navy blue RFD T-shirt, he pegged her with a cool, impenetrable stare. “You’re the boss, Detective.”

The words held just enough attitude to make her cheeks prickle. God, between his pushback and the condition of the scene, she’d had her work cut out for her by a blind man wielding a hacksaw. Then again, she probably should’ve known he was going to sling shit in her direction every millimeter of the way.

“Okay,” was all she said, tamping back the
you moody, broody jackass
part for the sake of the greater good. “Let’s take it from the top.”

Walker studied her for a minute before loosening his arms and turning toward the front walkway. “When we arrived on-scene, there were already flames showing in the first and second-story windows. My captain sent me and three other firefighters to do search and rescue inside the house.”

The door to the waist-high fence clanged shut behind them, rattling the NO TRESPASSING sign attached to the chain links. “Is that standard protocol, or did you think someone was in the house?”

A witness—or better yet, a suspect—was a complete Hail Mary, Isabella knew, the same way she was also ninety-nine-point-four percent sure both the captain and Kellan would’ve mentioned any suspicions that the house had been inhabited when they’d responded to the fire. But in her line of work, assumptions weren’t just dangerous. They could be deadly. Better to ask and be sure.

“Standard protocol,” Walker confirmed, moving over the concrete walkway that led to the house. “We do S&R on all residences showing flames unless the scene isn’t secure enough for us to enter.”

“And the four of you went in through the front door?” Isabella gestured toward the porch facing the street, now decorated by wide bands of bright yellow caution tape strung between the two posts on either side of the bottom step.

“Yes. Hawk and Dempsey were in front of me, and McCullough was at my right on the lieutenant’s six. There was a lot of smoke. I remember being able to taste it from right here.”

Walker dropped his gaze to the midway point of the crumbling concrete path, but his steps didn’t slow. His long, jeans-clad legs ate up the distance, and even at five-foot-nine, Isabella had to work to match his strides. Although she kept her head on a swivel to take in their immediate surroundings as they moved toward the house, the neighborhood remained eerily quiet, and damn it, canvassing was going to yield a gigantic goose egg.

This search with Walker had to give her something to help find the women in those photos. It
had
to.

They reached the porch, Kellan’s eyes calculating with every step. “Lieutenant Hawkins gave me and McCullough the command to check the basement when we got right about here.” He ducked beneath the caution tape, reaching back to hold it up so Isabella could follow. “He also told Dempsey to breach the door, but that took some doing.”

Her boots thudded softly on the worn, soot-stained porch boards as she followed him to the entryway in question. Other than wearing a blazing red notice warning KEEP OUT BY ORDER OF THE REMINGTON FIRE MARSHAL, the door didn’t look like anything special, and certainly not anything a trained firefighter should have trouble kicking in. “Was the problem with your guy or the situation?”

Walker laughed, the low rumble rippling up Isabella’s spine. “Dempsey could break into a bank vault with a hairpin and a smile. You want to know why he had trouble with the breach, see for yourself.”

Reaching down, he turned the knob and guided the door in on its hinges. Surprise popped through her that the door was unlocked, quickly chased by the realization that the damage caused by the breach had rendered the hardware useless.

And sweet Jesus, there was a bucketload of hardware. The reinforcement plate triple-screwed into the doorjamb gleamed up at Isabella from its grossly tilted mooring in the splintered wood, and holy
shit
.

“Is that…”

“Steel reinforced,” Kellan confirmed. “The deadbolt isn’t exactly standard issue, either.”

She eyed the two-inch deadbolt hole in the ruined doorframe, her pulse knocking harder in her veins. She was all for personal safety, but locks like this were damn near professional grade. “Pretty unusual for a residence.”

Walker shrugged, but didn’t disagree. “The neighborhood’s not great. Didn’t you say the previous renter was a little old lady? Maybe she wanted the protection.”

“Maybe,” Isabella allowed, although even she could hear the doubt bleeding through her tone. “But there’s a fence all the way around this house, even the front yard, and this hardware is new. Whoever installed it didn’t want anyone coming in here unless they knew about it, that’s for sure.”

Or anyone getting out
, whispered a voice from deep in her chest.

Time to move. Right now. “So you and McCullough headed to the basement to do search and rescue while Hawkins and Dempsey checked upstairs?” Isabella asked, forcing her eyes from the lock to the space in front of her as she crossed the threshold into the house.

“Yeah.” Walker slid the door shut behind them, his eyes following Isabella’s gaze toward the stairs leading upward. “I can’t take you up there, though. With the damage, it’s way too dangerous.”

The hard set of his stubble-covered jaw suggested he was braced for an argument, and part of her was actually disappointed not to offer one up. But it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that any evidence that might’ve been up there was long gone now, and anyway… “I’m determined, Walker, not stupid. Just give me a second to look through the main level here and then we can head downstairs.”

His silence held as much surprise as irritation. “Suit yourself. But I’m coming with you.”

Great
. Isabella moved from the foyer to the living room, taking in what little was left in the fire-damaged space. The flames had eaten away at what looked to have once been a couch, although the jury was still out on what color the thing might’ve been in its former life, and the patches of wallpaper that had managed to survive curled away from the water-stained drywall in floral-patterned chunks. Every ounce of her gut told her she had a snowball’s chance of finding anything salvageable up here, much less anything salvageable that might also be a lead. But Isabella had never let a little thing like shitty odds stop her before. She wasn’t about to start today. The silence pressed against her ears, making her hyper-aware of Kellan’s eyes on her as she checked out the room, watching in that quiet, cautious way that told her he saw nine times as much as he said.

“So how’s your sister doing?” she heard herself ask. God, it was the last thing she’d meant to bring up, which must be a true testament to her pure idiocy right now. But if the mention had thrown Walker for a loop, he didn’t show it. In fact, his expression was pretty much carved out of granite, strong and cold and completely unmoving.

“Fine.” His arms re-knotted over his chest, the inky edge of a tattoo peeking out from beneath the dark blue sleeve of his T-shirt.

Isabella bit her tongue hard enough to feel the sting. She should just shut up and do the job she’d come here to do. But she’d lifted the lid on the topic. Trying to tap dance around it now seemed stupid. Or worse yet, cowardly. “Kylie moved to Remington, right? From Montana?”

“Yes.”

Jeez, he was the high lord of the monosyllable. She moved across the living room, the sunlight filtering in from the few unbroken windows showing her a whole lot of ash and empty space. “It must be nice that she’s close by now.”

“You think that just because everything turned out okay in Chicago by the grace of God and my buddy Devon’s quick thinking, you get to talk about my sister like she’s the weather?”

The musty scent of ashes and old smoke filled Isabella’s nose as she sucked in a breath of pure shock. “What?”

Walker pinned her with an icy stare from halfway across the burned and broken room. “You compromised Kylie’s safety by trusting Collins. She was nearly killed, and you’re treating her like casual conversation.”

“I’m not. I’m—” Isabella stopped short, the slam of her heartbeat warning that he wasn’t going to believe her no matter how genuine her remorse really was. But she hadn’t knowingly put Kylie’s life in danger. He had to know that. “We were racing against the clock to keep Kylie safe, Walker. Collins had worked with his team for three years. None of them had ever had so much as an overdue credit card bill. What was I supposed to do?”

“Better,” he said, the word hitting her ears like a shout even though he’d barely breathed it. “You were supposed to do better. You have no idea what I had on the line.”

“You have no idea what I know.”

For a breath, then another, Isabella stood on the ruined floorboards with her throat in a knot and her chest full of thorns. But she wasn’t here to argue with him. She was here to help the women in those pictures. Period.

No matter what Walker thought about her abilities as a cop.

Isabella took in the rest of the first floor in silence. Not that there was much to see, but the few pieces of ruined furniture in the living room coupled with the remnants of trash in the kitchen told her someone had been squatting here after the rental agency had cleaned the place out five months ago.

“Okay,” she said, pulling a small Maglite from the pocket of her leather jacket as she turned toward the basement door. “So can you walk me through what happened once you and McCullough headed down to the basement?”

“Yeah, sure.” Thankfully, Walker seemed to want to get to business just as much as she did. He swung the door open, waiting until Isabella had taken a few steps down before following her into the basement.

“The fire wasn’t as bad down here. It must’ve started on the second floor and traveled down through the walls. Still, we knew time was tight, so Shae and I split the basement,” Kellan said, the words sparking fresh curiosity in Isabella’s brain.

“Did she find anything at all?”

Walker waited until they’d both reached the bottom of the steps before shaking his head in answer. “A couple of small rooms that were empty, but that was all.”

Isabella took a minute to check out the two rooms in question, both of which were barely bigger than a shoebox and about as well-appointed. Both doors bore locks, though, and while the mechanisms were a lot less heavy-duty than the one upstairs, they were still deadbolts installed from the hallway side, and neither room had a window.

The only way out was if whoever had the key opened up.

“Alright,” she said, pivoting on her boot heel to shine her flashlight down the basement hallway. Her only hope of finding something—
anything
she could take to Sinclair—stood twenty paces away, in a nearly-empty room that had come dangerously close to burning down.

The police have no leads, Isabella. They say there’s nothing to go on. No way to know who did this to Mari…

No. Not today. If there was any shred of evidence in this basement, Isabella was going to find it.

She forced her feet into a steady gait, following the beam of the flashlight past the stairs to the opposite end of the corridor. Pushing the door inward, she paused in the entryway to examine the room where Walker had found the photos. The blackout curtain had been pulled back from the tiny rectangular window set high up by the ceiling on the far wall, and while the daylight struggling past the dust-smudged glass wasn’t much, Isabella would take it. Everything was just as it had been when she and Sinclair had been here four days ago, from the dinged and scratched up desk to the pizza boxes strewn over it, and her gut squeezed with determination as she exhaled.